This sounded right up my street from the description, I love vampires, I love a baddie FMC, I love queer books, I love weird books! It should’ve been such a hit for me but it was sadly a miss. I didn’t like the writing style at all, it felt like an amalgamation of other writers voices that felt off putting and made it hard to connect with the characters & the story. It felt like ‘trying to be weird’ rather than just being weird, if that makes sense? I don’t think this is a bad book, I just really wasn’t for me.

3,75/5 stars.

Bunny meets Triangle of Sadness with a heavy sprinkling of True Blood. Rebekah and Hugh are emotional vampires in quite the literal sense. And it just so happens to be they get to attend an all-you-can-feed buffet when they get invited to a queer cruise. The result is as messy as you might expect, but also very entertaining.

The Good:
- The main character is unapologetically not a good person. And I love that for her. Slay, literally.
- The descriptions are ample and chaotic and over the top, and really heighten the vibes of this fever dream of a story.
- It's just weird as hell.

The Could Be Better:
- There's a lot of telling why Hugh is an interesting person, and I can kind of imagine the type, but there's not a lot of showing why he's interesting. And really, people like him definitely exist. It's not a farfetched persona, but he doesn't really do anything? Rebekah is the narrator so the reader is seeing him through her eyes. And they've been together for centuries, so it's only natural you don't get a real time fresh perspective on him.
- While the novella is only 168 pages I still think it could've been more tight in the storytelling. There's just a bit more style over substance. Or the book could've been longer but with flashbacks to their previous adventures to balance it out.

The Bad:
- Nothing's really bad, I liked it in all its red meat flavored cotton candy glory.

Like some other reviewers said there's a very specific audience for this, but it definitely exists! The "I support women's rights AND women's wrongs" crowd.

Thanks NetGalley and Creature Publishing for providing me with this ARC! All opinions are my own.

DNF. I didn’t vibe with the writing style, and wasn’t interested enough in the plot or the characters to keep reading. I might not be its target audience, though, since it feels a bit niche.

Vampires at Sea is a poignant, yet humorous, tale about a sophisticated vampire couple, Rebekah and Hugh, who embark on a queer cruise across the Black Sea as they struggle with themselves and their relationship with the mysterious Heaven. Told in narrative style, readers explore Rebekah's internal dialectic as she wrestles with her feelings toward Hugh, being a vampire, and herself. Fans of Henry Miller and Anne Rice will find this story delicious and intriguing. Filled with profound reflections on life, love, sex, war, and being human, Vampires at Sea is a short novel perfect for beach reading. Though this is a typical book for me to read, it was enjoyable and expanded my outlook on the world.

Story was light and easy to read , not too many characters to keep track of , was highly confused about Heaven , they wore a skirt with a split up to their thigh then they have a beard , not my kind of thing .
But thank you for sharing

I really appreciate this book for what it is, a short horror story that leaves you a bit confused.
At the beginning, I felt a bit disconnected from the story and the characters. After about thirty percent, that improved and I started to really enjoy it.
I liked that the focus was just on three characters, but at the same time, I wish Hugh had been a more fleshed-out character.

What a fun and entertaining story! I was engaged the whole time reading this and wanted so much more. The ending felt a little lackluster for me but that didn't deter my five star rating. I loved this book and I loved Rebekah so much and I wish for only the best in her eternity.

This book was honestly so fun! I loved the concept of queer vampires on a cruise, and the way it was written made me fly by it! My only complaint is lack of character and plot development. However, if you're looking for just an intriguing little fluff piece, this is perfect!

What We do in the Titanic

To me vampire media is about desensitization of human concerns, this book did just that and even added a new layer with main characters being emotional vampires. It was also funny enough, I laughed at times, Rebekah is a very silly girl.

However, what bothered me were some concepts that were not fully realized and made me confused instead of adding something to the story, while the war vaguely made sense (even if only vaguely), I couldn’t say the same about Misha (literally why were they there).

Thank you, NetGalley and Creature Publishing for allowing me to read this book early. The opinion in this review is my own.

This book caught my attention first by the cover because it was so intriguing. The premise sounded interesting, but the lyrical writing took a while to get used to and it was hard for me to grasp what was going on at first. The characters are fun to read and have quite a bit of depth in such a short amount of time. I don’t think labelling it as horror was accurate. It has the same amount of horror as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and that’s not a complaint. Once my mind put it in the same universe as Rocky Horror, I enjoyed it even more. This was a fun and campy romp with lots of spice, but also lots of heart.

We’re on vacation!

This novella was delightfully fun, well-written, and thought-provoking. I love Rebekah, and her character was so well developed that I feared she would jump off the page and suck the life out of me! Some themes I loved: the Seven Deadly Sins, gender fluidity, emotional vampires, power exchanges, and self-infatuation.

