A devastating love story, a bewitching twist on history, and a blood-drenched hunt for purpose, power, and redemption. Professor Sebastian Grave is drawn back to the Beast of Gévaudan by an estranged lover and a dark secret, only to find the French countryside aflame with revolution, demons, and a monster bent on making war on the world.
My Review
Thank you so much to Macmillan Audio for the ALC.
Something in the French countryside is enthusiastically turning peasants into chew toys, and somehow that is just the beginning of the chaos Cameron Sullivan has packed into this wildly ambitious debut.
The Red Winter drops you straight into eighteenth century France, where the mud is thick, the church is suspicious, and the Beast of Gévaudan has apparently come back for seconds. I was not particularly familiar with the real historical nightmare that terrorized rural France in the 1760s, but I don’t think you need to be. Sullivan takes that history, shakes it violently, and reveals demons, conspiracies, and several centuries of supernatural nonsense hiding underneath. I was absolutely here for all of it.
Our guide through the misery is Sebastian Grave: monster slayer, academic, professional disaster bisexual, and reluctant host to a heart-eating demon named Sarmodel. Sebastian is genuinely hard not to love, and his witty, snarky, slightly dramatic personality combined with Sarmodel’s constant interjections made this blood-soaked adventure wildly entertaining. Nothing motivates a monster hunter quite like unresolved romantic trauma, and getting dragged back into the hunt by his ex-lover Antoine is very on brand.
The structure is more complex than it first appears. Multiple timelines, an alarming quantity of footnotes (which I devoured like a delighted little goblin), and interlude chapters featuring Joan of Arc, yes, that Joan of Arc, all layer together into something genuinely dense. It reminded me of Empire of the Vampire. I will say, I listened to the audiobook, and while the narrators completely nailed the tone, tracking rotating timelines and demons with several names and forms made my brain audibly crack at points.
That sense of overwhelm also muted my emotional investment somewhat. The relationship between Sebastian and Antoine is clearly meant to be the tragic heart of the book, and I understood the complexity intellectually, but I never quite felt the punch, which flattened the ending for me a little.
Still, The Red Winter does so many things I love: it’s casually, uncomplicatedly queer, it has genuine thematic weight around hunger (for love, flesh, power, revolution), and it announces Sullivan as a storyteller worth watching closely.