Callum Quinn, © 2023
Vampires, Hearts and Other Dead Things
By Margie Fuston
The (a) story follows Victoria, a young woman desperate to hold on to hope as she watches her terminally ill father’s life slowly fade before her eyes. Having been especially bonded to him by a shared love of the macabre and the undead since the first vampire publically announced their existence, Victoria is willing to do the unthinkable: become a vampire herself so that she may, in turn, save her father through immortality.
Getting her miracle, however, is no easy feat. Armed only with scant rumors, facts pulled from ancient legends, and her estranged friend Henry, Victoria travels to New Orleans in order to track down one of the elusive creatures and have them change her. But when she meets Nicholas, an exotic young man who may or may not be exactly what she’s looking for, she is faced with a new challenge: to prove to him that she loves her life enough to live it forever.
Now, in order to get what she wants, Victoria must learn how to open her grieving heart back up to joy, or else lose her beloved father. But how could she possibly start living again, while someone she loves is dying?
The (A) story is about living life to the fullest. Nicholas’s challenge to Victoria is undeniably clear with its message: if you’re hoping to live forever, then you’d better be in love with your life. And as Victoria’s story unfolds we quickly observe that much of the joy in life comes from the little things—like eating beignets with your best friend in the French Quarter, or the rush you get from dancing with someone in a thunderstorm. Much like Victoria, throughout the course of the book we learn to see the bigger picture of what life could be, no matter where we’re going or where we’ve been.
But it is also very much about grief, and the importance of accepting it. For most of her journey Victoria tries desperately to hold herself in an empty void, feeling nothing. She refuses to feel joy because she believes it would be a betrayal to her father, who is getting sicker by the day. But she also refuses to fully give in to her grief; for one thing, doing so would be admitting defeat, and having to accept her father’s unavoidable death. And for another, accepting her grief would, in a way, mean her own death: “not in the good, immortal way—just [becoming] a person rotting on the inside.” Victoria is stuck between finding life in death and death in life, depending on which path she chooses to take. But in the end it is not until she learns to fully embrace her grief that she can also fully embrace her joy.
I wanted so much to not only love, but adore this book. As someone who typically is not into contemporary novels, I was hopeful when the synopsis painted an enchanting picture of a story—something raw and real, with just enough of a supernatural twist to keep me invested.
Sad to say, it fell short of my expectations.
For starters, Victoria is obnoxious on several levels. Her obsession with vampires comes off as childish naïveté at best, and willing stupidity at worst. True, the universe of this book is set up as if vampires actually do exist, but even so there were only a few supposed vampires that came out in public in the first place, and they all went back into hiding soon afterward. It would be incredibly easy for one to argue that it was all an elaborate prank that didn’t go anywhere… and still she persists.
She persists all in the hope of saving her father—which, at first glance, may seem like a noble reason to be persistent. But this aspect of her reasoning is tainted over the course of the entire story by the fact that she never asks her father if this is something he wants: she just runs off, determined to get herself turned into a vampire so she could save him. Add to this the fact that she only barely glosses over the possible consequences of this action—the most major one being her father’s absolute disgust over what she has done—and you’ve got one hell of a stupid decision.
Not to mention the way she treats Henry, her supposed best friend and love interest #2. I put him as #2 and not #1 because, let’s face it: even though he upended his own plans for the summer by jumping on a plane with her (totally last-minute), and following her all the way to New Orleans to help her track down a vampire (even though he doesn’t believe in them at all), she spends most of the trip ignoring him—when she’s not being straight-up rude to him. He is most certainly not first in her mind, and I’d say even putting him as #2 is a bit of a stretch.
Not that I can entirely blame her for ignoring Henry’s existence for most of the trip, considering he feels more like a literal stepping stone than an actual character. Not only does he accept her constant abuse, maybe sometimes getting slightly agitated for a few seconds before letting it slide, but he also chooses to stand by her even after she admits to him that she’s going to “let [him] down again and again.” It even reaches a point where her careless attitude toward him nearly gets him killed (yet another thing that he gets a little angry about before instantly forgiving her). Remember, this is supposed to be the best friend / love interest—and he is neither interesting nor, clearly, from Victoria’s opinion, a friend.
And that’s not even including the climax of the story which, while I won’t spoil it for you with the details, completely negates the lesson being learned and just further proves Victoria’s selfishness and stupidity to the point where I wanted to throw the book across the room.
What is good about the book? The settings are quite vivid, really drawing me into New Orleans in a way that makes me want to actually go eat beignets in the French Quarter and dance in a thunderstorm beside an old cathedral. Also, the added aspect here and there of Victoria seeing the world through an artist’s eyes succeeded in lending the book some beautiful descriptive details. And obviously the concept itself was unique enough to pique my interest… I just wish I’d had a chance to beta read for Fuston before she sent this out for publication: I would have given her a detailed list of things to reconsider.
Pick it up, if you wish, so you can decide for yourself. But Vampires, Hearts & Other Dead Things is that rare find that I do not see myself recommending to other readers.
