I came away from this book feeling conflicted. While there were moments I genuinely enjoyed, overall I found myself a bit lost in the multiple storylines.

Rather than weaving together seamlessly, multiple narratives felt disjointed, and I often wished the focus had remained on just one.

That said, the prose itself is beautiful and engaging. The writing style kept me turning the pages even when the story structure didn’t quite work for me.

Part Two, with its exploration of the Royal Society, was by far the most compelling section for me. I couldn’t help but wish that thread had been developed earlier and carried more strongly throughout the novel.

It took me a while to decide how I wanted to rate this book. I enjoyed it but I was also confused…..

The story and the writing was easy to follow but I just didn’t know what was going on. I still enjoyed it though and read it in one day. So there was definitely things about it I enjoyed.

I'm not 100% sure how to rate this book. On one hand, I enjoyed the different elements of the story, on the other hand I think I was confused at least half of the time.

I followed the story well enough to be able to read it but also felt like I didn't know what was happening. Like the book was keeping secrets it kept eluding to and if I just kept reading id find them out. I'm not even sure if I did or not.

The intertwined stories changed perspective and weren't always clear they were a side step or addition to the main story. They were melancholy and beautiful, dark and unhinged.

Could I stop reading despite my ongoing confusion? No.

It felt a bit like I was watching a film with sunglasses on, I could follow along mostly but I felt like I was missing a lot, straining to see. Or like someone dropped an unbound book and put it all back together as best as they could, maybe slightly out of order, missing a couple of pages and adding in a few stray ones from elsewhere.

The story was certainly gothic and some would say horror too. I enjoyed the LGBTQ representation.

If this review is a bit all over the place it's because I'm baffled.

Perhaps I'm just not the right audience. I think I liked it. Not sure I would read it again.

Wow! This was my first book to read by this author but definitely not my last! This book will leave you wanting for more and the characters and storyline stick with you long after you finish it. Do yourself a favor and pick up this page-turner!

A Blood as Bright as the Moon is haunting, lyrical, and deeply atmospheric. Andrea Morstabilini has crafted a novel that feels both mythic and intimate, a story that lingers in your mind long after you finish. From the very beginning, the prose pulled me in with its intensity and beauty, and I found myself completely absorbed in the world he created.

What struck me most was the way the novel balances brutality and tenderness. There are moments of darkness and violence, but also flashes of hope, love, and humanity that shine all the brighter against the shadows. The story feels timeless, almost like a modern fable, yet the emotions and struggles at its heart are strikingly immediate and relatable.

Morstabilini’s writing has a dreamlike quality, but it never loses its emotional grounding. The characters are vivid and flawed, and their relationships carry a raw honesty that made me care deeply about them. The atmosphere is thick and unsettling, yet threaded with light, which made the book feel layered and alive.

A Blood as Bright as the Moon was an interesting gothic horror that gives us a great protagonist in Ambrose and a slow building (in my opinion) but interesting storyline. I did enjoy this one, but it did take me a little while to get fully immersed in it, when I did however I did enjoy it. I will say it may not be for everyone but if you do enjoy vampires and a slower paced gothic horror this is one for you.
As always thank you to the publisher for the advanced copy to review, my reviews are always honest and freely given.

“Vampires want to fly — but only maybe to the moon.”

🗓 𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗲: September 2, 2025

✨ 𝗤𝘂𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗦𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘆 & 🍵 𝗧𝗲𝗮 𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀
Ambrose and his vampire clan are tucked away in a creepy Frankenstein-style castle with big dreams — like building wings and literally flying to the moon for safety. But Ambrose isn’t fully on board. He’s got secret ties to a human, and when a sinister group known as the Royal Diurnal Society shows up, things get launched into all-out chaos.

This one is gorgeously atmospheric and often a total mind-bender. The setting is creepy Gothic perfection: moonlit castles, queer undercurrents, and scheming cult vibes all in one. The prose? Lush and deliciously weird. But I will say, just a bit — the narrative sometimes spins out of control in the best and most confusing way. It’s so rich that hours later I’m still trying to sort through whether I’m in the 1800s or some fever dream. The emotional core is there, but it can feel foggy when the symbolism speeds ahead. Still. Those visions of moonbound vampires? Absolutely unforgettable.

🫶Thank you to @titanbooks for this gifted copy!

