This is a book for all the party girls out there, as author Rachel Koller Croft explains in the acknowledgements of her latest book, We Love the Nightlife. Her second book is certainly an ode to clubbing, and joyfully celebrates early 20-somethings dressing up and making out with dudes on the dance floor. (And just dudes: Don’t let the suggestively sapphic cover fool you into thinking anyone in this story is anything other than straight.)
But We Love the Nightlife is also a story about vampires. Two vampires specifically, and the toxic friendship they have. Sucking blood, however, is a secondary concern in their undead lives; what drives them and the plot is the urge to flee from or maintain power, with one trying to wrench herself away from the other who ruthlessly controls her existence.
The two vampiric gal pals have been together for decades and still party hard in the London club scene, so much so that they seldom leave their neighborhood (other vamps have marked their territory around them) and never leave the city (though, admittedly, the logistics of traveling when the sun will kill you is understandably tricky).
When the book starts, the younger one, Amber, has finally realized after forty or so years as a vampire that her relationship with her maker, Nicola, isn’t so great. She realizes this when her master violently murders her former husband, who in 2021 has become a senior citizen since Amber turned vamp back in 1979. Nicola kills him because Amber broke the rule to never contact anyone from your human life when she “accidentally” brushed into her ex one night. He had no idea it was her of course—she still looked twenty-three, not sixty-four—but it was enough for Nicola to literally rip him to shreds, and enough for Amber to finally realize that she wanted out from under Nicola’s thumb.
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We Love the Nightlife
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The drama unfolds from there in a fashion akin to a CW show from the 2010s. Through chapters told primarily from the points of view of Amber and Nicola, we jump back in time, both to Amber’s earlier vampire days and back to 1850 when Nicola turned, to present day as Amber struggles to come up with an elaborate plan to flee from her maker. No matter what time we’re in, however, some things jump out: You could make a fabulous boa out of all the red flags Nicola gives off, and becoming a vampire appears to make you think in staccato sentences.
Take, for example, Nicola thinking about a dude who once scorned her:
We could belong to each other.
Forever.
I was so young.
I still believed in love.
And even more foolishly, I thought he did, too. (p. 227)
Amber’s thoughts take on even more of this rat-a-tat-tat phrasing. Here is one example of many, when she sees Nicola dancing (platonically, of course) with an Instagram influencer late one night:
Something’s different though.
No doubt about it.
Nic doesn’t play like this with her food.
She’s not hunting.
She’s dancing.
Like she did with me when we met. (p. 123)
Drama!
Cue commercial break!
If such stylistics are your jam or don’t bother you much, however, We Love the Nightlife can be a fun, bubble gum read.
This is especially true if you don’t mind that other characters are mere props for Amber and Nicola’s drama, and are accordingly thinly developed on the page. We get enough juicy backstory on these characters—which include a hunky human guy who likes photography, a grumpy vampiric duo, and a fabulous male vampire with a Playboy-like penthouse scene going all night, every night—that could make for interesting novels in their own right. Within the confines of this book, however, they come across as little more than people sprinkled in for vibes, plot points, or cookie-cutter distractions.
Nicola and Amber are relatively more complex. We get an explanation as to why Nicola is such an evil, controlling vampire, and we understand why Amber agreed to be turned by her way back in the disco era. We also see Amber appear to go to darker and darker places in her quest to free herself from Nicola. Or does she? Close to the end we learn that Amber has her own… violent tendencies, let’s say, which makes subsequent betrayals and bloody situations lose what weight they had when viewed through Amber’s eyes.
But then there are the dance numbers! The cool party scenes! Vampires full of glamour in more ways than one! There are also a couple of twists and turns that may surprise you—or not, though either way they’re fun. And while the end is slapdash, with major characters and plot points getting unexpectedly and awkwardly discarded, We Love the Nightlife delivers on its promise to be a glitzy book about party girls who just happen to also be vampires. And if you read the ending more closely, you may also notice that the cycle of toxic vampiric relationships looks likely to repeat itself. But that won’t stop them from dancing, darling. Because there’s nothing two vampiric gal pals love more than staying out until dawn, drinking blood, and having fun. And if that sounds like a good time for you, We Love the Nightlife might tickle your fancy.
So try it.
Or don’t.
Do what moves you or your TBR list.
Either way, you’re fabulous.
We Love the Nightlife is published by Berkley.
