Slayer by Leia Stone: Meet Your Next Vampire Obsession

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There’s something ridiculously satisfying about picking up a book expecting, at minimum, a good time and realizing a few chapters in that you’re completely hooked. That was Slayer by Leia Stone.

On her eighteenth birthday, Stella is supposed to be celebrating her new life after aging out of the group home she’s lived in since birth. Instead, vampires crash the party, and when it comes to Stella, something strange happens: she’s immune.

Enter Asher, a gorgeous, broody vampire hunter, who blows her understanding of the world wide open. Vampires are real, Stella can sense them, and she isn’t just some orphan who accidentally stumbled into the supernatural world. She’s a lost one; she was born into it. And she, too, is a vampire hunter.

Vampires, a secret academy, a broody vampire hunter, dangerous secrets, and a heroine who discovers on her eighteenth birthday that the supernatural world is very, very real.

Yeah, I’m in.

Slayer has that addictive, slightly nostalgic feel of vampire books I used to devour as a teen, while still being a fast, fun fantasy novel that kept me saying “just one more chapter.”

It may have hooked the vampire-obsessed reader I used to be, but that isn’t actually why I gave it 4.5 stars.

Title: Slayer (Slayer, 1)

Author: Leia Stone

Publisher: Bloom Books

Format: eARC/Physical

Genre: YA Paranormal, YA Fantasy, YA Romance

Release Date: September 8, 2026

Pages: 320

Star Rating: 4.5 stars

Spice Rating: 0 chili peppers

It’s YA, But It Never Felt Like It

Nostalgia might have been what initially pulled me into Slayer‘s orbit, but the writing style, plot, and the worldbuilding are what earned this book its 4.5 stars.

Leia Stone’s writing is incredibly easy to fall into. There was never a point where reading Slayer felt like work, and considering how easily I kept convincing myself to read “just one more chapter” before putting it down for bed was apparently the much bigger problem.

Honestly, Slayer is a young adult book, but at no point did it feel like a YA book. And I mean that in the best possible way. The writing never felt overly juvenile or like it was trying too hard to remind you that the characters were young.

Instead, it was fast-paced, entertaining, and so dangerously good at convincing you to continue reading and find out what happens next.

That made Slayer incredibly easy for me to get lost in, but the writing alone wouldn’t have kept me there. That was all due to the plot.

The More I Learned, the More Questions I Had

The more I read Slayer, the more intrigued I became not only with Stella and her history but with her mother and the secrets she holds, pulling Stella into her web.

While yes, this first installment is setting up the characters and their motivations, there are smaller, less pronounced threads running through the main story that kept catching my attention. Little questions and pieces of information that didn’t necessarily seem important at first glance, but started to feel like they were pointing toward something much, much bigger.

And that was probably one of my favorite things about Slayer (aside from the worldbuilding). I wasn’t only interested in what was happening right then; I became increasingly curious about what Leia Stone was quietly setting up for book 2: Staked.

Veil Haven Feels Like More Than a Backdrop

And while we are on the subject of Slayer‘s worldbuilding, the world really does feel like a world unto itself. Yes, I know that’s literally the point of worldbuilding, but stay with me.

While much of Slayer takes place at the academy, the city of Veil Haven never feels like a convenient backdrop created solely to house the story with nothing more added. The city has its own history, places, rules, and identity, and Leia Stone puts enough detail into the descriptions to make it feel lived in rather than constructed to suit Stella and her needs in the moment.

There’s a sense that Veil Haven existed long before she arrived and that there are pieces of its history — and the supernatural world within— that neither Stella nor the reader fully understands yet.

That richness is what made the smaller threads running below the main plot even more intriguing, solely because I couldn’t always tell what was simply part of Veil Haven’s history and what Stone was quietly plotting for Staked.

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And Here’s Where I Deducted That Half Star…

And here’s where I deducted that half a star….

Stella.

Stella was fucking infuriating in the beginning.

Listen, I will admit that Stella’s reactions could be realistic. But GIRL, be so fucking for real. For someone who had just discovered that vampires were real, that there is an ENTIRE supernatural world she knew absolutely nothing about, and that her own history was tangled up in it, Stella had an incredible talent for making decisions that had me wondering whether self-preservation said, “no, not you,” and skipped her entirely.

I can handle a heroine making questionable decisions (I am one to make questionable decisions myself). Sometimes that’s half the fun. But there is a difference between I’m doing this because I have a reason and fuck the consequences and girl, why the fuck would you do that?

Early Stella had me firmly in the second camp.

So… Does Stella Get Her Half Star Back?

I guess the good news is that she didn’t keep me there.

As the story progresses, she slowly starts allowing herself to consider possibilities beyond the ones she’s decided have to happen.

More importantly, she starts to let people in.

Stella spent so much of her life believing that she is essentially on her own that watching her realize she actually likes the people around her — and that maybe she doesn’t have to do EVERYTHING alone — made some of that earlier frustration kinda worth it.

And damn it to hell, that’s where my half-star deduction gets more complicated.

Because Stella absolutely irritated the hell out of me in the beginning, but by the end, some of the very things that frustrated me had become a part of her greater arc and endeared me to her. Her stubbornness, yes, was born out of necessity, but it wasn’t simply erased; her circumstances started to challenge what she thought she knew.

So maybe I should give back that half star, huh?

…I’m still thinking about it.

Thank you to Leia Stone and Bloom Books for sending me a deluxe edition of Slayer to read and review.

Support your local indie bookstore and purchase a copy of Slayer from Bookshop.org at no additional cost to you. Or, if accessibility is an issue, shop Amazon and read it on Kindle Unlimited.