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Verdict: A Lambda Award–winning gothic horror novel that reimagines Lucy Westenra and Bertha Mason as immortal survivors haunting 1967 San Francisco, anchored by a fierce found-family bond rather than a romance, held back by a slow-building middle third and a real split in trade reviews.
Best for: Readers who want atmospheric, prize-decorated gothic horror with confirmed bisexual representation, and who are willing to read the Lucy–Bertha relationship as sisterhood rather than the book’s central love story.
Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — no romance.io entry; no reviewer documents on-page sexual content between the leads)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.3/5 — a 3.48 Goodreads average pulled down by a genuine trade-review split and a slow-building middle third)
Tropes: Found family, gothic horror, feminist literary retelling, revisionist vampire fiction, single POV, 1967 historical setting, bisexual representation, morally grey antagonists, reclamation arc, standalone.
Reluctant Immortals is Gwendolyn Kiste’s 2022 gothic horror novel from Saga Press, a standalone reimagining Lucy Westenra, the discarded victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, the attic-bound first wife of Brontë’s Jane Eyre, as two immortal women hiding from the men who made them monsters, until Dracula’s ashes and Mr. Rochester’s return force them into the chaos of the Summer of Love in 1967 San Francisco.
The book carries a 3.48 average across roughly 3,470 Goodreads ratings, and it’s decorated in a way most reviews here aren’t: a 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, and a Bram Stoker Awards final-ballot spot for Superior Achievement in a Novel. That prestige sits next to a genuinely split trade reception — Library Journal and Booklist praised it outright, Publishers Weekly panned it hard. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.
What Is Reluctant Immortals About?
Reluctant Immortals is feminist revisionist horror before it is anything else — the kind of book that takes the discarded women of nineteenth-century gothic fiction and asks what they would actually say if anyone let them narrate. That makes the 1967 setting more than scenery: the Summer of Love backdrop of free love, exploitation, and men who talk liberation while practicing control gives Kiste a modern mirror for the Victorian abuse her leads already survived once. Readers expecting straightforward vampire horror should recalibrate; the monster doing real damage on the page is rarely the one with fangs.
Lucy Westenra spends the book keeping Dracula’s ashes sealed in urns and her own name a secret, having learned that visibility gets women like her killed twice. Bertha Mason assumes, correctly, that Rochester is not done with her, and that assumption drives everything that follows. The novel is told entirely from Lucy’s point of view — a choice more than one reviewer has flagged, since it means Bertha, arguably the more compelling of the two, is filtered through her friend’s account rather than narrating any of it herself.
What Makes This Feminist Gothic Horror Work
- The found-family bond: Lucy and Bertha’s decades-long partnership is the element readers name most consistently as the emotional core — a gothic sisterhood built on shared trauma, not romance.
- The 1967 backdrop: Setting the reclamation story against the Summer of Love lets Kiste show liberation rhetoric curdling into the same old control, without a history lecture.
- The prestige: A Lambda Literary Award win and a Bram Stoker final-ballot placement are real, verifiable recognition, not blurb inflation.
- The reclamation structure: Rather than escaping their abusers, Lucy and Bertha confront and out-maneuver them, which readers consistently call more satisfying than a rescue plot.
- Familiar villains: Recasting Dracula and Rochester as controlling, garden-variety abusive men, not supernatural threats first, is what makes the literary retelling land as commentary instead of pastiche.
Book Synopsis
Los Angeles, 1967. Lucy Westenra has spent nearly a century keeping Dracula contained in three sealed urns, never letting the ashes touch, terrified of what happens if he becomes whole again. She shares a rented house and a careful, question-free arrangement with Bertha Mason, the woman the world remembers only as Rochester’s mad wife in the attic. They cook, they argue over rent, they do not ask what the other survived before they met. It is a fragile peace, built on the assumption that if neither is ever seen, neither can be hurt again.
