Vile Lady Villains
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A queer, gothic horrormantasy that's perfect for readers of S. T. Gibson and Kiersten White.
With the consequences of her murderous actions closing in, Lady Macbeth turns to the three witches for help. They give her a potion that transports her to an unknown realm. Desperately lost, she opens a door and comes face to face with a beautiful woman drenched in blood.
Klytemnestra, Queen of Mycenae, is exacting bloody vengeance on her husband. Yet as she revels in her triumph, an otherworldly door appears and a strange woman steps in. Thinking this stranger a spirit, she chases Lady Macbeth into the realm of stories.
Hunted by screaming wraiths into worlds that are hell bent on their demise, this murderous pair are forced to form an alliance or perish. Yet the realm’s goddess, The Mistress of the House of Books, claims to hold the key to saving them.
As every threat brings our vile lady villains closer, turning ill intentions into fiery attraction that no author dare write, they have a choice: remain within the confines of their original tales ... or burn down the world to pen a new story together ...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing from mythology and Elizabethan literature, Christopoulou's ambitious but somewhat overwrought debut offers a muddled melange of romance and redemption. The heroines are two of drama's most virulent criminals: Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, who helped her husband murder his way to the Scottish throne, and Klytemnestra, whom Aeschylus showed rewarding her husband's return from Troy by butchering him in his bathtub. After these canonical killings, Shakespeare's weird sisters, here revealed to be one and the same as the Fates of Greek mythology, summon both women, now going by Anassa and Claret, respectively, and set them on a quest to save their souls by protecting innocents like Helen of Troy and Ophelia from meeting their tragic fates. After narrowly avoiding killing each other, the antiheroines fall into rapturous love as they travel as "partner in penance" through shadowy realms of intersecting stories, encountering classic characters and overcoming sinister wraiths sent by the Mistress of the House of Books. Christopoulou packs her leads' lightly episodic adventure, told in alternating first person, with classical allusions but doesn't engage particularly deeply with her source material. The result is inconsistent characterization and occasionally clunky prose, especially in the dissonance between generally effective descriptive passages and jarringly contemporary-feeling dialogue. (At one point, Claret instructs Anassa to "Keep it together please" while Anassa bemoans "I'm such an idiot.") Readers in it for the romance may be pleased, but others will long for more depth.
