Fang Fiction - Kate Stayman-London

I came for the hot vampires and stayed for the emotional damage.

Look. I went into Fang Fiction fully prepared to roll my eyes. A book about a woman who finds out her favorite vampire series is real? That's either going to be the most self-indulgent thing ever written or it's going to be my entire personality for a week. Reader: it was the second one.

Here's the pitch. Tess Rosenbloom dropped out of her Columbia PhD program, works nights at a too-cool Brooklyn hotel, and copes with life by disappearing into the Blood Feud vampire novels like the rest of us cope with a bad week and a TBR pile. Then an actual vampire, Octavia Yoo, struts into her hotel, and suddenly Tess is getting shipped off to a literal island of exiled vampires to track down Octavia's brother Callum — who is, naturally, dangerous, brooding, and inconveniently hot. You know. As they do.

Is it campy? Wildly. Stayman-London cranks everything to eleven and knows she's doing it. The vampires are melodramatic, the fandom references are deep-cut Buffy-and-Swiftie millennial catnip, and the whole thing winks at you so hard you'll worry it pulled a muscle. The book is stitched together with fake podcast transcripts, Blood Feud excerpts, and fandom articles, which sounds gimmicky and absolutely is — but the gimmick works, damn it. It's a love letter to being so obsessed with a fictional world you'd genuinely consider moving there.

Now, my receipts. The romance is the weakest link. Callum and the dreamy book-crush Felix are supposed to be the swoon engines, and both of them are about as three-dimensional as a laminated bookmark. We're told to be obsessed rather than shown why, and for a book riding on a love story, that's a real "ma'am, do your homework" moment. If you need a love interest with an interior life, lower your expectations a notch.

But — and here's where I shut up and sit down — underneath the camp, this book is secretly about a sexual assault survivor reclaiming her life, and Stayman-London handles that with genuine, careful grace. It would've been so easy to let the goofy vampire fun flatten the serious stuff. She doesn't. Tess's trauma, her withdrawal from the people who love her, her slow decision to stop running — that's the real spine of the book, and it's handled with more tenderness than the cover full of fangs would ever lead you to expect. The friendships do more emotional heavy lifting than the romance, and honestly? Good. That's the part that stuck with me.

Read it if: you've ever used a fandom as a flotation device, you miss Buffy, or you want a vampire romp that's secretly smarter and softer than it lets on. Skip it if: you need your love interests to have, you know, personalities, or you want your vampire fiction po-faced and serious.

The verdict: Goofy on the surface, genuinely moving underneath, and self-aware enough to get away with all of it. Four stars, one of which is purely for emotional sabotage I did not consent to.

(Heads up: the book deals with sexual assault and its aftermath — there's an author's note up front, and I'd second the trigger-warning search before you dive in.)