I love a good novella, especially in horror form. There’s just something about taking a terrible, horrific tale and managing to condense it down to something around 100 pages while still managing to tell a whole story and get your point across, as an author, that impresses me so much. It’s much the same thing with short stories, but since “Bloodsucker City” is a novella (clocking in at 138 pages in paperback format), I’ll save my breath gushing about short stories in the horror genre and get to the novella this story has the most in common with, style and plot-wise, but is also the complete opposite of: “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”.
And I mean it: this could be a female-centric version of “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” if the timeline were changed to match the third wave of female incarceration in the United States during the 1930s and Stephen King wrote it as a horror novella. All the way from the unjust imprisonment of an innocent woman for life in a forbidding, stark, and miserable women’s prison perched atop a jagged mountain in the middle of nowhere to an unconventional escape… there are other similarities, but I don’t want to spoil anything.
The only reason I’ve given up those two details is because I believe the parallels between King’s novella and what Jim Towns’ has written here are completely intentional, and it really works. If you were to do a compare and contrast paper between the two novellas, it would be terrifically interesting, because what both protagonists (Elena in “Bloodsucker City” and Andy in King’s novella) go through is similar and horrific, but with such different definitions of horror. “Bloodsucker City” is the feminist horror dark mirror of “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, and I think that was the whole point: Prison is horrific for everyone, but as with every systemic institution in America, prison is more horrific for women than it is for men.
I really and truly enjoyed every page of this. I encourage you to pick it up.
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![Bloodsucker City by [Jim Towns]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41UjUTmia1L._SY346_.jpg)
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