Rating: 👍🏻

This is a vampire story, yes, but it’s also a story about depression and loneliness, and how we cope. Some of us, like Bethany, isolate, pushing everyone away. And then there’s James. He copes by developing an obsession with Bethany, following her over the years, regularly picking her up and taking her home, and then subsequently drinking so much of her blood he gives her amnesia so she forgets their encounters.

(Nobody’s perfect, and while vampirism can cure you of the ill of aging, it doesn’t, it turns out, promise perfect mental health.)

I could say a lot more about this book, like how the non-chronological storytelling keeps the tension high as we find out what happened in 1997 almost as Bethany does in 2007. Or about how Campbell has such a gift when it comes to grounding the reader in time and place (like in an early scene in the book when 1997 Bethany is dealing with a retail customer upset because they don’t have the Tamagotchi they’re looking for). Or how she adds to the lore of vampires in clever ways, what with them never cleaning because their sense of time is so distorted.

But mostly I’ll say this: god, Nenia Campbell's writing is such a gift. Like, truly.