I admit I expected more trappings of the ’60s, more specific mentions of music and fashion, but I was pleased to find references I didn’t expect: details about cars and drive-ins and the layout of neighborhoods that might as well be Transylvania or the moors to me. But the past comes with you even when you escape not just the places you’re from, but their time period entirely. In Reluctant Immortals, set in California in the 1960s, Lucy and Bee (as Bertha now calls herself) have found each other and fled to America for something resembling a fresh start. Both of these characters were sidelined in their original novels, fridged before refrigerators existed, and Kiste is on a mission to restore their voices. Reluctant Immortals features British heiress Lucy Westenra, whom you may recognize as one of Dracula’s victims from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, and the Jamaican Creole character Bertha Mason, whom you might not remember as the madwoman Rochester confined in the attic in Jane Eyre (1847). Gwendolyn Kiste would like to remind us all, however, that it’s always been a horror novel. Being a woman in America does feel a little bit like being in a horror novel these days.
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