Trapped in a pub during a violent storm, the hungry occupants decide to play a game: each will tell a story and the best tale will win the meager food offered by the bartender.

The first to speak is a mysterious woman who gives the name Ivona Knight. Soon, Ivona’s small audience is at once mesmerized and horrified as she tells the tale of her life, growing up in Romania under the terrifying rule of Prince Vlad Tepes Dracula. After being sent to live with the volatile and violent prince, one by one all her loved ones are maimed or killed. After her secret lover is executed for his inability to carry out the prince’s abhorrent atrocities, Ivona avenges their deaths by killing the cruel prince in battle. Since then she’s sworn to exterminate the descendants of Dracula’s line.

During the telling of her story, she continues to be drawn back to the attractive man sitting across from her in the tavern. She sees in him a similarity to her deceased lover but as the night goes on, Ivona cannot be certain if the familiarity she senses in him means he’s friend, or enemy.

Author Shannon Leigh takes a familiar historical story and offers a creative twist in the Vlad Tepes Dracula tale. Part fiction, but mostly historical fact, Vampyress takes the reader on a dark journey of brutal torture and utter despair for the Wallachian region of Romania. Volunteering vivid imagery, Ivona educates her audience as to how Dracula was given the moniker Vlad the Impaler. Sucking the innocence, purity and joy from the region, Vlad’s end doesn’t come too soon and his killer takes it upon herself to eradicate all descendants of Dracula’s line. Now, centuries later, Ivona finds herself in a storm barricaded tavern with a man who could be a descendant of the torturer, or one whose job is to take from her the evil she’s carried around since she pulled it from the dying body of the Impaler.

I would have liked Leigh to explain in the story why, after 500 years, Ivona still hasn’t managed to kill off his line, and what would happen to the mysterious vampire once that occurs but it doesn’t detract from the dark tale or its telling. Best read when the lights are on, Vampyress is a tale sure to please lovers of vampirism and horror.

Reviewed by: Bella