AFTER her studies in Paris, a young painter from Bucharest returns to the mountain resort of her childhood, on the border with Transylvania, where she spent her summer vacations with her bourgeois aunt in a luxurious villa. The communist regime now belongs to the past, many young people have emigrated to the West, the place is in ruins, while cunning politicians exploit the abandonment of the countryside. When a badly abused corpse is discovered in the tomb of Vlad the Impaler, the infamous Dracula, the heroine decides to investigate the history of the unyielding prince, battling her own ghosts.

Balancing between fantasy and reality, with biting humor and a critical spirit, Dana Grigorcea crafts an atmospheric portrait of post-communist Romania, trapped in a liminal space between legends of vampires, the remnants of the old regime, and today’s dead ends.

For her novel, the author won the Swiss State Prize for Literature (2022).

A humorous, bizarre, atmospheric reinterpretation of the gothic novel. Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag

Resorting to the myth of vampiric transformation, the plot of the work—imaginative and poetic—focuses on a society that, instead of confronting the challenges of the present, prefers to awaken the evil spirits of the past. Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen

Grigorcea's visually and linguistically vivid novel is simultaneously a horror story, a detective thriller, and a grim social portrait. Kulturnews.de

A fantastic, highly inventive yet rational approach to the horror and everyday life of Romanian society during and after the Ceaușescu regime. Frankfurter Rundschau

“Some Never Die” is a political horror novel with a subversive take on the legend of Dracula. Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen