In Rachel Feder’s work of literary criticism The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love, Feder deconstructs Pride and Prejudice and traces Fitzwilliam Darcy’s attributes and cultural lineage back to the Byronic hero, best embodied by Lord Byron himself. Feder suggests that the aristocratic, tall, dark, and handsome figure of Mr. Darcy and the maddening allure of his aloofness are on par with the dangerous and tantalizing nature of the vampire. Romina Garber’s The Last Vampire makes Feder’s arguments literal: Mr. Darcy is an actual vampire, transplanted from Jane Austen’s Regency England to the U.S. and struggling to adapt to modern life in New Hampshire.

Garber’s rendition of Fitzwilliam Darcy is much younger than its literary inspiration. In The Last Vampire, William Pride is a nineteen-year-old, English-born descendant of a powerful vampire clan who is awoken from a centuries-long hibernation when Garber’s eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Bennet stand-in, Lorena Navarro, stumbles upon his coffin in a closed-off wing of Huntington, a remote New Hampshire boarding school. William is drawn to the scent of Lorena’s blood and bites her but does not incapacitate or turn her. Needing the vital sustenance that Lorena’s blood offers and desperate for information about life in the modern world and what happened to the rest of vampire kind, William coerces her into becoming his Familiar. In exchange for her bodily and informational assistance, he’ll refrain from killing her and all of her friends. Lorena agrees but threatens to release video footage of him attacking her.

As William poses as a high school student and embeds himself in Lorena’s friend group to keep her close and detract from too many unwanted questions, William and Lorena’s dynamic gradually transforms from an enmity-fueled transactional relationship to something bordering on platonic, then to an unlikely friendship that morphs into a star-crossed romance.  

The enemies-to-lovers trope, disastrous first impressions, and slowburn romance element, along with certain story beats, are meant to parallel Pride and Prejudice. Twilight is another clear influence and both Jane Eyre and Dracula are alluded to within the text. Britney S. Lewis’s Blood Moon is a recent YA comp.  

The plot is interesting, but unevenly paced and hastily tied up. It is hampered by underdeveloped characters (including the FMC, to some extent) and a misaligned setting. The worldbuilding is also inconsistent, as it can be cohesive and compelling in some parts and suffer in others. Setting the main action of the novel at a boarding school with a student body composed exclusively of seniors is a confounding choice. Given the story that Garber seems to want to tell with her characters, why not set it in a remote, recently renovated, private college and have Lorena and the other students in her orbit be college freshmen? The high school element doesn’t always ring credible and creates unnecessary constraints for the narrative. 

Indeed, there’s an imbalance between the vampire lore, the urgency of William’s quest to find other vampires and confront whatever threat led to their disappearance, and the relative low stakes and mundanity of Lorena and her peers’ everyday lives at Huntington. Altering the setting from a high school to a college could have removed some of the narrative barriers that the necessity of accounting for parental authority presents. The characters’ families could have still played a role in their backstories and character development from off campus, as they do in Lewis’s Blood Moon. Lorena and William, a presumed student, would have had much more mobility and freedom to pursue leads in their search for William’s kin.

The novel is at its strongest when it focuses on the William-Lorena relationship and explores William’s past and place within his vampire society. Garber could have given more space to these aspects of her worldbuilding to strengthen the sense of atmosphere, heighten the conflict between the dueling vampire factions, and make the resolution feel earned rather than hastily thrown in. The storytelling flounders whenever the focus shifts to Lorena’s largely interchangeable roommates and classmates, their passing squabbles, and her mother’s career as a parenting influencer.

A slow start in the early chapters preceding Lorena’s collision with William yields to a slight uptick in narrative tension and a sense of balance as their relationship progresses and the chapters alternate between their perspectives. In the last third of the novel, the pacing really ratchets up before the book somewhat abruptly ends. Areas devoted to the shifting allegiances and grievances among Lorena, Salma, and their roommate Tiffany drag the pacing down. Secondary characters in the Huntington setting seem to work best when shown briefly and collectively (eating together or in the secret library) rather than individually. The other vampires William encounters in Hanover, NH and later Brooklyn, Boston, and Paris, are drawn slightly better than the Huntington teens, but still underwritten. Their sections are also casualties of the rushed plotting.

The Last Vampire is a diverting take on Jane Austen’s classic that emphasizes the archetypal romantic pairing of sparring love interests and reframes the story through a BIPOC lens with its Argentinian American heroine and inclusion of Latine and African American secondary characters. Lorena and William superficially read as Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy avatars. Their chemistry and relationship are questionable and contentious at the onset of the book, but the harshness of their aversion slowly softens and changes into something intriguing and ultimately cute. While the vampire paranormal premise and duo of Lorena and William are interesting enough, the novel loses points with its handling of life-or-death stakes that don’t always feel as dire as they should at pivotal moments in the plot. Low-stakes high school issues aren’t well juxtaposed with the supposed imminent human-vampire interspecies war that preoccupies the latter part of the novel.