Other Worlds by Kay Freeman: A Gothic Romantasy Review
Luna’s path through shadow and desire reveals a story of love, loss, and transformation, perfect for fans of gothic romantasy this autumn.
Moonlight spilled across the crumbling villa, revealing whispers of secrets long buried and desires yet unspoken.
What Other Worlds Is About
Luna’s marriage just ended. Her ex-husband is famous, unfaithful, and the kind of public breakup that follows you. Trying to rebuild her life and her photography career, she retreats to Assisi, a real town in Italy known for its medieval streets and Gothic architecture.
That’s where things get supernatural. A vampire who owns a crumbling villa offers her immortality. A werewolf pack leader stalks her through the surrounding forest, determined to claim her as his mate.
Luna ends up pulled three ways: toward her past, toward the vampire’s offer of an eternal escape, and toward the werewolf’s raw, instinctive pull.
It’s the first book in a planned series, and it leans on three familiar romance tropes: enemies to lovers, beauty and the beast, and the classic love triangle. If you’ve read romantasy before, you’ll recognize the shape of the story fast.
What makes it gothic instead of just paranormal romance is the setting work. Freeman writes Assisi like she’s lived there: crumbling villas, narrow cobblestone streets, moonlit woods. That atmosphere does a lot of the book’s heavy lifting.
What to Expect Before You Read
This one comes with real content warnings worth knowing about going in. The book includes discussion of child loss as part of Luna’s backstory, along with graphic sex scenes and scenes depicting wolves hunting. None of that shows up in most marketing copy for the book, so it’s worth flagging here directly.
At 202 pages, it’s a quick read, closer to a weekend binge than a commitment. Readers who’ve finished it describe it as fast-paced and easy to fall into, though a few have noted the conflict resolves a little too smoothly for a story built on a three-way emotional tug-of-war.
If you want a story that lingers in tension before paying it off, that’s worth weighing. If you want an atmospheric, fast-moving romance-fantasy you can finish in an afternoon, that’s exactly what this delivers.
Who Should Pick This Up
Other Worlds fits squarely into the new adult romance and fantasy genre. If you’ve enjoyed vampire and werewolf love triangles before, in the vein of Twilight or other gothic-romance hybrids, this will feel familiar in the best way.
Fans of enemies-to-lovers and beauty-and-the-beast tropes will find both here, blended into one plot rather than kept separate.
It’s not the book to reach for if you want dense world-building or slow-burn tension. It is the book to reach for if you want a strong setting, a love triangle with real stakes, and a story you can finish without a multi-week commitment.
About the Kay Freeman
Freeman spent over two decades as an art professor before shifting into romance writing full-time.
She was selected for the Romance Writers of America’s RAMP mentorship program, and her debut novel Truth Moon launched through The Wild Rose Press in 2023. Her novel Hitman’s Honey placed third in the Mid-Atlantic Author Society’s Romance Contest.
Other Worlds is her seventh novel and the first in a new series, with a sequel already in the works. She writes a free Substack newsletter on the craft of romance writing for other authors in the genre.
Where to Read More
Want more gothic romance recommendations? Check out our roundup of dark romance books for fans of haunting, melancholic love stories, or dig into our complete guide to Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles if you’re after a deeper, longer vampire series.
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