She Made Herself a Monster

We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster?

In nineteenth-century Bulgaria, Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays—animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then Yana eliminates the threat and leaves seeds of hope in her wake.

The village of Koprivici, however, is plagued by exceptional illness and misfortune; its children rarely survive infancy. There, Yana meets a headstrong orphan whom the villagers blame for their curse. As Anka approaches womanhood, the village captain is grooming her for marriage against her will. Anka is powerless against him—that is, until Yana arrives. Together, the orphan and the vampire slayer hatch a plan to conjure a monster so vile it might provide cover for Anka to escape. But their plan quickly takes on a horrifying life of its own...

Inspired by Slavic folklore, She Made Herself a Monster concocts a clever mix of witchery, ghost stories, heresy, and deception to spin a feminist fable about agency and the power of collective action. It is a haunting and astoundingly cathartic tale of two women who will stop at nothing to take control of their fate.

A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut set in nineteenth-century Bulgaria: a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—actually a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons.