Do you like queer found families, second-chance romances, and alluring vampires? Then The Stars and the Stage by D.N. Bryn will be your sinful addiction.
I received an eARC of this novella. It is a ‘backstory’ novella that tells the story of some side characters from an upcoming novel in D.N. Bryn’s Guides for Dating Vampires series. The story is set in a vampire fetish club that is experiencing threats from an anti-vampire vigilante group, though there’s plenty of sexiness around that heavier storyline. It can be read as a standalone.
The Stars and the Stage is set in the early 1990s, and features a nonbinary vampire protagonist. Bryn is the right author to be telling this story: their full understanding of the gender nonconformity of their main character Diego shines through. Others may have fallen to the temptation to, for example, let the character’s deadname slip, but Bryn carefully avoids that, even when the character is being (accidentally) deadnamed.
The second-chance romance with Diego’s teenage-years boyfriend, with whom they once had a devastating breakup, is both heart-wrenching and scorching. Often at the same time. There’s also a secondary relationship of a type that is not explored enough in fiction: a platonic life partnership that is just as important to Diego as their blossoming romance.
Another factor that I appreciated about this novella is how the persecution of vampires within Bryn’s work, as always, dovetails with homophobia and the AIDS crisis and its generations-spanning fallout, without ever talking over the top of those issues.
The beginning is slow, but from half-way through, the tension dials up as the plot unspools.
All in all, this novella is unapologetically queer from the ground up.
“If you want to prove yourself, then bleed for me.” Diego refuses to see themselves as their society’s monster. Since fleeing their hometown—and the high school sweetheart who spurned their fangs—a decade ago, they’ve found a new home with the staff of a sensual role play club that creates fantasies for vampire-human couples. Working as the temporary stand in for humans with no vampire of their own, impassioned romance now seems like a thing of the past. That is, until Diego’s traitorous high school flame reappears in a storm of drama, claiming he’s finally ready to earn their forgiveness—in whatever way Diego demands of him. The man now trying to woo them back isn’t quite the one they remember; he’s aggressively forthright, persistently self-sacrificing, and strong in ways Diego could never have fathomed. But his sudden re-emergence comes just as the club is under threat, and any good thing might just be too good to be true. Explore the wider world of the Guides for Dating Vampires series with this standalone novella set in Los Angles in the 90s, where a fiery sub/dom second chance romance blooms between the transmasc-NB/M couple.
