Popular culture is saturated with vampires. They are everywhere you look, like a mythological Bradley Walsh. There are pasty ones. Scary ones. Sexy ones. Even – Lord, forgive our teenage sins – sparkly ones. So, it was surely only a matter of time before the undead revealed their latest incarnation: the millennial.
In hands less assured than debut author Claire Kohda, this new development in vampiric lore could easily have felt gimmicky and cheap. Instead, Lydia – the angst-ridden protagonist of Woman, Eating – is an engaging mix of assertive and floundering, hopeful and hideous. Bitten when she was only a baby, Lydia grew to adulthood like any normal human, before the ageing process abruptly ended in her early twenties. While that might sound like heaven to many of us, Kohda harnesses the traditional trope of the unchanging vampire to cleverly explore how modern women often feel cut adrift in the world, unable to reach the milestones which defined the lives of previous generations.
With no boyfriend, house or career prospects, Lydia is unwillingly consigned to the margins of society, hiding away in the very shadows her forebears once loved to haunt. An authentic, intelligent reinvention of a familiar story, Woman, Eating is one vampire tale you won’t regret inviting inside your home.
Woman, Eating, Claire Kohda (Virago)
Price: £14.99. Info: here
words RACHEL REES
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