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

Funny and strange at points, but I didn't feel much for this book.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC

An odd little novella. Interesting premise, but the execution failed to grab me. Felt very flat and unanimated for a book purporting to be about vampires. Where is the eroticism??

Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this ARC!

I am very sorry to this author, because I can tell a lot of love went into this, but I didn’t like this book.

What I loved was how unapologetically queer this was. I loved the concept of a queer cruise and queer poly vampires, but that was about it.

I hated the narrative voice, I found it super corny. I didn’t find any of the three main characters particularly interesting, and I’ll say for a book with the word ‘Vampires’ in the title, these were potentially the most unvampiric vampires i’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately, this book also suffered from telling not showing. There were a lot of passages that went like this: They went here. They wore these clothes. Then they had sex.

There was no romance, there was no eroticism, there was no passion in the writing to ME personally.

I also found the ending incredibly anticlimactic, but considering I didn’t connect with any of the characters and wasn’t rooting for any of them, that isn’t really a shock.

* spoiler alert ** This was a fun little snack of a read.

I will admit it took a minute to fall into the writing style. But that might be partly on my having come from several very heavily styled reads to this one. But once you fall into the rhythm of it, it is a fun way to hear the main characters world. The vulgar way Rebekah talks mixed with the constant mention of outfits and her unimpressed views of those around her were great fun. This book also heavily feels like it takes place in the same world as What We Do In The Shadows.

The plot was quick, the characters were interesting. The big baddie was a flashy bundle of, 'look at me,' with an interesting twist. I enjoyed that it turned in part into a murder mystery and toward the end got a little deeper with the character development.

I did feel at the end a little put out because of how quick everything suddenly came to a close. It both made sense and didn't. Did everything get tied up? Sure. Did all the characters but mainly our protagonist find their end? Sure. But it felt a little rushed. It almost in a way felt a little like they were given X amount of pages to tell their story and realized when they were nearly out of pages they still had story to tell and just put it out there without the filler added in that we get the other 90% of the book. It wasn't an issue in the end but you can definitely feel it.

All in all this was a good story with neat ideas. A nice easy read full of fun quotes.

Thank you to Netgalley and Creature Publishing for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was pitched as everything I love: vampires, queerness, orgies, and cruises, so I was overjoyed when I got an eARC. Unfortunately, it ended up falling a bit flat for me in a lot of areas, but there were still some elements I enjoyed.

Vampires at Sea follows Rebekah and Hugo (or Hugh to Rebekah), one day they get an invitation to go on a queer cruise and figure "why not?" Chapters are divided by day of this two week cruise, getting to know what happens everyday (spoiler alert: a whole lotta nothing) Eventually they run into Heaven (literally) and they story really begins (did anyone else picture Heaven as JVN the whole time or just me?)

Rebekah narrates the story which is one of its saving graces, she is that bitch and she knows it. I loved being in her head for the most part though I'm not sure she would feel the same. That being said I have a lot of issue with pacing, this is a rather short book but it still felt very slow and not in a mysterious way.

going into spoilers:
The sex scenes in this book were pretty boring and not "graphic" as I've seen they described, for example the orgy from the synopsis lasts maybe 2 pages (I read on my kindle) and most of it was focused on characters who were not participating. I don't really have a problem with this per se, but it is not what I have seen people talk about.

This book also left with with so many questions and about zero answers. What is (was?) Heaven really? What are (were) their powers? What happened to Rebekah's memories? What's going on with Hugh (just like in general)? What's up with the war? What is Rebekah and Hugh's backstory? And so many others.

Overall this book could 100% appeal to a certain type of person looking for a certain type of story but that was regrettably not me. 2.5/5

This is tough, because I think this had great potential to turn into something very cool. Unfortunately, that never really came to fruition. By the end of it, I was just feeling a bit... indifferent? Nothing about this changed me, but it was fun!

Thank you, Netgalley, for providing me with an eARC of this book.

~

I see the vision. The vision unfortunately kinda sucked. The first half of this novella is full of thinly veiled sarcasm that I felt bordered on being just flat out insulting.
I almost enjoyed the middle, where there begins to be an actual story, but unfortunately our main character & narrator is insufferable. It felt repetitive, and I grew tired of the little “humorous” clips being thrown in in parenthesis during scenes they did not belong in.
I expected a lot more from this, unfortunately, and it failed to deliver.

I think in the end this was... fine? I struggled for a majority of the book to connect with the characters, and I was admittedly hoping for a bit more vampy-ness. I KNOW that these are emotional vampires, but it felt like they were only vampiric in order to make the book hornier a lot of times. I was hoping for more horror, more fantasy, more something- but this felt like a litfic, maybe a bit of magical realism, but not exactly what I wanted.

It was a quick read, it was entertaining, most (and best) of all it was gay as fuck, but it didn't leave a lasting impression or move me in any momentous way.

I usually don’t mind a book with minimal plot if the characters are memorable and the atmosphere is strong. Vampires at Sea had potential in both areas, but unfortunately, it fell a bit short.

The characters, in particular, lacked depth and development, which made it hard to stay fully invested in their journey. That said, the writing style was a highlight. It was lyrical and evocative, perfectly suited to the moody setting. I also appreciated the fresh take on vampires, especially the intriguing way they feed, though I wish that aspect had been explored more fully.

In the end, while there were some good ideas and I did enjoy the read overall, the story felt too surface-level to earn more than three stars.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!