She Made Herself a Monster
Superstition and gossip fuel life in a 19th-century Bulgarian village. Creatures stalk the nights; misfortune dominates their lives. Yana, born with a face half-dark and half-light, is secretly watching and waiting from the woods. In the dead of night, she lays tableaus of death – a slaughtered chicken, a murdered lamb, bloody eggs. As paranoia is heightened, Yana appears, ready to save the village from this menace. Yana’s divided face is proof to them she has one foot in each world – spirit and physical – and is best suited to vanquish the evil.
Many of the village women are under suspicion of witchcraft: the widowed Nina, the captain’s housekeeper Yulia, the old woman Minka on the hill. It was the night Anka was born when a spark set her house aflame and killed her parents that started the string of failed crops, sick and dying infants, and other misfortunes. She is shunned as a witch. The captain, Anka’s uncle and the man obsessed with her dead mother, is now her guardian. He will marry and protect Anka as soon as her menses begin, but Anka does everything possible to avoid this fate. We also meet her cousin Kiril and their friends Margarita and Simeon, along with the blacksmith’s widow Nina, who all see through Yana’s scam and work with her to battle real threats.
The prologue sets up a ghastly scene of Yana destroying a ‘vampire’ in the basement of the church while the villagers watch, which ties to the ending. This gothic novel of light horror has blood flowing throughout – Anka’s monthly bleeding, Yana’s bloody tableaus, the unseen vampire feasting. Disturbing is the uncle’s fixation on marrying Anka despite her efforts to escape him. As Yana creates her vampire to deceive, then to destroy, we see that it’s what people believe that matters more than what is real.
