2025 has been a banner year for queer vampire fiction, including Patrice Caldwell’s debut YA novel Where Shadows Meet, Kat Dunn’s Carmilla-inspired Hungerstone, Kiersten White’s Dracula reimagining Lucy Undying, Cheon Seon-Ran’s Korean bestseller The Midnight Shift, and many more. But it’d be hard for any of them to live up to the towering New York Times bestseller Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, by V.E. Schwab, author of the Shades of Magic series and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and creator of Netflix’s queer vampire series First Kill.
Schwab’s centuries-spanning epic Bury Our Bones links three women who gain the power to reshape their constrained, frustrated lives when they become vampires, though that experience takes radically different forms in 16th-century Spain, 19th-century England, and 21st-century Boston. One thing links them, though, beyond vampirism: All three are lesbians, and all three are in denial about their sexuality, until joining the undead releases them from societal 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 you look at these classic vampires, they’re inherently queer.” It’s an irresistible quote, but that interview doesn’t unpack the meaning behind it at all. So with the annual Fangsgiving holiday looming, Polygon reached out to Schwab to talk about the queerness of classic vampires, and vampires in general.
Schwab clarifies that she isn’t necessarily saying Dracula, Nosferatu’s Count Orlok, Varney, and so forth are canonically gay characters. (Though Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dracula predecessor Carmilla is, and Anne Rice’s Lestat is bisexual, and a confirmed gay dad.) She’s saying they’re queer in terms of how they break the rules of straight society.
“The original literary vampires represented carnal knowledge,” Schwab tells Polygon. “At their foundation, whether we’re looking at [Dracula author Bram] Stoker, [The Vampyre author John William] Polidori, Carmilla, vampires represent a defiance of societal gender and sexual norms. They represent a rejection of conformity, of the default, and specifically of heteronormative and prudish structures.”
She particularly 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, all of these things,” Schwab says. “I’ll get so canceled by somebody for this, I’m sure, but the hill I will die on is, I don’t believe in straight vampires. I think it is antithetical to the underpinning of a vampire, which is essentially a Byronesque, hedonistic form that is interested in experiencing life, interested in experiencing desire, hunger, intimacy, love, whatever it is, in such a way that it doesn’t conform itself, it doesn’t limit itself. So I have a hard time imagining a straight vampire.”
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil features a range of same-sex and opposite-sex vampire couples, mixed vampire/human couples, and vampires that aren’t necessarily in relationships at all. But all of them in one way or another represent this temptation to abandon cultural norms. Even the book’s vampire protagonists consistently find new forms of dark knowledge in other vampires, who tempt the protagonists to change, grow, and break the conventions they’ve developed for themselves. The only exceptions to that rule are the youngest, most newly undead vampires, who aren’t yet sophisticated enough to lure other vamps away from whatever represents conventionality to them.
“I can imagine a young vampire that hasn’t lived long enough to explore all the facets of itself,” Schwab says. “But a straight vampire seems like a house instead of a field. To me, a vampire is a natural, organic form that is meant to exist in the world, and you can’t bring it into the house. Sometimes that’s taken to the deeply symbolic extension of vampires not being able to enter someone else’s house. But I don’t believe the vampire was meant to come in. I believe we were meant to go out.”
Associating vampires with queerness is historically fraught: Vampires are almost always depicted as predators, and often as monsters and killers, with the ability to assimilate and convert even unwilling or unknowing humans. Given the long history of conservative culture trying to paint people on the LGBTQ+ spectrum as predators who groom, convert, or just assault vulnerable victims — a cyclical narrative currently playing out again in the right wing’s war against trans people — the “all vampires are queer” link could feel like a dangerous idea.
But Schwab says that when vampires are portrayed as dangerous monsters, it’s generally because the narrative is coming from the status-quo perspective of people who don’t want the rules to change, or for people to escape societal boundaries. “The fear of queerness is the voice inside the house,” she says. “The people who are saying vampires are wrong, unnatural, ‘It can’t come into the house, it can’t stand daylight, it can’t eat food, it can’t have all of these things, it is an unnatural monster’ — that’s not the monster saying it, right? It’s the humans telling the story. So one of the reasons I’ve found vampires to be such a wonderful queer allegory is because of the difference between those stories.”
That’s not to say all narratives written from the human side of the equation demonize vampires — books like Twilight make being preyed on by an obligate sanguivore seem exciting and romantic, even if the vampire disagrees with his prey about that.
“I have a hard time with some of the more recent vampires in pop culture, because for a while there, it got really straight and really sanitized,” Schwab says. “That’s antithetical to me — it feels like, Well, you just wanted the sexy teeth part, but you didn’t actually want any of the things they represent. And vampires, what I love about them, why I will stan for them, is that they represent a direct intersection of horror and romance. And I think for queer identity, especially — but really, for any identity which is not the cultural default — romance has a bit of horror to it, because there is a bodily danger to romance.”
Schwab says anybody (and “any body”) that “doesn’t toe the center line of what society deems safe and acceptable” takes risks when opening up to romance — LGBTQ+ folk, people of color, people without privilege or money, people outside a narrow range of conventional beauty. “We walk out into the world, and we’re immediately in danger, by virtue of our bodies,” she says. “That is just the nature of being. So for me, it’s hard for queer romance to exist without horror. Also, being openly queer is scary! So the reason the women are vampires in my book is, I wanted to take people who are so often seen as prey by society, and make them predators, because I felt like that was the greatest liberation I could give them.”
Again, she emphasizes that “queer” doesn’t strictly refer to sexuality or relationship status. “Not every member of the queer community is sexual or romantic,” she says. “But the thing about vampires is, whether it’s a sexual attraction or not, everyone is compelled by them. Every human in a vampire story is in some way attracted to or repulsed by the vampire. The same is absolutely true for Dracula — the men and women in that book are drawn into his thrall. He has that power over Helsing, over the men that come into his life, as well. It can be an antagonistic appeal. It can be an antagonistic attraction. It doesn’t have to be sexual to be obsessive, to be compulsive.”
She points to Robert Eggers’ 2024 feature Nosferatu as a clear example of a story about a vampire who’s repulsive, yet compelling. “I was like, ‘That man was hot for everyone, and he was also a monster.’” she says. “I’m just fascinated by the intersection of fear and desire, and how the desire is not always genitalia-based. Desire can just be I want them to see me, I want to be in their light, or even something you don’t want, but still feel.”
Ultimately, she says thinking of vampires as a queer metaphor, as a symbol of anything outside of a traditional heteronormative paradigm, is useful because it helps readers see outside of the boundaries they take for granted. (This explains a lot about Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, which has all its protagonists questioning what they were taught was true, or what they’re told they have to do, particularly in the roles enforced on them as women.)
“I think anything which adds nuance and complexity to the scale of attraction between people is great,” Schwab says. “Because what I’m saying when I’m talking about the queer influence is just a broadening: Can we take it away from the binaries? Binaries are so useless to me. They’re useless to me as a writer. They’re useless to me as a human. Life exists on spectrums. We are not good and evil. Very few people are a hundred percent straight, a hundred percent gay. We all exist on a spectrum that takes in all of our highs and lows and all of our identities. I think vampires draw the humans around them into that spectrum of existence.”