🏰 Gothic atmosphere
🌈 Queer vampire lore
🌙 Moon-bound dreams
⏳ Foggy time vibes
🌌 Cult tension
💫 Dreamlike prose

I genuinely had no idea what was happening and not in a fun way. The new take on vampires seemed fun and the writing was beautiful but full of purple prose and just didn’t hit the mark with me.

This book is like a dark haunting fairytale for thr queer and gothic at heart. Thank you to Net Galley, the Publisher and author for the eARC, I am leaving this review voluntarily with my honest opinion.

This takes place in a version of Frankenstein, Germany. It follows a young vampire torn between his loyalty to his clan and his desire to remain connected to the human world. I love a new take and Morstabilini offers a fresh take on vampire lore and blending gothic horror with timeless queer themes. The prose is beautiful and immersive. Almost hypnotic at times. Giving the world what I think is, a very unsettling yet alluring atmosphere. While there are moments where the pacing drifts, or pieces that I wish had been given more detail, the story overall delivers a compelling tension and moral complexity that kept me hooked.

Well... that was something. I absolutely adored the premise of this - vampires that want to fly to the moon because King Ludwig II, also a vampire, has built a castle up there? That's just so strange, I NEEDED to know more.
I also genuinely enjoyed the first act. The prose is a bit pretentious, the author clearly wants to sound lyrical, but I liked the vibe, the mysteries, the protagonist's yearning for so many things - happiness, most of all. It was an interesting take on vampire culture focused on a very small cult, strongly believing in aforementioned premise. They even built wings in order to fly to the moon, and while I have no idea how they actually manage to do so (as vampires apparently do breathe and all in this version), it was interesting on a conceptual level. Then Act II changed things up dramatically, including turning from first to second person narration (which I admittedly rarely like) and with our protagonist stripped completely of agency, trapped in the role of suffering observer - but I still was kind of intrigued by it. It's mostly one long discussion between vampire hunters, but I liked the differences of approach to dealing with vampires and it always felt like it was leading to something big.
Then that big thing happened and it was GLORIOUS, and it promised more things to come.
And then came Act III. And nothing really happened. It was basically an entire act of meandering, with some antagonists that were built up dying off the page, with big anticipated confrontations turned into short conversations. The world finally opens up and we get little glimpses into the supernatural societies, be it vampires or otherwise, but they are just... glazed over. Little breadcrumps here, some mentions there. It felt weirdly disjointed, like it was teasing us with greatness, and left me wholly unsatisfied.

So yeah, interesting premise, intriguing world, beautiful prose - but in the end the concepts failed to deliver anything truly meaningful and exciting. Still, 2,5 stars rounding up to 3 because I did enjoy the first half for what it was.

2 stars

this was gothic and eerie, and creepy(?) and the prose was beautiful, but the story itself didn't grab my attention. I honestly don't know what it was
it says it's for fans of T. Kingfisher and SMG, and I feel like Mexican Gothic fans will probably like this one, too.

thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Highlights
~broken snowglobes as a threat
~the moon’s not an escape
~never trust a cult leader

:be warned of spoilers ahead! see the end for trigger warnings:

I have no idea what the point of that was.

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, but it ended up being a disjointed snoozefest.

It really doesn’t help that the synopsis is wildly misleading: Ambrose isn’t ‘hunted’ in any way you’d expect from hearing that he is – isn’t aware he’s being hunted, so there’s no plotline where he knows he’s in danger, and who he’s in danger from. Which means that functionally, in term of it affecting the story the reader gets, he’s not being hunted. The secret society isn’t ‘bent on his destruction’; it’s being torn apart by its internal politics, only one faction of which wants vampires wiped out. And referring to Ambrose’s family as ‘the rest of his kind’ is just flat-out lying; Regina’s ‘clan’ is made up of FOUR vampires, including her and Ambrose. There is in fact a whole WORLD of other vampires out there, none of whom are involved in this nonsense at all.

I’d like to file a complaint with whoever wrote the synopsis and whoever approved it. Gah.

