An Education in Malice - Review

I have once again been coaxed into reading a mediocre book because it has vampires in it.

“I wanted to fall at her feet and worship her. I wanted to desecrate her in every filthy manner I could imagine. I wanted all of her, in every way, all at once.” I’m listening….

Sapphic, dark academia, vampires, Carmilla retelling. How could I not like this book? I’ll tell you how. 

I’m kidding. I liked it okay. There’s something here that I love. The all-consuming need to please, the lure of academia, the suffocating desire to be the best, to get the gold star. What did Taylor Swift say? “I’m still a believer but I don’t know why. I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try.” 

The story follows Laura, an Episcopalian girl from Mississippi, as she begins her freshman year of university at St. Perpetua’s in Massachusetts. Laura is shy, sheltered, and sweet. She is also a little freak! She reads Victorian porn in the library! Laura is a student of poetry, and falls in with the poetry cohort, where she meets the mysterious Carmilla Karnstein, the kind of girl that would hold a cigarette in ripped tights and smudged eyeliner in a coming of age movie. The Muse with capital M. She’s an enigma. She’s so cool you can’t help but hate her, but love her. Carmilla’s real introduction in the novel is when she blows into class and asks the professor to give her a light! (It’s 1968, by the way). 

The aforementioned professor is Ms. De Lafontaine, who has a little obsession with Carmilla, and vice versa. As a lifelong teacher’s pet myself, I get it. So begins an academic rivalry between Carmilla, an unchallenged favorite, and Laura, a young woman desperate to prove herself. 

I’ve read the source material, and I adore it. Carmilla keeps a lot of her allure, she’s just as enchanting. However, the original Carmilla is dark, manipulative, and cunning. Laura in this version is much more fleshed out than in the original. I won’t spend time critiquing how good of a re-telling it is, because it’s not an adaptation. Suffice to say, it gets the job done!

I’ll start with what I enjoy about this book. Gibson does a fantastic job tying up the sexual with the vampiric need to feed. They’re inextricable. I said this once in a film class in college: that vampires were inherently erotic. And people snickered! I know we grew up with the sexless vampires of Twilight, but vampires are supposed to fuck. And Carmilla and Laura have a great dynamic on this front. Carmilla needs Laura to feed, so she is in a kind of sexual thrall to her, an inversion of the usual control the vampire would have. Carmilla pleads, she is desperate to be owned by Laura. Laura looks to Carmilla like a violent goddess, desperate to gain her favor. They want to hurt each other, to torture each other, to bring each other to climax a million times in one night. That’s vampirism baby!

A big disappointment of this book is the lack of atmosphere. Just because it takes place on a college campus doesn’t make it “dark academia.” The school serves only as a flimsy backdrop for the characters and a vehicle to stir up the rivalry. The university is glossed over almost entirely, unless it’s De Lafontaine’s class, and even then we only see it actually play out once or twice. 

The other big disappointment is the lack of direction. The story has a strange, stunted sort of pacing. Some scenes are cut so short, then it skips ahead quite a bit. Stop and go, stop and go. So I feel like it was next to impossible to build up any sort of momentum. How many times can we finally get somewhere, then they send poor Laura away and the scene changes to “I didn’t see Carmilla for three days after that…” Groan! The book is short (which seems like a pattern for Gibson) so it's not like we didn’t have the time. That’s where all the dark academia bits should have gone, in all those cut out scenes! 

Like Gibson’s other novel, A Dowry of Blood—which I read last year—it focuses on the characters and their relationships only, and lends no time to flesh anything else, to its detriment. No plot, just vibes. No story conventions, just vibes. The best example is toward the literal climax, when Laura goes to confession. When she leaves, she sees De Lafontaine, and they start a short conversation. Hilariously short. Within a page, Laura says “hey, I actually have an idea how to kill the raging lunatic that’s on the loose right now!” and Ms. D says “tell me everything.” Then the chapter ends. When the next one begins, we are already in the middle of the actual plan! No build up, no satisfying scheming montage. This is also what I disliked about Dowry so go figure. It’s not her thing! 

Speaking of Dowry, there’s a cheeky little cameo from our very own Magdalena, one of Dracula’s brides. I didn’t even catch this until I finished the book, because it really just blows right past you. The girls meet her at a party they go to with De Lafontaine, and then they have public sex while everyone watches! Anyway. The novel ends with an invitation from Magdalena to Carmilla and Laura, asking them to go to Spain with her, to be her companions. Just before they leave, Magdalena extends the invitation further to Laura: to become a vampire. And then the book just ends! By far the most interesting aspect of the book, and Magdalena gets all of 4 lines and adds almost nothing to the story. I want to really love the cliffhanger, because I love to be challenged like that as a reader. This one puts a sour taste in my mouth, because it feels like another cop-out. Why write anything of actual plot substance when I can just end it right when it gets good? Classic S.T. 

The final gripe I have is with the writing. On a line level, It’s good! It’s got great one-liners. Great quotables. But if every other line is over flowery and too quotable, then is any of it actually doing anything for the story or the characters? We get it, “She kissed me with a martyr's agonized desperation, like I was the only sword she ever wanted to fall on” now let’s do some exposition! For every bit of gorgeous prose, there’s a cliche “soft as silk.” If you’re going to stoop to simile, you need to earn it. Make it surprising. For every highlightable line, there’s a “somehow, I made it back without being detected.” This is a personal thing. I think it’s lazy to write “somehow, this happened” or “I couldn’t name the feeling,” etc etc ad infinitum. Find the words! That’s what writers do! Lastly, because I can’t not say it, just how many things can be “heady”? Evidently, most things! 

I hope to enjoy the next book I review. I’m not this mean usually. 

2/5 stars