Set in seventeenth-century Istanbul, The Carpet Merchant of Konstantiniyya, Vol I is a beautifully drawn meditation on love, home, faith and loss. It tells the story of Zeynel, an ordinary man surrounded by the extraordinary – his life, his death, and the aftermath of his unwilling transformation into a vampire. Born into an esteemed family of scholars, the young Zeynel meets Ayşe, an Anatolian girl from a tiny village, who harbours big dreams. Where he is insecure and pressured to live up to the expectations of other people, she is sure of herself and knows exactly how to achieve what she wants. Perhaps there is more to their meeting than just chance. Twenty-five years later, Ayşe is a successful businesswoman, and Zeynel her contented husband. But on a trip one evening, he plays Good Samaritan to a mysterious traveller, who turns out to be his undoing… Forced into unfortunate circumstances he must learn to reconcile himself with his curse and make sacrifices to protect the people he loves, even if that means letting go of the things he holds most dear.

In the second and final installment of the Eisner-nominated online graphic novel, we follow Zeynel, a carpet merchant turned vampire, as he travels across the West in search of home, after the passing of his wife, Ayse. Through a young English friend, Alfred Grimsley, Zeynel moves to a quiet town in Southeast England. There he finds himself at the centre of a fad for all things Turkish, grappling with the meaning of home as it is distorted by the lens of Orientalism. Three years later, he is surprised when he finds the vampire responsible for his death—Mora Strigoi—at his door begging for forgiveness. While Zeynel and Mora struggle to make sense of each other's differences, Alfred Grimsley uncovers a trail of blood made by a mysterious serial killer, and makes the terrifying discovery that it ends at the doorstep of his closest friend, Zeynel. A modern Gothic satire, peeling apart the trope of vampire as 'the foreigner', and recognising that true vampirism is in the Western consumption of Eastern bodies and objects; and a dramatic narrative about the healing power of compassion, arising out of faith, love and legacy.