That peace ends when a stranger’s arrival threatens to scatter Dracula’s ashes for good, dragging Lucy back into a fight she thought she’d already won. Bertha, meanwhile, must reckon with the fact that Rochester has never stopped looking for her, and that his reach extends further than either woman wants to admit. Pushed north into the Haight-Ashbury scene at its most crowded and most disillusioned, they discover the counterculture’s promises of freedom come with their own price tags, and that men who claim to have changed are often running the same old script in new clothes.
What starts as damage control becomes something closer to a reckoning. Lucy and Bertha are no longer just hiding from the men who made them — they’re being maneuvered toward a confrontation neither chose, in a city with its own dangerous ideas about liberation. Whether either woman can afford to be seen again, after a century of learning that visibility is fatal, is the question the rest of the book has to answer.
My Review
What Kiste gets right first is the premise, and she gets it right without hedging: taking two women who exist in classic literature only as a dead girl and a locked-up madwoman, and building them a friendship instead of a fate, is a genuinely good idea, executed with real conviction. Lucy and Bertha’s domestic, trauma-shaped partnership — the agreement not to ask questions neither wants to answer — is the strongest writing in the book, and nearly every reviewer, favorable or not, names it as the thing that works.
The second real strength is the 1967 setting, which does actual work rather than sitting there as mood lighting. Kiste uses the Summer of Love’s gap between rhetoric and reality — free love preached by men who still expect control — to argue that the abuse Lucy and Bertha survived in the nineteenth century never really left, it just changed clothes. That argument is sharper than the vampire-horror marketing suggests, and it is why Library Journal and Booklist reviewed this as a serious literary novel rather than genre horror.
Where it struggles is pacing, and this is the dominant complaint rather than a personal gripe: multiple readers and critics describe a slow, meandering middle third before the back half kicks in. Three more structural issues recur alongside it. The book is told entirely from Lucy’s point of view, and several reviewers, independently, wanted a split perspective giving Bertha a voice of her own instead of a secondhand one. The male antagonists read as flat and interchangeable to more than one critic, Rochester and Dracula both reduced, at points, to variations on “a man like him.” And a secondary romantic subplot between Bertha and Jane Eyre, per one trade critic, never earns the page time it needs.
The expectation to reset here is about genre, not quality. This book is not billed anywhere — not on romance.io, not on the sapphic-fiction database I Heart SapphFic, not in a single review found for this piece — as a sapphic romance between Lucy and Bertha. It is feminist horror with confirmed bisexual representation and an intensely close female friendship. If you came for a driving f/f love story, recalibrate: it isn’t the book’s project. If gothic horror with real literary ambition and a fierce, unromantic sisterhood at its center is what you want, it delivers that more capably than the marketing lets on.
My honest note: A genuinely strong premise and a real award pedigree, slowed by its own middle third and a point-of-view choice that shortchanges its second lead. If you need the romance to be the point, this isn’t your book; if you want prize-decorated gothic horror about women reclaiming their own stories, it earns the trip.
| Element | In Reluctant Immortals |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Lucy Westenra & Bertha Mason — immortal survivors, found-family sisterhood, not a romance |
| Core tropes | Found family, gothic horror, feminist retelling, revisionist vampire fiction, reclamation arc, single POV |
| Setting | 1967 Los Angeles and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, at the height of the Summer of Love |
| Heat level | 1/5 — no romance.io entry; no documented on-page sexual content between the leads |
| Series | Standalone — fully resolves, no announced sequel |
| Content notes | Physical and psychological abuse, sexual assault referenced (not depicted graphically), coercive and controlling male partners, trauma flashbacks, violence |
How Dark and Spicy Is Reluctant Immortals?
Romance.io has no entry for Reluctant Immortals, which is itself informative: the database that catalogues adult romance heat levels does not catalogue this book, because it is not sold or read as one. Across every review consulted for this piece, trade and reader alike, not one names on-page sexual content involving Lucy or Bertha. That places heat at 1/5 by description, the same way this site scores a closed-door book: not a mark against the writing, just an accurate account of what is and isn’t on the page.
