Book 40 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year – I will probably make 40 my default goal for next year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Decided to try something just a little bit different for my 40th book of the year — a sapphic dark academia horror-romance! In particular, I read Lethal Kiss (2026), by Taylor Grothe, just released last month.

I’m not one who typically reads romances, and as a straight guy I’m not one who typically reads sapphic romances, but I came across Taylor Grothe on Threads and the premise of the book intrigued me enough to check it out. And I enjoyed the book immensely — it is a fun, dark, and thrilling tale set in the halls of a corrupt academic institution!

Marcella is a monster with a human form that has lived for hundreds of years, sustaining herself on the lives of unsuspecting human victims. With all that time to kill, she’s developed and maintained an interest in learning, and has become a strong scholar of folklore. When a job opportunity opens up at prestigious Preston University, she eagerly accepts, looking forward to a new place to lay low and feed without drawing attention.

Lacie is an assistant professor at Preston, fighting to make tenure this year on a campus where all professors are treated as disposable and women in particular are treated as little more than playthings by their seniors. But Lacie has fought to get to where she is, and she isn’t going to let the seductive newcomer Marcella get in her way.

Then scholars start turning up dead on campus. The first couple are covered up as suicides, but it soon becomes clear that there is something else monstrous lurking the academic halls that is not so discreet in how it feeds. Marcella and Lacie find themselves in an unlikely alliance when it looks like the murders could be pinned on them, and they vow to find the real murderers to protect themselves. As they dig deeper into the circumstances of the deaths and the history of Preston University, they find themselves drawn towards each other. Marcella finds herself wanting to protect this beautiful young woman, even though she knows that Lacie will be repulsed by her true form. But her real problem is that their snooping around draws attention, and soon they are as much the hunted as they are the hunters.

Lethal Kiss was a great fast-paced read. It balances the horror and thriller aspects with the romance excellently, always keeping them intertwined and relevant. It captures the dark academia aesthetic perfectly and it is fun to see Lacie and Marcella navigate university politics at the same time they are trying to find a killer.

Marcella starts the book as something of an antihero, only concerned with her own survival and satisfaction, and grows into something more. The character development between her and the more innocent yet resilient Lacie is fun to watch.

For the monsters in the book, Grothe draws on their own background as a scholar in Icelandic literature. They note in a foreword that the abilities and origins of the creatures are not fully folklore accurate but have been adjusted for story purposes. And the abilities of Marcella and others are fascinating and really well done horror!

As for the erotic scenes in the book, I’m pretty sure folks don’t really want to hear a detailed summary from me, but I will say that they are well written and sufficiently unusual, as one would expect for a romance between a human and a monster!

The only thing about the book that raised my eyebrows a bit, as a lifelong academic, was the extreme level of misogyny and sexism that pervades the fictional Preston University, which seemed over the top for modern academic institutions. But then I had to remind myself that: 1. that culture of corruption is a large part of the story, and 2. as a white male academic, my perception of problems in academia is going to be very different from that of a genderfluid author!

Overall, I had a great time with Grothe’s Lethal Kiss! It was a fun, thrilling read, and I’ll likely keep an eye out for more of Grothe’s work as well as more horror-romance novels.