If you need a brain cleanser, this is the book for you. It’s quick, sexy, and entertaining. I wish there was a little more to the ending, but I had a great time with it.

Thank you, Creature Publishing and Netgalley, for the ARC read in exchange for an honest review!

”We’re on vacation!”
Are these really vampires?? Sex vampires? I’m still not sure after finishing this, and was definitely expecting more vamp!!!

I couldn’t connect to the characters at all. This book was just sex, narcissism, and then more sex and more narcissism…
The “horror” tag also felt unnecessary, nothing in this book felt more horror than thriller.
BUT, I did enjoy the way it was written. It felt a bit “What We Do In The Shadows”. The prose could be really interesting and beautiful at times, and was the reason I kept reading until the end.

Thank you Lindsay Merbaum and NetGalley for this ARC! 📚

This book was… fun & fine. It's for a very specific audience. If you are looking for a fun, sexy, quick story of a couple navigating polyamory, then you will like this book - if none of those things interest you then don't try it.

It's the perfect length - it’s funny at times, heartbreaking at other times and it is well written (though the language is very crass and explicit, again if that’s not for you then don’t read this).

It was enjoyable! Nothing particularly groundbreaking but in fairness it is a short book. I was intrigued the whole time even if it did feel a little predictable.

but It's just very specific to certain tastes, so if it's not for you, you will not like it. If you go into it expecting a quick sexy read, you will like it!!

⭐️⭐️.75

DNF at 48%

This was, unfortunately, decidedly not for me.

I could connect neither to the characters nor to the (barely existent) plot.

Even though I thought the characters and lore was intriguing throughout the first few pages, my interest rapidly deteriorated as time went on and we never learned anything new.

I also struggled a lot with the writing style. To me it just felt like it was trying to be something that it definitely wasn’t. A lot of the sections that were supposed to be funny just came off as cringy and it pulled me out of the story every time.

And additionally to all of that, literally nothing was happening! I felt like most scenes (including the smut) just told you in a few sentences what was going on and then moved on to the next thing without giving you the chance to even start to feel immersed in the story.

So yeah, sadly did not enjoy this. I expected a fun vampire novella to quickly read in between other books, but the fun was very much lacking for me.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

Wanted to love it but unfortunately didn't. Writing style just wasn't for me. Found it to be wince-worthy at times and just didn't have a good time overall.

Not sure how I feel about this— I like the idea of emotional/ energy vampires, and Hugo and Rebekah had an interesting relationship. But I can’t tell exactly what this is supposed to say. Is it a critique on influencer culture? Hookup culture? Is it just a bizarre story about vampires at sea? I don’t know. But I was admittedly a bit confused and then the book ended. Intriguing.

Rebekah and Hugh are vampires who have been together forever. On a Black Sea cruise that was meant to be a vacation, the couple meets an alluring socialite, Heaven. The boundaries of their open relationship strain when Heaven forms a special bond with Hugh. What is Heaven up to? Rebekah’s discontent grows, and she begins to suspect that there is more to Heaven than meets the eye. Rebekah and Hugh sustain themselves on emotions rather than blood; an important part of their feeding process is charming their way into sex with anyone who catches their eye. As such, the book depicts kink, orgies, and intercourse. Rebekah’s narration follows her winding thoughts; she is blunt about her sexual desires, which often lead her to have sex with her opponents. Will Rebekah and Hugh stay together?

It is a humorous carnal horror novella. I enjoyed the book due to its humor..

I flew through this little book! It was so funny and captivating it was hard to put down, with lore interspersed and some mystery around it, just stunning and hilarious throughout!

DNF at 50%
I was torn about this, I enjoyed some aspects of it such as the idea of a vamp couple getting on a queer cruise to enjoy a sex holiday lol
I liked the fresh vamp lore of different ways of feeding
I wish we got more content of the main couple together as we really didn't get much of them interacting.
The reason I am stopping reading this is because I find the fmc sooo egotistical. Not in a self-confident way, which I support, but in a cocky I am the most beautiful why is no-one paying attention to me annoying way. And I found the NB character they both fall for spoke in such annoying social media speech? Yet they were 30-40?? It was too much for me.
I was definitely intrigued by the plot but I have too much to read to spend more time on this story I am not fully captured by. I may come back to it

I was thinking of giving it two stars but in the end I didn't really enjoy anything about this book, so clearly this one wasn’t for me.

The premise was interesting and had so much potential, but everything ended up being extremely underdeveloped. How can you make a book with vampires on a cruise and to that add an orgy and make it the most boring thing possible? The author had all the elements to make this story interesting, but succeeded at it being boring.

Also, I didn’t care about the characters, they felt unidimensional and there wasn’t much about them for me to want to continue reading.

I only finished this book because it was short, but otherwise I would’ve dnf'd it.