House of Hunger

Young Marion Shaw dreams of escaping from her abusive and addicted brother. When she reads an advertisement for a bloodmaid in the North, she leaves the Southern slums and takes the Night Train to the unknown. Surrounded by debauchery in the House of Hunger, Marion indentures herself to Countess Lisavet, who is loosely based on Elizabeth Bathory, the serial killer who bathed in and drank human blood. Henderson’s Lisavet is more vampiric and sapphic in nature, blithely surrounding herself with young women in order to feed on their bodies and souls. Narrator Jeanette Illidge expertly builds suspense during the creepy gothic portions of the novel, but also adeptly voices the steamy sex scenes, which become more and more nightmarish as the bloodmaids discover the truth about the House of Hunger. Henderson blends race (Marion is darker skinned, while most of the Court is not), poverty, and gender issues with historical fiction and the paranormal, just as in her debut, The Year of the Witching, which won the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award for Best Debut in 2020.