Eight top queer vampire titles

Hal Schrieve is the author of books about teens, queer community, monsters and aliens. Hir first book Out of Salem (2019), was selected for the National Book Award Long List for Young People’s Literature in 2019. It was followed by How To Get Over the End of the World (2023).

Schrieve’s new novel is Fawn’s Blood.

At Electric Lit the author tagged eight "queer vampire novels that approach the idea of 'inhumanity' in creative, queer ways." One title on the list:

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?

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue