"The blood is the life."
~Dracula, by Bram Stoker
"Marion! Marion! Come out wherever you are! The hounds would like to play!"
~House of Hunger, Alexis Henderson
I have loved this sort of book pretty much since I've been able to read. Spooky house or castle. Isolation. A love interest with questionable motives and morals. Fleeing in the middle of the night.
Marion is a poor young woman living in an industrialized urban area, think London in the Victorian era, working as a housemaid. She supports her drug-addicted, dying brother. She sees a notice in the paper for a bloodmaid, and ends of applying in hopes that after her terms of indenture she will obtain financial and personal freedom.
In this world, aristocrats feed of the blood of poor women, and they live on the moors in the north. There's no indication, that I can see, that the blood does them actual good, and it's certainly not great for the people doing the bleeding.
The moors/moors are a staple of gothic literature because they're wild, untamed, and symbolically cruel. In Seanan Mcguire's Wayward Children series -- first book if the series is Every Heart a Doorway -- one of the world they visit and revisit is called The Moors, and it's the embodiment of where vampires and mad scientists reign.
What would you give or gamble to change your life? Would you bleed? How much? Alexis Henderson makes no bones about how this is a form of sex work. Bloodmaids are mistresses, jockying for favor, making the best choices they can with limited options in order to some day be independent.
Marion is indentured to Lisavet Bathory. If you're a fan of vampire stories or creepy history, you might have heard of this character's obvious inspiration, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian noblewoman. What she got up to in her spare time -- both real and rumored -- well, I suppose due to the nature of the homage, would be a bit of a spoiler to share. However, whenever you see a quip about bathing in the blood of virgins to retain your youth, you have those rumors to blame.
Lisavet is beautiful, mysterious, demanding, and the people in her sphere fall under her spell, no one more than Marion, and the other 4 bloodmaids. The story is blood-drenched, and as meat is repeatedly described it's clear that the women in this house are another form of meat served up in a futile effort to sate the insatiable.
It IS the House of Hunger.
Every chapter starts with a quote from bloodmaid.
"We are all alike in the fact that our great life's work is deciding who and what we're willing to bleed for." "We bleed for those we love most." "It's a strange thing to go from hungry ... to the thing hungered for."
I don't want to say much more about the plot, so I'll say the author has given a lot of thought of the role of classism and sexism. Exploitation. Sex work and sex trafficking. There's talk of how important youth is and how vulnerable that makes girls.
"We're broken into submission, by grief and poverty, long before we ever set foot in this House. And then we arrive, on the promise of the first kindness many of us have received in years, and you take advantage of weakness. You cultivate it, to better exploit us."
It's fine to read this as a horror novel, and it works great on that level, but I appreciated the thought and symbolism, which only further engaged me.
The last portion of the book was pretty tense and pretty scary. And extra bloody in a book with no shortage of blood.
I had this at 4 stars, but I'm bumping it up to 5, because it honestly gave me everything I needed in this subgenre, and I bookmarked a million passages.
"Sometimes I feel like I've been building you a House out of my own bones. And still, you look at me with so much contempt and mistrust. You complain because there are gaps in the roof of my ribs, and you ask me to give more of myself to fill them. You want my hips to be the bowl you drink from. My shoulders, your bed. My arms, your walls. My legs, the very ground you stand on. You want your fill of my blood whenever you crave it. What more do you want from me?"
