Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo Format: eARC
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, Gothic, horror, horrormantasy
Pages: 149
Published by Tordotcom on March 10, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Hache Pueyo returns after But Not Too Bold with her new novella Cabaret in Flames, where Interview with the Vampire meets Certain Dark Things in an alternate-Brazil where brutal flesh-hungering Guls stalk the night streets and manipulate the government from their glittering cabaret
Guls can be brutal. Few know this better than Ariadne, who lost half her body to their appetites, but their brutality is a predictable constant amid Brazil’s political chaos. Now, she treats them in the specialized clinic she inherited from Erik Yurkov—the mentor who rescued her as a child, trained her in medicine, built her prostheses, and disappeared without a trace.
Ariadne’s routine is disturbed when Quaint knocks on her door: a charming, tattooed gul claiming to be Erik’s oldest friend. Quaint suspects foul play in Erik’s disappearance, and they soon discover Erik sought asylum at Cabaré, an infamous club in Rio de Janeiro frequented by the gul elite.
Together, Ariadne and Quaint will unravel the conspiracy behind their friend’s disappearance, navigate the labyrinthine world of Ariadne’s memories, and discover what Erik means to them—and what they are starting to mean to each other.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
My Review:
The story begins with Ariadne, in the middle of the night in an unnamed city in Brazil, living in the midst of a district controlled by literal monsters – who is not afraid. At least, not afraid of the monsters on the outside.
Because she knows those monsters intimately. From the inside. Because she’s the only doctor capable of treating their ailments and injuries when their own natural advanced healing isn’t enough.
Although she might not be the ONLY doctor. Her mentor, Dr. Erik Yurkov, is missing, and has been for well over a year at this point. She thinks he left under his own steam, but he’s not answering her letters and something just isn’t right.
She’s right about that, in more ways than she can even remember. It’s only when someone claiming to be one of Erik’s oldest friends knocks on her door that she learns/realizes/remembers that the situation is considerably worse than she fears.
Even as she discovers that not all the monsters are as monstrous as the ones who made her what she is. A brittle, broken survivor of the worst that both human and monster behavior has to offer.
She’s willing to do whatever it takes to save Erik, because once upon a time he saved her from experiences that no one would want to survive. There were plenty of times where she wished he hadn’t, but he did and she owes him. She owes him enough to go back into the belly of the beast that she’s been trying to forget for her entire life.
But this time, she has one of the monsters at her side. Quaint might be one of the monsters, but he’s HER monster.
Escape Rating A-: I picked this up because I liked the author’s debut novella, But Not Too Bold a LOT more than I thought I would. I was surprised because that story – and this one as well – are both VERY dark fantasy that lines its half-eaten toes right up to the line between dark fantasy and outright horror as the whole story leans precariously over that border and stares into the horror abyss with considerably more longing than dread.
The, let’s call them ‘born monsters’, are not quite human – although they certainly act like the worst of us in all the worst ways. They’re also not quite vampires, although that’s the closest equivalent. The monsters in this version of our world, these ‘Guls’ do survive by drinking human blood. But they also eat human flesh. Some of them are quite, quite fond of it, in fact. And the ones who aren’t generally look the other way.
(Guls are not cannibals because they are explicitly not human. Guls are born, not made. Also, while I’m adding asides, if the term gul sounds familiar and automatically means evil in your head, the two most likely reasons for that are Gul Dukat from Star Trek Deep Space 9 and Batman‘s nemesis Ra’s al Ghul.)
The story starts a bit in the middle, as well as in the middle of the night. Ariadne is trying so hard not to remember so much of her own past, as well as trying to keep what mental health she has by not thinking too hard about the frankly much more terrible monsters running the Brazilian government (this alternate Brazil seems to be suffering from the worst excesses of the Brazil’s military dictatorship period, only even more so because the real monsters seem to be in cahoots with the human monsters.)
In other words, the backdrop of the fictional horrors are, well, real horrors. Which is part of what makes the story so compelling. Even though Ariadne’s need to suppress her own memories, while we understand once we do get them, also make for a labyrinth that the reader has to navigate while the story is progressing at a dangerously rapid pace – at least for Ariadne.
In the midst of the danger, the fear, the horror, and Ariadne’s confrontation with a literally grisly past and the monsters who created it, there’s a surprising and surprisingly charming light – and that’s Ariadne’s unexpected and unexpectedly equal in spite of their circumstances – relationship with Quaint. In spite of being on opposite sides of the extremely sharp dividing line between humans and guls, their relationship is sweet and hot and tempting and more equal than the reader imagines is even possible at the outset. It may be, at least in part, a trauma-bond, but it’s a beautiful and marvelously nuanced one that this reader, at least, would love to see more of.
Because of the way the relationship between Ariadne and Quaint works, I enjoyed Cabaret in Flames even more than I did But Not Too Bold. If you like or are even just plain curious about horromance (yes, that’s the actual word), both books but especially Cabaret in Flames do an excellent job of making the fantasy truly dark, the horror utterly horrifying, and the romance surprisingly delicious.
This reader wouldn’t mind – AT ALL – seeing more of Ariadne and Quaint. And, now that I’m hooked, I’ll be looking for the author’s next book with GREAT anticipation.