American Ghoul
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A wildly entertaining debut from Michelle McGill-Vargas, American Ghoul deftly combines horror and social commentary—with a dash of buddy comedy—in an innovative twist on the vampire genre.
You can’t kill someone who’s already dead.
That’s what Lavinia keeps telling her jailer after—allegedly—killing her mistress, Simone Arceneau. But how could Simone be dead when she was taking callers just a few minutes before? And why was her house always so dark?
Lavinia, a recently freed slave, met Simone, a recently undead vampire, by chance on a plantation in post–Civil War Georgia. With nothing remaining for either woman in the South, the two form a fast friendship and head north. However, Lavinia quickly learns that teaming up with this white woman may be more than she bargained for.
Simone is reckless and impulsive—which would’ve been bad enough on its own, but when combined with her particular diet, Lavinia finds herself in way over her head. As she is forced to repeatedly compromise her morals and struggles to make lasting human connections, Lavinia begins to wonder, is she truly free or has she merely exchanged one form of enslavement for another? As bodies start to pile up in the small Indiana town they’ve settled in, people start to take a second look at the two newcomers, and Simone and Lavinia’s relationship is stretched to its breaking point …
Book discussion questions are available here: https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/www.blackstoneaudio.com/docs/American%20Ghoul_Discussion%20Guide.pdf
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McGill-Vargas's deliciously unsettling debut adds a vampiric twist to the Reconstruction-era United States. From an Indiana jail cell, Lavinia, a formerly enslaved woman, recounts her life—starting with her first meeting with Simone, a vampire whose existence led Lavinia to her current predicament. At the time, the recently freed Lavinia is working at a brothel in Georgia, but she leaves with Simone to travel the country as her "ghoul," responsible for guarding Simone's coffin during the day and helping her to find meals and hide corpses. In Indiana, Lavinia makes new friends—particularly King, a fishmonger who lives on the shore of Lake Michigan and takes Lavinia under his wing. But, as the bodies pile up and Simone's hunger grows, vampire and ghoul find themselves increasingly at odds as Lavinia's desire to set down roots and build a life clashes with Simone's needs. At times their relationship resembles a road-trip buddy comedy; at others the horror is palpable. The depth of social commentary, touching on the intersections of superstition and prejudice, serves as a stark counterpoint to the narrative's more lighthearted elements. It's Lavinia's distinct voice that makes these tonal shifts work. Readers will be drawn in.