The first third or so of Blood as Bright is perfectly fine, sometimes rising to good: Ambrose and his bizarre little family live in a ruined castle until the day Regina leads them to the moon, where, she claims, Ludwig 2nd, himself a vampire, rules a beautiful realm that’s a paradise for vampires. It’s a cult, basically, with Regina as obsessed cult leader, telling them parables and holy stories of Ludwig’s vampiric life, with all sorts of rules that must be followed to prove themselves worthy of Ludwig. (Bits of vampire!Ludwig’s life are interspersed throughout the book, jarring and adding nothing at all to the book.) Ambrose feels oddly ambivalent about all of it, but he’s very close to another of the vampires, Agata, and their friendship seems to be the main tether keep Ambrose in place. When he can sneak out from under Regina’s eye, he goes into the nearby town to spy on the doctor Martin, who Ambrose is attracted to – but more importantly, he harbours a hope that Martin might be able to cure vampirism if Ambrose ever reveals himself to him.

The prose is lovely, but there’s a very Literary Fiction (derogatory) feel to it all – introspective in a way that feels pretentious and over-indulgent, kind of rambly, with zero impetus driving the story forward. The story drifts, barely disturbed by the strange broken snowglobes that appear around the vampires’ castle, and the murder of the sacred-to-Ludwig swans. So I was very surprised that near the 33% mark, Regina announced it was time to head to the moon, and everyone started strapping their wings on.

(They do not, alas, have their own biological wings like the figure on the cover. These are mechanical, vaguely steampunk-y wings.)

But! Catastrophe! Ambrose’s wings break. And when he crashes to earth, he is staked by a vampire hunter who comes out NOWHERE, narratively. It’s a painfully random, jerky series of events, but for a second I thought Morstabilini had gone where few authors dare to tread and killed off her main character!

She didn’t, though. Ambrose isn’t dead. Instead he’s paralysed, unable to move or react to stimuli, but still aware of what’s around him and, unfortunately, very able to feel pain.

Part two opens with Ambrose laid out on an operating table. He’s ‘examined’ (read: tortured) and then a bunch of men arrive – the Diurnal Society – and gather around him to debate what to do with him.

I’m not kidding: the whole second part (no longer in first-person, by the way, switching between second-person and formatted-like-a-script third-person) is these mostly awful men, who are all COMPLETE STRANGERS TO US, enumerating on how great they are (and how awful their political rivals within the same society are), how it’s high time they Do Something after only studying vampires from afar for centuries, and what the different factions within the society are. Oh, and how gross vampires are, and Amrbose in particular, since he’s also gay as well as being a vamp.

It is stunningly boring. Everyone is despicable (the one guy who calls the rest of them monsters leaves without trying to get Ambrose free, so yeah, I’m counting him as despicable too), everyone is long-winded and grandiose, most of them are clearly narcissists, and hi, I don’t care about the internal politics of bigots actually??? Or their history??? Never mind their completely ridiculous, zero-evidence-for opinions on vampires??? And you’ve given me NO REASON TO???

The ending of this part would be satisfying if, you know, I had any emotional connection to any of it. As it was I kept turning pages in a haze of outrage, waiting for the moment it would all click together and I’d understand what the fucking point was.

Alas, no point ever manifested.

Part three shifted gears: I went from bored to furious. Because finally, at last, Morstabilini starts giving us the most tantalising glimpses into the wider magical world: it’s revealed that vampires have their own culture (none of which we’ve seen before) and their own dialect/language; there are vampire-adjacent beings who can talk to the dead, and magical spiders who can recreate buildings that have been lost to fire. It’s extremely cool! But these are just glimpses: a sentence or two about each thing, and then it’s gone, never brought up again.

THE FUCK. Why weren’t we seeing all of this from the beginning?! You made me read through vague plotless rambling in the first part, boring and disgusting bigots pontificating in part two, and only at the END prove you had the good stuff all along, but I can’t have it???

Oh, and the moon was a total disappointment: Ambrose doesn’t get there, but we do see it, and it’s just like our moon – ie barren and white and dusty – except the vampires can somehow breathe there. And there are probably monsters. But I was hoping for some fantastical weird realm like the not-Earth planets in Radiance by Catherynne Valente, and nope! That did not happen! Because of course it didn’t.

The first two parts should have been cut, and part three should have been expanded into its own novel. Show me the rest of the vampire world! Why do some vampires set jewels in their teeth? Explain the taboos around speaking to the dead! I want more of the spiders! Plus, you know, the whole travelling quest-of-vengeance thing (even if I’m still mad about how that went down) and the love story that’s so fast it’s practically instantaneous. BUILD IT UP AND MAKE IT A FULL NOVEL. It could have been amazing!

