Stakes | Noelle McCarthy

A darkly funny, sparkling follow-up to the author’s bestselling memoir, Grand.

You have to invite him in. You have to want the vampire’s badness in the house with you. Growing up in Catholic Ireland, Noelle McCarthy is captivated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire is a risk-free fantasy, a suave alternative to the fraught realities of desire. Twenty years later, exhausted by her unruly appetites, Noelle returns to Dracula, reckoning with her own history and a changing world: generation-spanning shame and trauma given voice by #MeToo and the horrors emerging from Irish soil.

More than a century after readers were first mesmerised by Dracula, Stakes transposes its electric themes of transgression, intoxication and sexual danger onto Noelle’s own life, asking: what’s the difference between an inheritance and a curse?

A funny, visceral follow-up to the acclaimed Grand, Stakes celebrates the power of a gothic horror to help you face the parts of life that scare you most.

Noelle McCarthy is an author, broadcaster and producer. Her first memoir, Grand- Becoming my mother's daughter, won best first book of non-fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2023. That year, she was the writer in residence at Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters. Noelle grew up in Ireland and started her radio career at 95bFM in Auckland in the early 2000s before going on to work at Radio New Zealand for more than a decade. She makes long-form narrative podcasts as Bird of Paradise Productions, alongside her husband, John Daniell. Noelle lives in Featherston with John and their daughter and many copies of Dracula.