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Verdict: A Victorian vampire gothic with the best prose in the sapphic corner of the genre, let down by a middle that wanders for longer than the story needs it to.
Best for: Readers who want sentences worth rereading and a found family they will grieve leaving, and who can forgive a book that takes its time getting where it is going.
Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit open door)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.78 Goodreads average and a pacing complaint that turns up in every star band, including the five-star ones)
Tropes: Vampire romance, historical gothic, found family, slow burn, hurt/comfort, class difference, fat heroine, sex worker heroine, revenge plot, immortality as damage.
A Long Time Dead by Samara Breger is a standalone sapphic historical romance published by Bywater Books in May 2023, set in a London of 1837 where Poppy — working class, formerly a sex worker, and newly dead — wakes up inside the household of Roisin, the aristocratic vampire who made her, and has to work out whether the woman who ended her life is also the one she wants to spend eternity with.
It holds a 3.78 average across 2,040 Goodreads ratings, and it is carrying the single most valuable piece of critical validation any book in this subgenre has: the New York Times named it one of the ten best romances of 2023, praising its “balance of humor and brutality.” That endorsement and the reader reviews are describing two rather different books, and the gap between them is the most useful thing this review can tell you.
What Is A Long Time Dead About?
A Long Time Dead is a paranormal romance that reads as historical fiction first. The 1837 setting is not wallpaper — the class machinery is the engine. Poppy comes from the bottom of that society and Roisin from the top of it, and immortality does not dissolve the distance between them so much as preserve it indefinitely.
Poppy is introduced through what she has already lost: a body that is no longer hers to feed, a life she did not agree to leave, and a set of survival instincts that were built for a world she has now aged out of. Roisin is introduced through what she assumes — that she has done Poppy a kindness, that time will settle the matter, that the household she has assembled is a family rather than a collection. The book is told in third person and keeps a slight distance from both of them, which is unusual for the genre and is a large part of why it reads like a novel rather than a romance beat sheet.
What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Gothic Work
- The prose: The single most-praised element, and by a wide margin. It is the thing readers name first when they recommend it, and — the detail that matters — several reviewers who rated it two and three stars still concede the writing outright.
- The Brood: The vampire household is the emotional core. More than one reader says plainly that they cared about the found family more than about the central couple, which is a strange thing for a romance to survive and this one does.
- Poppy herself: Fat, working class, a former sex worker, and written without either apology or a redemption arc attached to any of those facts. Readers single her out specifically, and there is very little else in the subgenre that looks like her.
- The tonal mix: Genuine gore next to genuine jokes. One reviewer’s verdict — “Anne Rice wishes!!!” — captures the register better than a paragraph of description would.
- It is complete: A standalone with an epilogue, no series commitment, no cliffhanger. In a subgenre that runs on trilogies, that is worth stating plainly.
Book Synopsis
Poppy has spent her life being useful to people who were not useful back. She has survived London from underneath it — the work, the cold, the arithmetic of a body that is the only thing you have to trade — and she has done it without much expectation of anything better. Then she dies, and does not stay dead.
She wakes into Roisin’s world instead: a house, a name, a household of vampires with centuries of habit between them and rules Poppy was never taught. Roisin is beautiful and remote and responsible for all of it, and she has the particular confidence of a woman who has never had to ask whether she was wanted somewhere. Poppy has spent her whole life reading rooms she was not invited into. She reads this one immediately.
What follows is a long, decade-spanning account of what the two of them do to and for each other, threaded through a revenge plot that predates Poppy entirely and a found family that closes around her before either woman admits what is happening. The question the book keeps returning to is not whether they want each other. It is whether a person who was never given a choice about any of this can meaningfully choose the woman who took the choice away.
My Review
Breger can write, and I want to lead with that because it is the reason this book is worth your time and it is not a close call. The sentences do work. The imagery is specific rather than atmospheric-by-default, the humour is dry enough to survive the gore sitting next to it, and the voice holds for four hundred pages without going slack. One reader’s line — “Breger had me in her thrall by the end of the third sentence” — is the version of this I heard most often, and I do not think it is an exaggeration.
The second real strength is the Brood. The vampire household is written as a family with history, which means it has grievances, in-jokes and a hierarchy nobody states out loud. It is the most alive part of the book, and it is the reason several readers report caring more about the house than about the romance. That should be a fatal problem in a romance and it is not, because the household is where Poppy’s arc actually happens — she is a woman who has never been kept, learning what being kept costs.
Where it struggles is pace, and this is not a personal gripe. It is the dominant complaint in the reviews and it is unusually well distributed: I counted eleven independent reviewers naming the length or the meander, and they range from a one-star did-not-finish at eighteen per cent to a four-and-a-half-star review that still says it “felt like a longer read than it actually was.” A complaint that crosses the whole star spread like that is telling you something structural. The book is 412 pages, it spans decades, and it separates the two leads for long stretches — which serves the theme and starves the romance. Three readers say outright that it needed a tighter edit.
