Book Club with Julia and Victoria Julia Clausen and Victoria Bruick

Victoria teaches Julia all about the origins, tropes, and metaphors of vampire lore that create the undead monster we read about today. 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 disappeared when she accidentally closed all her tabs.

(And don’t forget to check out the bonus content where Victoria shares all the thoughts on Twilight that didn’t make it into the episode!)

Julia takes Victoria on a deep dive of octopus stories throughout time and space in this first episode of The Vampire & the Octopus series. We tackle questions like “Are octopus stories a form of colonizer horror?” and “What’s with all the octopus books coming out recently?” and “Why did the 19th century French think the octopus was the physical embodiment of hell?”

Julia discusses disability, comedy, creativity, and treating people like people with Steven Verdile, the founder of the disability satire publication The Squeaky Wheel.

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.

Views expressed on Book Club with Julia and Victoria and bookclubwithjv.com are solely those of the hosts and not necessarily those of their employers, clients, guests, and collaborators.

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

Julia and Victoria grapple with the grotesque narrative choices in Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan, translated by Chi-young Kim. Julia incorrectly uses the word “epigraph” when she means “epitaph” approximately 25 times.