The Semenovore: What Google Doesn't Know About Vampires

Liliana Moraru was the fastest thing to come out of Codlea, Romania, fast enough for scholarship offers on two continents, not fast enough to outrun the vampire posing as the local constable. He kills her mother and marks Liliana for silence. Her grandmother does the only sensible thing: ships her off to Tulane on a soccer scholarship, because apparently the Atlantic stops everything except student loans. It does not stop vampires. He follows her to New Orleans and, in an encounter she did not consent to and cannot undo, turns her into a Semenovore: immortal, heartless in the literal sense, and hungry for something only stocked in fertility clinics. There is a complication built into the biology. Liliana is a lesbian, has been her whole life, has a girlfriend back home to prove it, has never once looked at a man and felt anything but boredom. Her body now runs on exactly the substance her heart has no interest in. Survival, it turns out, has nothing to do with desire, which she finds almost insulting. New Orleans obliges anyway. Bourbon Street volunteers. The city's industry offers bulk rates. Her teammates cover for her without knowing why. Her coaches assume steroids, since the actual explanation is more ridiculous. The hunger keeps winning. When she collapses at practice, a French Quarter occultist named Vespera Lane explains why: her maker has been feeding off her without either realizing, and she is dying of it. The fix isn't garlic, isn't therapy. It's homicide, specifically his. Her grandmother flies in with more garlic than a pizzeria and several centuries of grudges. What happens next in the alleys of the French Quarter isn't about revenge. It's about Liliana deciding what she actually wants to be, and who she's willing to keep being it for. The Semenovore is literary horror about immigration, appetite, and the specific indignity of surviving one monster only to become another, one whose hunger has nothing to do with who she loves.