American Ghoul

A wildly entertaining debut from Michelle McGill-Vargas, American Ghoul deftly combines horror and social commentary—with a dash of a buddy comedy—in an innovative twist on the vampire genre.

You can’t kill someone already dead.

That’s what Lavinia keeps telling her jailer after—allegedly—killing her mistress, Simone Arceaneau. But how could Simone be dead when she was taking callers just a few minutes before? And why was her house always so dark?

Lavinia, a recently freed slave, met Simone, a recently undead vampire, on a plantation in post-Civil War Georgia. With nothing remaining for either woman in the South, the two form a fast friendship and head north. However, Lavinia quickly learns that teaming up with this white woman may be more than she bargained for.

Simone is reckless and impulsive—which would’ve been bad enough on its own, but when combined with her particular diet Lavinia finds herself in way over her head. As she is forced to repeatedly compromise her morals and struggle to make lasting human connections, Lavinia begins to wonder if is she truly free or if has she merely exchanged one form of enslavement for another. As bodies pile up in the small Indiana town they’ve settled in, people start to take a second look at the two newcomers, and Simone and Lavinia’s relationship is stretched to its breaking point...