Walk Among Us by Cassandra Khaw; Genevieve Gornichec; Caitlin Starling
Publication Date: May 4, 2021
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Until this book, my experience with the role-playing game Vampire: the Masquerade began and ended with the short-lived 1990s-era TV show Kindred: the Embraced, which I still adore with the fire of ten thousand suns but which I knew all along probably had little to do with the source material. So I actually took a look at the online wiki for the game before reading this book, and I'm glad I did, because all three stories within basically assume you're already familiar with all the relevant Vampire: the Masquerade background lore. (Though to be fair, none of the stories is intensely lore-intensive, in the sense that you'll be completely lost without any preexisting background knowledge.)
There are three stories here: the first follows a young human whose life is upended when she begins to encounter the Kindred; the second follows a newly-embraced Kindred as he struggles to navigate his new existence; and the third follows a longtime Kindred as she finds herself caught in certain inescapable webs of her existence. Of the three I thought the first was the strongest, both because the narrator's ignorance of the Kindred made the store more easily followable to a reader who'd never played the game before, and because there was a twist at the end that I genuinely didn't see coming. (Something I always appreciate!)
Overall, if you're a fan of the RPG, or if you're just in the mood for some decent vampire fiction, this is a decent afternoon read.
