‘What else is this shed for, if not torturing unsuspecting vampires?’
Rahil Zaman has good reason to keep his distance from the world—and his fangs are only part of that. He hides in his crumbling home, acquiring blood through the risky one-night stands he finds on hunter-infested hookup apps. After one such fling turns sour, Rahil ends up trapped in the work shed of the one match he wishes would respond to his flirtations.
Finding the hot twink he’d been ghosting inside his work shed was not on Mercer Bloncourt’s agenda. Between his work as a craftsman and his tumultuous relationship with his chronically-ill daughter, he doesn’t have the time or heart for a relationship. But Rahil is not the only intruding presence in Mercer’s life. A hostile hunter and a manipulative research scientist both insist—on threat of his daughter’s life—that he recreate versions of his ‘holy silver’: a vampire-killing metal forged in the wake of his wife’s murder, bound up in all the grief and destruction he’s striven for years to overcome.
To complicate matters, Rahil is the rare vampire who’s immune to the deadly silver, providing Mercer the perfect lab rat to test a kinder vampire-affecting metal.
As Rahil and Mercer rush to the forge, they must face their past wrongs once more, and in time, discover that no mistake is worth the sentence of eternal loneliness.
COVER ARTIST: ThistleArts (Titling by Houda Belgharbi)
PUBLISHER: Kraken Collective
YEAR: 2025
LENGTH: 458 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Romance
RECOMMENDED: Highly
Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Main Character(s), Bi/Pan Main Character(s), Ace Main Character(s).
HOW TO BARE YOUR NECK AND SAVE A WRECK is a romance between two widowers, one of whom has a daughter and the other of whom lost his sons many years ago. This adds a welcome layer of depth to their romance. Their dynamic is more certain in some ways and more hesitant in others, because they have both been in love before, having each committed to forever with someone else only to have it cut short by death.
I like the way this plays with traps and bondage, focused much more on the way the characters feel about the situation than the particulars in a physical sense. They gesture at the point of it without getting bogged down in the tiny details of what chains hang where. It was also nice to see an asexual character in a sexually intimate relationship, exploring those dynamics while making it clear that those are not automatically contradictory elements.
There's also what seems like really good chronic illness/seizure rep, at least as much as I can tell as someone who doesn't have the particular conditions involved (nor their non-magical counterparts). It's important to the plot without taking over, the characters are full developed outside any medical issues, and it's just great all around.
The books in this series are self-contained enough to functionally stand alone, but because they all take place in a specific city and a relatively short span of time, there are mild spoilers and subtle updates for the events of previous books. One place where this series really shines is in taking secondary or briefly-appearing characters from previous books and giving them a place of their own. The smith has appeared before, but his role was fairly limited. The vampire had not appeared previously, but turns out to be related to someone who died much earlier in the series.
This wraps up something left hanging all the way back in the first book, and in an unexpected way. One of the antagonists in HOW TO BITE YOUR NEIGHBOR AND WIN A WAGER turns out to be the son of the vampire in this book. It means that a narrative thread which had been left hanging with no expectation of closure is called forth again to show that even someone who was doing terrible things will have someone in their life who cared about and misses them. His father has room to mourn him and speak fondly of him at times, without offering any justification for the bigoted obsession that got him killed.
The main story, as always, is completely new. I love the way the characters in this series keep having such different backgrounds from each other, despite all living in roughly the same place half of them being vampires, since that's kind of the point of the series. The vampires are different from each other, as there are as many stories of becoming and adjusting to vampiric life as there are vampires. This stars the oldest protagonist the series has had yet, with not social connection to what younger vampires are doing these days. As for the blacksmith, his presence introduces and resolves several items related to the workshop and some questions around holy silver.
This is not the last book in the series, it appears that there will be at least one more, which fits with how this particular book wraps up. The story ends in a very satisfying place for the main plot, but gently points to several open questions which need another volume to resolve.
Someone could start here because each story can be read by itself, but if they like this book then they should go back to the start of the series and try to read them in order as much as possible after that. The structure of the series lends itself well towards accidentally reading them out of order without having too much spoiled, especially since references are made in a way that would really only stand out to someone who had already read the books, not someone who picked up this one and then later went back for the earlier volumes.
If you like this you may like:
- Blind Man's Wolf by Amelia Faulkner
- The Traitor's Mercy by Iris Foxglove
- The Reanimator's Heart by Kara Jorgensen
Graphic/Explicit CW for grief, sexual content.
Moderate CW for blood, chronic illness, terminal illness, child death, suicide, murder, death.
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Reviews That Burn is a review blog which accompanies the Books That Burn podcast. Books That Burn is a member of the Certain Point of View podcast network. Essays, blog posts, and reviews are by Robin. All music was composed by HeartBeatArt and is used with permission.
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