Tag: vampire

Fawn’s Blood is a young adult vampire novel about queer teenagers, vampire and human, who must fight to find ways to survive in a world that doesn’t want them to. Rachel is a queer teen with a vampire slayer mother, but when Rachel is turned into a vampire, she’s caught between worlds. Fawn is a trans girl looking for her best friend Silver, who appears to have faked his death to become a vampire, but hitchhiking across the country to find him leaves her in the same place as Rachel: Seattle, where a battle between vampires and vampire slayers isn’t as simple as that. As arguments about how vampires should or shouldn’t access blood divide both vampires and humans, Fawn and Rachel have to discover that knowing who to trust isn’t easy, whether that’s through queer or vampire community.

I’ve really enjoyed Schrieve’s previous books and how both novels make YA feel like a space for complexity in the relationships between teens, between teens and adults, and in queer community, and Fawn’s Blood continues this whilst also updating the YA vampire novel for our current moment, particularly around anti-trans sentiment and ideas of infection and corruption. The world of the novel feels biting (pun intended), working both as an allegory and as a literal monster story (as vampire stories should), and also exposing how much of vampire fiction focuses on individuals rather than the collective, and how this isn’t necessarily healthy for the vampire characters to see themselves as archaic loners in a world that doesn’t want them to exist. At the same time, there’s the humans who support vampires, and I love how Schrieve makes the vampire girl cis (as far as we see) and the supportive human girl trans, to really play with these ideas of allies and what allyship meas.

Fawn’s Blood reminds me of the thrill of reading Darren Shan’s vampire books as an eleven-year-old crossed with my love of what queer horror can say about the world. The characters feel complex and real and the world suitably messy (despite the very different subject matter and levels of dark stuff, the world of the vampires does make me think of Lost Souls in some ways). As a queer, trans adult who has loved vampire media since reading Darren Shan’s YA vampire series as a pre-teen, Fawn’s Blood is certainly the kind of book I needed back then, and which is even more necessary now given its real life resonances.