Reading Lists

These authors find creativity and liberation in hunger, desire, and depravity

Photo by rylan krupp on Unsplash

Vampires are a mixed signifier. They can represent sinister, unstoppable power or conquerable vice. While their folkloric iterations were possible to ward off with garlic and other household items, as the figure of the vampire has evolved into modernity it has become chained to its victims by bonds of power and desire. Eighteenth century Europe imagined vampires as physically grotesque, but by the nineteenth century, the German literary imagination was already transforming them. Goethe’s vampire girls search for ancient pagan lovers. In the hands of tubercular Romantics, vampires could signify the hot, appealing scions of the upper class who would delight, use, and then abuse you (Polidori, author of The Vampyre, based a vampyric sketch on his boyfriend/boss, Lord Byron).

Gay overtones were part of the vampire tradition from the start—Christabel, written between 1797 and 1800 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, focuses on a woman seduced by a female supernatural being named Geraldine. Bram Stoker knew Oscar Wilde from childhood and wrote *Dracula *shortly after Wilde’s indecency trial over sex with men. The book features clear caricatures of Wilde’s manners. In the trial’s wake, a reactionary Stoker destroyed his own correspondence with Wilde, edited all references to personal correspondence with Wilde to add condemnation of him, and began work on a book about a predatory monster who lures a young man to his castle. Even if vampires weren’t gay, they were frequently menacing men with foreign accents or viciously sexual women—in either case, threats to the system of control and containment represented by state and family. It’s interesting to note that the appearance of literary vampires coincides with the acceleration of European imperialism, anxiety about revolutionary violence, and the enforcement of racial hierarchy.

In my book* Fawn’s Blood,* vampires are about blood drinking, gay sex, and taking pleasure in monstrosity and perceived deviance. I wanted to write about young queer people’s relationship to their need for other queer people—the raw, sexual kind of need, the desire for inspiration while living a life without precedent, and also the kind of need that asks for advice, care, solidarity and support. Like vampires, queer people have, depending on the era they live in, a tendency to be lonely. In imagining vampires, I want to show a web of people tied together through bonds of desire, people who have the potential to harm themselves and others but who also have the potential to survive if their needs are met. Vampires can signify a lot more* *than contagion and the erosion of newly-invented family structures.

Here is a list of queer vampire novels that approach the idea of “inhumanity” in creative, queer ways.

*Carmilla *by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Carmilla was published in 1872 and is among the first vampire novels written in English. Laura is our Gothic heroine: an Austrian girl who as a child dreamed of a vampiric panther and a beautiful scary woman by her bed. After a carriage accident, she meets Carmilla, a sickly girl who looks just like the lady from her dreams. Carmilla touches Laura’s hair, kisses her, and invites herself to live in Laura’s house. She hates the sound of church bells and hymns and her presence causes Laura to have nightmares of a catlike beast feeding on her. It takes a shockingly familiar old painting to clue our heroine in that this stranger might be a seventeenth-century fiend. Conversational, serially published, salacious, and quite readable, this book’s great surprise is how clearly lesbian it is (they kiss each other’s faces, bounce each other’s long brown hair in their hands), even though the framing is that lesbianism will lead you to a coffin of blood.

*Hungerstone *by Kat Dunn

Hungerstone, a Carmilla-redux, is part of a recent lit-fic grappling with the Gothic origins of speculative fiction and the novel in general. Here, Dunn revives the Victorian lesbian in a tale about the wife of a steel magnate discovering her true desire…for Carmilla, who, as in the original, invites herself into Lenore’s house and feeds on local girls. Desire becomes a source of tension as she grapples with terror of the unknown and her need for companionship, sensuality, and love. There’s something fun about taking what you like from a literary predecessor and running with it—Carmilla is ripe to inspire more lesbian takes.

