I don’t know if I really was a good fit for this eARC. I can assume there is a lot of fun jest and wordplay within the queer community, but the playful poking fun and jokes went over my head and felt a bit like the author was punching down on their fellow bisexuals.
Rebekah is difficult to like, and the sex scenes felt coarse. I wouldn’t recommend this one, and didn’t have a good time reading it.

Unfortunately I was granted the book so close to it's archive date that I never got to download it or read it 😭

If I manage to read it elsewhere I'll be sure to update my review.

I was immediately pulled in by the description of this book. I found the feeding of the vampires an interesting take, it wasn’t something I had read before. Unfortunately, I did find the story a little lacking. There was a random war put in which felt like a storyline that had once been bigger but was then removed. There was no purpose to it, and did make me wonder why it was even mentioned. Rebekah was rather dull as a narrator, but I did like her character development and her choices at the end. I think the story needed more refinement and development to live up to its promise.

3.5. I requested this book on Netgalley because I wanted sexyqueerchaos on a cruise ship and I guess I got queer chaos on a cruise ship, I just didn't personally find it very sexy. My first slight disappointment was when I discovered the main characters - a married couple of vampires - weren't old school blood thirsty vampires but emotional vampires, meaning they feed on people's emotions. This was a cool twist and definitely made the story less messy but apparently I have a blood k1nk because I missed some good old neck biting and blood guzzling. I really enjoyed the plot and variety of.characters and how much they bent gender and defied binaries, but I didn't find the smut very smutty. I can't put my finger on how, but it was like it wasn't written to titillate and so it very much did not, and that was another disappointment. The cover, however, swoooooon.

This book is great if you like following a schedule of unpredictable and captivating events. I have never read a book in this format before, and I enjoyed it. This book delivered drama and had me on the edge of my seat, just as it described!

Very much in two minds about this book, and I wish that Goodreads would let you give half stars. Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

I quite liked a lot of this. The prose was a little purple, but not overly so. The pacing was good, and I was intrigued by the mystery of Heaven and what their goals were. The concept of energy vampires was cool, as was the setting of the queer cruise. The erotic aspects were well done and did not make me physically cringe during moments where I was not supposed to physically cringe. I read this in an airport while traveling, and I had a lot of fun.

However, I feel a little weird about Heaven's shapeshifting. It reads a little like transfemme people are dangerous because they can pretend to be something that they aren't, and I don't love that. [ When combined with the thing that sends Rebekah over the edge being Heaven taking on her own form, it leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. (hide spoiler)] It doesn't feel intentionally transphobic, but I still feel slightly uncomfortable with it.

With that said, this has not turned me off Merbaum. I'd like to check out Merbaum's novel The Golden Persimmon in the future.

This is a book which tastesfully uses its characters to portray situations which we morally would find very bad. The characters do not act "good" or are in healthy relationships but it is so much fun to observe their thoughts and actions! It is dark but still hilarious at times, it can feel a bit over the top sometimes but overall it was very enjoyable!

If you like
-vampires and other occults
-LGBTQ+ characters
-polyamorous representation
-vacation vibes
-mystery
This could be for for you
Trigger warnings include
-war
-murder/abuse

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy to read and review. My actual rating for this novel is a 3.25 stars out of 5.

Well that was different. It's giving vampire novels from the 90s,but then with a lot of tech. I like my vampires to be more sultry than slutty, but since this is from their viewpoint I can appreciate how they would view it since I usually read from the human's POV; if this was from the view of one of the other cruise members, I'm sure it'd be sultry as all Hell.

I think I'll be processing this one for a bit, much like Rebekah.

Pretty, entertaining, but somewhat disjointed. Prose that oscillates between melancholy clarity and bitchy cattiness. The character voice of an immortal, timeless—but only in the sense of the timelessness of post-modernity, no future, no past, and the present devouring their refuse. Glass shards are pretty by moonlight but dig in annoyingly in your shoes. Inebriation recommended for enjoyment.

Thank you for the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an Advanced Reader Copy!
I have struggled on collecting my thoughts about this read, because I understand everyone’s taste is different, however this story became one of my first 1 star reads on NetGalley.
In my opinion, A book should either have a strong plot or strong characters; and perhaps the strongly bad characters in the story were the thing that kept me reading.
It’s intriguing really, how shallow one can be. I’m not even sure what else to say about Rebekah.
There is nothing to say about Hugh obviously, as he was only a painting, not a real character playing any deliberate role the story. A puppet, that’s all.
Now, I’m struggling to categorise the story because it’s definitely lacking for horror, and there was no suspense to call it a thriller.
The writing felt short and rushed, way too descriptive for my taste, and even at that, the topics were mundane. At some point I was wondering whether I’m reading the actual pamphlet of the cruise?
Reading this was a painful experience, and I rarely give a one star, but I am unable to rate this higher.

Tjis was so weird and fun! absolutely love the slowly growing kind of uncomfortable atmosphere and things just start to not fit anymore!

me, reading other vampire books: no no this is all wrong, vampires should be hornier
me, reading this vampire book: ...maybe less horny. let's dial it back

While I REALLY wanted to get lost in a fun, silly, sexy, vampires at sea romp, it felt like the author tried a bit too hard to make the main couple zany and fun. I am, perhaps, too old for all of that, but I'm sure there's someone out there who will love this one.

This was an interesting story; I enjoyed the different characters but I thought it would go some different places. Overall, I did enjoy it.

Thank you to Net Galley for the ARC!

This was a challenging read despite being fairly short. I found a lot of the characters' motivations to be contrived and changeable. There were a few aspects that I did like.

