In The Brides Charlotte Cross provides a delightful extension to the internet’s favorite cursed epistolary novel – Dracula. The Brides functions as both a sequel and a prequel, with events occurring on both sides of the famous story and bringing an excellent sapphic twist as well. The Brides is out July 7th, and I would like to thank Harper Collins for sending The Lesbrary an ARC. Dracula fans, pencil in the date, you’re going to want to mark this one on your to-read list.
Before the events of Dracula, Mafalda Lowell travels to Budapest on family business. Behind her, in England, she leaves Lucy North, her recent schoolmate and secret lover, and they exchange a voluminous correspondence planning for their futures. As Mafalda’s recently widowed aunt takes a turn for the worse, Lucy decides to go to Mafalda in Budapest, chaperoned by their other recently married friend, Eliza, and her new maid, Alice, who is burdened with visions that she cannot always keep out. The girls’ reunion does not stay pleasant long, as they are beset by societal pressures, sudden and inexplicable illness, and a strangely intense man with old fashioned manners.
Meanwhile, after the events of Dracula, Dr. Seward has taken up a new post in a new and modern facility in Oxford. Delighted by his new job and his very competent female colleague, he is dismayed when a noblewoman who is their new patient displays symptoms that remind him of events he would rather never think of again.
The thing about Dracula companion books is that, in my opinion, they very rarely can match the atmosphere of the original, but I found The Brides to be engaging from the very start. In Dracula, the characters often strive to downplay supernatural or unnatural events, because those are not things that a normal person encounters or talks about, and by the time they do acknowledge them, it is too late to avoid them.
Cross continues Stoker’s epistolary framework and atmospheric tension to great effect, especially with the dual timelines of events. Readers of Dracula will know what is occurring (and Dr. Seward does not deceive himself for long), but during the earlier timeline, the characters have no notion they are in a horror novel until it is too late to escape it.
There is a fully fleshed historical novel going on about queer love struggling with how to exist within an intolerant society that gets gatecrashed by a vampire, and it raises the stakes even as you the reader know what is going to happen. I appreciated Cross taking characters like the Brides and giving them full backstories and complex motivations and tragedies; I thought it all worked really well and I was on the edge of my seat for most of the book.
So if you are looking to have a hot horror summer and you loved Dracula, add The Brides by Charlotte Cross into your to-read list immediately. Out July 7th, you’ll get an excellently done epistolary tale, a rising sense of dread, and a new appreciation for some old favorites.
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