Blood and History: Review of  Sara Hinkley’s The Red Sacrament

Jon Greenaway Under Review:The Red Sacrament. Sara Hinkley. Titan, July 2026. If, as Fred Botting famously wrote, the Gothic represents a writing of excess, then Sara Hinkley’s The Red Sacrament fits that description perfectly. Densely plotted, with rich and pleasurable prose, it clocks in at a hair under 500 pages long and represents the arrival of a major new voice in horror fiction and perhaps the most vital, politically engaged vampire novel of the last decade. The setup is deliberately theatrical, opening with a list of dramatis personae and staging its plot in Paris, 1869. Here, the mysterious and exclusive Théâtre Saint-Siméon houses a coven of vampires who survive by performing for and preying upon the city’s nocturnal audiences. The libidinal pleasures of the troupe’s performances—their opulence and eroticism, the theatrical mise-en-scène of each show—are matched by a persistent and gnawing political tremor. Outside the doors of the theatre, revolt and revolution simmer in…