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Book: “The Ones Who Come Back Hungry” by Amelinda Bérubé
Publishing Info: Sourcebooks Fire, July 2024
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an ARC from the publisher.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: From the author of Here There Are Monsters comes a chilling supernatural horror that is part terrifying vampire legend and part modern exploration of toxic relationships wrapped up in a novel about hunger, yearning, and loss.
After the sudden death of her perfect, popular older sister, Jo and her family feel empty. But days after crying at Audrey’s graveside, Jo stumbles on the impossible: Audrey, standing barefoot in the snowy backyard. But Audrey isn’t breathing. She’s still marred with the evidence of an autopsy. She’s decaying. And worst of all, Audrey is hungry, and only human blood can curb her relentless appetite.
Jo knows she can put her family back together; she just has to figure out how to fix Audrey. She hides her sister and sustains her with her own blood, determined to figure out how to keep Audrey with them. When her search takes her to her sister’s grieving inner circle of friends, Jo finds herself drawn into their fold―and to Audrey’s boyfriend, Sam.
As Jo slips further into her sister’s old life, Audrey’s hunger and jealousy grow more insatiable. She’s not going to sit back and let Jo replace her or, worse, discover the secrets hidden beneath her golden girl facade. As Jo struggles to juggle everything she will be forced to decide which of her loved ones needs her the most ―and who she’s willing to sacrifice to save them.
Review: Thank you to Sourcebooks Fire for sending me an ARC of this novel!
It’s been awhile since “Twilight” made vampires the hot paranormal love interest, which in turn made vampires so passé due to the over saturation of the sub-genre. But lo and behold, I am confident in saying that vampires have made their way back into the forefront of horror fiction, with MANY vampire stories coming out lately. But this time around we don’t see nearly as much romance as we did back when Edward Cullen was bringing in the readers, and while I am no longer as staunchly critical of “Twilight” as I was back when it was a phenomenon, I do have to say that I really love that vampires are a little bit wicked again. Mostly because authors are finding ways to explore that wickedness and make it feel fresh, while also being willing to explore the tragedy that can come along with it. And with that we come to “The Ones Who Come Back Hungry” by Amelinda Bérubé, a new YA vampire novel about a younger sister named Jo whose older, popular sister Audrey died… and then came back as something hungry for blood. Blood that Jo is willing to provide, and Audrey is more than willing to take.
It’s a great premise, and I really enjoyed the ‘vampire mother and teenage daughter’ theme in “Night’s Edge”, so why not a vampire and her sister?
Overall this one worked really well for me. I already like a vampire as manipulative predator story, and when you make the manipulator a formerly popular older sister and the manipulated an always waiting in the wings younger sister, it has SO much room to explore and devastate. Jo is our protagonist, who is absolutely floored and devastated by the sudden death of her ambitious and driven older sister Audrey. Jo is left adrift, her mother is so bereft she shuts herself away from the world, and her father is trying to keep things together in the family but doesn’t know how to verbalize his grief. I thought that the portrayals of grief and how many forms it can come in was well done and at times quite heart wrenching, and it makes all the more sense when Audrey suddenly shows up at the house in the middle of the night, much to Jo’s horror. Jo has always been in Audrey’s shadow, and hoping to piece their family back together and to bring back the golden child she, of course, wants to help Audrey and try to ‘cure her’, as she is very clearly not alive, but not quite dead (even though she very much looks and smells like she is). If this means she’s going to do some bloodletting, and Audrey is going to keep begging her, and badgering her, for more, so be it. It’s a return to the ‘vampire as a manipulative abuser’ trope, and while it doesn’t explore the intricacies of Audrey herself beyond selfishness (that may have even been apparent when she was alive), it’s an interesting character study of Jo and how far she would go to help Audrey, the sister who always outshined her. Things get all the more complicated when Jo starts spending time with Audrey’s friends, especially her boyfriend Sam, and Jo starts to relish filling a void left behind. Jo’s arc adds a very human element to a supernatural horror story, and it was pretty effective.
I also really enjoyed the vampire world building in this book. Bérubé has a really great author’s note in the back talking about the inspiration of New England ‘true’ vampire stories, and how she referenced and researched and pulled tidbits from that folk lore. She also goes a bit further and expands upon the vampire lore and makes for some creative, and actually pretty well thought out, additions to how vampires in her story work. The biggest one was the way that Audrey has kept all of her wounds and seems to be decaying before Jo’s eyes, with blood being the only thing to tenuously bring her back from a rotting brink. There’s even the fact that any kind of warm air make Audrey’s skin start to bloat and change, the way that heat would affect a rotting corpse (with some pretty nasty imagery involved). It’s a real change from how so many vampires are portrayed as beautiful and seductive antagonists, and I really appreciated the way she takes it a few steps further into grossness while still working within a wholly believable range (of COURSE a corpse would start to bloat in heat, and what are vampires but sentient and immortal corpses?). I love that vampires get to be gross as well as creepy and unsettling in this book.
“The Ones Who Come Back Hungry” is an entertaining vampire novel for a YA audience with some serious crossover potential for adult horror fans. I definitely enjoyed it.
Rating 8: A dark and at times quite sad book about loss, sibling dynamics, tricky familial relationships, and vampires.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Ones Who Come Back Hungry” is included on the Goodreads list “YA Novels of 2024”.
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