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Vampire Missionaries
A haunting blend of Gothic horror, religious satire, and supernatural thriller, this is a bold, subversive story that pits faith against fangs in a battle for redemption. Two young Mormon missionaries, Gabriel and Luke, wake up in their apartment, dazed, blood-soaked— and sprouting fangs. Loyal to their devotion they attempt to carry on their mission, but they quickly learn their newfound thirst isn't just metaphorical. Bound by blood to an ancient, manipulative vampire called Bishop, the boys are thrust into a spiritual crisis that threatens their faith, their morality, and the souls they vowed to save. Each failed attempt to resist their monstrous urges pulls them deeper into a web of violence, seduction, and, at times, humorous, damnation. With Bishop's influence spreading across the small Oregon town like a plague, Gabriel and Luke must confront the seductive power of their transformation and make a harrowing serve their new master and become harbingers of death or defy him— and risk eternal suffering to reclaim their morality.
300 pages, Paperback
Published April 14, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I was so disappointed in this book. The idea had possibility, but the execution didn't work. The idea that someone who was straight before would automatically become pansexual simply because they are a vampire? I guess every single person has their own take on vampirism, but I thought this was going to be more about the struggle of their faith, not just swearing and sex.
Thanks so much to NetGalley for the free Kindle book. My review is voluntarily given, and my opinions are my own.
Thanks so much to NetGalley for the free Kindle book. My review is voluntarily given, and my opinions are my own.
December 29, 2025
netgalley arc
really neat concept. a pair of mission partners get turned into vampires, and the story is about how they grapple between what their life is turning into now that they are vampires and how/if they can continue what lives they left behind in terms of faith and values.
i think the author did a good job illustrating the anxieties of the missionaries dueling with their religion and what was happening to them as new vampires. i also enjoyed how the author brought in the genealogy aspect of the mormon church.
the book had heavy pronoun usage of “he” “they” “it” etc, and because of that, there were many times i truly had no idea what was happening or what was being described. that made it confusing and unappealing.
there was def a twist i didn’t see coming, which i always enjoy.
the end though was also confusing, the battle scene was hard for me to follow and the point of view switches made it difficult to visualize in my head.
overall, i think it was a really neat story premise (that’s what kept me reading and why i didn’t dnf)
thank you to dead sky publishing for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. vampire missionaries will be published on April 14, 2026
really neat concept. a pair of mission partners get turned into vampires, and the story is about how they grapple between what their life is turning into now that they are vampires and how/if they can continue what lives they left behind in terms of faith and values.
i think the author did a good job illustrating the anxieties of the missionaries dueling with their religion and what was happening to them as new vampires. i also enjoyed how the author brought in the genealogy aspect of the mormon church.
the book had heavy pronoun usage of “he” “they” “it” etc, and because of that, there were many times i truly had no idea what was happening or what was being described. that made it confusing and unappealing.
there was def a twist i didn’t see coming, which i always enjoy.
the end though was also confusing, the battle scene was hard for me to follow and the point of view switches made it difficult to visualize in my head.
overall, i think it was a really neat story premise (that’s what kept me reading and why i didn’t dnf)
thank you to dead sky publishing for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. vampire missionaries will be published on April 14, 2026
April 18, 2026
This book isn’t technically bad. It’s an okay read if you’re looking for something casual and full of nonsense. If you don’t mind a book that’s the equivalent of eating empty calories, then have at it. I’m not going to dissuade you. Honestly, sometimes with two-star reads I find myself regretting having read the book but I don’t feel that way about this one. It just isn’t a book I’d read again and it has far too many things wrong with it for me to give it any higher of a rating.
This is another book that suffers from the curse of not having enough story to justify the page count. By all rights, this book should have been a novella. Instead, author Kathleen Rhodes felt the need to shoehorn two “romantic” subplots in that the book didn’t need and in the end took a lot away from the main themes and messages of the story.
