Books book reviews Anna Kovatcheva’s She Made Herself a Monster and the Ambiguous Fantastic Anna Kovatcheva’s new gothic novel features a vampire hunter, but… is it really a vampire story? By Tobias Carroll | Published on March 25, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Here’s a question: Does a novel need to actually have fantastical elements to be considered a fantasy novel? This question has been on my mind since reading Molly Templeton’s recent column on genre boundaries, but it’s also been coursing through my brain since I finished Anna Kovatcheva’s novel She Made Herself a Monster. The publisher’s description of the novel is coy about just how supernatural the book actually gets; the phrases “feminist fable” and “Gothic gem” come up, though the publisher pointedly does not categorize it as fantasy or horror. There’s a good reason for that. She Made Herself a Monster begins with a woman named Yana, who is traveling from village to village in eastern Europe acting as a vampire slayer. We’re a long way from Buffy Summers or Abraham Van Helsing here, though: Yana’s method involves hammering a brick into the neck of a corpse, then presenting the townspeople with a spike and instructing them to bury the body outside of the town’s borders. The language Kovatcheva uses for this sequence is visceral; she captures both the violence of Yana’s actions and the fear and awe of the people gathered around to watch this ritual. Yana lowers the mallet to the ground and holds the railroad spike out to the mayor. Its sharp end is gummy with flesh gouged from the roof of the dead man’s mouth. What she does not show, pointedly, is a member of the undead fighting for its uncanny life, desperate for survival, to endure one more day with the promise of more bloody feasts in its future. That’s because Yana’s act is precisely that: a show put on for the benefit of the locals, and a way to secure her own livelihood. As Kovatcheva writes, “The simple fact is: they want to believe her.” That said, calling She Made Herself a Monster a work of historical fiction or crime fiction doesn’t fit nearly as well as shelving it closer to the fantasy or horror sections of some metaphorical or literal shelf. Why? Because at its core, it’s still concerned with themes prevalent in both of those genres, including memory, ritual, and fear. While Yana is the character on whom this novel opens, she isn’t the central character. That distinction belongs to Anka, a young woman who is under the guardianship of a man known to everyone as the Captain. In a novel where every other significant character is referred to by their first name, that is the first signal that something is different about this man, but Kovatcheva leaves the specifics vague. Is it just that he holds more power than anyone else in the book? Or is that he has become something different, a person who’s opted to conceal his humanity behind a title and the authority it conveys? Buy the Book She Made Herself a Monster Anna Kovatcheva Buy Book She Made Herself a Monster Anna Kovatcheva Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget She Made Herself a Monster is set at a time in the past when science and superstition are at an uneasy impasse. Anka’s cousin Kiril, another major figure here, is introduced having a conversation about science and astronomy with his friend Hasan, all the while looking on the ways that his horizons have expanded since leaving his hometown. That one of the first things Kiril does upon arriving back home is to defend a widow accused of witchcraft—something he accurately perceives as utterly wrongheaded—establishes the tensions on the ground here, and also helps explain why Kiril sought to move elsewhere. Eventually, Kovatcheva reveals another reason why the Captain is known as the Captain, as opposed to his given name: It’s a way of leaving an earlier version of himself behind. Unfortunately, that earlier version of himself was a more fallible man, one with the capacity to err in tragic ways—but also one capable of levels of compassion that this version of himself has sloughed off. The Captain, it seems, loved Anka’s late mother; he also has designs on taking Anka as his wife when she is of age. The emphasis there is very much on “taking her”; Anka is understandably horrified by the idea of her surrogate father becoming her husband. Alternately, the Captain’s degree of self-justification—“When we marry, we will complete the grand plan—do you see now? Do you see it?”—takes things into the realm of moral horror, if not its supernatural counterpart. The arrival of Yana in the village provides Anka with a glimpse of how different her life could be and of how she might be able to use the locals’ superstitions (including a wariness around Anka due to the circumstances of her birth) as a way of making an escape from a terrible situation. She Made Herself a Monster is a slow-building work; Kovatcheva lets the narrative emerge slowly, rooting the plot and story in the connections between the characters and the events that took place before the start of the novel. Myths, legends, and superstitions are not the only old stories that have a bearing on these characters’ lives; their family histories also play a part. One of the questions Kovatcheva is pursuing here has to do with the connections between rituals and narratives. Can someone be a vampire hunter if they go through all of the motions of banishing a supernatural creature, even if there is no creature to be banished, provided the locals are satisfied with their work? At its core, this is a story about the power of stories, encompassing everything from Yana’s livelihood to the Captain’s troubling search for redemption, and about how stories can transform lives and communities. Anka’s quest to create her own story here may not involve slaying monsters, but it’s just as formidable a challenge.[end-mark] She Made Herself a Monster is published by Mariner Books. The post Anna Kovatcheva’s <i>She Made Herself a Monster</i> and the Ambiguous Fantastic appeared first on Reactor.