The one thing worth flagging in advance isn’t heat, it’s tone: the book deals directly with sexual assault (alluded to, not depicted) and sustained abuse by male partners, and more than one reviewer notes it stays dark without much relief. No reviewer flags anything beyond that. For gothic vampire fiction at a comparable heat level and literary register, both White is for Witching and The Confessions of Frannie Langton sit in the same low-heat, high-atmosphere band.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want gothic horror with real critical pedigree, you’re drawn to feminist reclamations of classic literature’s discarded women, you want confirmed bisexual representation without needing it to drive a romance plot, and a slow build in exchange for atmosphere doesn’t bother you.
You may want to skip it if: you came specifically for a sapphic romance arc, a single point of view frustrates you when the second lead is the more interesting one, flat or repetitive antagonists pull you out of a story, or you need a fast-moving plot from page one.
In short: a prize-decorated feminist horror novel with a real found-family bond at its center, marketed in a way that implies more romance than the book contains.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
There’s no viral BookTok moment attached to this book, and no meaningful Reddit thread turned up in a search by title and author — the discourse here is quieter than this site usually reports on. What’s actually driving new readers to Reluctant Immortals is prestige: the 2023 Lambda Literary Award win and the Bram Stoker Awards final-ballot placement both function as ongoing discovery engines, the kind of credential that gets a horror-adjacent book onto library and staff-pick lists years after release, which likely explains why its Goodreads rating count has kept climbing steadily rather than spiking once and stopping.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The found-family bond between Lucy and Bertha is the most consistently named strength, described across reviews as a “sorority” and the thing that “carries the story” even when other elements wobble. The 1967 setting and its Summer-of-Love disillusionment come up almost as often, praised for giving the feminist argument real teeth instead of vague gesturing. A vocal minority singles out the reclamation ending — confronting the abusers rather than escaping them — as more satisfying than the genre’s usual rescue arc.
What readers argue about and complain about: Pacing is the single most repeated criticism — a slow, meandering middle third before the back half accelerates, named independently on separate sites. Second: the single point of view. Because the book is narrated entirely by Lucy, several reviewers say Bertha never gets to be a full character on her own terms, and at least two wish outright for a split perspective. Third: the male antagonists, which more than one critic calls flat and repetitive, Rochester and Dracula both reduced at points to interchangeable versions of the same controlling man. There’s also a real split on the ending — some readers find the “in-between” afterlife space Lucy occupies satisfyingly ambiguous, others find it simply confusing.
The most useful finding here is the trade-review split. Library Journal and Booklist both reviewed this as a serious, well-executed literary novel. Publishers Weekly reviewed the same book and concluded it “delights in and eroticizes its depictions of female victimization” even as it claims to condemn it — a structural critique essentially no reader review raises. That the two camps disagree this sharply, on a craft question rather than just taste, is worth knowing before you start.
Narrated by Carlotta Brentan for Simon & Schuster Audio, the unabridged edition runs a little under nine hours.
Prefer audio? Listen to Reluctant Immortals on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
The standalone question worth asking first: Reluctant Immortals fully resolves — no cliffhanger, no announced sequel, nothing further to commit to. If it works for you, Kiste’s catalogue is the natural next stop: her most-read book, The Haunting of Velkwood, sits a little higher at 3.57 across more than double the ratings (8,312), and her Bram Stoker Award–winning debut, The Rust Maidens, rates higher still at 3.68 across 2,356 ratings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Reluctant Immortals a romance?
No. The central Lucy–Bertha relationship is consistently described as a platonic found-family bond, and the book carries no romance.io listing. A secondary romantic subplot between Bertha and Jane Eyre exists but stays thin.
Does Reluctant Immortals end on a cliffhanger?
No. It’s a complete standalone with no announced sequel, though reaction to how it resolves is genuinely split between “satisfying” and “underexplained.”
How spicy is Reluctant Immortals?
Barely at all. It scores 1/5 on this site’s heat scale — no romance.io entry, and no reviewer documents on-page sexual content between the leads.
Did Reluctant Immortals win any awards?
Yes. It won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction and was a finalist for the 2023 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel.
Is there an audiobook of Reluctant Immortals?