So I’m enormously frustrated. There was so much potential here, but it was let down at every turn – so thoroughly that it almost feels purposeful. The synopsis is a lie, but in complete fairness I don’t know what else the publisher could have written, since there isn’t really anything coherent enough to be a story here. I cannot wrap my head around why the choices that were made were made; I don’t know what Morstabilini was trying to say, or do, but I’m pretty sure the intent wasn’t to entertain (if it was, it failed miserably). The torture and bigotry felt gratuitous at best; you wrote vampires that don’t need to drink blood; every time something cool was held out to us, it was snatched away. The whole book’s wishy-washy and vague, jumping from Thing to Thing at random, pulling 180s and flip-flopping all over the place. The tone is pretentious (see: the whole narrative thread of the freaking tarot cards)(and I say that as a tarot reader!) and there’s no meat to it.

Just. Wow. Absolutely not.

Don’t waste your time.

Trigger Warnings: torture (graphic), dehumanising treatment, homophobia, leeches, cults, animal death (off-page), graphic mass-murder, lobotomies (off-page)

With the premise that I’m giving this two stars only because NetGalley won’t allow a non rating, I don’t normally rate books I haven’t finished reading and as much as it pains me to say I quit this at 50%.

Unfortunately the author started losing me somewhere around 35% but I kept going hoping it would get better and wanting to give this a fair chance. After all I did find the protagonist Ambrose an interesting character and the overall take on vampires fairly fresh.

The premise is intriguing and the writing atmospheric if a little too self indulgent. It was charming to start with as it fit with the melancholy and ennui going on in the protagonist’s mind. But it ended up becoming tiring. There’s lyrical writing and there’s verbose and I’m sorry to say Morstabilini fell into the latter for the sake of vibes(tm). The switch up in the narration tense also jarred with me. I understood the stylistic choice but I didn’t feel like it worked well enough to get me through and pull me into continuing the story just now.
There were also instances of really peculiar and random focus on details I found either redundant or hilariously out of place which broke me out of the narrative on more than one occasion.

Finally I’m pretty versed in Italian literature having grown up studying it and I could appreciate the author's influences and subconscious homages but that’s as far as my appreciation went.

This story will find the right audience for it, I’ve no doubt. And perhaps in a future I’ll pick it up again, but for now at least, I’m setting it aside.

Until next time,
Eleni A.E.

Dnf at 40%
The writting style is not for me, almost halfway through and I don't know what's happening and I couldn't care less about any of the characters

Andrea Morstabilini’s Blood as Bright as the Moon is a haunting, lyrical foray into the gothic tradition of vampire literature. It is steeped in atmosphere and vivid prose that often reads like poetry. Morstabilini’s command of language is undeniable—there are passages so rich and strange, I found myself rereading them just to savor the cadence.

The novel’s early chapters bristle with promise: an eerie setting, complex queer undercurrents, and characters who seem poised to unravel something dark and meaningful. It’s clear that the author has deep reverence for the gothic genre, and for much of the first half of the novel, I was fully immersed.

Unfortunately, as the story progressed, I found myself drifting. The narrative momentum began to falter for me in the second half, and the emotional grip I’d felt early on loosened. While the prose remained beautiful, I struggled to stay invested in the plot and characters as they moved toward the novel’s conclusion.

That said, Blood as Bright as the Moon will no doubt find its ideal readers, and I genuinely admire its aesthetic boldness. Though it wasn’t ultimately a match for me, Morstabilini’s talent is clear, and I’ll be keeping an eye on what they do next!

..: Disclaimer :..
I received an ARC of A Blood as bright as the Moon by Andrea Mostabilini, published by Titan Books via Netgalley in exchange for my honest opinion. Many thanks to the author and publisher for the trust!

A BLOOD AS BRIGHT AT THE MOON is filled with lush prose and has a unique take on the vampires. Beautiful.

Thank you NetGalley and Titan Books for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

In Andrea Morstabilini's mesmerizing English-language debut, readers are taken into a gothic horror story with queer vampires, secret societies, and grotesque experiments.

