Recent additions to the lore have reframed vampirism as an escape from the horrors of being a marginalized person in a world that favors White men.

In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a Black man is offered freedom from the realities of being a Black man in 1932’s American South by becoming a vampire. In V. E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, it’s women who are given the choice: become a vampire or remain an object in a man’s world.

“How do you break the system?” Schwab asks, reflecting on the realities Sinners portrays, before expanding the question to her latest book, where two women, several hundred years apart, are told, “the only way to break the system is to leave the system entirely,” Schwab says. “I think that it’s tempting.”

Spanning 500 years and focusing on three women (o

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