PITTSBURGH — There was always something about the stories of Lucy Westenra and Bertha Mason that Gwendolyn Kiste felt were incomplete — and that's putting it generously.
Lucy first appeared in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula" and is mostly defined by her two murders, first by Dracula when she was human and then by monster hunters after transforming into a vampire. Bertha is the deranged first wife of Edward Rochester who is locked in an attic in Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel "Jane Eyre."
"I always felt that you don't get to know nearly enough about Lucy and Bertha as characters," the 38-year-old Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, resident and horror author told the Post-Gazette. "It was always a question of who they were and who they might have been."
