Fails to Take Flight: Blood As Bright As The Moon by Andrea Morstabilini

A Blood as Bright as the Moon by Andrea Morstabilini
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Gay MC
PoV: First-person, past-tense; second-person, present-tense; third-person, past-tense
Published on: 2nd September 2025
ISBN: 1803369760
Goodreads

A vampire, desperately torn between worlds, is hunted down by a secret society bent on his destruction, in this elegiac and unsettling queer gothic horror, perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Frankenstein, Germany. Ambrose, a young vampire, lives a life secreted away from the modern world with the rest of his clan, all of them under the spell of the charismatic Regina, who spins stories of salvation for their kind. Their grand plan? To build makeshift wings and fly to the moon where a safe haven awaits for all vampires.

But Ambrose harbours a he is not ready to abandon the earth, and he is in contact with a human who believes he can be saved. As the rest of his kind prepare to flee their home, Ambrose is torn between loyalties.

However something else is on the horizon – the Royal Diurnal Society – a group with sinister plans for vampires, are closing in, and if Ambrose isn't careful, he could find himself right at the centre of a terrifying and mysterious experiment.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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~broken snowglobes as a threat
~the moon’s not an escape
~never trust a cult leader

:be warned of spoilers ahead! see the end for trigger warnings:

I have no idea what the point of that was.

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, but it ended up being a disjointed snoozefest.

It really doesn’t help that the synopsis is wildly misleading: Ambrose isn’t ‘hunted’ in any way you’d expect from hearing that he is – isn’t aware he’s being hunted, so there’s no plotline where he knows he’s in danger, and who he’s in danger from. Which means that functionally, in term of it affecting the story the reader gets, he’s not being hunted. The secret society isn’t ‘bent on his destruction’; it’s being torn apart by its internal politics, only one faction of which wants vampires wiped out. And referring to Ambrose’s family as ‘the rest of his kind’ is just flat-out lying; Regina’s ‘clan’ is made up of FOUR vampires, including her and Ambrose. There is in fact a whole WORLD of other vampires out there, none of whom are involved in this nonsense at all.

I’d like to file a complaint with whoever wrote the synopsis and whoever approved it. Gah.

The first third or so of Blood as Bright is perfectly fine, sometimes rising to good: Ambrose and his bizarre little family live in a ruined castle until the day Regina leads them to the moon, where, she claims, Ludwig 2nd, himself a vampire, rules a beautiful realm that’s a paradise for vampires. It’s a cult, basically, with Regina as obsessed cult leader, telling them parables and holy stories of Ludwig’s vampiric life, with all sorts of rules that must be followed to prove themselves worthy of Ludwig. (Bits of vampire!Ludwig’s life are interspersed throughout the book, jarring and adding nothing at all to the book.) Ambrose feels oddly ambivalent about all of it, but he’s very close to another of the vampires, Agata, and their friendship seems to be the main tether keep Ambrose in place. When he can sneak out from under Regina’s eye, he goes into the nearby town to spy on the doctor Martin, who Ambrose is attracted to – but more importantly, he harbours a hope that Martin might be able to cure vampirism if Ambrose ever reveals himself to him.

The prose is lovely, but there’s a very Literary Fiction (derogatory) feel to it all – introspective in a way that feels pretentious and over-indulgent, kind of rambly, with zero impetus driving the story forward. The story drifts, barely disturbed by the strange broken snowglobes that appear around the vampires’ castle, and the murder of the sacred-to-Ludwig swans. So I was very surprised that near the 33% mark, Regina announced it was time to head to the moon, and everyone started strapping their wings on.

(They do not, alas, have their own biological wings like the figure on the cover. These are mechanical, vaguely steampunk-y wings.)

But! Catastrophe! Ambrose’s wings break. And when he crashes to earth, he is staked by a vampire hunter who comes out NOWHERE, narratively. It’s a painfully random, jerky series of events, but for a second I thought Morstabilini had gone where few authors dare to tread and killed off her main character!

