I progress further into The Blood of Roses. This novel is weird. The plot seems to focus on the machinations of a (sort of) vampire, who I think is motivated by some sort of religious dispute or schism. The whole thing is one Lee's sort-of middle ages settings, with an approximate Christian church, which is in opposition to some sort of strange folk tradition underlying it, the details of which are unclear. A motif of a tree keeps appearing, but what exactly it means, and which religion it belongs to, I don't understand yet.

Beyond that it's also very interested in characters remaking and transforming themselves, often literally - we're up to three people who have created new physical versions of some aspects of themself for some purpose or other, in at least one case without knowing it. Remaking oneself isn't a new theme in what I've read of Lee's work, but this is definitely a different take on it, both in how literally the text treats it, and in how ambiguous to downright negative the text is about doing so; here it appears less a tool of self-actualization than self-abasement or self-escape or perhaps self-manipulation. The effect is very strange, and I'm interested to see where the story goes with this theme.

Also the second quarter of the novel is mostly a prequel/retelling of the first quarter, but from a different character's perspective. This makes certain things in the first section make, well, not exactly sense, but seem less inexplicable. Lee's really outdoing herself with the prose on this one, there's been a couple passages that are just devastating in how perfectly they capture the emotion of an event.