Publication Date: February 24th, 2026
Hardcover. 544 pages.
In 1785, Professor Sebastian Grave receives the news he fears most: the terrible Beast of Gévaudan has returned, and the French countryside runs red in its wake.
Sebastian knows the Beast. A monster-slayer with centuries of experience, he joined the hunt for the creature twenty years ago and watched it slaughter its way through a long and bloody winter. Even with the help of his indwelling demon, Sarmodel – who takes payment in living hearts – it nearly cost him his life to bring the monster down.
Now, two decades later, Sebastian has been recalled to the hunt by Antoine Avenel d’Ocerne, an estranged lover who shares a dark history with the Beast and a terrible secret with Sebastian. Drawn by both the chance to finish the Beast for good and the promise of a reconciliation with Antoine, Sebastian cannot refuse.
But Gévaudan is not as he remembers it, and Sebastian’s unfinished business is everywhere he looks. Years of misery have driven the people to desperation, and France teeters on the edge of revolution. Sebastian’s arcane activities – not to mention his demonic counterpart – have also attracted the inquisitorial eye of the French clergy. And the Beast is poised to close his jaws around them all and plunge the continent into war.
Debut author Cameron Sullivan tears the heart out of history with this darkly entertaining retelling of the hunt for the Beast of Gévaudan. Lifting the veil on the hidden world behind our own, it reimagines the story of Europe, from Imperial Rome to Saint Jehanne d’Arc, the madness of Gilles de Rais and the first flickers of the French Revolution."
Wow, what a story The Red Winter is! I definitely felt like I needed a couple days to process this one after finishing this one.
The Red Winter is a brutal, beautifully-written, and deeply ambitious fantasy debut that really sinks its teeth into (get it?) history and myth--and it definitely does not let go. It’s a dark reimagining of the Beast of Gevaudan and the origin of the werewolf and it's full of blood, sorrow, and a long, intense hunt for redemption.
Sebastian Grave is a monster-slayer who comes with a whole lot of background and baggage (most of this background revolves around a character known as Antoine). He has a demon stuck with him, a very, very long history on this earth, and even a love story that has managed to bleed into every aspect of his life (yes, the aforementioned Antoine). His alliance (of sorts) with the demon Sarmodel--wherein said demon inhabits his body with him and requires living hearts as regular payment (super fun!)--adds some really intriguing layers and a bit of chaos and, at times, some dark humor to the story that was its own sort of enjoyable. Sebastian is thrust back into chaos and violence when it seems as though the Beast has returned and Antoine's son, Jacques, comes to fetch Sebastian to go back to the past he thought he left behind.
The Red Winter is a deeply layered story that covers centuries of time and brings in supernatural elements and roots from European history, ranging from Rome to Joan of Arc to Gilles de Rais and the French revolution. It’s incredibly imaginative and, as I mentioned before, also really ambitious to take all of this on, and I have to say I was immensely impressed by Sullivan’s ability to weave all of this together in a way that actually made sense.
With that being said, all of this also makes this an incredibly dense read. The narrative frequently shifts in both POV and timeline, and although the structure does ultimate strengthen the world-building and scale/scope of the story, it really broke the emotional momentum and my own emotional investment in some aspects and characters of the books. There were sections where I really wanted to stay with a certain character or storyline, but then the book would switch for what felt like far too long before it returned and I would lose interest at times and even forget exactly where that exciting/interesting part even left off, which ultimately made the return lose steam for me. This all contributed to making the pacing feel quite slow at times, which I felt was already rather slow in certain chapters, and therefore made parts of this book really drag for me.
Despite many of the slower moments, I was still fully invested in the story and felt everything did come together relatively well. The writing is undeniably rich and incredibly atmospheric, the themes were compelling, and the characters are wonderfully complex. The Red Winter explores what happens when grief, guilt, love, and so many of those wonderfully common human emotions take center stage, and what the consequences of those things are.
Overall, this is a brutal, fascinating historical fantasy. If you’re looking for that dark winter read complete with tragedy, monsters, and violence, then look no further because The Red Winter is what you’re looking for.
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