This short novel will offend some readers. Strange, because anyone who reads past the dedication should know what they’ve picked up: “For all the hot queer sluts. You know who you are.” Still, pearls will be clutched. If it were up to Rebekah, the book’s emotional-vampire protagonist, those pearls would also be twisted around an eager fist to choke whoever is wearing them during a particularly vigorous group-sex session. 

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say there is an orgy per chapter in Vampires at Sea. But this narrative is about so much more than sex and lust, and the fleeting high they offer. Rebekah and her husband Hugo, who have been married for centuries, board the ship Zorya for a pleasure cruise, looking forward to “hordes of chemically uninhibited bodies with cellulite looking for pleasure, debasing themselves publicly” after their relationship hit a rough patch. A vacation, Rebekah thinks, with plenty of distractions (lovers), is just what they need to heal their long and open marriage. 

But what is supposed to be simple and fun gets more layered and complex, just like the labyrinthine ship whose corridors become a maze, whose gym-spa-bar-theater-casino become a blur of flashing lights and luscious body parts. All of that, and the emotions that accompany the hundreds and hundreds of vacationers aboard–emotions Rebekah, Hugo, and their kind feed on until their bellies are bloated. When she gorges, she says that “[i]t feels like sex and sleep all at once, like the warmest pleasure that coats your insides and tickles your bits. It’s delicious, it’s mana.” Rebekah learns the buffet is not free, though–while she is distracted by so many admirers, someone beautiful and dangerous is allowed to get too close, both to Hugo and to her. In a turn of “be careful what you wish for,” she comes to understand that she will have to fight–heart and soul, tooth and nail, breast and thigh–for the emotional vampire she loves.

For a slim and svelte novel, Rebekah’s predicament brings up heavy questions: What does she mean to Hugo, and what does he mean to her? What is the difference between comfort and love, between routine and happiness? Does she want only when she is wanted, or is it more perverse than that—the less she’s wanted, the more desperate is her craving? How selfish can a person be and still call their motivations noble? 

Not all of these questions will be answered. Certain mysteries will be left unsolved. In fact, there is a sense of unresolve, even after the last page is read—an itch left unscratched. Some of the story’s threads end abruptly, as if they’ve been snipped off. Others dangle in the breeze. This feels purposeful: Either Merbaum is leaving readers hungry for a sequel, or she is leaving them wanting and wanton, much as tantalizing Rebekah herself would.

Merbaum’s rolling, captivating narrative voice draws an audience like hipsters to a faux speakeasy. Rebekah addresses the reader directly, but rather than the reader stepping into the role of a fictionalized listener, Merbaum creates the sense that Rebekah is actually talking to the reader. Rebekah’s voice is intelligent without pretention, funny without effort. Even when she is describing gymnastic sex acts as she engages in them, there’s nothing juvenile about it. It’s still poetry. Slutty, slutty poetry: “We’re twisted up in our seats, making out like lovers who know they’re about to be wrenched apart. I ask Misha if they want to go somewhere and f*** properly.” Rarely have libido and eloquence been so well matched. 

The novel is cleverly organized into days, fourteen in all. As the two-week cruise progresses and Rebekah’s personal life gets messier, the world beyond the Zorya’s patch of water gets more violent and frightening. Rebekah isn’t safe on the ship—people keep disappearing, though the crew tries to hush it up—but she can’t leave it. Due to an amorphous and ever-present world war creeping closer, she and all the other passengers become inmates on a floating, rainbow-colored prison. This strange, almost framed setting—sumptuous rooms on a gigantic party boat surrounded by empty water lapping against shores where docking equals death—does much to heighten the novel’s tension. For Rebekah, things get bad, then they get terrible, and then she gets trapped. Accustomed to preying on other people’s pulsing emotions, Rebekah must make a life-altering choice about what to do with hers. 

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Lindsay Merbaum is a queer author of strange tales and the founder of Pick Your Potions, a consortium of mixology and witchery. Her first novel with Creature Publishing, The Gold Persimmon, was a 2021 Foreword Indies Finalist. Lindsay lives in Flint, Michigan with her partner and cats.

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Rebecca Cuthbert writes dark fiction and poetry. For books, news, and more, visit https://linktr.ee/rebeccacuthbertwrites.