With Blood Upon His Teeth by Adam McOmber Review: The House That Hunger Built

With Blood Upon His Teeth | Adam McOmber | Lethe Press |

With Blood Upon His Teeth by Adam McOmber is a queer gothic vampire novel set in a Cornish manor that will not keep still. This With Blood Upon His Teeth review comes from a reader who has spent years on haunted house books, and this one still caught me off guard. Jim Holloway, a shy tutor sent away from Manchester after a scandal, arrives at Harrow’s Cross to teach poetry to a girl who wants a detective, not a teacher. Then a cousin from California turns up with cold hands and no appetite for supper. If you follow our horror book reviews, you will know how rarely a vampire story feels new. Here is why this one does.

Adam McOmber’s best novel yet: a tender, frightening queer gothic where a vampire romance, a house that will not keep still and a father’s buried grief become one unforgettable story. Cool, lamplit prose, real teeth and a huge heart make this a vampire novel to treasure

With Blood Upon His Teeth Review: A Gothic Built From Longing

Some houses are built to keep people out. Others are built to keep one person in. The best gothic fiction has always known the difference, and it has always known that the second kind of house is usually made of love gone wrong.

Adam McOmber knows it too. With Blood Upon His Teeth is his latest novel, and it may be his warmest. That is an odd thing to say about a book with a severed head under a tea towel. But it is true.

Jim Holloway is thirty-six. He lives with his father in a semi on Burnage Lane, watches Steptoe and Son, and has spent his whole adult life hiding in oversized jackets. Then he is caught in a college lavatory with a student, and his father makes some quiet phone calls. Within weeks Jim is on a train to Cornwall, bound for Harrow’s Cross and a teaching post he is not remotely qualified for. His pupil, Blythe Harrow, is sixteen, reads Agatha Christie and New Age tracts, carries a pearl-handled revolver in her macramé bag, and works out that Jim is gay inside about four minutes. She is a joy. Every gothic should have a Blythe.

The house itself is the first great creation. It is a rotting pile of tilted corridors, locked doors and mermaid sconces that buzz like faulty strip lights. Meals arrive under silver cloches and nobody seems to carry them. A house phone has a switch with its label scratched out. A statue of Herne the Hunter stands in a garden Jim can see from his window but can never find on foot. McOmber lays these details down calmly, one at a time, and lets them pile up until the place feels less like a building and more like a mind.

How the Opening Teaches You to Read the Book

The first chapter is a small lesson in method. Jim’s cab stalls on a wooded hill. The driver mutters about dead spots. Rain falls on the windscreen out of a cloudless sky. Through the birch trees Jim glimpses a fine manor with twin chimneys, and then the car rounds a bend and the manor is a ruin. When he reaches for his wallet, the driver waves it away with a line that tells you everything about the family:

“The Harrows,” he says. “They always pay the fare.”

Look at how that scene works. Nothing in it is frightening on its own. A stalled car, a sunshower, a house that looks better from a distance. But McOmber puts them side by side and lets the reader feel the joins. Weather that does not match the sky. A house that changes between two glances. A debt settled before it was ever discussed. The whole novel runs on that unease, the sense that the world has been arranged for Jim by someone who is not quite telling him the truth. By the time you learn who did the arranging, you realise the clues were laid in the first five pages.

Reading McOmber’s prose is like walking a long corridor lit one sconce at a time. Each short sentence throws a small, warm pool of light, and the dark between the sconces does the frightening.

Is With Blood Upon His Teeth Scary?

Yes, though not always in the way the cover suggests. The vampire material is properly vicious when it lands. Kit Harrow, the cousin, is charming, funny and full of beach slang, and his slow unmasking is handled with real skill. There is a run through a night forest, with Jim carried in Kit’s arms and his glasses clutched in one hand, that is one of the best set pieces I have read this year. The shadows do not stay still:

There are times when the shadows seem to pull themselves free from trunks and branches and run alongside us in the night.

