A Dowry of Blood

A Dowry of Blood is a novel by the writer S T Gibson, published in 2021 by Nyx Publishing. It retells the story of Dracula from the point of view of one of his brides.

Constanta is a young woman with nothing left when a man arrives and saves her life, and the bargain she makes with him brings her into a household that is both a marriage and a captivity. Her rescuer is a monster, and the book follows her across centuries inside his family: the other consorts he gathers, the houses and cities they are moved between, the cruelties that she learns to recognise as cruelty rather than love, and the ways in which a person made to depend on someone can lose the language for resisting him. The novel is told in the form of a letter to her husband, written to account for what she has done and to explain why she has done it.

The book belongs to a wave of recent fiction that reads gothic vampire stories from the position of the people inside them, and the patterns it describes, of coercion, jealousy and the slow recovery of a self, are the subject rather than the decoration.