When Bulgarian-born Anna Kovatcheva was in her MFA program at NYU, her grandfather presented her with a unique Christmas gift: a list of fictional Bulgarian towns. “He said, Here, take these names and just make up the world around them,” she recalls. “It was like a Bulgarian Yoknapatawpha County.” One of the names on the list was Koprivci, the remote, seemingly cursed town in She Made Herself a Monster (Mariner, Feb.), Kovatcheva’s folkloric tale about a charlatan vampire slayer.

No actual vampires appear in the novel, but Kovatcheva, who moved to the United States as a toddler, wanted to delve into the belief in vampires “as a cultural phenomenon and way of interpreting the world.” She has long been steeped in vampire lore. On family visits to Bulgaria, her great-uncle regaled her with monstrous tales, and her father loved to point out that in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the monster’s coffin travels from Transylvania to the Bulgarian port city of Varna, near where her family lived.

In She Made Herself a Monster, an itinerant vampire slayer named Yana roams 19th-century Bulgaria, manufacturing evidence of supernatural evil and then ritualistically expelling it. (The novel is not for the squeamish: it opens with Yana hammering a brick down the throat of an alleged vampire.)

When Yana wanders into Koprivici, she meets Anka, an orphaned, otherworldly teenager betrothed to the town’s sinister Captain. Moved by Anka’s plight, Yana plots to help her escape the dreaded nuptials. “They both occupy that weird border space between life and death, the mundane and the demonic,” Kovatcheva says.

Since completing her MFA in 2014, Kovatcheva has worked in web design in Charlottesville, Va., and New York City. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she practices archery, a “postpandemic hobby” that allows her to embrace her inner slayer among the “ren faire dorks” who populate Brooklyn’s archery scene.

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