Bloodstains by Gaslight by Red Lagoe
Brigids Gate Press (March 29, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Broadbent
Red Lagoe’s Bloodstains by Gaslight comes with numerous trigger warnings, including intimate partner violence and sexual assault. I was warned. I assured Lagoe I would not be triggered. I think I said something like, “I’m okay.”
Two hundred and some odd pages later, I am decidedly not okay. “Emotionally shell-shocked” comes closest. Bloodstains by Gaslight is a propulsive read — I finished it in one sitting — but a hard one. That’s not a weak point; the novel is a devastating and realistic look at the horrors of domestic abuse, told slant, as Lagoe turns the vampire trope into a metaphor for partner violence.
While Lagoe eases us into vampirism, the domestic abuse becomes evident immediately. It’s 1997, and Reese, an eighteen-year-old high school senior, wants to break it off with Michael, a nineteen-year-old guy who’s her “best friend,” but whom she’s afraid of — he’s not only hurt her in the past and later denied it, he’s obsessed with her; he’s isolated her from her friends; and he’s dangerously jealous. He’s also thinking about marriage, which deeply frightens her.
But when newly created vampire Trevor nearly kills Michael in a botched suicide-by-car attempt, guilt forces him to turn Reese’s boyfriend into a bloodsucker. Suddenly Michael’s stronger and faster, still determined to keep Reese at all costs, despite the dangers of his bloodlust. While Trevor repeatedly warns that he’s a danger to everyone he loves, Michael refuses to listen. Michael’s vampirism becomes simply one more way he’s feeding off Reese. He’s finally turned. But Michael has been a vampire all along.
As events spiral out of control, drawing in Michael’s overly religious mother and her pastor, Lagoe uses familial relationships to both deepen character and illuminate the roots of violence. She lets us into Michael’s head, and while we may feel a shred of sympathy for him, his warped vision of love comes off as monstrous. Just as we see how Reese’s life leaves her vulnerable, we see how Michael’s past and present both predispose him to violence.
And Lagoe is careful to show us that Reese starts from a serious disadvantage. Her suck-it-up-and-deal single mother makes her pay rent; she doesn’t expect to go to college (partially because Michael talked her out of it), though she’s academically gifted. Her father ran out on her mother. Her car’s old. There’s a pervasive sense of poverty, of never-enough, of making do. Life isn’t fair, and Reese was dealt a bum hand.
Why harp on this? Certainly, domestic abuse can happen to anyone. However, Bloodstains by Gaslight shows a keen understanding of the unique forces at work in a case of intimate partner violence. Why didn’t you just leave? people ask. In Reese’s case, there’s no reliable place to go. With a grim constellation of forces arrayed against her, she’s forced to return to the monster again and again — by love, by lack of choice, by pity, by naked fear. The horrors are here, and Lagoe won’t let us look away.
While Lagoe illuminates the unique machinations of partner abuse to grim effect, she also understands the importance of making tropes your own. Not only does she use vampirism as more than a plot point, she avoids scooping familiar vampire myth. Lagoe invents her own spin on vampire lore — without unnecessary explanation — and it works well.
And despite its vampires, this novel drips with gritty realism. You’ll practically smell 1997’s Sun-Ripened Raspberry, and there’s also a grim knowingness to the pervasive poverty of the main characters, from Reese’s grease-scented uniform to the single-wide’s weight room to the dog who lives on a chain. Without cell phones, without regular internet access, Lagoe adds an extra edge of desperation and claustrophobia.
Good horror has something to say. Bloodstains by Gaslight is shouting about the real-life horrors of domestic violence, and vampirism provides Lagoe with the perfect metaphor. How many times have vampires seemed like creepers (Edward Cullen, anyone?!). Lagoe dares to speak into the silence, and her story’s gutting.
We need it more than ever.
