Victoria teaches Julia all about the origins, tropes, and metaphors of vampire lore. They discuss the origins of vampire stories in Slavic folklore, the Great Vampire Epidemic of the 18th century, the blood-sucking breakup novel Lord Byron’s “travel companion” wrote about him, and lament the loss of a key source for Victoria’s vampire-as-justice analysis that she lost when she closed all her tabs.

Julia is truly bamboozled, Victoria embraces that she is a vampire girlie, and they both dig into the context of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, edited with commentary by the absolute legend Carmen Maria Machado.

Julia and Victoria make another foray into the gothic genre with Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and spend a fair amount of time talking about mushrooms.

Julia and Victoria try to figure out why their 2011 Harper Teen copy of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte looks suspiciously like Twilight and why that’s interesting for the genre of Gothic literature.