I will NEVER say no to a sapphic vampire book and this one was beautifully gothic and atmospheric as well. @katalicedunn creates such vivid imagery in her stories that you truly feel like you’re alongside Lenore in the ancient Nethershaw manor.

the eeriness was a constant companion to this story and it put me on edge in the best way. I wanted so badly for Lenore to wake up from her life and know that she was deserving of more.
enter Carmilla, my devilish angel.
the more impenetrable and controlled Lenore forced herself to become, the more insistent Carmilla was to poke holes in her facade. Carmilla always found a way to drop a bread crumb or two of truths that would send Lenore’s head spinning, beckoning her to find the answers Lenore had always desired for herself but never dared to look for.

my rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

all in all, this was such a good read! Hungerstone is a journey of self-acceptance, rage, and desire. proof that even a vampire, driven by her thirst for blood, can be the voice of reason in this situation.😌

also it releases in the US today!

thank you @netgalley and @zandoprojects for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Between Nosferatu and Hungerstone, 2025 is THE year of the vampire. A seductive twist on a gothic classic, Hungerstone pulls you deep into a world of hunger, yearning, and dangerous secrets. This retelling of Carmilla is as dark and mysterious as it is empowering, with themes of female rage and self-discovery that resonate powerfully. With rich character growth and a mysterious, brooding atmosphere, this book will leave you captivated and craving more. Perfect for fans of feminist reimaginings, gothic suspense, and lesbians and their yearning.

I cannot wait to read Kat Dunn's previous works!

Also, whoever designed this cover deserves a raise... Like a serious one.

4.5 ⭐️ Like lesbian Nosferatu but without all the back sores <3

Thank you, NetGalley and Zando, for an early ARC.

This was so good, honestly the vibes were immaculate throughout.
Female rage, women behaving badly, and just a great creepy atmosphere. So enjoyable, I ate it up!

I wasn’t aware of the Carmilla story before, so I am not sure on the references etc. but I still loved it and don’t think you need to know in order to enjoy the book.

I could not out this down each time I picked it up to read. And the story stuck with me when I wasn’t reading.

The themes about want, revenge, and patriarchy were so well done and entwined with the story. It made for such an immersive read.

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
Genre: Horror
Themes: hunger as metaphor, workers’ rights, female rage/oppression
Pub date: Feb. 18, 2025

Lenore and her business tycoon husband, Henry, have moved from London to the countryside manor Nethershaw, where they are planning a shooting party with society’s elite. A carriage accident near their home brings Carmilla into Lenore’s life — and awakens a hunger deep within Lenore.

Hungerstone is a feminist reworking of Carmilla, the novella that inspired Dracula. Add this one to the popular “female rage” book lists; it is dark, gothic, creepy and fun. Surprisingly, I found the portions about workers’ rights and Henry’s business to be the most interesting.

My biggest issues with Hungerstone were the pacing and structure. The chapters might have worked better by designating the passage of time, such as Six Days Until Shooting Party, Five Days Until Shooting Party, etc., which could have created stronger suspense for readers. Some sections were redundant, repetitively describing everything that needs to be done before the party. Regardless, Hungerstone remains an immersive gothic thriller with class commentary, vampires and sapphic yearning.

Thank you to #NetGalley and Zando for the advanced reader copy of #Hungerstone.

I’m not going to attempt to sound elegant or write this like I do my endless university assignments. This is just a review.

From the beginning, I was hooked. Hungerstone put its teeth in me and would not let go until it had finished with me (at three o’clock in the morning, I’ll have you know).

While this is a contradiction to itself, it felt both slow and incredibly fast, with the climax of the story at the ending. And that climax was absolutely worth it. Thank god, we all got our figurative and metaphorical orgasam.

Being with Lenore felt claustrophobic, suffocating, frustrating and painful - which in true form, made it madly relatable. Any feminine presenting person is likely to find her journey within their own. The patriarchy is glorious, isn’t it my friends? (Ive never been more sarcastic in my life.)

Kat Dunn’s writing is gorgeous. I highlighted well over 100 lines. But toward the end, there were moments where I’d heard the same thing already. But honestly, I’m being nit picky. Because for it all being historical, I did not feel bogged down by it, and for that, I should really thank Kat.

