“Call him Ares. Call him Mars. Call him Avstamet. Or call him the Beast, as did the good people of Gévaudan, before they marched into his jaws, singing Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”
From the first pages I was immediately hooked by the voice and vibe. Sullivan drops us straight into eighteenth century France where the mud is thick, the church is suspicious, and something in the countryside is enthusiastically turning peasants into chew toys. Now, I will admit that I was not really (or honestly really not) familiar with the tale of The Beast of Gévaudan, the very real historical nightmare that terrorized rural France in the 1760s, but I don’t think you need to be to enjoy The Red Winter. Sullivan takes that history, shakes it violently, and reveals demons, conspiracies, and several centuries of supernatural nonsense hiding underneath, and I was so here for it all.
Our guide through all this misery is Sebastian Grave, monster slayer, academic, professional disaster bisexual, and host to a heart-eating demon named Sarmodel. It is honestly extremely hard not to love Sebastian, and his witty, snarky, and slightly dramatic personality combined with Sarmodel’s constant commentary made this entire blood soaked adventure wildly entertaining to me. We follow him in 1785, as he receives news that the Beast seems to have returned and gets dragged back into the hunt by none other than his ex-lover Antoine Avenel D’Ocerne. Like, nothing motivates a monster hunter quite like unresolved romantic trauma, right?
Now, that sounds all rather straight-forward, but it really is not. See, Sebastian also starts recounting the tale of the original hunt from twenty years earlier to Antoine’s son Jacques, with Sarmodel popping in whenever Sebastian starts sounding suspiciously heroic or acting dangerously foolish. To break up Sebastian’s tale, we also get interlude chapters following another historical icon (ehm hi, Joan of Arc?!), which really show how Sebastian and Sarmodel are significantly less charming when viewed by people who are not Sebastian himself. And to top it all off, there are footnotes. An alarming amount of footnotes, and yet I devoured every single one like a delighted little goblin.
Needless to say, The Red Winter is honestly way more complex than I had initially given it credit for, and I think I may have done myself a disservice by listening to this as an audiobook. Don’t get me wrong, the narrators are fantastic and they totally nailed the tone and atmosphere, but keeping track of multiple timelines, footnotes, action scenes, and a rotating cast of demons who all have several names and forms honestly made my brain audibly crack.
That sense of disorientation and overwhelm also hindered my emotional investment a bit, and especially the emotional core of the story suffered quite a lot for me. The relationship between Sebastian and Antoine is clearly meant to be the heart of The Red Winter, tangled up with the Beast itself and dripping with tragedy. But while I understood the complexity and appreciated the drama, I never quite felt the emotional punch, which really made the ending fall a lot flatter for me than I had hoped.
All that said, I still had a ridiculously fun time with this book, and I especially appreciated how casually queer it is. Sebastian is openly bisexual and nobody cares, which I always enjoy seeing. And Livia, a succubus working as Sebastian’s housemaid, could easily have been a very tired trope but ended up being far more interesting than expected. The whole concept of hunger also really stood out to me, be that hunger for love, hunger for flesh, hunger for power, or hunger for control. It runs through the demons, the church, the politics of a France creeping toward revolution, and Sebastian himself.
Ultimately, I think The Red Winter is a brutally bold and wildly ambitious book that didn’t quite reach its full potential for me, despite containing so many things I love. The fact that I devoured it anyway says a lot about Sullivan’s storytelling, and if this is what he delivers in a debut, I am extremely curious to see what he does next. If you like historical horror, theological chaos, demonic snark, and messy queer longing, I highly recommend letting this beast of a book sink its claws into you, if you dare.