Put aside thoughts of garlic wreaths, crucifixes and stakes driven through the heart – Octavia Butler’s Fledgling is not your typical vampire story. After seven years of waiting, fans of Butler’s intelligent and gripping fiction finally have another work to sink their teeth into. As in her previous novels from the Parable or Patternist series, Butler again gives us a strong and independent heroine and a story that pushes us to think critically about our own society.

“I awoke to darkness. I was hungry – starving! – and I was in pain,” so begins the story of Shori, a fifty three-year-old black vampire who stands four feet ten, looks like a 10-year-old girl and is able to function in daylight because she is protected by the melanin in her skin. As the novel opens we find Shori badly injured and barely hanging on to life. She is unable to remember anything – her name, her family, or why her body is able to heal so quickly. Butler takes us along on her amazing journey of self-discovery.

What Shori discovers is that she is an Ina (a vampire) and a special one at that, as she has been genetically engineered with the DNA of an African American human woman. She is the first of her kind. Her unique position leaves her, and those she cares about, open to danger from the ignorant and racist members of her present-day vampire society. Because she is different, some Ina fear her and the future she might bring. Yet, just as she has done in past novels, Butler again explores the breaking of barriers with relationships between young and old, Ina and human, black and white, and those of the same sex.

Butler’s is certainly a fresh and innovative take on the traditional vampire story. The character of Shori is completely unlike, for instance, her vampiric predecessor Count Dracula found in Bram Stoker’s novel who preys on innocent and virginal young women. Instead, Shori seeks to form mutually beneficial relationships with humans. Each Ina, we learn, forms a family with seven or eight human “symbionts.” This allows for the Ina to have a constant supply of the blood they need to survive without taxing any one individual, and the humans receive protection and benefit from the healing powers of the Ina saliva – living a much longer and healthier life than the average human. In creating these unique relationships, Butler pushes the reader to reconsider what it means to be part of a community – a community based on helping one another, not parasitic relationships.

Although the beginning of the novel is often disturbing and uncomfortable to read (we witness a sexual relationship between the child-like Shori who we are not yet aware is an Ina and a twenty-three-year-old man named Wright), it is well worth it to continue. Their relationship is, of course, much more complex than it first seems, and so is Shori. She is an attractive character who lingers in the reader’s mind long after finishing the novel. I, for one, am already eagerly anticipating a sequel.