I won’t tell you where to find all the meaning in this novel, but it’s there and there is a message for everyone. I want to pull it apart and dissect each moment and put it back together again.

I love blood. I love sapphic vampires. I love symbolism. I love feminine rage in its purest form. I love taking back power and using grief and anger as strength.

Lenore lives for her husband—to manage his temper, to maintain his reputation, and to run Nethershaw, the crumbling countryside manor his steel-industry wealth has bought. Though their ten-year marriage has produced no children and he no longer visits her bed, Lenore holds his secrets close, determined to be of use. But her strict control threatens to slip when an overturned carriage brings the mysterious Carmilla to Nethershaw. Frail and weak by day, Carmilla stalks the moors with surprising grace at night, her beauty and freedom awakening something dangerous within Lenore’s stifled heart—a vicious hunger that can no longer be ignored.

Hungerstone is truly a book to be savored. The prose is rich and thick, detailed with architecture, food, and dress that embody Victorian excess, and the sense of foreboding that winds through the story evokes gothic classics like du Maurier’s Rebecca and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Dunn celebrates female desire with brilliant nuance—Hungerstone is utterly delicious in its feminine rage, and the plot is heartbreaking, empowering, violent, and oh-so-satisfyingly bloody in equal measure.

As a character, Carmilla is offbeat and unrestrained—a fantastic counterpoint to Lenore’s rigid concern for propriety and the perfect catalyst for her undoing. Dunn positions Carmilla (and the sapphic vampire in general) as a representation of unbridled wanting, choice, freedom, and animal womanhood, and though I would have enjoyed seeing more of their relationship, Carmilla feels deliberately and cleverly obscure, both there and not there, real and not real, the woman Lenore loves and a metaphor for the hunger and longing within her.

I genuinely loved reading Hungerstone, in part because it so deeply resonated with my experience struggling not only to make choices for myself, but to know myself well enough to understand what those choices should be. If you can relate—if you, like so many women, have ever had to tuck your feelings aside, put on a mask to feel accepted and acceptable, protect yourself with hyper-vigilance, or keep quiet when you wanted to scream—this book was written for you. So get angry, sharpen your teeth, and BITE!

My rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5 (4.5 stars)

I need to be chased in the woods by Carmilla. For science.

Gothic sapphic vampires who get revenge on men? I mean, I am just a girl.

Hungerstone is a feminist and sapphic retelling of Carmilla. Full disclosure, I have not read Carmilla so this review won't be taking any of the original into account.

Lenore has been Henry's wife for 10 years now and being a wife is all she has known. She runs his home, plans his events, keeps his deadly secrets, and suffers with a cold loveless marriage. A carriage accident brings the mysterious Carmilla into their home and into Lenore's life. Carmilla is strange but alluring and Lenore finds her own hunger growing each day. When girls within their village fall into a sickness of bloody hunger Lenore is caught between staying faithful to her cruel husband or falling deeper into her own dark desire.

Carmilla was so full of desire and temptation, everytime she spoke I highlighted as if my life depended on it. I think Kat Dunn did a fantastic job of capturing her as this dangerous seductive creature. I'm a big fan of vampires written this way. Lenore, oh poor sweet Lenore. The build up for her anger and hunger was fantastic, intertwined with her confusion over her attraction of Carmilla on top of that.

The first half of the story and their interactions were my favorite but I felt the plot got a bit stale halfway through when we focused on the industrial revolution and Henry. Even I the president of hating men got a bit bored with the hating men part. I would have rather that time was spent feeding the romance between Lenore and Carmilla. While I could feel the desire and pull between them it could have been built up more.

I am just the kind of girl where if you promise a romance I will hang onto that like my life depends on it! Overall I am pleased with how this story played out as Lenore finding her own courage and desires outside of what society demands of women. Speaking out which, I especially enjoyed the bloody ending. What could be more satisfying to our hunger? :)

Thank you to the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Dunn balances gothic unease with a profound sense of longing, crafting characters who feel achingly real in their pain, desires, and desperation. The story unfolds with an eerie, slow-burn intensity, immersing you in its unsettling world while keeping you utterly hooked.

Thank you NetGalley for this arc!!

I absolutely love Kat Dunn!! This was just another example of stellar storytelling!! I’m always here for raging lesbian vampires!!!

