I didn’t know when I started it that Jacqueline Holland’s The God of Endings would perfectly suit a November of the soul. Haunting, wintery, darkening, this book really called to me when I read the first paragraph, and I can think of no better way to go on here other than to share it:

When I was a child, the dead were all around us. Cemeteries were not common in the early years of the 1830s. Instead, small, shambling family graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the edge of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse — until eventually you could look out across a village, see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead?

Our narrator, Anna at this point in her long existence, is a young girl in 1830 when she finds herself a dying orphan. Rather than let her go, though, her grandfather gives her the gift — or curse — of endless life by turning her into a vampire, which enables Holland to explore the agony that would surely be present in such an eternity.

Shifting back and forth between 1984 and the 150 years between her change and her present, the story shows how much she yearns for the one thing she witnesses all the time but cannot obtain for herself: an ending.

I envy these people terribly, it’s true, but not for their children and families; I envy their brevity. I envy the low stakes of their choices. Whatever they lose, whatever they suffer, they don’t suffer long. They get just a little life. Birth, some joys, some sorrows, then death to wash it all clean.