Julia makes her case of why the creature in Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires is NOT really a vampire, and Victoria makes a counterargument that it is actually the MOST vampire. They are both generally infuriated with everyone in this novel except Mrs. Green.

Julia and Victoria read a pandemic book called The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller where the octopus is not the focus of the story, but is at the heart of the book’s major themes of captivity and embodiment. Victoria makes the ill-advised choice to revisit some of her early-pandemic journals.

Julia and Victoria get very hungry talking about the trope-flipping, contemporary vampire novel Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda.

Julia and Victoria discuss Sea Change by Gina Chung and how authors use the octopus to contemplate loneliness and change. They discover that life really is about the friends we made along the way in this first book of The Vampire & the Octopus series.

Julia and Victoria learn what the word “flannel” means in British English and formulate their own theories about what happened to a stranded deep-sea researcher in the devastatingly beautiful novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.

Julia and Victoria conclude that How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu is a very good book–Julia is just sad.