We are introduced to Lenore, who is the epitome of perfection in society but is silently, mentally dying behind closed doors. She is the prime example of marrying out of convenience instead of for love. The mysterious and rather odd Carmilla enters Lenore's life, and with that, an insatiable hunger sweeps through the area. Carmilla challenges Lenore to open her eyes and fully see the coffin she's been living in. It's the perfect Carmilla retelling because she is more of a side character than the main event. We get to witness these events through a second pair of eyes.

A loose Carmilla retelling.
Sapphic.
Unearthing your true hunger.
ALL THE FEMME RAGE.
Tying it up with a lush atmosphere.

ahh, carmilla has needed a great retelling for a while. i was always a fan of the concept of the original - lesbian vampires? come on - but i felt like the original work by le fanu was a slog. this? no. in fact, i'd go so far as to say this book was compulsively readable.

this is exactly the kind of female rage book that i wanted to exist in the literary world. (though, let's be real, i will never have too many female rage books.)

hungerstone gives us lenore, a woman who has spent her life struggling to make out a world for herself. she has the social standing but she's penniless - she makes an arrangement to marry for money, her husband for status. with the expectations that she must act like a Good Wife (gross), her husband quickly decides once they pick an ailing carmilla up off the road that he's had enough.

but lenore is so drawn to carmila that it's palpable and honestly, pretty hot. carmilla constantly challenges the rigid rules that lenore has ascribed to herself and have been ascribed to her by the confines of a patriarchal society. carmilla clocks her husband's infidelity, suggests that maybe he isn't the perfect match he seems, especially when he keeps plying lenore to eat sweets covered in a substance that definitely isn't powdered sugar.

i loved the evolution of lenore's rage. i love that she errs on the side of what is polite in society until so much is thrust upon her that she explodes - she explodes at her husband, at the woman she believes him to be cheating with. and from there, she learns out to cleverly navigate the world for her own gain instead of her own survival.

Love, love, love!!!

I devoured this book in a few days (would’ve been even quicker if life wasn’t stopping me from reading it!)!!
The English Lit student in me absolutely loved the retelling of Camilla and the literary references!
This is definitely a book for all of the girlies who read books recommended in the ‘weird girl’ book videos on Booktok! Will be recommending this to all of my friends for the foreseeable.
My only complaint was that at times the pace seemed a little inconsistent, but not enough that it impacted my reading experience too significantly.
I’m excited to see what Dunn does next!

I devoured this. I feel grossly blessed to have read this right on the heels of Lee Mandelo's Summer Sons, which was another five-star read. Such nasty weird horror back-to-back.

Anyway, I love love love the depiction of coming to know your female agency here, and the impact that it has on Lenore. I love Carmilla, I love her unapologetic and unsettling behavior, and how immediately Lenore knows there is something different and wild about her. This reminded me a lot of Marina Yuszczuk's Thirst, which while being another sapphic vampire novel, also touches on women's agency over their own lives and explores what that can look like. Definitely recommend both if you find that this is right up your alley!

What a gorgeous retelling of Carmilla! I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The prose is vibrant and immersive, and the story itself has this perfect mix of mystery and tension. It’s the slow-burn sapphic vampiric romance that I didn’t even know I needed until now 😆 The journey of self-discovery and self-love is so beautifully portrayed and omg! the violence, death, and gore - oh my! As per usual, my advice is to Go In Blind.

Hungerstone by Kat Dunn comes out tomorrow February 18. Thanks to @netgalley and @zando

Thank you to author Kat Dunn, Zando, and NetGalley for this free eARC in exchange for an honest review!

"What is a monster but a creature of agency?"

Hungerstone begins as we follow Lenore (a woman in a loveless marriage) and her husband, Henry, as Henry plans an elaborate hunting party in their countryside home. Secluded from the bustling cities, the reluctant couple stumble upon a nearby carriage accident that brings the mysterious Carmilla into their lives and their home. What could go wrong?

Hungerstone, at its heart, is a story of, well, hunger. Of a hunger for what each character thinks they deserve. Through Camilla's urgings, (and as a parallel to the sapphic vampire trope of forbidden hunger) we follow Lenore as she begins to open her eyes to the world and the nature of the society that she exists in with her husband Henry. A retelling of Carmilla, while romance is a component of this story, it was more used as a means to an end--to push Lenore through a journey of self-discovery so that she can finally identify her self-worth.