Vampire Missionaries starts off interesting and engaging enough, but any cohesive narrative falls apart pretty quickly once Rhodes decides to stray from what could’ve been a natural narrative arc to the story in favor of something farther-reaching and weaker in personal stakes for the main characters. Once that happens the overall strength of the messaging completely collapses and the story fast becomes something you have to fight to care about. Even the body horror and (always fun) making fun of Mormons can’t help the story regain momentum at that point.
I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
This is another book that suffers from the curse of not having enough story to justify the page count. By all rights, this book should have been a novella. Instead, author Kathleen Rhodes felt the need to shoehorn two “romantic” subplots in that the book didn’t need and in the end took a lot away from the main themes and messages of the story.
Vampire Missionaries starts off interesting and engaging enough, but any cohesive narrative falls apart pretty quickly once Rhodes decides to stray from what could’ve been a natural narrative arc to the story in favor of something farther-reaching and weaker in personal stakes for the main characters. Once that happens the overall strength of the messaging completely collapses and the story fast becomes something you have to fight to care about. Even the body horror and (always fun) making fun of Mormons can’t help the story regain momentum at that point.
I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.
April 16, 2026
Choose the Right Vein
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Mormon missionaries turned vampire missionaries, in Portland, in January, with their sacred garments burning off their bodies. The premise alone should get Rhodes on a panel. What keeps them there is the psychological precision underneath the horror, the genuine tenderness underneath the comedy. An uneven but confident second novel from a writer worth watching.
Here is a premise with the velocity of a vampire who just smelled blood across a parking lot: two Mormon missionaries in Portland, Oregon wake up with fangs, their sacred garments burning their skin, prayer sending electric shocks through their bodies like a cosmic bug-zapper aimed at the soul. Vampire Missionaries announces itself with the confidence of someone who knows they have the good idea. Kathleen Rhodes does have the good idea. The book has other things going on too, some of them less good, but the idea is enough to carry you through a fair amount of what follows, and occasionally far enough that you forget the stumbles entirely.
Gabe and Luke are nineteen-year-old elders in the Hawthorn Branch of the LDS church, shipped to Portland for two years of faith delivery. Gabe is from Idaho, earnest to the point of pain, carrying his dead father and his drunk mother and eighteen years of devotion like a backpack that has rubbed all the skin off his shoulders. Luke is from Southern California, gay in a family that treated the discovery as a medical emergency, and here on a mission that is less about faith than about surviving until he can disappear somewhere his father will never find him. They wake up in their apartment without remembering the night before, no reflection in the mirror, two puncture wounds each on their necks, and the slow horrible dawning of what has been done to them. Their sacred garments, once soft linen pressed against their skin as covenant, now light them up like they are standing on a live rail. Gabe tries to pray and gets zapped. He tries a workaround. He says “Gaud.” He prays “lead me, darkness.” He is a teenage vampire in his church clothes trying to find a loophole in God’s firewall, and I wanted to stay in that scene for a hundred more pages.
The premise alone earns its existence. Vampirism as predatory religion. Missionaries turned into missionaries for a different master. The horror is already structural before anyone spills a drop of blood: these two kids have been turned by a creature who wants to weaponize the very infrastructure of their faith, their trained willingness to knock on strangers’ doors and ask to be let in. There is something genuinely unsettling about that, something that works past the jokes, and Rhodes knows it.
The jokes land, by the way. More often than you’d expect and better than they should. The boob-shaped door knocker at the maker’s house. The snake named Percy. Gabe trying to explain to Luke why stepping on stair thirteen in a sequence is nonnegotiable. A mother in waders and overalls who would rather hose down four teenagers than discuss what her son has done to them. Rhodes has a gift for the exact absurd detail that arrives without setup and doesn’t bother waiting to see if you caught it. The humor holds hands with real discomfort in a way that is harder to pull off than it looks.
