A female Shawshank Redemption with.....vampires! Sign me up!

1933

Lena comes home to her 11 year old son after a night of cocktail waitressing to find him murdered. The police arrest her and she is found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The Steelgate Island Prison for Women is where she is to serve her sentence but this prison isn't just a prison and the shadows you see out of the corner of your eye? They're real and they're hungry!

What a bloodcurdling good time this was!!! I loved Lena and was rooting for her the entire way. It's been a while since I've spent time with bloodsucking fiends and when done right, as this was, I realized how much I miss them. These aren't sexy vampires and they sure as shit don't sparkle. These are the real deal. Ancient, bloodsucking monstrosities that delighted this horror girls mind with some gruesome visuals. Bon appetite! 4 stars!

Also a big thumbs up to the cover of this one. It is fantastic!

Thank you to NetGalley and Castle Bridge Media for my complimentary copy.

Blooodsuck City is a novella by Jim Towns that is perfect for the Halloween season.
It's billed as The Shawshank Redemption, but with vampires, and definitely delivers.

We are following Lina, a mother who come home from work to find her son dead. She's convicted and sent to a maximum security women's prison to live out her life. She knows from the minute she arrives that something is wrong. Everyone in the prison knows the wardens are vampires, but keep it quiet for the sake of their families.
She sets out to just survive the prison, but others are out to make her stay a living hell.

This has to be one of the best things I've read all year. It hooked me in, delivered on the premise, and was paced in such a way that I never got bored. I also loved that the nature of the prison wardens isn't a big secret. Everyone at the prison knows exactly what they are.

I highly recommend this novella for anyone looking for a quick read or a great sppoky halloween read.

2.5/3*
This is bad girls/ orange is the new black but with vampires. It was tense at times and an interesting enough story.
The book is written kinda like a tv show is set up. With “scenes”
I am a visual reader and I think it was a very visual book and could clearly see and practically hear all the sound of the story. So that’s all great
The issue is that I didn’t feel any connection at all to any of the characters
The only one who I kinda felt some connection to is her bunk mate (I’ve forgotten her name …no reflection on the book I’m just bad with names). Also there was a few plot holes and some inaccuracies in the story. Some plot points hadn’t been thought through it felt like and overall i just kinda felt underwhelmed
The story has great potential and so does the author but it doesn’t feel quite there yet.
I have not commented on typos and missing words and sentence errors that will be picked up in a proofread.

I was intrigued by this book, but hesitant. Vampire stories have been so played out over recent years - I feel a bit jaded with the storylines. However, this book had a very old-fashioned Dracula sort of horror woven through it. A short novella, but packed full with so much terror and fear. The Wardens are a spooky, terrifying bunch of men. Highly recommend!!

The statement “female Shawshank Redemption with vampires” is an extremely accurate description of this book. Very well written, full of sentences and paragraphs that create a clear picture of the story in the reader's mind. Plot twists start at the very beginning of the book, drawing the reader in for a rollercoaster ride of what is happening to the main and supporting characters. The only thing I could complain about is that I wish it was longer (I understand it is a novella- but still), as well as having more scenes where the inmates were encountering the vampires- as to build up the suspense to the climax of the story.

Wonderful and captivating story!

I love stories set in prisons. I don't know why, I just do (Shawshank, anyone?) and so I scooped up Bloodsucker City after reading the blurb about a woman, Lena, who gets sent to a prison run by vampires. What's not to love, right?
The premise for this story was great. It drew me in and I did enjoy reading the story, but as I was reading it and once I'd finished it, I couldn't help but feel that this story would have been so much better if it had been a full novel, rather than a novella.
There were a lot of small scenes. Some just a paragraph long. And I think it could have done with more scene setting, more exposition, more rooting me in Steelegate Prison.
It sometimes felt rushed. And I get that sometimes the author wants to get to certain scenes, but I also think that it could have given the reader more apprehension, more curiosity, more fear, if the author had drawn the story out a bit more and given the characters more motivations.
The main character, Lena, had great motivations. We knew she had been incorrectly convicted and was, in fact, innocent, but everyone else in the story? We didn't get to learn about them. We didn't understand what was driving everyone else. What their backgrounds were. What their conflicts were and what they wanted. I also would have loved more about the Wardens and exactly where they came from and who they were before they took hold of the prison.
In conclusion, this was a good story. A quick, page-turning read, but I just wanted more detail and think this could have been better executed as a novel.

Bloodsucker City by Jim Towns was a truly entertaining and fun read if you enjoy a classic horror story. The novella was a quick and easy read that I enjoyed over the weekend. Reader do be warned, some of the details get grotesquely graphic and gory but for any fan of classic horror you should not be deterred. Jim Towns method of storytelling reminds me of classic horror films from the 1980's and I love it!