*Thirst *by Marina Yuszczuk

Thirst is a contemporary novel that follows a monstrous sapphic vampire unleashed on 19th century Buenos Aires. After a self-enforced hibernation of over a century, she falls in love with Alma, who is grieving her dying mother in the present day. Our nameless vampire was never human since she was gifted as food to a male vampire, fed on in childhood, turned, and taught her only feral hunger. After her vampire sisters are killed by slayers, she becomes a solitary woman of the world— an inverted Gothic heroine who murders the innocent rather than fight for her own virtue. Vampirism in this book is about distance from humanity, the hypocrisy of “civilization,” and the disconcerting proximity between intimacy and the ability to do harm. Each time our vampire comes close to the women she desires, she can only watch as they die at her hands or destroy themselves to avoid her; as she risks pursuit of Alma, the woman who opened her tomb, she wonders if love means death. One could also ask—does feminism or lesbianism mean abandoning the family?

“Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time” by K.M. Szpara

This novelette follows Finley, a gay trans man who is nonconsensually, but pleasurably, bitten by Andreas, an ancient gay vampire of dubious morals. In this world, laws prohibit vampires from biting humans and turning them into vampires without government approval. There is also an explicit ban that prohibits trans people from turning into the undead. When Finley’s new body betrays him, he goes for medical help, only to discover that his long, new life will be spent outside the confines of the law and in a slightly alien body that will no longer respond to human medicine. Sexy, worldbuilding-heavy, and trans, I didn’t read this until after I’d written my own book, yet many of Sparza’s ideas about vampires, transness, medicine, and contagion echo my own.

Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman

Everything is going wrong for the trans man vampire and archivist at the center of this book. He is trapped in early hormonal transition, a dead-end archival job, lives in the basement where he works, and his TERF colleague is trying to get him fired—she saw an embarrassing personal object on his desk which is also his bed. Suddenly, he is handed a trove of documents related to a dead TV writer by the writer’s attractive wife. The black box of human nature, the terror of confronting desire, and the embarrassment of being truly known by someone else form the heart of this vampire love story.

Lost Souls by William Joseph Martin

This Southern novel from the goth-inflected trans New Orleans-ophile of ’90s bad boy fame involves a teen runaway, a vampire bar owner, and plenty of blood, guts, and intrigue. Set in the same town as *Drawing Blood—*a gay story about two traumatized men falling in love in a haunted house—Martin’s vampire novel is a character-driven story of a half-vampire youth and a pair of human teens motivated by passion for countercultural music and tangled up in the business of a vampire coven whose leader is an age-old predator. This Southern, counterculture, over-the-top horror adventure takes itself just seriously enough, like a Marilyn Manson lookalike with real knives in their belt. Martin later wrote a much tamer book called *Liquor *about two gay guys just trying to open a restaurant in New Orleans. Lost Souls is him at his darkest and pulpiest.

The Lost Girls by Sonia Hartl

Holly, trapped in her adolescence after being turned by predatory vampire Elton, tries to get revenge. Hartl mocks the romantic hero of vampire/monster romance in the form of abusive, manipulative Elton, who seduces teen girls and turns them into vampires. Holly, Rose, and Ida, his victims, pursue him righteously, yet there’s melancholy Anne Rice angst going on as well—the women have had their lives derailed and options restricted by a bloodthirsty boy. There is meaning they can find together, but it might be a slog. Nestled inside its revenge narrative, the book explores how these women struggle to find sustainable dynamics with one another. The ending is not fluffy, and despite what they learn, these girls are not well-adjusted.

*It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror *by Joe Vallese

These essays meditate on queer and trans relationships to the horror genre. I love the essays on *Hereditary and Dead Ringers *more than I love the movies themselves. There are explorations of *The Birds *and unconsummated lesbian desire, takes on trans pregnancy, closeted feederism, love for one’s body, and the echoing afterimages of *Sleepaway Camp *through different queer brains. An unexpected highlight of the book is Bishakh Som’s beautiful black-and-white illustrations that punctuate the thematic sections organizing these essays.

Take a break from the news

We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox.