Sabine Issue #30

By A.P. (Black Cat, 224 pages, $12)

By Donna Blumenfeld
Published: December 1st, 2006 | 4:56pm

If you were looking forward to the lesbian-vampire pulp exercise this novel seems to be, you’d do better heading back to the dingiest corner of the bookstore and picking out something else. With a teaser like “Forbidden schoolgirl love in ’50s France,” I thought I couldn’t miss, but this offering from an anonymous author is pretty bloodless fare.  

The story is told in retrospect by Viola, who in 1958 was a 17-year-old British deb packed off to a questionable finishing school in the French countryside. Viola and her compatriots pass the days smoking, lazing about, acting existentially, and attending social events at the châteaux. The schoolmistress is Aimee, a genteel, aging pervert who sets her charges in spicy situations, then bursts in with feigned shock before the moment of consummation. Enter Sabine, a chain-smoking feminist brought in to replace the French instructor. Cross Simone de Beauvoir with James Dean and you’re close enough. Viola falls for her, and we get a brief, sexless idyll before the novel chugs on to what all the heavy foreshadowing portends.  

After hitting it off with an aristocratic young man at yet another party, Sabine takes to her bed with a mysterious, lingering illness, and some sloppy hickies, and jealous Viola contracts a bad case of the sleuths. Spoiler time: those seedy châteaux parties are thrown by noble, decrepit families of (gasp!) vampires vetting their young offspring for membership, and Viola is next. The real mystery is why a brood of dusty bloodsuckers apparently ready to die of boredom would bother inducting their equally dull, pampered scions into the club. Maybe the whole thing’s a social critique of European nobility, or an antidote to the Anne Rice school of fluffy-shirted vampire sex fiction. Ultimately, I would have liked a little less noir and a little more life.