Content Warning: Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire is pretty racist. Like, most Victorian novels don’t meet modern standards of diversity and inclusive language, but this one has some actual racist terms and problematic themes. It’s cool if you’re not up for reading the specifics.

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Okay. Florence Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire is racist in two ways. First, there’s some casual talk of brutality toward slaves near the book’s beginning, and it includes some serious racial slurs. Even though this book was published in 1897, long after slavery was abolished throughout the Americas, it’s set sometime in the past when slavery was still legal in Jamaica (so, 1830s at the latest). Harriet Brandt, the vampire in the book’s title, is the daughter of a Jamaican plantation owner and talks about it like it’s no big deal.

I’m guessing that 1897 British readers weren’t expected to approve of casual plantation talk, and in the book everyone except Harriet thinks this slavery talk is uncultured and inappropriate. No one is actually shocked or angered by it the way we’d get today, though, and it was pretty jarring. For a page or two I seriously wondered what I’d gotten myself into and considered quitting the book, but it’s never mentioned the same way again.

What does come up, and this is the second racist thing (potentially) about the book, is Harriet’s bloodline. Harriet’s vampirism is a big issue, obviously, but so is that fact that her mother was a “half-caste,” part white and part African. Harriet never considers her mixed heritage an issue, but all the cultured, proper English people she meets worry about it a lot. In fact, they worry about her race a lot more than they worry about her vampirism.

Technically, Harriet’s vampirism is separate from her blackness, but she gets both from her mother and they’re pretty tightly bound together in the book. This is actually what makes the book so interesting. I can’t tell whether Marryat was just being old-timey racist or trying to shake things up and make people think about race in a new way. I can see it going either way.

Harriet herself is actually a likeable and fascinating character. She’s not a traditional blood sucking vampire, she’s more of an energy sucker. She’s young and passionate and makes friends easily, and when some of them become sicker and weaker over time she has no idea she’s to blame. When she does realize she’s hurting the people she loves most, she’s devastated. It’s quite touching, and she’s one of the most cute and sympathetic vampires I’ve ever read about. She’s much nicer than many of the book’s “heroes.” It’s possible that Marryat wants the reader to sympathize with this mixed race vampire and rethink some racist assumptions about “tainted blood.” A few characters declare outright that Harriet is a wonderful person and shouldn’t be blamed for her parentage.

On the other hand, it does seem that no matter how nice Harriet is, no matter how good her intentions, being her friend is a dangerous thing. The more Harriet loves you, the quicker you sicken and die. So maybe the story’s still racist, wanting the reader to sympathize with Harriet’s problems while still shunning her from polite society. Maybe the reader is supposed to sympathize with Harriet but blame her parents for daring to have an interracial relationship? It’s hard to say.

The more I think about this book, the more I think Marryat wants me to think about this book. She’s doing this on purpose. Harriet’s mixed race is a big deal, but is it because she’s “tainted” or is it because Britain is hella racist about it? People die around Harriet, but is that because she’s a vampire or because it’s the 1800s and people died from all sorts of things back then? Is she being unfairly blamed because of the rumors about her parents? Is it about race, or the fact that she’s young and beautiful and ignoring what polite society tells her, and that entices some people and threatens others? Marryat purposely leaves these questions open, and that makes Blood of the Vampire stick with me longer than most Victorian thrillers.

By the end, I liked this book a lot. Most of the characters, Harriet and the various people she meets, were interesting and felt real. So many vampire novels are sweeping tales of good and evil (which is great), while this was a bunch of real, flawed people trying to figure out their lives. Even if Harriet is sucking the life out of people, she’s also sometimes unfairly judged, and sometimes taken advantage of because she’s young and new to British society. I want to avoid spoilers, but this story manages to raise heavy about race and gender and relationships, and build up a lot of drama and tragedy while keeping the characters and their actions very human and relatable. If you’re up for a vampire drama with surprisingly heavy themes, I highly recommend this.