tamaranth | 2026/068: She Made Herself a Monster

2026/068: She Made Herself a Monster — Anna Kovatchevka

"Humans have always needed people like me—as long as we’ve needed monsters.”
... “Do people need monsters?”
“A person can’t fight a plague, but they can fight the beast that cursed them with it. If not vampire or varkolak, it’s the Devil, or it’s witches. My way doesn’t end in witch burnings.” [loc. 1308]

Anka was orphaned on the night she was born: a house fire, a mother giving birth on bare earth lit by flames. The people of Koprivci, a small town in Bulgaria, believe Anka is the reason for the streak of stillbirths and fevers that has claimed nearly all of the children born in the last sixteen years.

Anka is miserable and lonely: her only close friend, Margarita, is to be married soon, to her childhood sweetheart. Her cousin Kiril (with whom she's had a love-hate relationship since they were little) is back from medical school, planning to rid the town of superstition and apply the techniques of modern medicine. And her uncle, known as the Captain, is determined to marry Anka herself as soon as she starts menstruating. Luckily the housekeeper, Yulia, is on her side, and helps her conceal her periods and consult with Minka, the village midwife.

Then a stranger comes to Koprivci: Yana, whose face looks shadowed even in bright light (I think she has vitiligo) and who is a self-proclaimed hunter of vampires and witches. There's certainly a witch in town, according to the townsfolk: Nina, a young widow, who's spent four months in the town jail. But when Yana arrives, occult signs multiply: dead hens, eggs full of blood... It's beginning to look as though there is a vampire in Koprivci: there is certainly a predator.

She Made Herself a Monster builds slowly, exploring ritual and story-telling: it's punctuated by Slavic folk tales, which cast the story's events in different lights. There's a deliciously Gothic ambience, but the rumours and stories of the supernatural are never precisely resolved. The focus is on Anka, and her relationships -- with Kiril, with Margarita, with the Captain, and especially with Yana. Anka is stronger than she seems at first, and she has agency: and in the febrile, superstitious atmosphere of Koprivci, the right words at the right time can spark a conflagration.

NB: The author was born in Bulgaria, but now lives in America: the novel was written in English.