A Vile Season by David Ferraro: Review by Alex Brown

A Vile Season, David Ferraro (Page Street YA 979-8-89003-072-6, $18.99, 400pp, hc) October 2024.

David Ferraro’s new young adult fantasy romance A Vile Season is comped as Bridgerton meets The Bachelor but with vampires. That’s exactly the vibe. Everything from the pacing, the intentionally and flamboyantly anachronistic diversity in the upper classes, the garish wardrobe, the playful disregard for historical accuracy, the overly dramatic rela­tionship conflicts, the marriage competition, the affluent and privileged cast, it all feels like a season of an addictive romance TV show.

After his hideaway is attacked by vampire hunt­ers, the notorious vampire Count Lucian Cross is driven into the hills. Seeking refuge in a cave before the sun comes up, he meets Vrykolakas, a vampire centuries older than Lucian and with magic no one has ever seen before. He offers Lucian a deal: Become human; get Ambrose, the heir to the dukedom, to propose to him; and steal a list with the names of all the vampire hunters in the region. In exchange Vrykolakas, will make him the most powerful vampire to walk the Earth. Lucian leaps at the chance for power.

He may look 17, but he’s all sharp teeth, hard muscle, and bloodthirst. Or, at least he was. Now he’s just a cute, wealthy, shallow boy competing for the hand of a boy even more insufferable than he is. Lucian is up against a lot of competition, including snooty Isabel, the probably neurodivergent Cecelia, hotheaded Melbourne, and meek Violetta. Rather than Ambrose, Lucian feels himself drawn to the youngest Harclay, Maxwell, a boy desperately searching for his brooding brother, who has been missing for a while. As the games heat up, so do things between Maxwell and Lucian. Complicat­ing matters is the arrival of Raven, a pickpocket he turned into a vampire years before, and a betrayal from his closest friend.

Although marketed as young adult with a main cast mostly in their late teens, much of the book felt more like a crossover title than actual YA. I think that has more to do with Ferraro not giving the abuse analogy enough weight. Much is made of how Lucian is turned evil by the vampire who turned him, and how that abuse trickled down into Lucian’s treatment of Helena and Raven. It seemed like Ferraro was setting up for a real conversation about generational trauma, processing childhood abuse, and how to acknowledge one’s own abusive behavior and work toward restitution and restor­ative justice with survivors. However, by the end of the book, the analogy peters out in lieu of bloody spectacle and a romance novel ending. Lucian is bad because he’s a vampire, and the evil humans are evil because they’re vampire hunters. While yes, it’s more fun to watch a bad guy get got, the lessons the story seemed to be leading to are more or less forgotten.

Speaking of bad guys, I wish Ferraro had done more with them as well. They’re so one-dimensional it’s hard to get too worked up about them. The human baddie is a character you’ve seen a million times before. He’s so wicked all he needs is a mus­tache to twirl and a cat sitting in his lap that he can pet. Vrykolakas, meanwhile, is almost cartoonishly evil. You mean to tell me that the best plan an ancient, bloodthirsty monster can come up with is manipulating one young man into seducing an­other young man in hopes of gaining control over their vampire hunting empire? The guy who cares so little about humans that he thinks of them as ba­sically cattle but who also apparently knows all the hot goss about a bunch of rural human lordlings?

That said, I don’t actually mind silly setups in fantasy or romance as long as the characters are in­teresting enough to patch over the weaker elements, and Ferraro pulls that off in A Vile Season. Lucian, Maxwell, Raven, and Helena are so intriguing and complicated that I didn’t really care what they were doing. I only wanted to spend time with them. Even the secondary characters like Zachariah, Ambrose, Cecelia, and especially Isabel and Violetta were well-developed and nuanced, often in ways I didn’t anticipate until the end.

As much as the Bridgerton meets The Bachelor elements are hyped in the marketing, there’s also a big mystery element. If anything, it’s also a bit like the early seasons of Angel or Teen Wolf, in terms of a main character who is a monster with a soul and the breezy mystery. Whatever happened to Emmett Harclay takes up much of the plot, even interrupting the marriage games and Lucian’s flirtation with Maxwell. At first, Lucian uses his investigation as a way to both worm his way into Maxwell’s good graces and as an excuse to search for the list of vampire hunters, but eventually it becomes the thing everyone deals with when they aren’t dancing at balls, traipsing around the rain-drenched countryside, or being hassled by Raven. Without the mystery, there’s little tension, but the mystery is also so straightforward that it was a little surprising that it took Lucian so long to figure it out. On the other hand, what comes of Emmett’s disappearance leads to some chaotic fight scenes and a wholly satisfying resolution.

It’s hard to get too bothered by the parts of David Ferraro’s A Vile Season that don’t stick the land­ing when all the stuff surrounding those weaker moments are so much fun. It’s an action-packed melodrama full of pining glances and swooning sighs. Plus blood. And broken bones. And lots of murder.

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This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.

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