Lore & Lust: How this Queer Love Story Rewrites Vampire Lore While Serving Sizzling Erotic Scenes.

In Karla Nikole's Lore & Lust, vampires who consume human blood are considered low-ranking as it is believed (and proven, apparently) that human blood lacks the nourishment necessary for [them] to function at their optimum capacity. Vampires feed from other vampires who willingly offer themselves and their blood, and they are called sources. A bloodline that has never fed from humans is considered purebred. One's family needs to feed from other vampires to ensure that their offsprings are considered a new generation that restarts this purity or the age of the new blood.

Looking into his eyes... Haruka likens it to staring into the depths of the ocean, if the waves and currents were the color of honeycomb. Golden and confounding.

At the centre of this story are Haruka Hirano and Nino Bianchi, two of a few remaining purebreds in a world filled with first, second and third generation vampire aristocracies who rely on them to place order and officiate marriage-type ceremonies calling 'bonding rituals'. It is this ceremony that introduces the reader to what is called Lore and Lust, a wide-ranging, unprecedented research manuscript compiled by Haruka's father and grandfather into the sacred act of bonding - a book that, as we later learn, is coveted by many since it investigates the underlying factors for successful pairing of vampires, purebred or otherwise.

I find the title of this book rather fitting since it takes the vampire lore and turns it inside out, recreating some of the many things we have come to know and understand about bloodsuckers, reintroducing it as fiction or otherwise, providing us with a brave new world where vampires aren't these fantastical or gory creatures from myths of old.

Having enjoyed the story of how these two vampires navigate their reclusive identities while gravitating towards each other in a fantasy love story unlike any other—the vampire communities in this story dismantle the idea of sexuality or gender expectations when it comes to attraction and feelings between a pairing.

I liked this book enough to know that im curious and looking forward to reading the second book in the series, titled The Vanishing, which, I believe, will look even further into the cultural event that happened some hundred years or something before when a huge chunk of purebred vampires suddenly disappeared without a trace. I wonder if this is somehow inspired by the story of the lost colony of Roanoke, because it sure sounds similar.