2025
In The Midnight Shift, Detective Su-Yeon is investigating a series of apparent suicides at Cheolma Rehabilitation Hospital, where elderly patients keep jumping from the sixth floor with handwritten suicide notes but mysteriously drained of blood. When she encounters Violette (a Korean adoptee raised in France who now works as a mysterious vampire hunter) Su-Yeon gets an answer she wasn’t expecting: a vampire is targeting the hospital’s loneliest, most isolated patients, the ones nobody will miss. The novel alternates between Su-Yeon’s present-day investigation, Violette’s backstory in 1980s France (particularly her intense, Carmilla-esque relationship with a vampire named Lily), and the perspective of Nanju, a nurse at the hospital with her own complicated connection to the supernatural events. Cheon builds a marvelously moody atmosphere around the idea that vampires hunt “lonely blood,” that is, people so isolated that they’ve forgotten how to cry, whose abandonment has altered the very chemistry coursing through their veins.
The French flashback sections were fantastic, capturing Violette as a lonely adoptee drawn to Lily in ways that feel both dangerous and beautiful and vital. That gothic, sapphic tension could have sustained an entire novel on its own. The premise about vampires targeting society’s most abandoned people (the elderly patients warehoused in facilities where no one visits) is compelling social commentary wrapped in supernatural trappings, though this leans more melancholy and atmospheric than actually frightening.
But I found myself increasingly confused by things that were referenced but never actually explained or shown. Vampire lore is mentioned constantly (there’s some code between vampires and hunters, as well as specific rules about when Violette can kill them), but I never quite understood how any of it actually worked. How does Violette kill vampires? What exactly are the rules she keeps referencing? Who does she work for and why? Characters kept talking about things like they made sense, but the actual mechanics and logic stayed frustratingly vague. The characters themselves never quite came alive for me either: Su-Yeon drifts through her investigation in this oddly detached way, Nanju hints at interesting backstory but gets so little page time I couldn’t really get invested in her troubles, and even Violette (despite all her flashback chapters) I never fully understood what drove her or how she’d ended up in this life.
The ending left me cold, partly because I was genuinely confused about what had actually happened and why. Things wrapped up quickly with what felt like important revelations, but I couldn’t quite follow the logic or see how the pieces connected. Maybe I missed something, or maybe crucial information just wasn’t on the page; either way, I finished feeling like I’d only gotten half the story. After all that atmospheric buildup, I wanted clarity and emotional payoff, but instead got rushed explanations that raised more questions than they answered. The ambition is clear: blending crime procedural with Gothic horror and exploring queer longing and cultural displacement, but the execution leaves too much unexplained. I kept reading because the mood and premise were enjoyably intriguing, but by the end, I felt like I’d watched a movie with several key scenes missing.
Bonus! Three new cryptid-inspired scents from Poesie (against an eerie Burchfield backdrop)…
Nessie: Tea steeped with blossoms and honey, a thick floral sweetness of highland flowers’ pollen suspended in viscous light. A kind of gold that pools slow, catches afternoon sun slanting through old glass, turns a chipped ceramic mug into a chalice. Wool blankets hung near yesterday’s fires, smoke absorbed into the weave, the ghost of peat clinging to fabric. Rain-grey mornings of soft, tannic ritual matters, steam as prayer, rising toward low clouds.
Mothman: Spiced warmth with its aggressive, bitter edges sanded down, autumn’s recognizable onslaught muzzled by dried leaves’ somber poetry, and tobacco’s civilizing influence. Red musk behaving itself for once, button-popped bodice replaced by a cashmere turtleneck, nutmeg simmering quietly, minding its own business instead of all up in yours. Unruly spices acting right, like their Gran is watching from heaven, turning potential chaos into orderly aromatic gorgeousness. Tea brewed strong enough to stain porcelain, threading through like the dirty bass line in a song you can’t stop humming, even though maybe it’s quite naughty, and who knows, maybe Gran IS listening.
Jersey Devil: Pine resin, cool and sharp, needles sun-baked but chilly, their green gone eerily concentrated and alien. Coastal salt drifts through forest density, ocean air wandering inland, turning shadows crystalline, evergreen ghosting translucent at the edges. Arboreal incense, blood-dark and frost-blessed, threading through branches that claw and clutch. Tea as shadow, as sanctuary, as a centering, grounding the strange marriage of forest meeting shoreline, land suspended between what roots deep and what erodes away, between darkness that grows and salt that preserves.
Looking for more 31 Days of Horror? Day Three 2024 | Day Three 2023 | Day Three 2022 | Or check my 31 Days of Horror category for more!
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