Glass Houses

Claire Danvers is sixteen years old, a college freshman at Texas Prairie University in Morganville, Texas, and two years ahead of where she should be. She wanted MIT. Her parents chose TPU instead, a small school in a small town that was cheaper and closer to home. Claire has a plan: keep her head down, do the work, and transfer somewhere better after a year. The plan dies on day one, in the lobby of Howard Hall, when she corrects Monica Morrell's version of an event from the Second World War in front of half the residents. Claire is right. That is the problem. Monica rules that dorm through fear and followers, and Claire has just made her look stupid in her own territory. Rachel Caine published Glass Houses with NAL Jam in October 2006, and it opens like a campus novel before it turns into a vampire story.

The consequences arrive fast. Claire's laundry disappears. Somebody empties the machines and leaves nothing but the basket, a small cruelty with a clear author, and nobody in the building will meet her eyes about it. Her things get moved. On the stairs, a girl named Gina shoves her, and Claire falls the length of a flight, spraining her ankle badly enough that she needs the campus clinic. Worse than the fall is the promise Monica makes while she is lying there: tonight. Claire does what a scared teenager does. She goes to the housing office and asks for another room. There is exactly one listing, a house on the edge of campus that sits outside the university rolls. By the end of her first week, Claire is taking a cab to 716 Lot Street, sitting on the porch because she cannot make herself knock, and crying. That is how Eve Rosser finds her.

The house on Lot Street

Eve is pale, friendly, and dressed like she raided a vintage store for a funeral, which is close to the truth of her life. She invites Claire inside. In the living room Claire meets Shane Collins, a lanky guy with an easy grin and a talent for making a disaster feel funny, and Michael Glass, the owner of the house, who takes one look at the sixteen-year-old stranger on his couch and says no. Michael is a musician who sleeps all day and keeps a quiet house with rules, and a minor moving in is not one of them. Claire makes her case badly and honestly: her ankle is the size of a grapefruit, the dorms are not safe, and she has nowhere else to go. Michael relents. She moves into a room upstairs, and the three roommates become four.

Eve explains Morganville that first night, and Claire assumes she is being messed with. Vampires. Not fiction, not a metaphor, actual vampires who run this town the way a family runs a business. The system has rules. Residents who sign on with a vampire get protection, usually marked with a bracelet, and people outside that system are fair game. The bracelets are contracts, Eve says, and contracts in Morganville are not metaphors. Break one, and the person you signed with comes to collect, politely and then not politely. Eve works at a coffee shop called Common Grounds, which is neutral ground, and she says that last part like it should reassure anyone. Claire decides her roommates are eccentric and goes to sleep. Then the police knock. There is a door behind the pantry that Claire has walked past twice without seeing, and Eve pushes her through it. Claire sits in the dark, listening to officers ask questions about a girl who has gone missing, and begins revising some assumptions.

Some history in this town is personal for this house. Years earlier, Monica and her family were behind a fire at the Collins house, and Shane's younger sister, Alyssa, died in it. Michael smuggled Shane out of Morganville afterward, which is not a thing the town lets people do, and it did not stick. Shane came back, because this is where his sister is buried and where his debt lives. He talks about Monica the way you talk about weather that has already ruined a year: present, permanent, and not worth arguing with. Claire hears all of this on her second night in the house and understands why Michael said no and why they let her stay anyway.

Life in Morganville

Michael's secret is stranger than the rest. A few years ago, after a gig, a vampire attacked him outside the house. The turning never finished. Now Michael exists in two halves: during the day he is barely there, a ghost who cannot leave the property, and at night he is solid, loud, and fully alive, playing music like it is medication. He believes the house itself is what keeps him anchored to being alive, which explains the rules, the quiet, and the way he guards the doors. Only Eve and Shane know, and now Claire does too. It is the first secret in Morganville that feels like it was handed to her on purpose, and she carries it carefully.

Life at 716 Lot Street settles into a rhythm. Eve pulls strange shifts at Common Grounds. Shane fixes the truck, cooks breakfast at noon, and teases Claire about her textbooks. Michael has the nights, and the house has the kind of easy quiet that Claire has never had anywhere else. Dinner happens at weird hours and always involves too much of it. Somebody leaves a note on the fridge about whose turn it is to buy coffee. Claire studies, and for a few weeks the semester behaves like a normal semester, and she has people who notice when she comes in. Then Eve brings her to Common Grounds after a shift, and a vampire named Brandon corners Claire by the counter, takes her wrist, and asks why she is not marked. Shane shows up before it goes further. The walk home is tense, and the street outside the house is dark in a way Claire now notices.

The violence escalates in two directions at once. On the street one night, Brandon attacks Claire for real, and Shane kicks him into a fence hard enough to break it. Michael appears with a stake and makes a promise about what happens next time. Then, in chemistry lab, Gina, the same girl from the stairs, pours acid down Claire's back. Claire spends time in a hospital bed. When she gets back to the house, she learns what Shane arranged while she was gone: a deal with Brandon that trades two bites on Shane, whenever Brandon wants them, for Brandon and his people leaving Claire alone. Michael is furious. Shane treats the deal like pocket change he found under the couch. Nobody asks Claire what she wants. Officer Bradfield offers her official protection if she moves back into the dorms. She says no, and surprises herself by meaning it.

