Book Review: Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

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“Every horror has a moment when it glistens; after that, it’s just sad.”

📚

Following two women throughout different time periods, Thirst is a sumptuous, brutal, and devastating feminist Gothic surrounding mortality, fear, isolation, and yearning. Opening in contemporary Buenos Aires, the first section travels back to the 19th century, chronicling an unnamed vampire’s centuries-old European origins and fraught existence, while the second portion moves into the deteriorating perspective of a woman whose mother has been diagnosed with a nightmarish terminal illness.

Both characters experience torment, angst, fury, and desire. They embody both monstrosity and humanity, the lines between blurred and often nonexistent. Their intertwining stories form an immersive and lush account of betrayal, abandonment, and suffering; terror, autonomy, and servitude; slaughter, mayhem, and assimilation; persecution, capture, and loss; wandering, madness, and escape; survival, struggle, and horror; obsession, deception, and shame; hate, vengeance, and violence; sensuality, need, and companionship; mercy, choice, and permission; freedom, confinement, and loneliness; and truth, legend, and lore.

Filled with delicious gothic elements, this novel is a gorgeous and eerie tale where past and present collide, producing a riveting narrative and an unflinching reminder of how the only constant is change, and that knowledge, history, and parts of ourselves die when we lose someone we love. It’s a sensual and terrifying story of blood, murder, and motherhood; cemeteries, monuments, and mausoleums; adaptation, discretion, and change; and pestilence, female agency, and male entitlement — one where thirst is all-consuming, permanence elusive and fleeting.

🖤Amanda

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