Yes. Simon & Schuster Audio’s unabridged edition is narrated by Carlotta Brentan, runs a little under nine hours, and is available through Libro.fm.
Is Reluctant Immortals told from more than one point of view?
No. It’s narrated entirely by Lucy Westenra, a choice several reviewers say leaves Bertha underdeveloped as a character in her own right.
If You Loved Reluctant Immortals, Read These Next
For the same gothic-literary register with a similarly thin sapphic thread rather than a driving romance, try White is for Witching. For the vampire-gothic mood this book has but with an actual central sapphic romance, A Dowry of Blood delivers what Reluctant Immortals doesn’t set out to. And for the same historical-reclamation engine — a woman written back into agency inside a story that once denied her one — The Confessions of Frannie Langton is the closest comparison here. For more in this vein, browse the Paranormal & Fantasy Lesbian Romance hub or the full Book Reviews archive.
The Bottom Line
Reluctant Immortals sets out to give two discarded gothic women a friendship, an armor, and a reckoning, and it mostly succeeds — the found-family bond is real, the historical parallel is sharp, and the pedigree (a Lambda Award win, a Stoker final-ballot spot) is earned, not inflated. What it doesn’t deliver is a central sapphic romance: the core relationship is sisterhood, the point of view flattens its second lead, pacing sags mid-book, and Publishers Weekly’s critique — that it eroticizes what it condemns — is worth taking seriously. Worth it for horror fans who want literary ambition over romance; skippable if a driving f/f love story is what you’re after. Check Reluctant Immortals on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Reluctant Immortals ranks as a prestige feminist gothic horror novel with confirmed bisexual representation — atmospheric and critically decorated, thin on actual romance, and best approached for the found-family reclamation story and the 1967 gothic mood rather than a central sapphic love story.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ 3.48 average across roughly 3,470 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Library Journal and Booklist praised it; Publishers Weekly panned it
- ✓ Lambda Literary Award win and a Bram Stoker final-ballot spot
- ✓ A slow-building middle third is the most repeated complaint
Romance ★★☆☆☆ 2.0/5
- ✓ Lucy–Bertha bond read consistently as sisterhood, not romance
- ✓ No romance.io listing; shelved as horror, gothic, retellings
- ✓ Secondary Bertha–Jane Eyre romantic thread stays underdeveloped
- ✓ Bisexual representation real enough to win a Lambda Award
Characters ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Lucy’s interiority and voice carry the book for most reviewers
- ✓ Multiple reviewers want more of Bertha’s own perspective
- ✓ Found-family bond named the emotional core across reviews
- ✓ Male antagonists read as flat and interchangeable to critics
Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Amazon’s review summary flags mixed reactions to prose style
- ✓ Publishers Weekly calls antagonists’ characterization “unrecognizable” updates
- ✓ Multiple reviewers praise witty, atmospheric line-level writing
- ✓ Repetitive phrasing around the male villains named by critics
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ Reclamation arc lands for most reviewers as satisfying vindication
- ✓ Shared trauma and recovery form the book’s emotional spine
- ✓ Publishers Weekly argues the book eroticizes the abuse it condemns
- ✓ “In-between place” afterlife mechanics leave more than one reader confused
Heat Level ★☆☆☆☆ 1/5
- ✓ No romance.io entry — not catalogued as adult romance
- ✓ No reviewer names on-page sexual content between the leads
- ✓ Lambda Award confirms bisexual rep without confirming heat
- ✓ Read for gothic horror and reclamation, not romance
Ending ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Standalone: fully resolves, no cliffhanger, no sequel announced
- ✓ Reviewers split on whether the “in-between place” resolution satisfies
- ✓ Vindication over the villains lands for most reviewers
- ✓ Costs are real — confrontation carries emotional torment, a body count
Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.1/5
- ✓ Lambda Award win and Bram Stoker finalist status reward revisiting
- ✓ Atmospheric 1967 setting and gothic mood widely praised
- ✓ Multiple reviewers flag a slow build before the back half
- ✓ 320 pages and a sub-nine-hour audiobook make a reread realistic
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