Stakes

You have to invite him in. You have to want the vampire’s badness in the house with you.

Growing up in Catholic Ireland, Noelle McCarthy is captivated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire is a risk-free fantasy, a suave alternative to the fraught realities of desire.

Twenty years later, exhausted by her unruly appetites, Noelle returns to Dracula, reckoning with her own history and a changing world: generation-spanning shame and trauma given voice by #MeToo and the horrors emerging from Irish soil.

More than a century after readers were first mesmerised by Dracula, Stakes transposes its electric themes of transgression, intoxication and sexual danger onto Noelle’s own life, asking: what’s the difference between an inheritance and a curse?

A funny, visceral follow-up to the acclaimed Grand, Stakes celebrates the power of a gothic horror to help you face the parts of life that scare you most.