Vampire Weekend is the greatest vampire story you’ll read in 2023
By Meg Dowell
By now you’ve read many … many books about vampires. But you’ve never read a book quite like Mike Chen’s Vampire Weekend.
Louise is just your average night janitor who also happens to be an aspiring musician. Nothing too out of the ordinary here. Except there’s a worsening blood shortage looming on the horizon, and she needs blood to survive.
And she’s not the only one.
Vampire Weekend is the perfect blend of a dozen different offshoots of vampire lore. Louise and her fellow vampires are frozen at the age they were “turned.” They’re not normally after humans; human blood is simply their one viable form of nourishment.
Oh, did I mention there’s a creepy vampires-only app that can’t be deleted? And Louise is probably being tracked by the vampire she loathes the most?
I’ve never devoured a book as quickly as I read this one — my rush to the end only made me desperate for more. This is the book that made me want to read more books about vampires (a certain series may have turned me away from the prospect a while ago). It only took a few pages for the author to convince me I had found the right re-entry point.
It’s funny, it’s suspenseful, it’s sometimes heartbreaking but always thrilling. The story will never go where you expect it to go, and that’s just one of many reasons you won’t be able to put it down once it’s open in your hands.
If you’re the kind of person who will catch every music reference in a book, you’ll especially love this one. One consequence of Louise having been around a long time is that she knows all the greats.
Don’t skip this one because it’s “another book about vampires.” Yes, it’s technically that, but it deserves so much more credit. Give it a chapter. I promise you won’t regret it.
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Vampire Weekend is available now wherever books are sold.