CW: Explicit Sexual Content, Dubious and Removed Consent, Violence, Murder, Description of War

Rebekah and Hugh are an ancient vampire couple who, after a love affair at home ends in arson, decide to take a queer art cruise for a change of scenery. While on the cruise, Hugh is seduced by a changeling influencer named Heaven. This drives Rebekah mad with lust, worry, and envy, eventually culminating in Heaven's murder.

What did I like?
- Rebekah, though she doesn't eat or drink, truly enjoys the theater and expression behind food. She orders food and beverages because she likes the way they look or the way she looks while holding them. They enhance her mood, the character she's playing, or simply bring her joy. I found it charming and an effective way to humanize her character, especially while she grapples with being seen as a monster.
- The vampire lore in this novella is something new. The vampires feed off of energy, emotion, and attention. We get to see which attention Hugh and Rebekah prefer, and which fills them up more.
- Hugh, despite being a vampire like Rebekah, is disgusted by what they are. This challenges Rebekah, who wants to be loved by Hugh, but also wants to love herself for who she is and embrace what she is.
- The book is structured by the days of the cruise. I liked it.
- The shapeshifter transforms into a Rebekah copy, and they have sex, And honestly, I thought that slapped.

What did I not like?
- Rebekah describes working an office job and being sexualized and touched by all of her coworkers at holiday parties. She lets us know that there's always a menorah there for her because the coworkers assume she's Jewish based on the spelling of her name. It rubbed me the wrong way to have a character be sexualized by men explicitly assuming they're Jewish. As this was only mentioned in this paragraph, and Rebekah tells us she is not Jewish, it serves nothing but to further the stereotype of the "sexy Jew". Speaking from the experience of a Jewish woman, it was off-putting.
- Heaven describes themself as ethically polyamorous. Rebekah and Hugh claim to be in an ethically open marriage. *funny*. Heaven coerces and manipulates Hugh into leaving Rebekah to use him as bait to draw Rebekah in. Rebekah and Hugh do not communicate about their boundaries and lash out when they're uncomfortable or upset.
- Dubious and Removed Consent. Rebekah explains multiple times that she uses compulsion to entice people to have sex with her, but that they would want to anyway because she's just that hot. Fine. What I cannot get past are her three sex thralls that she takes fully mentally under her control after Hugh leaves her. We are told that they lose all personal will power and that she has to compel them to feed and clean themselves because of the level of control she holds over them. She refers to them as children because of how malleable she has made their minds. Despite this, she compels them to have sex with her and each other while she watches. While in the narrative, we know Rebekah is embracing the monster that is a part of her, the audience has no warning and nothing to suggest that the protagonist is going to remove the capability of consent from strangers and force them into sex acts.
-Rebekah at one point references Marvel and then says something to the effect of "ugh, why do I know nerdy things?" Let yourself like things. Rebekah has been alive so long that she doesn't remember most of her life. She can like Thor, or at least reference him, without isolating part of your audience.
- A similar issue I found was how frequently I was being spoken to. This was usually done to try to influence my reading experience, which I just do not feel should be in the author's control because reading is something so personal and subjective. The first egregious example was Rebekah speaking in reference to Hugh: "You should always picture him in black and white, by the way. Or Sepia."

What did this book just not need?
- The WAR. I understand it was an isolating tactic to keep our characters trapped on the boat. Without fleshing it out and just calling it "WAR," it might as well have been inclement weather.
- All the orgies. This is a very short book with a plot that's mostly sex, how much sex the characters want to have, and how angry the characters are when they're not having sex. For a book billed as horror-comedy, I expect more horror and comedy. I think if the primary genre in advertising was erotica, I would have rated this book higher.
- Heaven as an influencer was grating and had nothing to do with their character. Having the best penthouse on the ship would have made significantly more sense to m eif they were just rich and mysterious, or if they had used their own form of compulsion. As opposed to it being a brand deal.

I genuinely expected to love this read based on the premise, but the issues that I had with it overwhelmed the experience. I understand this book is an arc and won't be published for a few months, so all things that I liked and disliked are subject to change. I will say that I think the most important addition would be a content warning section, as my copy did not include one, and this novella contains very heavy themes.

The premise of this book was so promising, a married vampire couple going on a hedonistic cruise sounds like it could be the queer book of the year!… but it fell pretty flat for me as much as I hate to say it. I really just kept waiting for it to pick up and it never did. It had so much potential but it was so underwhelming. The characters were very unemotional and didn’t feel… alive to me. The story was underdeveloped, and the plot felt not very well thought through.

I still finished it, but it was definitely not one of my favorite reads this year.

Rebekah and Hugh are essentially exactly how I would picture immortals after an extended time being alive; pretty bored and very eccentric. This book reads as if Rebekah is telling us the story and she is an unreliable narrator at best, prone to not remembering details, ignoring whole sections of events and basically exclusively interested in herself and Hugh.

I did enjoy the book, I wish there was maybe 8% more details involved. We never really come to any conclusions about anything, and some of that I was fine with and others I wish we'd gotten a touch more explanation on.

Thanks NetGalley for the copy!

I find myself in quite frustrated with this book. I can tell that it is important to the author and definitely a passion project.

This book is fun for the queer community because it blends supernatural elements with queer joy, and trauma is not a major focus! However, the narrator is annoying! Cringey! I just can’t picture a vampire speaking or thinking like this. It was HARD to read, so I unfortunately only made it through 40% because it was far too difficult to focus on the plot.

This was unfortunately a DNF @ 33% for me. I went into this book knowing next to nothing but being so pulled in by the cover and vague premise. I wanted to push through but the writing style just really wasn’t for me. It felt very all over the place and somehow boring despite being about vampires on a cruise and a bunch of (super short) smutty scenes? It just really wasn’t not my vibe