“Even when I’m rabid and horrible and want to do awful things…you make me a little better than the monster I am.”
Marcella is an ancient Draugr, an icelandic monster who preys on abusive men. But she has overstayed her meal as an associate professor in Seattle, and people are starting to talk. She moves across the country to the classics program at Preston University near Boston. There, Lacie is scrambling for a tenure track in a brutally competitive old-boy’s club, resentful of the beautiful new professor in the tight dresses and Louboutin heels drawing the eye of every man in charge.
But when bodies start dropping, it becomes clear that the young professors disappearing aren’t just quitting from stress. And Marcella realizes her new hunting grounds are someone else’s territory. But leaving would mean letting the beautiful, snappy little human professor become prey, and her heart won’t allow it.
Lethal Kiss is a perfectly timed release to enjoy in the dark shifting of the year that is November, with the smell of crisp snow and rotting dead leaves in the air. It’s gloriously gothic and deliciously dark academia, but adds a really interesting twist by rooting the supernatural forces in Nordic cultures. We get draugr and vaettr instead of ghosts and vampires, and that theme carries through from the ancient library stacks to the snow-silenced landscape. We have a gruesome mystery with personal stakes, steamy sapphic yearning, and unexpectedly spicy uses for prehensile tongues.
The sapphic love story is wrapped in feminist rage and monstrous needs, with interesting exploration of the archaic patriarchal toxicity that still rules academia, and how those patriarchal systems pit women against each other for scraps of success, to avoid becoming fodder for the machine. And when women stick together, they can burn it all to the ground.