What Rhodes has clearly lived in, and what comes through with authority, is the psychological interior of people in crisis. Twenty years working mental health, jails, emergency rooms, addiction services, the full catastrophe of what happens when human beings can’t hold themselves together. That expertise coats Gabe and Luke, not as case studies but as texture. Gabe’s guilt about his father’s death and what led to it. Luke’s hypervigilance, the practiced smallness of someone who learned that taking up space invites punishment. The way a young man who has been beaten for being who he is can still hear that voice in his head louder than any vampire’s whisper. These are not horror-novel gestures at trauma. They are specific, and they cost something.
Rhodes is also a non-practicing Mormon, and the satire has the specificity that only insider knowledge produces. The garments. The CTR ring. The anointing oil. Sacrament Wonder Bread. The sacred covenants that turn lethal against the body making them. This is not mockery. It is something richer than mockery, something closer to grief, because the rituals Rhodes is pulling apart are ones they once watched believed in. You can feel that in Gabe’s anguish, in his attempts to keep praying after the prayers have been weaponized against him. Faith does not become a joke here. It becomes a wound.
The prose, however, is inconsistent in a way that keeps pulling you out of the experience. Sentences that earn their music are followed by sentences doing basic logistics. There are point-of-view slips that snag like a nail catching fabric. Passages where the style goes flat and functional at exactly the moment when the scene needs the language working. Rhodes can write. There are stretches here that move, that have rhythm and specificity and real charge. The problem is those stretches are not continuous. The book is written in two registers and switches between them without ceremony.
The pacing carries the same problem. The middle section, which should be doing two things at once (deepening the boys’ bond, building the threat of Bishop) does both more slowly than necessary. A subplot that is conceptually interesting runs about twenty pages longer than necessary. The climactic showdown is exciting in patches and overcrowded in others, four things happening simultaneously in a space where the staging keeps slipping out of legibility. The ending does not fully honor what the book has just done to you. There’s an emotional reckoning and then something too breezy, something that feels like a safer version of the honest conclusion. Not catastrophic. Just slightly wrong, the way a chord resolves to the wrong note when you know what the right one is.
There is a better version of this book not far from this one. The bones are good. The characters are good. The idea is fucking excellent. What it needed was a harder editing pass and someone willing to cut twenty pages from the middle without apology.
You should still read it. The premise alone is worth the price of admission. Luke Parley, the gay teenager from Southern California who came to Portland to hide from his father and ended up undead, with a chain in his fist and something to prove to a God he’s not sure is listening anymore, is someone I will think about for a while. Gabe Fitzpatrick, pressing his face through the bars of a vampire cage and trying to untie someone’s wrists while his arms are burning off, is one of the most earnest characters I’ve read this year so far. Earnest is not an insult. Earnest is the hardest thing to make land in horror and it mostly lands here.
Kathleen Rhodes grew up in Gresham, Oregon, below the poverty line. They came to fiction through two decades of mental health work, moving from therapist to registered nurse to Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, seeing patients in jails, emergency rooms, and addiction clinics. Their debut, The Dark Road (2024), was a psychological thriller about two strangers sharing a coma-world built from mutual trauma. Vampire Missionaries is their second novel, and the jump in ambition is visible. So is the jump in confidence. Rhodes already knows how to write characters whose interior lives feel clinically observed and completely human. What they are still building is a prose style that matches that knowledge for consistency. When the two things align here, they align well. There is enough of that happening in Vampire Missionaries that I want to know what comes next.
The CTR ring burning on Gabe’s finger in the first chapter is the image the whole book is reaching for. Choose the Right. The right thing keeps changing and the ring keeps burning. That’s horror. That’s also just being nineteen.
BWAF Score: 6/10
TL;DR: Mormon missionaries turned vampire missionaries, in Portland, in January, with their sacred garments burning off their bodies. The premise alone should get Rhodes on a panel. What keeps them there is the psychological precision underneath the horror, the genuine tenderness underneath the comedy. An uneven but confident second novel from a writer worth watching.
