My Goodreads review: An Education in Malice

[ankh_hpl]

An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


[Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.]

Dark academia and vampirism -- in this case, an updated riff on Carmilla -- combine in this lush exploration of love and blood at a New England women's college circa 1968. Compressed into one fall semester, the plot manages to blend artistic ambition, obsessive romance, serial murder, and a spectacularly inappropriate professor/student relationship (hint: fangs are involved) into an entertainment that keeps pages turning or clicking.

How well this approach works otherwise depends on the reader's taste for erotic description, or possibly said reader's preference for romance vs. vampiric worldbuilding. I'm a fan of both well-written vampire fiction and dark academia, but not so much explicit material. S.T. Gibson's prose is elegant, if slightly florid in an traditionally Gothic way. Her approach to dark academia, however, left me wondering if anyone was making it to class after the first half of the novel. Though there was that drained body found in the quad . . .

I suspect that I'm simply not the right reader for a novel like this, which would probably rate at least four stars from its intended audience. Gibson has created a perfectly stylish box of blood-dark chocolates for long winter evenings. I'd just prefer to curl up with something a bit more varied, or perhaps harder-edged.





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