Two expectations to reset. First, this is shelved by readers as horror and gothic at least as often as romance, and people arriving for scares report finding a hedonistic decades-long novel instead. Second, the heat runs hotter than the jacket copy suggests — romance.io bands it “explicit open door,” tags it fem-dom and BDSM, and there is on-page group sex that the publisher’s blurb does not prepare you for. If “Victorian romance” made you expect restraint, recalibrate. If it made you expect a fade to black, definitely recalibrate.
My honest note: The best-written book on our sapphic vampire list, and not the best-paced one. If you read for sentences and for a household you can live inside, this is the one. If you need a romance that stays in the same room as itself, the middle will test you.
| Element | In A Long Time Dead |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Poppy & Roisin — a newly turned working-class vampire and the aristocrat who made her |
| Core tropes | Historical gothic, found family, slow burn, hurt/comfort, class difference, revenge |
| Setting | London from 1837 onward, and the vampire household Poppy wakes into |
| Heat level | 4/5 — explicit open door, with fem-dom and BDSM elements and on-page group sex |
| Series | Standalone — complete, with an epilogue, no sequel announced |
| Content notes | Graphic gore and body horror, blood, cannibalism, murder, physical and emotional abuse, explicit sexual content; grief, suicidal thoughts and domestic abuse at moderate weight; fatphobia, sexual assault and torture flagged at minor weight; readers additionally report drugging, mind control, animal death and forced institutionalisation |
How Spicy Is A Long Time Dead?
A 4 out of 5. romance.io bands the steam level “explicit open door” — one step below its top rating — and readers confirm the scenes are graphic rather than suggestive. What the band does not capture is the range: the same database tags the book fem-dom and BDSM, and four separate reviewers flag the volume of sexual content as more than they expected, one calling it a “perverse level of sex talk.” Nobody is complaining that there is too little.
The element worth knowing in advance is on-page group sex, which arrives without much warning from the packaging and which a positive reviewer for The Lesbian Review describes, approvingly, as “smoking hot orgies.” Beyond that, no reviewer I found flags specific kink content that would surprise someone comfortable with the tags above. If you want this band elsewhere, A Hunger Soft and Wild sits at the same 4/5 explicit open door, and House of Crimson Hearts goes a full step higher.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you read for prose above everything, you want a found family with real history rather than a supporting cast, you like your vampires melancholy rather than powerful, and you would rather have one complete book than the first third of a trilogy.
You may want to skip it if: a wandering middle loses you, you need the couple on the page together to stay invested, you came for gothic horror and will feel cheated by a decades-spanning character novel, or a large volume of explicit content is not what you wanted from “Victorian romance.”
In short: the best sentences in the subgenre, attached to the loosest structure.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
There was never a viral moment here, and there still isn’t one. The visible social footprint is remarkably small for a book with this much critical standing — one independent BookTok review and two fanworks on Archive of Our Own, both posted more than two years after publication. That second detail is the interesting one: people were still writing in this world in 2025, which is a quieter and more durable signal than a wave of videos. What the book has instead of buzz is the New York Times nod, a small-press pedigree at Bywater, and a professional audiobook — Ella Lynch narrating fourteen and a half hours for Podium Audio, released July 2024, more than a year after the print edition.
Prefer audio? Listen to A Long Time Dead on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The prose, first and by a distance — and the strongest evidence for it is that critical reviewers concede it anyway. One two-star reviewer writes that “Breger’s prose is the absolute star of the show” in the middle of an otherwise unhappy review. Then the Brood, which several readers say they were more invested in than the couple. Then Poppy, singled out repeatedly as a fat, working-class, ex-sex-worker heroine written without flinching. Then the tone — the gore-and-jokes register that gets compared to Anne Rice, usually favourably and usually with exclamation marks.
What readers argue about and complain about: Pacing, above everything — eleven independent voices, and the crucial detail is that they are not confined to the low ratings. The most-liked review on the entire book is a one-star did-not-finish at eighteen per cent whose complaint is simply boredom: “I should not be bored by a lesbian vampire revenge romance.” Second: editing and structure, with three reviewers describing chapters that function as filler episodes. Third: the volume of sexual content, from four readers who wanted less of it. Then a cluster of smaller recurring notes — that the romance is not sufficiently earned given the page count, that Poppy is hard to like, and two flags for anachronism. Note the genuine inversion here: prose is the most-praised element in the book and the specific target of its two loudest detractors, one of whom calls it “cumbersome.” That is a taste split, not a craft failure, and it means the sample chapter will tell you more than the average will.