Here is a premise with the velocity of a vampire who just smelled blood across a parking lot: two Mormon missionaries in Portland, Oregon wake up with fangs, their sacred garments burning their skin, prayer sending electric shocks through their bodies like a cosmic bug-zapper aimed at the soul. Vampire Missionaries announces itself with the confidence of someone who knows they have the good idea. Kathleen Rhodes does have the good idea. The book has other things going on too, some of them less good, but the idea is enough to carry you through a fair amount of what follows, and occasionally far enough that you forget the stumbles entirely.
Gabe and Luke are nineteen-year-old elders in the Hawthorn Branch of the LDS church, shipped to Portland for two years of faith delivery. Gabe is from Idaho, earnest to the point of pain, carrying his dead father and his drunk mother and eighteen years of devotion like a backpack that has rubbed all the skin off his shoulders. Luke is from Southern California, gay in a family that treated the discovery as a medical emergency, and here on a mission that is less about faith than about surviving until he can disappear somewhere his father will never find him. They wake up in their apartment without remembering the night before, no reflection in the mirror, two puncture wounds each on their necks, and the slow horrible dawning of what has been done to them. Their sacred garments, once soft linen pressed against their skin as covenant, now light them up like they are standing on a live rail. Gabe tries to pray and gets zapped. He tries a workaround. He says “Gaud.” He prays “lead me, darkness.” He is a teenage vampire in his church clothes trying to find a loophole in God’s firewall, and I wanted to stay in that scene for a hundred more pages.
The premise alone earns its existence. Vampirism as predatory religion. Missionaries turned into missionaries for a different master. The horror is already structural before anyone spills a drop of blood: these two kids have been turned by a creature who wants to weaponize the very infrastructure of their faith, their trained willingness to knock on strangers’ doors and ask to be let in. There is something genuinely unsettling about that, something that works past the jokes, and Rhodes knows it.
The jokes land, by the way. More often than you’d expect and better than they should. The boob-shaped door knocker at the maker’s house. The snake named Percy. Gabe trying to explain to Luke why stepping on stair thirteen in a sequence is nonnegotiable. A mother in waders and overalls who would rather hose down four teenagers than discuss what her son has done to them. Rhodes has a gift for the exact absurd detail that arrives without setup and doesn’t bother waiting to see if you caught it. The humor holds hands with real discomfort in a way that is harder to pull off than it looks.
What Rhodes has clearly lived in, and what comes through with authority, is the psychological interior of people in crisis. Twenty years working mental health, jails, emergency rooms, addiction services, the full catastrophe of what happens when human beings can’t hold themselves together. That expertise coats Gabe and Luke, not as case studies but as texture. Gabe’s guilt about his father’s death and what led to it. Luke’s hypervigilance, the practiced smallness of someone who learned that taking up space invites punishment. The way a young man who has been beaten for being who he is can still hear that voice in his head louder than any vampire’s whisper. These are not horror-novel gestures at trauma. They are specific, and they cost something.
Rhodes is also a non-practicing Mormon, and the satire has the specificity that only insider knowledge produces. The garments. The CTR ring. The anointing oil. Sacrament Wonder Bread. The sacred covenants that turn lethal against the body making them. This is not mockery. It is something richer than mockery, something closer to grief, because the rituals Rhodes is pulling apart are ones they once watched believed in. You can feel that in Gabe’s anguish, in his attempts to keep praying after the prayers have been weaponized against him. Faith does not become a joke here. It becomes a wound.
The prose, however, is inconsistent in a way that keeps pulling you out of the experience. Sentences that earn their music are followed by sentences doing basic logistics. There are point-of-view slips that snag like a nail catching fabric. Passages where the style goes flat and functional at exactly the moment when the scene needs the language working. Rhodes can write. There are stretches here that move, that have rhythm and specificity and real charge. The problem is those stretches are not continuous. The book is written in two registers and switches between them without ceremony.