She didn’t, though. Ambrose isn’t dead. Instead he’s paralysed, unable to move or react to stimuli, but still aware of what’s around him and, unfortunately, very able to feel pain.

Part two opens with Ambrose laid out on an operating table. He’s ‘examined’ (read: tortured) and then a bunch of men arrive – the Diurnal Society – and gather around him to debate what to do with him.

I’m not kidding: the whole second part (no longer in first-person, by the way, switching between second-person and formatted-like-a-script third-person) is these mostly awful men, who are all COMPLETE STRANGERS TO US, enumerating on how great they are (and how awful their political rivals within the same society are), how it’s high time they Do Something after only studying vampires from afar for centuries, and what the different factions within the society are. Oh, and how gross vampires are, and Ambrose in particular, since he’s also gay as well as being a vamp.

It is stunningly boring. Everyone is despicable (the one guy who calls the rest of them monsters leaves without trying to get Ambrose free, so yeah, I’m counting him as despicable too), everyone is long-winded and grandiose, most of them are clearly narcissists, and hi, I don’t care about the internal politics of bigots actually??? Or their history??? Never mind their completely ridiculous, zero-evidence-for opinions on vampires??? And you’ve given me NO REASON TO???

The ending of this part would be satisfying if, you know, I had any emotional connection to any of it. As it was I kept turning pages in a haze of outrage, waiting for the moment it would all click together and I’d understand what the fucking point was.

Alas, no point ever manifested.

Part three shifted gears: I went from bored to furious. Because finally, at last, Morstabilini starts giving us the most tantalising glimpses into the wider magical world: it’s revealed that vampires have their own culture (none of which we’ve seen before) and their own dialect/language; there are vampire-adjacent beings who can talk to the dead, and magical spiders who can recreate buildings that have been lost to fire. It’s extremely cool! But these are just glimpses: a sentence or two about each thing, and then it’s gone, never brought up again.

THE FUCK. Why weren’t we seeing all of this from the beginning?! You made me read through vague plotless rambling in the first part, boring and disgusting bigots pontificating in part two, and only at the END prove you had the good stuff all along, but I can’t have it???

Oh, and the moon was a total disappointment: Ambrose doesn’t get there, but we do see it, and it’s just like our moon – ie barren and white and dusty – except the vampires can somehow breathe there. And there are probably monsters. But I was hoping for some fantastical weird realm like the not-Earth planets in Radiance by Catherynne Valente, and nope! That did not happen! Because of course it didn’t.

The first two parts should have been cut, and part three should have been expanded into its own novel. Show me the rest of the vampire world! Why do some vampires set jewels in their teeth? Explain the taboos around speaking to the dead! I want more of the spiders! Plus, you know, the whole travelling quest-of-vengeance thing (even if I’m still mad about how that went down) and the love story that’s so fast it’s practically instantaneous. BUILD IT UP AND MAKE IT A FULL NOVEL. It could have been amazing!

So I’m enormously frustrated. There was so much potential here, but it was let down at every turn – so thoroughly that it almost feels purposeful. The synopsis is a lie, but in complete fairness I don’t know what else the publisher could have written, since there isn’t really anything coherent enough to be a story here. I cannot wrap my head around why the choices that were made were made; I don’t know what Morstabilini was trying to say, or do, but I’m pretty sure the intent wasn’t to entertain (if it was, it failed miserably). The torture and bigotry felt gratuitous at best; you wrote vampires that don’t need to drink blood; every time something cool was held out to us, it was snatched away. The whole book’s wishy-washy and vague, jumping from Thing to Thing at random, pulling 180s and flip-flopping all over the place. The tone is pretentious (see: the whole narrative thread of the freaking tarot cards)(and I say that as a tarot reader!) and there’s no meat to it.

Just. Wow. Absolutely not.

Don’t waste your time.

Trigger Warnings: [View post to see spoiler]

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