A review by awanderingweasel
An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson

dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

An Education in Malice became my most anticipated book of the year as soon as S.T. Gibson, whose work I have loved since reading A Dowry of Blood, announced she was working on a Carmilla retelling. I love consuming media about vampires. My academic research revolves around vampires. In other words, I’m somewhat of a vampire connoisseur. In extending some grace to this book and its author, I’ll partially blame the following thoughts on my high expectations and my familiarity with the genre and its tropes. 

 

This book tries to do a lot of things at once. It traverses the horror, gothic, fantasy, romance, and dark academia genres without grounding itself in any of them. What immediately struck me about its lack of dark academiadness was the fact that, despite my close reading (I was taking notes for an academic project), by the time I reached 60% of the book I had forgotten they were enrolled in a college and had classes to attend. I just thought they were taking a poetry seminar because the narrative solely focused on De Lafontaine’s course. Towards the end of the book, other courses – Astronomy and Church History – are mentioned because Laura and Carmilla have finals. Tell me more about Saint Perpetua’s course catalogue, please!! I was a bit annoyed by the lack of worldbuilding, especially because the setting isn’t even contemporary, so I think we could have spent more time looking at the time period and the academic environment. And to be quite frank, there wasn’t much going on with the plot or the characters that we couldn’t focus on worldbuilding every so often. 

 

With that premise out of the way, I have to say that although I found the reading experience most frustrating at times, there are some elements I appreciated. The religious references and overtones, which pullulate S.T. Gibson’s books, were very nice. I like when an author has a peculiarity about them, a predilection for some thing that inevitably bleeds into everything they create. Religious imagery is it for S.T. Gibson, and I really like that. I also enjoyed the absence of men in the narrative. It is both true of real life and vampire novels that men ruin everything, and you can quote me on this. Human men kill Carmilla in the original story, but this book forsakes that ending in order to focus on the blossoming of a (complicated) sapphic relationship.