The pacing carries the same problem. The middle section, which should be doing two things at once (deepening the boys’ bond, building the threat of Bishop) does both more slowly than necessary. A subplot that is conceptually interesting runs about twenty pages longer than necessary. The climactic showdown is exciting in patches and overcrowded in others, four things happening simultaneously in a space where the staging keeps slipping out of legibility. The ending does not fully honor what the book has just done to you. There’s an emotional reckoning and then something too breezy, something that feels like a safer version of the honest conclusion. Not catastrophic. Just slightly wrong, the way a chord resolves to the wrong note when you know what the right one is.
There is a better version of this book not far from this one. The bones are good. The characters are good. The idea is fucking excellent. What it needed was a harder editing pass and someone willing to cut twenty pages from the middle without apology.
You should still read it. The premise alone is worth the price of admission. Luke Parley, the gay teenager from Southern California who came to Portland to hide from his father and ended up undead, with a chain in his fist and something to prove to a God he’s not sure is listening anymore, is someone I will think about for a while. Gabe Fitzpatrick, pressing his face through the bars of a vampire cage and trying to untie someone’s wrists while his arms are burning off, is one of the most earnest characters I’ve read this year so far. Earnest is not an insult. Earnest is the hardest thing to make land in horror and it mostly lands here.
Kathleen Rhodes grew up in Gresham, Oregon, below the poverty line. They came to fiction through two decades of mental health work, moving from therapist to registered nurse to Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, seeing patients in jails, emergency rooms, and addiction clinics. Their debut, The Dark Road (2024), was a psychological thriller about two strangers sharing a coma-world built from mutual trauma. Vampire Missionaries is their second novel, and the jump in ambition is visible. So is the jump in confidence. Rhodes already knows how to write characters whose interior lives feel clinically observed and completely human. What they are still building is a prose style that matches that knowledge for consistency. When the two things align here, they align well. There is enough of that happening in Vampire Missionaries that I want to know what comes next.
The CTR ring burning on Gabe’s finger in the first chapter is the image the whole book is reaching for. Choose the Right. The right thing keeps changing and the ring keeps burning. That’s horror. That’s also just being nineteen.
April 8, 2026
I received a free copy of this through a Goodreads giveaway, thank you to Dead Sky Publishing for providing the chance to read it; the following is my honest review.
I was very excited for this book when I signed up for the giveaway and then was shocked to see the low score. Having read it, I can understand some of the criticisms, but I always feel Goodreads users are too harsh in their scores. It’s surprising that my 3 stars rating is the highest at the moment.
Let’s start with the positive parts of this book: I like modern paranormal media that acknowledges other works in the genre. Turned into a vampire? Figure out if you’re a Twilight vampire, Lost Boys vampire, or something else. As someone who was more conservative and religious when I was younger, the missionary characters felt very real to me. The doubts mixed with desire to do things right really resonated. A lot of the details are very specific to Mormonism, but enough are common across many religious groups for this to resonate with a variety of people. Having said that, this book is obviously about processing the author’s religious trauma. And it is right out there front and center for most of the book. Oh, also, the cover art is amazing. Fantastic job, this is why we pay real artists!
Now having said all that, I agree with comments in other reviews that were some very confusing parts—the jumps between POVs weren’t always clear and especially during the big fight it was difficult to follow who was where and how exactly they were engaged in the fight. The story dragged quite a bit, so it wasn’t until halfway through that I felt engaged, and then things slowed down again for a while before the final encounters. And finally, after an entire story arc of Luke finally embracing his sexuality and fighting through years of trauma and abuse… the author fell into Bury Your Gays. I think that is actually my largest complaint. There is a set up for a sequel at the end, but I’m not as interested in it without Luke’s POV and seeing the difference between how he and Gabe continue to adjust to their situation.
I told my friends that I would give this book a C-. It completed all the objectives of the assignment but is far from stellar. There’s a lot of potential in the premise and the writing; I’d still consider reading more by the author, just not a continuation of this particular story because it’s probably best to leave it be and start over with a stronger foundation.
