Mortal Passions is a dark-academia vampire novel centred on Laura Wyck, a twenty-six-year-old English PhD student at the unnamed University of ———, a beautiful but financially collapsing old institution to which she has devoted almost her entire adult life. Laura is intelligent, romantic, self-dramatising and chronically uncertain about what is good for her, and the book opens by linking that trait to her lifelong attraction to things that hurt her. The immediate crisis is institutional: the university has overspent on buildings and consultants and now plans major redundancies, including cuts of roughly half the English department and the possible sale of the Carville, the ancient library Laura adores. Her supervisors, the sardonic Alan Dearborn and the more severe Siobhan McDermid, may lose their jobs, threatening Laura’s already-stalled doctorate. Laura joins her closest PhD friends, principled former activist Tara and gentle Gordon, in trying to force management to answer questions. Around the same time, strange things begin happening in and around the Carville. Laura’s library card fails inexplicably, university technology starts malfunctioning, and one night she hears a terrible scream outside the library. She goes searching in the rain but finds no one. The reader, however, is shown that nearby a woman has been attacked by something cold and ravenously hungry, dragged away and thrown into the river.
At a hostile meeting with senior management, Laura encounters the person who has already caught her attention by rudely barging past her at the Carville: Elise, usually called Eli, a tall, grey-haired, strikingly handsome butch consultant of uncertain age and undefined authority. Vice-Chancellor Scarborough says Eli has been brought in to help with the restructuring. Laura is furious because Eli appears to embody the consultancy culture destroying the university, yet she is immediately and intensely attracted to them. Eli seems equally fascinated with Laura. The meeting itself is disastrous: management repeats empty language about “tough business decisions,” Scarborough announces that she will leave after the restructuring, and Eli watches Laura with unsettling concentration. Soon afterward Laura and Eli begin a flirtation built on hostility, attraction and moral compromise. Laura initially rejects Eli’s invitation for a drink, then, after a period of nightmares and university breakdowns, asks them out herself. Eli behaves like an impossibly old-fashioned gentleman: they fetch Laura’s books, buy expensive wine and steak tartare, take her to an elegant jazz bar, pay for everything, walk her home, and rescue her when a chunk of stone suddenly falls from the Carville and nearly crushes her. Eli’s body is always unnaturally cold, their eyes sometimes seem to darken, they claim to identify blood by smell, they barely sleep, and they never eat. Laura notices all of this but, because Eli gives her exactly the luxury, attention and protection she has always wanted, she repeatedly chooses not to examine it too closely.
The horror plot becomes explicit through a series of deaths. The woman found in the river turns out to be Marina, another doctoral student whom Laura disliked. Marina has been exsanguinated, and Tara learns that other people have gone missing nearby. Meanwhile, the university itself behaves like a diseased body: emails corrupt, doors malfunction, alarms go off, shelves move by themselves, walls and offices collapse, and a high-pitched sound in the English building causes headaches and nosebleeds. Siobhan becomes increasingly terrified and paranoid, convinced that Eli is not really an employee but someone brought in off the books to eliminate problems. She tries to send a warning email from the Carville’s lower stacks, but is interrupted. Not long afterward Laura finds Siobhan dead in a soundproofed study pod, her throat savagely torn open and blood covering the walls. Laura is traumatised, especially because she had recently heard Siobhan crying in a bathroom and deliberately fled rather than offer help. She begins to worry that this says something ugly about her character. Eli responds not by reassuring Laura that she is good, but by telling her that they love her even if she is selfish or heartless, an answer that deeply appeals to Laura because it promises love without moral conditions. Their romance accelerates. Laura hides Eli from Tara and Gordon, skips professional obligations to spend time with them, and becomes accustomed to Eli’s gifts, hotel room, expensive meals and total attentiveness. When she finally admits whom she is dating, Tara reacts exactly as Laura feared: she points out that Eli is involved in the restructuring, has no clear official role, and arrived just as the university began collapsing. Laura defends Eli, says she may love them, and the friendship ruptures. Gordon refuses to take sides strongly enough for Laura, and later, after a malfunctioning rolling stack breaks his arm, he tells Laura that he does not want her help because she has barely spoken to him for weeks. Laura becomes increasingly isolated from the ordinary human relationships that once anchored her.
