Up here on Mount Lee is as good a place as any to lay him to rest. So now here I am, standing in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, a shovel in one hand, an urn of his ashes in the other. I cover my ears and recite a prayer I no longer believe, but it’s not enough to blot out the sound of him. He’s been at it since yesterday, calling out for me, calling out for anyone, his voice strained and distant, so soft I can never quite make out the words, so unforgiving I can never escape him. It’s almost sundown in Los Angeles, and Dracula’s ashes won’t shut up. Rochester, and the two women who survived them, Bertha and Lucy, who are now undead immortals residing in Los Angeles in 1967 when Dracula and Rochester make a shocking return in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.Ĭombining elements of historical and gothic fiction with a modern perspective, in a tale of love and betrayal and coercion, Reluctant Immortals is the lyrical and harrowing journey of two women from classic literature as they bravely claim their own destiny in a man’s world. Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel that looks at two men of classic literature, Dracula and Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre-as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967. 2023 Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novelįor fans of Mexican Gothic, from three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature-from Lucy Westnera, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, Mr.

Reluctant immortals book