I’ve had The Coldest Touch by Isabel Sterling on my bookshelf for a couple of years—a victim of the neverending TBR list. I would say that any vampire love story is perfect for me, but the sparkly baseball family forced me to have to qualify that statement long ago. The Coldest Touch has none of the problems of that other YA vampire book: Elise, the non-vampire, can walk through a room without tripping over something and is at least semi-competent at staying alive in the face of a supernatural threat.
Let’s back up a minute: The Coldest Touch begins with a girl named Elise, who is buying magical ingredients for some sort of ritual. Following her is another girl named Claire, who for some reason doesn’t have a great relationship with sunlight. It turns out that the ritual is to bring back Elise’s brother Nick, who tragically died prior to the events of the book. Oh, and the whole “following Elise” thing involves Claire having to blend in as a high school student. Why is Claire following Elise, you ask? Well, for that to make sense, you have to know that into every generation, a Death Oracle is born.
And here you were thinking I was going to keep the Twilight thing going for the entire review.
Nope. Claire is a Watcher shepherd, tasked by the Council Veil to break the news to Claire and then recruit her to their cause. Elise is no Buffy, however; instead of slaying vampires, she sees the deaths of the living when she touches them. I have to say, I really do enjoy how Sterling subverts expectations. Surely, “the coldest touch” refers to the vampire, right? Again, nope.
Although I could see the connective tissue between The Coldest Touch and Twilight/Buffy, I spent a lot of time thinking about the connections between The Coldest Touch and Lisa Frankenstein. I saw Lisa Frankenstein on opening night in a completely empty theater. (For the record, I liked Lisa Frankenstein better than the other, more well-known horror film that Diablo Cody wrote, Jennifer’s Body.) Both The Coldest Touch and Lisa Frankenstein deal with navigating supernatural intrusions into adolescent life following familial tragedy. They are also “works of the current moment,” whereas Buffy and Twilight already seem like relics of a different time. Life moves pretty fast in the world of books/movies/TV about teenagers, doesn’t it?
If you like any of the works to which I’ve compared The Coldest Touch, then read this book immediately. Sterling keeps the story from getting too dark while maintaining stakes both fantastic and grounded in reality. In terms of romance, The Coldest Touch lands squarely in the realm of YA. Sterling mentions Jennifer Dugan in the Acknowledgments; for context, I would say the romance content of The Coldest Touch is a bit dialed down from what I would expect in a book written by Dugan.
Back to Lisa Frankenstein, which is the most queer non-queer film I’ve seen in a while. I really liked it (a lot of people didn’t), and I wanted to like it a whole lot more. With all due respect to “subtext,” which has got us through a lot of difficult and dark times, queerness needs to be “text” when it is part of the text. In Lisa Frankenstein, all that’s missing is a giant neon sign that blares, “GUYS, WE MADE A QUEER ALLEGORY! IS IT ABOUT BEING TRANS? MAYBE! *WINK WINK*” I bring this up because I kept thinking about how Sterling handles the queer content of The Coldest Touch in a much different fashion. Sterling includes traditional coming-out and queer trauma tropes, but they have a place in the narrative without overtaking the narrative. (You know, the narrative about a vampire infiltrating high school and a once-in-a-generation girl with powers.) The sapphic content isn’t squaring up for a Sharks-and-Jets-style rumble with comphet. It’s there because it’s part of the story, and it takes up exactly the amount of text that it should.
In other words, it’s 2024—go enjoy some queer YA urban fantasy with a dash of paranormal romance.
Liv (she/her) is a trans woman, a professor of English, and a reluctant Southerner. Described (charitably) as passionate and strong-willed, she loves to talk (and talk) about popular culture, queer theory, utopias, time travel, and any other topic that she has magpied over the years. You can find her on storygraph and letterboxd @livvalentine.
