2025 was a banner year for queer vampire fiction, including Patrice Caldwell's debut young adult novel. Where the shadows meetKat Dunn Carmilla-inspired Hungry StoneKirsten White Dracula rethinking Lucy UndyingKorean bestseller by Cheon Sung-ran Midnight shiftAnd many more. But any of them will have a hard time matching the New York Times bestseller. Bury our bones in the midnight landTo V.E. Schwabauthor of the book “Shades of Magic” series and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRueand creator Netflix's Bizarre Vampire Series First murder.
Schwab's centuries-old epic Bury our bones connects three women who are given the opportunity to change their limited, disillusioned lives when they become vampires, although the experience takes radically different forms in 16th-century Spain, 19th-century England, and 21st-century Boston. However, they have one thing in common beyond vampirism: all three are lesbians, and all three deny their sexuality until joining the undead frees them from social norms.
In an interview earlier in 2025, when Bury our bones was published Schwab told today that her book was inspired by classic vampire fiction, and that “if you go back and look at those classic vampires, they're inherently weird.” It's a compelling quote, but this interview doesn't reveal its meaning at all. So, with The annual celebration of the Giving of Fangs is approachingPolygon reached out to Schwab to talk about the weirdness of classic vampires and vampires in general.
Schwab explains that she doesn't necessarily say “Dracula” NosferatuCount Orlok, Varneyetc. are canon gay characters. (Although Joseph Sheridan's predecessor Le Fanu's Dracula Carmilla there is, and Lestat played by Anne Rice is bisexual and confirmed gay father.) She says they are weird in the way they break the rules of heterosexual society.
“The original literary vampires represented carnal knowledge,” Schwab tells Polygon. “At their core, whether we look at [Dracula author Bram] Stoker, [The Vampyre author John William] Polidori, Carmillavampires represent a violation of social gender and sexual norms. They represent a rejection of conformity, reticence and, in particular, heteronormative and prudish structures.”
She specifically points to Carmilla: one of Stoker's inspirations for Count Dracula — as an example of how often vampires in literature represent a dark escape from convention. “She represents sex, but she also represents knowledge, power, autonomy, freedom and all these things,” Schwab says. “Someone will cancel me for this, I'm sure, but the hill I'll die on is that I don't believe in heterosexual vampires. I think that's the opposite of the core of the vampire, which is essentially a Byronian, hedonistic form that's interested in experiencing life, interested in experiencing desire, hunger, intimacy, love, whatever it is, in a way that it's not subject to itself, it's not limiting itself. So I'm having a hard time. imagining a real vampire.”
Bury our bones in the midnight land includes a number of same-sex and opposite-sex vampire couples, mixed-gender vampire-human couples, and vampires who are not necessarily in a relationship at all. But they all, in one way or another, represent this temptation to reject cultural norms. Even the book's vampire protagonists constantly find new forms of dark knowledge from other vampires, which tempt the protagonists to change, grow, and break the conventions they have developed for themselves. The only exception to this rule are the youngest undead vampires, who are not yet sophisticated enough to lead other vampires away from what is conventional to them.
“I can imagine a young vampire who hasn't lived long enough to explore all the facets of himself,” Schwab says. “But a real vampire feels like a house, not a field. To me, a vampire is a natural, organic form that has to exist in the world, and you can't bring it into a house. Sometimes this leads to a deeply symbolic extension of how vampires can't go into someone else's house. But I don't believe the vampire was meant to come in. I believe we were meant to come out.”
The association of vampires with weirdness is historically fraught: vampires are almost always depicted as predators, and often as monsters and killers, capable of assimilating and converting even unwilling or unsuspecting humans. Considering long history a conservative culture that attempts to portray people on the LGBTQ+ spectrum as predators who groom, proselytize, or simply assault vulnerable victims. The Right's War on Transgender People — the “all vampires are weird” reference may seem like a dangerous idea.
But Schwab says that when vampires are portrayed as dangerous monsters, it's usually because the narrative comes from the perspective of status quo people who don't want the rules to change or people to break free from social boundaries. “Fear of weirdness is a voice inside the house,” she says. “People who say vampires are wrong, unnatural: 'He can't go into the house, he can't stand daylight, he can't eat food, he can't have all these things, he's an unnatural monster' – it's not the monster saying that, right? It's the people telling the story. So one of the reasons I think vampires are such a wonderful, weird allegory is because of the difference between the stories.”
That's not to say that all narratives written from the human side of the equation demonize vampires—books like Twilight Make the obligate sanguiad's hunt seem exciting and romantic, even if the vampire disagrees with his prey about it.
“I have a hard time relating to some of the last vampires in pop culture because for a while they became very direct and really sanitized,” Schwab says. “This contradicts me – it feels like Well, you just wanted some of the sexy teeth, but you didn't really want any of what they represented. And what I love about vampires and why I will support them is that they represent the direct intersection of horror and romance. And I think that for queer identity, especially—but really, for any identity that is not the cultural norm—romance has a little bit of horror in it, because romance has bodily danger in it.”
Schwab says that anyone (and “every person”) who “doesn't adhere to the center line of what society deems safe and acceptable” is at risk by opening up to romantic relationships—LGBTQ+ people, people of color, people without privilege or money, people outside the narrow range of traditional beauty. “We go out into the world and are immediately put in danger because of our bodies,” she says. “It's just the nature of being. So for me, it's hard for a queer romance to exist without horror. Besides, being openly queer is scary! The reason why the women in my book are vampires is because I wanted to take people who society so often considers prey and make them predators, because I felt like that was the greatest liberation I could give them.”
Again, she emphasizes that the word “queer” does not strictly refer to sexuality or relationship status. “Not everyone in the queer community is sexual or romantic,” she says. “But the thing about vampires is that, whether it's a sexual attraction or not, they compel everyone. Every person in a vampire story is somehow attracted or repelled by a vampire. The same is absolutely true for Dracula — the men and women in this book are captured by him. He has power over Helsing, as well as the men who come into his life. This may be an antagonistic appeal. This may be an antagonistic attraction. You don't have to be sexual to be obsessive and compulsive.”
She points to Report by Robert Eggers 2024 Nosferatu as a prime example of a story about a repulsive, but at the same time irresistible vampire. “I thought, 'This man was hot. everyand he was also a monster,” she says. “I'm just fascinated by the intersection of fear and desire, and how desire isn't always based on the genitals. Desire can be simple I want them to see me, I want to be in their lightor even something you don’t want but feel anyway.”
Ultimately, she says, thinking of vampires as a queer metaphor, as a symbol of everything that falls outside the traditional heteronormative paradigm, is useful because it helps readers look beyond the boundaries they take for granted. (This explains a lot Bury our bones in the midnight landin which all the main characters question what they have been taught or what they are told they should do, especially in the roles forced upon them as women.)
“I think anything that adds nuance and complexity to the magnitude of attraction between people is great,” Schwab says. “Because what I say when I talk about strange influence is just an extension: Can we remove it from the binaries? Binaries are useless to me. They are of no use to me as a writer. They are useless to me as a person. Life exists in spectrums. We are not good and evil. Very few people are 100% straight and 100% gay. We all exist on a spectrum that includes all of our ups and downs, as well as our entire individuality. I think vampires draw people around them into this spectrum of existence.”
