…delightfully sophisticated and refreshing … playful, beguiling, horrifying and sexy

-Sydney Morning Herald

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In a reading culture where vampire stories have been commodified for an indiscriminate but devouring audience of teens, here finally is a remodeling of the genre for mature intelligent readers who prefer their vamps similarly mature, intelligent and endowed with the finer luxuries of life. Always Hungry is luscious in its attentiveness to the classic European sensibilities of Bette, one of the Originals, who seduces a willing Australian writer visiting Amsterdam to promote the award-winning translation of her book, Monstrous Women. The text takes pleasure, as will its readers, in such ironies, which are grounded in social commentary about monstrosity and the writing industry, fandom and fame, slippery genders and shifting categories of identity. The counter narrative involves a hermaphrodite antagonist campaigning to be taken seriously as a writer and as a social intervention into the binary categories of gender. The politics of LGBTI are queered further by the possibilities of eternity and feeding a hunger on a lunar cycle. Departing from the current trend of passive girls falling victim to hot teenage vampire boys, this work recasts the vamp tradition as relations between women that are sumptuous and satisfying, loyal and long-lasting.

-Alison Bartlett

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I was engaged by this MS and didn’t want to put it down – largely because of its disturbing fascination, but also because of the elegance of the writing. Ms Baranay is known for fiction which pushes boundaries, especially in areas of gender and sexuality. Her fine-grain writing examines the minutiae of female relationships, of female feistiness and vulnerability. Always Hungry advances her exploration of gender contrasts into the domains of monstrous sex and the multiply-sexed. All this is done in a provocatively postmodern style – antiseptic and smart. But also, this MS is a vampire novel for intelligent adults, and herein lies its truly disturbing nature. While the history/mythstory of vampirism is well-researched, and forms part of the discourse of the novel, the vampire-sex scenes are themselves delightfully shocking. The reader keeps wanting the vampire theme to be a metaphor of sorts, an allegory for the nature of relationships, of love, of sex-change, or perhaps of how the publishing industry treats writers, but the taste of real blood seeps in, But also, this MS is a vampire novel for intelligent adults, and herein lies its truly disturbing nature. While the history/mythstory of vampirism is well-researched, and forms part of the discourse of the novel, the vampire-sex scenes are themselves delightfully shocking. The reader keeps wanting the vampire theme to be a metaphor of sorts, an allegory for the nature of relationships, of love, of sex-change, or perhaps of how the publishing industry treats writers, but the taste of real blood seeps in, ineluctably.

-Nigel Krauth

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