Spoilers Ahead

This book delivers on the common themes and atmospheric storytelling you expect to see in vampire narratives but ultimately falls short.

In Thirst, we follow the journey of a female vampire as she travels through different countries, time periods, and historical events and tries to survive without making her existence known to humans. She enjoys romances with both men and women, all of which eventually end through various forms of death. She decides to go into permanent hiding after she’s threatened with her identity being revealed. But after decades have passed, she’s accidentally reawakened from her sleep and brought into the modern world by a single mother who has a fascination with death.

This book is a solid 3 for me, and that’s mostly because of the first half where we learn about the vampiric protagonist’s adventures and struggles with eternal life throughout the centuries. I loved this part of the book. We see her bloodlust and cruelty, her loneliness, her selfishness, and her grief over her vampiric sisters. She grapples with her immortality and how it makes her both invisible and vulnerable amongst humans; her thirst for blood, which drives her to glut herself on dozens of innocent people; and her desire for the touch and attention of other living beings, despite her need to stay hidden. All themes that show up often in stories about vampires. Even in her sympathetic moments, we’re acutely reminded that she is still considered a monster when we see her take pleasure in manipulating and killing others.

Her humanity was stolen from her after she was sold to a vampire by her mother, and the only real family she had were the other girls she grew up alongside in the vampire’s castle. She and the other women lived a fairly “comfortable” existence, with their meals procured for them and no need to hunt—until all the vampires were killed by angry villagers. This leaves the protagonist to fend for herself in the world.

From there, we see her make it to Buenos Aires and meet various humans that she becomes attached to, all while navigating the yellow fever epidemic ravaging the city.

I expected this rich storytelling to flow naturally into the modern-day setting we get a glimpse of at the very beginning of the novel, but that doesn’t really happen. Instead, we receive smaller mentions of the vampire character while mostly focusing on the other protagonist, who is a single mother named Alma dealing with her own mother’s failing health. The mystery and ambience of vampirism are exchanged for more “worldly” concerns, like co-parenting and spinal surgeries and co-workers you don’t really want to hang out with. There are oddly drawn-out, somewhat mundane scenes of Alma taking her son to the dentist and cleaning her mother’s tracheotomy tube that don’t feel like they have a clear purpose within what’s listed as a “gothic” vampire story.

There’s an interesting throughline that could connect Alma’s grief for her mother with the vampire’s grief for her sisters and her complex feelings about her own mother, but this feels unexplored. The vampire protagonist really doesn’t get a lot of meaningful airtime in the latter half of the novel—not enough for her and Alma to build a convincing dynamic, whether that be romantic or platonic or something else.

(This is categorized as a sapphic romance, but much of that element occurs between the vampire and side female characters, not necessarily with Alma.)

This lack of a concrete dynamic makes Alma’s choice even odder. At the end of the book, our human protagonist gives up her life to live alongside the female vampire. I don’t exactly want to be all “think of the children,” as I’ve read stories such as selkie tales that end with mothers abandoning their children for a life they always wanted to live or were robbed of, so this isn’t new to me. But in my view, Alma doesn’t show such a strong desire throughout the narrative to leave it all behind that would precipitate her being willing to abandon her son. Of course, she experiences immense grief and stress over her dying mother, but I didn’t get a sense that she’d go so far to escape the pain. For that reason, this ending seems a bit left field.

Overall, I don’t think I’ve read many translated novels (or at least not lately), so it was nice to dive into this one. I listened to the audiobook, which was great for immersing myself in the settings and hearing the correct pronunciations of names and locations. If you’re going to read this one, it’d be best to temper your expectations regarding narrative cohesion and the depth of the relationship between the two protagonists.

If you’re a big fan of vampire media like me, you might check out the same-named film Thirst by Park Chanwook if you haven’t already. It shares some elements with this book, including epidemics/sickness, dying mothers, and female protagonists who are stifled by their current living situation. This film has been one of my favorites for a while, and it’s influenced by the 1867 French novel Thérèse Raquin—which the film In Secret is also based off of…but I’m not gonna get into all that here. I’ve fanned out about Oscar Isaac enough on this blog already. Lol.

Pick up this book if you like:

• Vampiric protagonists
• Historical settings
• Queer characters
• Women’s wrongs

Pass it by if you don’t want to read about:

• Lots of talk about grief and death in various forms
• Parental death
• Epidemics and chronic illness
• Religious blasphemy (regarding Christianity)