That sentence is typical of McOmber at his best. Plain words, an easy rhythm, and one verb doing the damage. The shadows do not loom or creep. They run alongside, like dogs pleased to be out. It is the friendliness that makes your skin crawl.

Later, Kit tells Jim what happened on a California beach, and the confession is the most brutal passage in the book. It is long and calm and utterly without mercy, and it changes how you read every tender scene that came before. McOmber does not let the romance off the hook. Kit is someone Jim could love. He is also something that ate a whole beach of boys and the girl who begged him to stop.

Then there is the drive back from the harvest fair. I will say only that the Harrows send a car, the young man at the wheel has very pale eyes, and the journey is the finest stretch of body horror in the novel. It is grotesque and sad at once, and once its meaning lands it becomes one of the saddest things in the book.

Where the book is less frightening is in its last act. Once the house opens into a red, featureless labyrinth, the horror shifts from the domestic to the cosmic, and the cosmic is harder to make personal. The ideas are bold. A deer with antlers of red glass, an abandoned carriage by a red lake, a gallery of statues that look like everyone Jim has met.

But the maze repeats its pattern of corridor, window, creature a little too often, and a long explanatory speech from Manx Harrow spells out machinery that the book had been wiser to leave half seen. This is the one real limitation, and it costs the novel half a star. It slows the run into the ending just when the book should be at full stretch.

How With Blood Upon His Teeth Compares to McOmber’s Earlier Novels

McOmber has been circling this book for years. Jesus and John sent its lovers wandering through a labyrinthine Roman villa. Hound of the Baskervilles, also from Lethe Press, turned Conan Doyle’s cursed house into a queer and erotic puzzle box for John Watson. The Ghost Finders gave us a closeted occult detective in Edwardian London. Strange houses, mazes and men who cannot say what they want: the same building blocks appear again here, but the structure is far more ambitious, and the feeling is far more open.

What is new is the warmth. Jim’s voice is prim, funny and sometimes heartbreaking. He worries about scratching the Alfa Romeo. He wonders whether his Let the Good Times Roll t-shirt might strike Kit as charming. He tells himself, again and again, that he must be a better man for his father’s sake. McOmber lets that voice carry long stretches of the book, and it carries them well. Blythe gets the best lines. Kit gets the best entrances. Jim gets the best of the heart.

In genre terms, the book sits in a long line that runs from Carmilla through Shirley Jackson’s Hill House to Interview with the Vampire, with a hallway borrowed from House of Leaves. McOmber’s own website points to Dark Shadows, and the comparison fits the velvet and candlelight. The 1973 setting also makes a natural partner of Keith Rosson’s Coffin Moon, another vampire novel that uses the seventies as a period of grit and grief rather than nostalgia. And anyone who has worked through our list of Top Queer Horror Books You Shouldn’t Miss will find this sits comfortably beside the best of them.

One quibble for British readers. Jim is a Mancunian born and raised, yet now and then his voice drifts across the Atlantic. He offers to hold the flashlight. He calls his late mother Mom. You could read every slip as one more crack in the house’s illusion, and the book half invites that generous reading. I am not sure it was meant, and a sharper edit would have caught it.

What I love most is that he refuses the easy ending. Jim does not go home to Manchester and learn his lesson. He chooses the story. The final pages give him bandages, bare feet in wet grass, and a one-eyed vampire asking him to the pictures at the Town Hall. It should be silly. It is moving. A man who has spent his whole life being told his desire is wicked decides, at last, to live inside it.

In the darkness near the end, his father says it plainly: “Some wounds bleed forever, Jim, and some dreams do not end.” With Blood Upon His Teeth is the rare horror novel brave enough to let the dream win.

Content warnings: sexual content, homophobia and a police arrest, graphic gore and bite wounds, violence against animals, violence against a child, and the narrator briefly picturing his own death.