The standalone question worth asking first: it resolves. There is no series, no cliffhanger, no sequel and no complaint anywhere in the reviews about being left hanging — for a vampire book in 2026 that is genuinely unusual. Where you go next is Breger’s own backlist, and here the numbers are honest about the scale of the jump: her debut Walk Between Worlds sits at 3.64 across 306 ratings against this book’s 3.78 across 2,040. The reviewer who covered both calls this one more mature on every level. She has also said she is writing further Victorian supernatural romances set peripherally to this world, though none has published as of August 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does A Long Time Dead have a happy ending?
Yes. It is a complete standalone with an epilogue, and no reviewer in the sweep reports an unresolved ending or a cliffhanger. One reader does think the epilogue runs on longer than it needed to.
Is A Long Time Dead a romance or a horror novel?
It is sold as a romance and shelved by readers as horror and gothic about as often. Both readings are fair — the romantic arc resolves, but the book is structurally a decades-spanning character novel with a revenge plot, and readers arriving for scares consistently report not finding them.
How spicy is A Long Time Dead?
A 4 out of 5. romance.io bands it “explicit open door,” and tags it fem-dom and BDSM. There is on-page group sex, and four separate reviewers flag the amount of sexual content as more than the packaging led them to expect.
Is A Long Time Dead part of a series?
No. It is a standalone with no sequel published or announced. Samara Breger has said she is writing further Victorian supernatural romances set peripherally to this world, but as of August 2026 none has been released.
Is there an A Long Time Dead audiobook?
Yes — narrated by Ella Lynch for Podium Audio, running 14 hours 28 minutes, released 23 July 2024. It is stocked on Libro.fm, so you can buy it in a way that supports an independent bookshop.
Did A Long Time Dead really make the New York Times’ best romances list?
Yes. It was named one of the ten best romances of 2023, and the paper praised its “balance of humor and brutality.” It is the only book on our sapphic vampire list carrying that level of mainstream critical recognition, and it is worth knowing that no other trade outlet reviewed it at all.
If You Loved A Long Time Dead, Read These Next
If the literary-gothic register is what held you, A Dowry of Blood works the same seam at a lower heat and in a tighter package. If it was the historical vampire world rather than the prose, A Hunger Soft and Wild gives you a medieval-fantasy setting at the identical 4/5 heat band and an ending that lands faster. And if you want the same appetite for ruin with academia instead of aristocracy, An Education in Malice is the obvious next stop — with the warning that it is not a romance either.
For more in this register, browse our best sapphic vampire romance books guide or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
A Long Time Dead is the most ambitious book on our sapphic vampire list and the least disciplined. The prose is the best in the subgenre, the found family is written with real history behind it, and Poppy is a heroine there is almost no precedent for. It is also long, structurally loose, and separated from its own romance for stretches that serve the theme at the story’s expense. Whether that trade works depends entirely on whether you read for sentences or for plot — but the reader who reads for sentences is getting something nothing else here can give them. Check A Long Time Dead on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, A Long Time Dead ranks as a literary sapphic vampire gothic — beautifully written and unusually humane about its monsters, held back by a middle that wanders, and best approached for the prose and the household rather than for the romance plot.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ 3.78 average across 2,040 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ New York Times top ten romances of 2023
- ✓ Prose conceded even by detractors
- ✓ Pacing complaint spans every star band
Romance ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Devotion register lands hard
- ✓ Class distance survives immortality
- ✓ Consent question sits at the centre
- ✓ Leads separated for long stretches
Characters ★★★★☆ 4.1/5
- ✓ Poppy has almost no precedent
- ✓ The Brood written with real history
- ✓ Roisin’s remoteness is earned, not stock
- ✓ Four readers find Poppy hard to like
Writing ★★★★☆ 4.4/5
- ✓ Most-praised element by a distance
- ✓ Gore and jokes held in one register
- ✓ Critical reviewers concede it anyway
- ✓ Two loud voices call it laboured
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.9/5
- ✓ Immortality written as a wound
- ✓ Found family carries the weight
- ✓ Cycles of trauma are the real subject
- ✓ Decade jumps dilute the stakes
Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ romance.io band: explicit open door
- ✓ Fem-dom and BDSM elements tagged
- ✓ On-page group sex, unflagged by packaging
- ✓ Four readers wanted less of it
Ending ★★★★☆ 4.2/5
- ✓ Complete standalone, no cliffhanger
- ✓ Epilogue closes the arc
- ✓ No unresolved-ending complaints found
- ✓ One reader finds the epilogue overlong
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.8/5
- ✓ Prose rewards a second pass
- ✓ Fanworks still appearing two years on
- ✓ Ella Lynch audiobook is a real alternative
- ✓ 412 pages discourage a quick reread
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