Lucy Undying: A Dracula Novel

So, so, SO frustrating to read. An absolute mess and overly long for what it is.

The novel reads almost like Kiersten White had two, maybe three, ideas for Dracula retellings / spin-offs centering Lucy Westenra and either did not know how to approach them, or her editor / agent / she herself thought the ideas were too similar in themes to allow her to publish them as separate works. Instead of evaluating each of those ideas and making some (I am sure) difficult decisions with which ones to part, all of them have been poured into a single novel as parallel narratives that eventually somewhat clumsily join together.

There is incredible dissonance between each of those narratives and it is not just because Lucy (as a vampire), Lucy (as human, in her diary) and Iris (annoying on purpose) are different people at different points in time and their lives (or non-lives). They are simply telling three different stories, and the way they were presented within this novel, I really could not care for at least one of them (the modern-day section and Iris' narration). That is a solid half of the book.

The worst part? I feel like I have picked up each of those stories separately - a story about Lucy Westenra who turns into a vampire and then spends several decades roaming the Earth, a mystery that an ex-pat unravels about a girl tricked into her death by the people around her, a messy literary novel about a higheress who discovers her family business' dark secret.

When summarising the three clearly defined narratives within the novel, I can somewhat see why White felt they could be combined. But I also see why maybe only one of them needed to be related to the Dracula. I loved White's Author's Note and am completely sympathetic and on board with what she wanted to tell about lesbianism and a heteronormative society - I think this is very cool. But she could have done so much more with those themes within the novel itself which, at the end of the day, reads like an AI-cover gas station book.

I wanted so badly to like this book. I adore Dracula and was very excited to see a sapphic Lucy retelling. But the way the author treated the original cast, especially Mina, was so bizarrely OOC that it felt like wish fulfillment fanfic that somehow got published. I tried my best to force myself to read it, but I couldn’t.

I really, truly wanted to love this guys.

Dracula is in the running with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for being my favourite classic novel of all time. I own four copies, have annotated half of them, and written two dissertations about it's representation of the feminine monster. I commiserate with a lot of what White wrote in her acknowledgements at the end of this novel about how the ball is kind of dropped with Lucy Westenra - one of only two major female characters - in the book and all it's major adaptations and I was honestly so interested in reading a what-if scenario featuring a sapphic, vampiric Lucy who survives the events of the novel.

To a degree, what ground Lucy Undying covered within this area are the parts of this book I really enjoyed. Lucy is a character who we only really see through the eyes of those around her (particularly men!), and there's some interesting commentary in White's novel about that. Lucy's diary entries - and her unseen fake diary entries - in Lucy Undying offer a glimpse into a character who is routinely both sexualised and infantilised, and I was particularly invested in the passages and chapters that covered the events of Dracula from her perspective.

I also find the idea of a modern-day vampire MLM hilarious, so White's approach on the idea - tempered with an appropriate amount of ridiculousness - was very interesting to see. It's a natural evolution of the Marxist idea of capitalists as vampires - 'dead labour... vampire-like' - and I would genuinely be so interested in reading a book that was completely dedicated to this idea.

Unfortunately, I don't think both these narratives really needed to be in the same book.

This book is over 400 pages long and by page 300 I felt like some of it could have been cut. I think White struggles with juggling so many point of view characters and narrative devices because we routinely cover the same ground over and over again barely chapters apart.

Overall, this novel just fell flat for me because I think it both wasn't what I expected, and the elements of it that I did like were a slog to get to.