A Blood as Bright as the Moon is such a beautifully unique story that I find it difficult to review, but I'll do my best to put my love for this book into words. I was originally drawn in by the idea of vampires creating wings to fly themselves to the moon. It's a refreshingly original plot that sounds just strange enough to make sure I wouldn't be able to move on from the idea of this story.

Morstabilini's writing style is particularly noteworthy, capturing readers from the very beginning. From the first line, this book will sink it's teeth into you and pull you along. Though it doesn't have to pull very hard because you won't want to look away. The pacing is able to take a slow and steady approach because of its addictive eeriness. It's not a horror book filled with constant scares, but it's one that gets under your skin and into you head, and it will build itself a home there as well.

Although this is a horror story, it also felt like a story about love--love for people, for places, and, perhaps most of all, love for identity. Vampires aren't just an aesthetic in this book, they're a tool for exploring the individual and showing why we're important, and why we don't need to be changed. It shows how our flaws and our love and our choices, both good and bad, make us what we are. This book masters weaving beauty into horror.

This book is rich in complex character dynamics, breathtaking atmosphere, and perfectly intertwining subplots. It's a story you'll never run out of things to talk about. You could fill each page with countless annotations and spend hours telling everyone you know about it. It's beautiful and it's strange and it's heartbreaking. Andrea Morstabilini has taken on vampires and he has absolutely perfected them. If you're counting down the days to any 2025 release, it needs to be this one.

Review on Goodreads (sophreadingbooks https://www.goodreads.com/sophreadingbooks) expected 9/1/2025
Review on Instagram (sophiesreading https://www.instagram.com/sophiesreading/) expected 9/1/2025

★★★ ¾

What an interesting title this was! Filled with lush prose and a unique take on the vampire stories we all know and love (I wasn't expecting a book about a vampire cult building wings to fly to a castle on the moon to work as well as it did) and absolutely teeming with magic, this book so easily drew me in. With its mythology, side characters that felt like three-dimensional figures that could really exist rather than being used simply as vehicles, and a parable that felt reminiscent of classic gothic literature but that did not draw away from the story at hand, this book felt like a fairytale in all the best ways—a world that I could enjoy delving into and savoring—and I appreciated all of the historical references to help cement the world into being, even if I didn't understand all of them (and I think I may benefit for a reread to put together all of the threads I missed the first time around).

The main things that drew me away from the immersion were firstly that the historical elements were expected to be known by the reader, which—though not necessarily a negative—expected a certain amount of knowledge that the reader may not initially possess or know to cross-reference, what with the fantastical feel of the rest of the novel. A bit of extra telling to clarify which parts of the story are myth and which are not so that the reader can truly immerse themselves into the experience may be to the work's benefit. Furthermore, I simply wish the title was longer. The author did a wonderful job packing a story that felt so rich and full of love into under three hundred pages, but I think the underlying story would move from "great" to "perfect" if just a little bit more meat was included to tie all the different threads together.

Thank you to Titan Books and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review! All opinions are my own.

This book is a mesmerizing blend of gothic horror and historical fiction! I was captivated by the narrative, especially in the second act, which was downright chilling. The horror was visceral, and the tension built with such a slow, haunting burn. The setting is absolutely stunning, the atmosphere thick with unease, and with the eeriness of it being a perfect backdrop for this dark tale.

It's both grotesque and beautiful, nauseating at times but impossible to look away from. A gripping, intellectually stimulating experience that will stay with you long after the final page.

I highly recommend it for anyone who loves gothic fiction that blends history, horror, and a deep exploration of human nature. It’s dark, haunting, and so wonderfully thought-out.

This book was impossible to put down. I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher.

This was such a fascinating take on vampires and also a blending together of different events from history. I loved the Frankenstein setting, the vampire characters, the anatomist horror and the mythos of Mad King Ludwig. It just all worked together so well! This book just embodies gothic literature so beautifully.

I found myself mesmerised by this book. I was genuinely horrified at times (act two). I had so much empathy for the main character. It was such a fascinating tale that challenges the traditional view of what a monster is.

The setting was incredible with the seemingly abandoned castle in the town of Frankenstein. The cult like residents, the desire for the moon. This felt like such a reverent collection of certain gothic elements from the 1800s and I just loved it.

Highly recommend this, it was gripping, thoughtful, nauseating at times and an incredible reading experience.