V.E. Schwab and Queer Vampire Storytelling

V.E. Schwab and Queer Vampire Storytelling

This article relates to Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

Author V.E. Schwab is known for bestselling fantasy novels like Vicious (2013), in which college roommates study the darker side of gaining superpowers, A Darker Shade of Magic (2015), where a smuggler's deal goes awry while they travel through parallel worlds, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020), in which an immortal woman is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. After publishing her first few novels, Schwab came out to her audience as gay in her late twenties, a process that she wrote about for O's "Coming Out" series in October 2020. She wrote that she felt pressure to come out when she started writing more explicitly queer characters and having readers question her characters' authenticity; and in turn, coming out affected her fiction. "Your characters begin to live the way you do, unrepentant," she wrote. "Never reduced to their queerness, only expanded by it. It infuses them in many ways, sometimes subtle, others loud. They take up space in the world, space they deserve."

As a gay fantasy writer, Schwab has an interesting perspective on the vampire story. Vampires in popular culture have often been representative of forbidden sexual desire and of a cultural anxiety surrounding queer identity and struggles. However, Schwab appears to have slightly different intentions when it comes to vampires and queer storytelling. For example, her first foray into vampire storytelling was "First Kill," a short story about an unwitting high school crush between a vampire and a monster hunter that appeared in an anthology titled Vampires Never Get Old: Tales With Fresh Bite in September 2020; two years later, it was turned into a Netflix television show. While the fact that First Kill was a fantasy show with two girls as the romantic leads was notable, Schwab made it very clear in several interviews that it would not be strictly about queer identities or coming out, saying that while she appreciated the power of those types of stories, there was an "othering component" to them. "Well, what that says to a young queer audience is, 'This is why we write stories about you.' Not any other aspect," she told CBS News. "Your sexuality is the reason you are on this page or on this screen… If it's not about your queerness, you're not going to be at the center of this story."

The first episode of First Kill follows Juliette, a young vampire who must kill her first human as she also finds herself drawn to a classmate, Calliope, who is later revealed to come from a family of monster hunters. But the show focuses less on the fact that the two leads are women and more on the Romeo and Juliet-like drama and the fact that each girl is the other's first love. Similarly, Schwab's latest novel, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, follows a magnetic, dangerous lady vampire from the 1500s into the modern day—and while Schwab herself has dubbed the book her "toxic lesbian vampire saga" on Instagram, it is a story very much defined by decades of adventures and bloodsucking rather than the gender identity of the vampire's chosen partners.

In Schwab's own words, she is more interested in writing "queer existence," which has less to do with queerness and more with the multitude of identities within queer people. "I like to write genre stories featuring queer characters to say, 'You get to have adventures, you get to have genre, and it doesn't always have to be about your gender or sexuality,'" she told The Queer Review.

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This article relates to Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. It first ran in the June 18, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.