Bee is suffering from nightmares the thing that keeps her alive after death stirs every night, and Rochester just cannot shut up and keeps calling Bee. Their life is not much unlike so many other immortal characters in literature and films, they are not enjoying a rich and lavish existence. All we know is that it was not her choice but another unasked present from Rochester. Unlike Lucy, Bee is not a vampire, but the way how she became immortal remains a secret for the first few chapters.

Every night they go to an open-air movie theatre and afterwards check on Dracula’s urns: the remains in them are constantly trying to escape and return to life. They live in a decaying house they bartered for some jewellery and have just $100 left to spend. They had met each other back in London seventy years ago, immortality and their terrible partners of the past bringing them together, and soon decided to move to the States to start a new life. Short for Bertha Mason, the first wife of Edward Rochester. The story begins when we see Lucy Westenra burying one of the urns with Dracula’s remains under the Hollywood sign since it has been annoying her greatly in recent days. Though personally not a huge fan of America 70s, I should say that LA and San Francisco of that time felt like a perfect background for the unfolding events – murky, full of hippies, so unlike Victorian England and the Romanian castles, and at the same time just right for the celebrity immortals and their reluctant victims. Rochester, and the two women who survived them, Bertha and Lucy, who are now undead immortals residing in Los Angeles in 1967 when Dracula and Rochester make a shocking return in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.Ĭombining elements of historical and gothic fiction with a modern perspective, in a tale of love and betrayal and coercion, Reluctant Immortals is the lyrical and harrowing journey of two women from classic literature as they bravely claim their own destiny in a man’s world.Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste from #BookReview #Horror #FeministRetellingįor me, Gwendolyn Kiste’s “Reluctant Immortals” was an ultimately feministic retelling, bringing together “Dracula” by Bram Stocker and “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte. Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel that looks at two men of classic literature, Dracula and Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre -as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967. For fans of Mexican Gothic, from three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature-from Lucy Westnera, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, Mr.

Reluctant immortals gwendolyn kiste