I was very excited for this book when I signed up for the giveaway and then was shocked to see the low score. Having read it, I can understand some of the criticisms, but I always feel Goodreads users are too harsh in their scores. It’s surprising that my 3 stars rating is the highest at the moment.
Let’s start with the positive parts of this book: I like modern paranormal media that acknowledges other works in the genre. Turned into a vampire? Figure out if you’re a Twilight vampire, Lost Boys vampire, or something else. As someone who was more conservative and religious when I was younger, the missionary characters felt very real to me. The doubts mixed with desire to do things right really resonated. A lot of the details are very specific to Mormonism, but enough are common across many religious groups for this to resonate with a variety of people. Having said that, this book is obviously about processing the author’s religious trauma. And it is right out there front and center for most of the book. Oh, also, the cover art is amazing. Fantastic job, this is why we pay real artists!
Now having said all that, I agree with comments in other reviews that were some very confusing parts—the jumps between POVs weren’t always clear and especially during the big fight it was difficult to follow who was where and how exactly they were engaged in the fight. The story dragged quite a bit, so it wasn’t until halfway through that I felt engaged, and then things slowed down again for a while before the final encounters. And finally, after an entire story arc of Luke finally embracing his sexuality and fighting through years of trauma and abuse… the author fell into Bury Your Gays. I think that is actually my largest complaint. There is a set up for a sequel at the end, but I’m not as interested in it without Luke’s POV and seeing the difference between how he and Gabe continue to adjust to their situation.
I told my friends that I would give this book a C-. It completed all the objectives of the assignment but is far from stellar. There’s a lot of potential in the premise and the writing; I’d still consider reading more by the author, just not a continuation of this particular story because it’s probably best to leave it be and start over with a stronger foundation.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
I can't lie, I expected something sillier from the title, but still decently enjoyable. There were more typos than I'd expect from something coming out in 3 days, which did take me out of the story more than I would like to admit. Like I've seen other reviewers say, I expected more focus on the faith vs. vampirism element rather than "oh no another boner" and swear words left and right, but again, not unenjoyable. I've also seen folks say they struggled with POV changes and unclear pronoun usage, but I didn't find that to be a problem. It's not my new favorite vampire novel- I'm not sure anything will unseat 'Salem's Lot- but I can't say I regret the time I spent on it.
Thank you to Dead Sky Publishing and Edelweiss for the digital ARC! My review is unbiased (clearly) and all opinions stated are my own.
Thank you to Dead Sky Publishing and Edelweiss for the digital ARC! My review is unbiased (clearly) and all opinions stated are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I just really couldn't get into this one, despite the great premise.
The prose didn't appeal to me, the humor didn't really hit, and it just wasn't for me at all. Sometimes even simple scenes were a bit hard to follow due to how they were written, especially in regard to pronoun use. I made it about 40% of the way through before putting it down. One of the very few books I've DNF'd, unfortunately.
Thank you to NetGalley and Dead Sky Publishing for the review copy! (Sorry.)
The prose didn't appeal to me, the humor didn't really hit, and it just wasn't for me at all. Sometimes even simple scenes were a bit hard to follow due to how they were written, especially in regard to pronoun use. I made it about 40% of the way through before putting it down. One of the very few books I've DNF'd, unfortunately.
Thank you to NetGalley and Dead Sky Publishing for the review copy! (Sorry.)
Did Not Finish
March 31, 2026I got to page 66 it wasn’t a good book at all. I can see why it only has 1.67 stars. It was odd in the beginning of the book they were talking about the young boys getting erections that turned me off right away but I gave it more time. I couldn’t finish it even though I did win it as a giveaway! Sorry.
April 18, 2026
Interesting idea, but parts of it fell flat. The writing was sporadically fantastic but sometimes really dry. 3 stars. tysm for the E-ARC.
Read
February 17, 2026arc. I definitely got confused at some points but overall this was a fun read. I thought it was two guys who turned in into vampires and how they deal with it, which it was, but oh good lord there was significantly more. There were plenty of times where I was giggling over them being stupid (in the best way).
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews