Fake vampires, real villains: a review of She Made Herself a Monster

What I liked most about this story is that it's possible to sympathize with people who make poor decisions. They're put in impossible positions, and the bad choices they make are small enough to seem inconsequential. Things mostly revolve around gendered violence, but it's isn't just about sexually abusing and exploiting women (though do be warned that sexual assault does occur in this book). It's also about enacting little betrayals. It's exposing secrets. It's complicity in the face of cruelty. It's taking advantage of a harmful situation that you didn't technically create. It's choosing one woman over another. It's believing a rumor. It's being betrayed by your own body and desires. Eventually, however, these inconsequential things build up, and small acts of violence reveal themselves to be incredibly damaging, especially if there's a conveniently vulnerable scapegoat.

In this case, the scapegoat is Anka, a girl being groomed to marry a man she's not interested in, but she's not the only vulnerable person in town. There's also Nina, the widow being accused of witchcraft. There's Kiril, Anka's abused, manipulated, and deeply insecure cousin. There's the entire town of Koprivici, a small Bulgarian village that seems to have been cursed.

Because of this curse, everyone is superstitious, which allows them to fall prey to the new arrival, a con woman who's pretending to be a vampire hunter. Her intentions aren't initially pure, not exactly, but they're also not nefarious. She Made Herself a Monster isn't interested in easy and simplistic divides between good and evil. Everyone, no matter how kind and innocent, finds that protecting themselves and those they care about always come at a cost.

What you should expect from this story is beautiful prose, a folkloric atmosphere, more gore and suspense than actual supernatural horror, a few scenes with (what I interpreted as) sapphic pining, a fascinating twist on the vampire story, and a tiny bit of righteous feminine rage.

If I have criticisms, it's that the plot and premise are a little thin. Anka has her reasons for not running away from her desperate circumstances, but they get increasingly flimsier over time. It's sometimes not totally clear why her plans for escape are constantly changing and failing.

I also found that some characters didn't have the most distinctive voices. The side characters especially blurred together, and I kept getting the sense that there might have been a few dropped plotlines around them. (For example, for a book about superstitions, it's disappointing to meet zero characters who are actually superstitious. All we see is people who know better tricking their neighbors. We don't learn much about those tricked neighbors.) It's a real shame, because what makes the book special is a tangled web of relationships and a resulting set of power dynamics between many people in one village. Since a lot of characters have an important role to play in this web, Anka doesn't (or shouldn't) have the burden of carrying the narrative alone. However, as the plot progresses, minor characters get sidelined. The focus ends up narrowing in on Anka a little too much, and I eventually started to realize that she's somewhat derivative as far as protagonists in horror novels go.