Part of the Introverted World

Love demands sacrifice. Her blood. Her body. Even her life….

Singapore, 1927. Verity Edevane needs blood. And not just anyone’s blood. She craves the sweet, salty rush from a young woman’s veins, the heady swirl of desire mixed with fealty—such a rarity in this foreign colony. It’s a lot to ask, but doesn’t she deserve the best?

Gean Choo needs money. Mrs. Edevane makes her an offer Gean Choo can’t refuse. But who is her strange, alluring new mistress? What is she? And what will Gean Choo sacrifice to earn her love?

Po Lam needs absolution. After decades of faithfully serving Mrs. Edevane, Po Lam can no longer excuse a life of bondage and murder. She needs a fresh start. A clean conscience. More than anything, she needs to save Gean Choo from a love that will destroy them all.

***

A destitute maidservant must choose whom to love: her vampire mistress, or the woman trying to save her life in The Wicked and the Willing, a standalone, F/F steamy historical gothic horror vampire novel with a love triangle, a choice of endings and no cliffhangers. This novel contains two mutually exclusive endings, although most of the story is not interactive. Due to the mature content and dark themes, it is intended for adult listeners only. It contains potentially disturbing scenes and an abusive romantic relationship between two women. Further content information is available from the author’s website. This audiobook is performed by Emily Woo Zeller, an AudioFile Golden Voice and an Audie, Earphones, and SOVAS award-winning narrator.

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The Wicked and the Willing🩸🦇🖤 by Lianyu Tan

Admittedly got a little carried away compiling this,, Just a lesbian here being very excited that Lianyu Tan created a gothic vampiric wlw historical dark romance extravaganza set in my home country. This novel went absolutely hard with the horror, angst, textures, sexual tension -- it was sexy, scary and visceral, nothing held back. I wolfed down 70% of this in one fevered sitting.

From my long-term Libby tbr, where I put it several years ago based on a favorable review by author Alexis Hall. In The Wicked and the Willing, Gean Choo is desperate for money after the death of her father in 1920s Singapore. She takes a position as a maid to the reclusive Verity Edevane—but she soon finds that the position isn't for housework, it's to feed Mrs. Edevane blood...

I had mixed feelings about Kat Dunn's Carmilla retelling Hungerstone last year. In contrast, The Wicked and the Willing is much more what I wanted from sapphic vampire gothic. In Tan's Singapore, it's not a coincidence that most vampires are wealthy white people, in a slightly heavy-handed colonialism metaphor. People like Mrs. Edevane literally prey on their colonial subjects, in her case via a series of pretty young maidservants who always end up dead. Gean Choo is caught between her attraction to Verity and her fear as she's slowly dragged into an explicitly abusive, non-consensual relationship where Mrs Edevane. Meanwhile, she's attracted to Verity's butch steward and fixer, Po Lam, but she can't pursue the attraction without risking Verity's violent jealousy.

This is a book that leans into the darker side of romance without a healthy relationship in sight. Gean Choo is already a survivor of childhood sexual assault and falls easily into Verity's controlling grasp. However, while I appreciated the complexities of Gean Choo's struggle to survive, I felt that she was flattened a bit too much into a passive victim. In most of her time on page, she's literally food, and in the role of a gothic heroine, she reacts rather than acts. The vampire/prey dynamic suits the story, but I personally prefer books where both women are insane, not just one of them. Likewise, I had mixed feelings about the "choose your own adventure" element of the ending, which felt like a bit of a cop-out. I thought the "bad ending" suited the themes of the books better, but I would have preferred if it was properly elaborated and given space to breathe, rather than wedged in with an alternate ending.

Possibly the most haunting moment of the book, if not the whole series.

I laughed. “You almighty Andalites. There is no limit to your arrogance, is there? Well, let me tell you something: We may be simple people. But we don’t use biology to invent monsters. And we don’t enslave other species. And we don’t unleash a plague of parasites on the galaxy, endangering every other free species, and then go swaggering around like the lords of the universe. No, we’re too simple for all that. We’re too stupid to lie and manipulate. We’re too stupid to be ruthless. We’re too stupid to know how to build powerful weapons designed to annihilate our enemies. Until you came, Andalite, we were too stupid to know how to kill.”

Possibly the most haunting moment of the book, if not the whole series.