The book

Then the book enters the picture, and everybody wants it. It is an old handwritten volume, the closest thing Morganville has to a founding document, and it explains how vampires were made and how the town ended up in their hands. For the older vampires it is history they would rather control, and for everyone else it becomes a weapon. Claire does not know where it is when the rumors start. She only knows that people have begun watching her friends and that nobody is asking politely.

Finding the book becomes Claire's project, partly because she cannot pay these people back in any other currency. She starts in the campus library, and the trail leads to a floor of the library that does not officially exist, behind a door she freezes open with liquid nitrogen taken from a teaching assistant's lab. The people guarding that floor are not students, and Claire barely escapes what is waiting there. The search costs lives, including the life of a professor named Wilson, who is dying by the time she reaches him and whose last useful words send her to his empty house. There, on a shelf, is a Bible that turns out to be hollow, and inside it is the black book.

That is also the week Claire's parents visit. They know nothing except that their brilliant daughter is unhappy, and they come ready to fix it. Claire cannot explain vampires to them, so the visit becomes a countdown instead: two days, and then they want her packed and in the car. She looks at her roommates, at this weird house with its rules and its secrets, and picks staying. That night, Shane walks her to her door, and they kiss, which complicates two of the three rules they have been living by. It is a quiet scene in a book that is about to stop being quiet.

The night everything breaks

Monica decides to solve the Claire problem for good. Her people grab Claire off the street, and the plan is worse than a scare. They drive her out of town to burn her alive. The execution falls apart because the driver, a girl named Jennifer, is not as committed to murder as her passengers, and the car crashes. Claire escapes into the dark and ends up sheltering in a church, where Amelie finds her. Amelie is the vampire who founded Morganville, the most powerful person in the book, and she asks about the book. Claire lies to her face and survives the lie, which feels like a miracle until she checks whether her hands are shaking. She makes it home.

Claire finally tells Shane the full truth about Michael, and the house has one last ordinary evening before everything arrives at once. At sundown, Michael rises solid, and whatever Shane believed before gets corrected in the living room. Then Oliver arrives. Oliver owns Common Grounds, which means the neutral ground was his all along, and he announces what he has never bothered denying: he was the vampire who attacked Michael years ago. Eve invites him in before anyone can stop her, her voice flat in a way Claire has never heard, and a vampire crosses the threshold of Glass House for the first time. Michael fights him out of it, badly hurt and entirely committed, and Eve revokes the invitation like she is slamming a door in a storm. The fight wrecks the living room, and when it is over, the four of them stand in the broken glass of their own front window and understand that the neutral part of their lives is finished.

It is the beginning of the longest night in the book. A siege forms around the house: vampires outside in the dark, some of them wearing badges, and humans sent in through the broken kitchen window because vampires still need an invitation and rubble does not. Miranda, whose vampire boyfriend is dead in all of this, gets a knife to Eve's throat before Shane talks her down. The fighting goes on in hallways and doorways, and it ends when the sun comes up and takes Michael mid-sentence, solid to ghost in the middle of the floor. The siege breaks apart after that, less resolved than exhausted.

The bargain

Afterward, everyone wants answers, and some people want them with paperwork. Monica and her brother Richard demand the book. Richard is a police officer, and he makes the demand sound official. Shane hands over the Bible. What the Morrells walk away with is not everything they think it is, a trick nobody discovers on the spot. Somewhere in the chaos of that night, a fire starts in Claire's room, and it gets put out before it can take the house, which feels like the whole story in one sentence: fire, then someone staying to stamp it out.

Then Amelie makes her offer, which is the kind of offer that is all exits and one door. Glass House becomes hers, meaning it sits under her protection, which in Morganville is worth more than any lock. The book, or what is left of it, buys that safety for the roommates. Claire can stay in town. She also cannot leave it. Nobody who knows as much about Morganville as Claire does gets to walk away with the knowledge intact, so the deal on the table is simple: stay in school, stay in the house, stay alive. Claire takes it.

The book ends the way the series prefers, one beat before the next disaster. A man arrives at the door with a knife and an old name: Shane's father, Frank Collins, back in town with a score to settle against every vampire in Morganville, including the one living in his son's house. Claire has never met him. She has only heard the stories, and the stories did not prepare her for a man with a knife and nothing left to lose showing up at the only door she has left in the world. That is where Glass Houses stops, which explains why the second book starts with dead girls and dancing and does not slow down for anyone.

Caine writes these books fast, in short chapters that end on hooks, and this one reads in a single sitting if you let it. She also writes teenagers who act like teenagers, which is rarer than it should be in books about monsters. The Morganville Vampires ran for fifteen books and finished with Daylighters in 2013, which means there is more than enough town to move into. The age gap between Claire and Shane is a conversation the book keeps having, and the violence is real, so this sits toward the older end of young adult. What stuck with me is not the vampires. It is the house: four people with built-in reasons to stay out of each other's business who choose to make a family anyway. Start it when you want something quick and sharp, and do not get attached to the porch light staying on.