The Beautiful and the Grotesque: A Guest Post from S.T. Gibson

The author of A Dowry of Blood is back with her newest novel, An Education in Malice, that will delight both dark academia lovers and vampire enthusiasts. Here, S.T. writes about the inspiration behind her spellbinding new novel.

I knew that An Education in Malice should feel slightly out-of-time in order to complement the historical setting of A Dowry of Blood, but I had a lot of freedom in choosing the time period. 1968 was a dynamic and turbulent year in American history, and it quickly captivated my imagination when I was sorting through possible eras to set my dark academia story in. It felt in some ways like the tipping point between the past and modernity, and I was particularly interested in the social station of women at this time, and how that might be reflected in a setting that was entirely made up of ambitious young women.

I recognized that, even accounting for my historical research and consulting photographs and essays from the period, I wouldn’t be able to authentically capture the era. Everything represented would be filtered through my own imagination, preconceived notions, and aesthetic sensibilities. But the late sixties spoke to me particularly because it was such a time of social upheaval, of counterculture and marginalized communities breaking through into mainstream visibility, and of the dissolving (or at least challenging) of many social taboos. I thought that boundary-crossing and rule-breaking was appropriate for a story about vampires, whom I’ve always imagined to be a reflection of buried impulses and strangled desires.

Throughout history, gothic literature has pulled back the curtain on society’s sins and brought the skeletons in our collective closets to life. It’s the narrative space where light and dark, the beautiful and the grotesque, and the spiritual and the carnal are allowed to exist in complementary tension without canceling each other out. Introducing those themes into a slightly more modern setting than the usual crumbling Victorian manor house was a compelling challenge to me. Interweaving a more antiquated perspective from De Lafontaine really served to bring out Carmilla and Laura’s naivety and passion as well.

In the end, I deeply enjoyed the time I spent marinating in late sixties fashion and music, and I hope I created a compelling story offset by a vivid historical setting. I’ll never get tired of the way vampire stories illuminate cultural phobias and capture the existential questions of any given time period, and as always, it was a privilege to explore through the lens of vicious girlhood and unapologetic queerness.