I did quite enjoy following Lenore throughout the story, and uncovering the secrets of herself, her past, and her husband. I would definitely recommend this book to those who are fans of character-driven stories, as the book could be a bit slow moving at times. I highlighted quite a few passages, and I am happy to say that this author's writing is so lovely to read, and so so quotable. I love how she brought such an old story to the modern age with such modern themes in regards to female rage and female empowerment without taking the story itself out of the Industrial Revolutionary Era.

However, I will note that I do wish that there was more to the characters presented--at least, besides our heroine, Lenore. I found that the characters of Carmilla and Henry themselves did not have a lot of substance. It seemed more that they just fully embodied the tropes they meant to fulfill rather than being their own being. This is contradictory to how Lenore was portrayed; like she was breaking out of her poor obedient housewife trope.

Combine the bones of Le Fanu’s Carmilla and the veins of classic gothic works, with the heart of angry women throughout the ages and you get Hungerstone by Kat Dunn. Lenore is the ever-dutiful wife to an iron-works owner, Henry, whose life gets turned asunder after their move to a new, distant home in the moors. On the way to their new abode, they encounter an overturned carriage with one occupant, a mysterious woman who only tells them her name, Carmilla. As Carmilla entangles herself further and further into her life, Lenore finds herself questioning everything. A story of different kinds of hunger and how feeding the wrong one can be the death of you.

Lenore's growth of character throughout the story was extremely well done. I liked that we were able to get a peek at her life as a child growing up with her bristly aunt and how it showed the molding of her character into the person we meet in the beginning of the novel. Carmilla is fascinating as a character and I loved the way she was written. It was very like Le Fanu's Carmilla, but with her own little quirks and twists. Henry is an extremely frustrating character, but very well-written. I also liked that we get to see Lenore interact with her best friend, Cora, who is, at times, a foil for her. The atmosphere and setting were appropriately gothic and set the tone for the story.

This was such a delicious book. I absolutely loved it.

Hungerstone is what every vampire novel aspires to be; sensual, sexy, dark, and teetering on the edge of sinking its teeth into the reader. Kat Dunn has done an extraordinary job of building the tension needed in a book of this magnificent scope. The queerness of the horror genre is at its best when it is equally playful and alluring as it is dark, and this book is a modern masterclass in precisely that. A well deserved 5/5 stars.

Thank you to the Author, Zando, and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my review.

hungerstone by kat dunn *arc*
★★★★★
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“‘carmilla,’ i say, tasting the syllables in my mouth. a little harsh, but with long, languorous vowels lingering between the lips.”
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lenore’s marriage to henry is as cold and unyielding as the steel industry that built his empire. ten years have passed, no child has come, and the distance between them has hardened into something unspoken. when henry moves them to nethershaw manor for a grand hunt, the ghosts of their past settle in the rafters. then a carriage accident deposits carmilla—a woman too pale, too strange, too alive in the dark—onto lenore’s doorstep. with carmilla comes an unraveling. girls in the village grow sick. whispers of hunger, of blood, curl through the air like smoke. and lenore, starved for something she cannot name, finds herself drawn to the mysterious woman.
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“she is so hungry for so much.”
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hungerstone is gothic horror at its most exquisite—moody, violent, and overflowing with forbidden desire. the prose is stunning, each sentence drenched in longing. the setting is alive: the moors, untamed and watching; the manor, filled with secrets it cannot contain. the horror lingers, not just in the sickness spreading through the village or the shadows pooling in candlelit corridors, but in the very nature of hunger itself—who is allowed to want, to take, to consume. this is a novel of appetite and reckoning, of what happens when a woman dares to reach beyond the limits of what she’s been given. it is as intoxicating as carmilla’s gaze in the dark, as sharp as two fangs piercing your neck. sapphic, sinister, and wholly unrelenting. i devoured it.
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“and all i am left with is my raw, untrammeled hunger. i am a woman woken from thirty years slumber, and i would eat the world should it satisfy this empty, keening void where my heart should be. i would cry with grief over my life so unfulfilled, and drink down the salty tears, eat my worthless tongue and impotent fingers, skin this carcass and pick the bones clean. oh god. there is something wrong with me. i am so, so hungry.”
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