Reluctant Immortals

A new novel who features Bertha Mason:

Reluctant Immortals

by Gwendolyn Kiste

Gallery/Saga Press (August 23, 2022)

ISBN13: 9781982172350

For fans of Mexican Gothic, from three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes 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.

Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel that looks at two men of classic literature, Dracula and Mr. Rochester, and the two women who survived them, Bertha and Lucy, who are now undead immortals residing in Los Angeles in 1967 when Dracula and Rochester make a shocking return in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

Combining elements of historical and gothic fiction with a modern perspective, in a tale of love and betrayal and coercion, Reluctant Immortals is the lyrical and harrowing journey of two women from classic literature as they bravely claim their own destiny in a man’s world.

Litreactor interviews the author:

What has it been like for you in general seeing this book come to life? Was the idea one you’d been working on for a long time, or was it a more recent plot seed that grew into the story it is now?

I feel like Reluctant Immortals is a story that has been percolating inside me for years, ever since I was a kid and first saw both Dracula and Jane Eyre. I loved the film versions so much, but I was so sad that Lucy from Dracula and Bertha from Jane Eyre met such terrible and tragic ends. I wanted something better for them. That was without a doubt the first seed for this novel. (...)

How did you prepare to get into the mindsets of Lucy Westenra, Bertha Mason, and the other characters? Did you reread the classics, watch the films, or anything like that? Do you have any favorite versions of the films or any print editions of Dracula or Jane Eyre that are special to you?

I reread both the books, with a specific focus on the sections featuring Lucy in Dracula and Bertha in Jane Eyre. The book was written entirely during the pandemic, which meant I had plenty of time at home, so my husband and I made a point to watch as many Dracula adaptations as we could, as well as a few of the versions of Jane Eyre. My favorite versions of Dracula are Hammer’s 1958 Horror of Dracula as well as Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu. Both of those adaptations, while not entirely faithful to the source material, capture the beauty and strangeness of the original story. As for Jane Eyre, I’m a big fan of the Orson Welles/Joan Fontaine version because it’s the first one I ever watched with my dad way back when I was a kid. There’s something so inherently haunting and gothic about that version, and it still delights me to watch it even after all these years.

EDIT: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviews the novel:

If you’re going to completely reimagine the stories of two famous literary characters, you might as well do it with style.
That’s what fans of “Dracula” and “Jane Eyre” can expect with “Reluctant Immortals,” the new novel from Waynesburg resident Gwendolyn Kiste. It features the Bram Stoker Award-winning author taking two women from those works of classic literature — Lucy Westenra of “Dracula” and Bertha Mason of “Jane Eyre” — and elevating them from largely overlooked victims to the heroes of their own narratives. (...)
It will be interesting to see how fans of “Jane Eyre” react to Kiste’s depiction of the titular Jane, who is a much more enigmatic figure than Bee in this story. The same could be said of the “Dracula” characters who show up in “Reluctant Immortals,” particularly poor, eternally damned Mina Harker and Dracula’s loyal henchman, Renfield. (Joshua Axelrod)