Fangs & All begins -- after a brief, mysterious flashback to a bloody incident from the protagonist's past -- with a pair of young lovers, Boots and Samantha, driving to visit Boots' estranged family for the weekend in their remote, gothic-style mansion in the wood. Boots is hesitant to reconnect with her family, but Sam encourages her to make amends and renew lost connections.

Then, Sam discovers that her girlfriend's mother is a vampire. Her father is a witch. Her aunts and uncles and grannies and cousins are a melange of ghosts and sea creatures and lycanthropes. Boots' family -- her mother in particular -- are extremely hostile to the outsider, and some of them even attempt to do her harm.

Oh, and Boots is a vampire, too.

Press materials for the book describe it as "Meet the Parents meets Wednesday" in a "queer, tongue-in cheek YA graphic novel about every young couple's worst nightmare: meeting the family." However, there isn't much humor here, and it certainly lacks the lushly dark wit of a modern Wednesday Addams.

There's peril, but it never feels all that perilous. And nobody -- especially Sam -- reacts in a manner that actual living people would do in this situation.

Author and artist Tas Mukanik never gives Sam much room to deal with her new reality -- the knowledge that, not only are monsters real, but they're her de facto in-laws. She never acts like a person whose life was just threatened with drowning or dismemberment, or who just learned that her lover drinks blood and has done real harm to people in the past. While her matter-of-fact attitude to these big revelations might play well in a funnier book, there's nothing here that earns a chuckle ... not even the scenes where Boots, who hasn't been practicing with her powers very much, is stuck in bat form.

And when a powerful sorceress in the clan decides -- with potentially good intentions -- to wreak a magical, life-altering transformation on Sam, no one bats much of an eye. Not even Sam.

And the climactic resolution doesn't actually resolve anything.

I've seen reviews that Fangs & All is supposed to be a metaphor for toxic and abusive families, but it's a little too blatant to be a metaphor. Boots' family are just horrible people, and their abuse isn't veiled in the least. Some of them straight up try to kill Sam, after all.

I would be tempted to say the book pays homage to Richard Moore's Boneyard series (the first several volumes of which were reviewed here), what with its mishmash of unrelated monsters living together in some sort of familial harmony, but Moore offers sympathetic characters, real humor and evocative storylines that Mukanik left out of this book. And, while it's certainly up to the reader to decide, I'd argue Moore is a much better artist, too. Mukanik's pencils -- enhanced by Winter Jay Kiakas' inks -- are too cartoony for the story he's telling and seem at odds with the narrative tone.

The parallels with Hotel Transylvania are also hard to ignore, although again, Fangs & All is neither as clever nor as funny as its predecessor.

In the end, it seems like maybe Mukanik hoped Fangs & All would earn kudos simply for providing a pair of likable LGBTQIA+ protagonists ... but neither the story nor art deserves the accolades.