Bloodsucker City's narrator is Lena. Unfortunately, Lena has found herself in quite a dilemma. She has been framed for the murder of her son, Jonathon. Lena is a widow struggling to make ends meet working a job she hates to put food on the table and a roof over her and her son's head. She is forced to leave Jonathon, a 10-year-old, unattended while she works. Lena comes home to find her son brutally murdered and within moments of this horrific discovery the police show up and arrest her for the crime. The story is set in the 1930's so there is no forensic evidence, or any type of investigation conducted to prove Lena's innocence. She is caught "red handed" literally.

Lena is sentenced and convicted to life without parole in one of the worst prisons imaginable, Steelegate Island Prison for Women. The prison is known to house some of the worst criminal women in the state and also known to never have any rehabilitated prisoners released back into society. Lena is processed in and soon finds herself amid hell on earth. Not only does she have to watch her back with other prisoners, she also must be wary of the prisons' wardens, whom she has been warned are more than their outward appearances let on. Lena soon finds that Steelegate Island Prison is in essence like a holding pen for livestock awaiting slaughter. Prisoners are fed and basic needs are provided for, but they are no longer treated as humans, they are stripped of all their dignity and are just awaiting their turn to be run through the slaughterhouse. Steelegate figurative and literally drains the life out of its prisoners.

I enjoyed Bloodsucker City. I thought it was an entertaining, light horror read. I personally would love to see the author, Jim Towns, and publisher, Castle Bridge Media, turn Bloodsucker City into a graphic novel or comic series. The novella itself reads like a comic to me and I feel like it would transfer very easily into an illustrated story that would appeal greatly to classic horror fans.

Thanks to Netgalley and Castle Bridge Media for an advanced copy for an honest review.

I actually really enjoyed this book. I've always liked vampire stories but its becoming increasingly difficult to find ones where romance isn't involved. These aren't your twilight vampires with sparkles.. They are ruthless and brutal just what I like to read. If I had one complaint it would be there is too much foreshadowing. There was a lot of that in this book with lines alluding to "a dark shape in the corner". Let me be surprised or figure it out myself. Don't spell it out for me. Other that though I very much enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone into darker vampire stories.

Female Shawshank Redemption with vampires sounded cheekily, cheesily intriguing. Enough to override my initial reservations, because I don’t really care for vampire fiction, too trite, too clichéd, really the least interesting of monsters out there.
But, lo and behold, this turned out to be surprisingly good and neither cheeky nor, more importantly, cheesy. In fact, the author did the vampires just right, not glamour, no decadence, these exsanguinators are pure ancient evil and pure present danger. Their castle…a remote island prison for women, a building seemingly etched into its surroundings (rendered as perfectly darkly atmospheric as you’d expect from a scary story), one with a series of subterranean places you wouldn’t want to find yourself in. Well, you wouldn’t want to find yourself anywhere near that island in general and yet one wrongly accused, wrongly convicted woman does.
This book is her journey as she slowly gets clued in the terrible and terrifying secrets of the prison and its Wardens. Will she survive? Will anyone? Read and find out.
The story takes place in 1933 and the vampires in it by then are already experiencing the push of modernization, this prison was their attempt at adaptation to the ever changing world, but there are still difficulties with management. Can it be (gasp) an end of a very long era? But don’t pity them, these guys are an ancient nightmare that needs erasing.
For all his evil, Warden Samuel Norton never considered drinking his inmates.
So yeah, this was fun and quite well done. Recommended for genre fans. Thanks Netgalley.

I'll admit I was a bit hesitant to read another story with vampires as the central theme. However, I am VERY happy I decided to go ahead and read BLOODSUCKER CITY by Jim Towns. The fact that he is a horror movie director definitely swayed my decision. The first line of the book's synopsis also grabbed my attention and piqued my interest. It reads:

"Like a female Shawshank Redemption— with vampires."

What self-respecting horror fan could pass up a book with that plot? 100% I was in!!!!

I was not disappointed. Jim Towns has crafted a fabulous story of risk, reward, and redemption. This novella has everything required of a great story. There is a gutsy heroine who has been trampled on simply by virtue of being a woman in 1933. There is a story of deep familial bonds, ones that transcend death. There is a women's prison where those who could not (or would not) conform to society's expectations of who and what and how a woman should behave.

I don't want to ruin the story for any potential readers, but if you are a fan of horror and/or historical fiction, this is one book that you should pre-order now. It will be officially released on November 2, 2021 and I predict that it will obtain a dedicated cult following. I can't wait to see how people react to BLOODSUCKER CITY.

I rate this book as a solid 4 OUT OF 5 STARS ⭐⭐⭐⭐

*** Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a free copy of this book. ***

Bloodsucker City by Tom Ford.
Falsely convicted of murdering her own boy, Lena—a poor young widow—is sentenced to life imprisonment in the infamous Steelgate Women’s Prison: an ancient stone fortress perched atop a jagged mountain in the middle of nowhere.
A brilliant read. Read in one sitting. Couldn't put it down. I loved the cover and the blurb drew me in. This was quite gory. Lena and dr mears were my favourite characters. 5*.