Charis welcomes Gwendolyn Kiste in conversation with Addie Tsai for a celebration of their respective novels, Reluctant Immortals and Unwieldy Creatures, each of which takes cues from classic works of horror literature and remixes them to make new feminist meanings. Reluctant Immortals (Kiste) is a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature—from Lucy Westnera, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967. Unwieldy Creatures (Tsai) is a biracial, queer, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein.
