Imagine a cruise ship, one of those multi-tiered, wedding cake ones that knifes through crystal blue waters to the thumping beats of EDM, sparkling with diamond-clear swimming pools, laden with endless buffets of delicate morsels, and stuffed to the brim with glittery queer humans who are pumped and primed and primped for all manner of decadence. Now imagine your sunstruck cruise ship is sailing through amorphously dangerous waters while harboring two vampires and one extraordinary, indefinable, supernatural being. This is Linday Merbaum’s Vampires at Sea, a luscious mouthful of a novella that begs to be savored like a bite of tagliolini with white truffles, even as you’d like to slurp it quick and cold like a Kumamoto oyster.

I am not one given to cruise shippery. I can’t cope with claustrophobic surroundings, intimacy with strangers, or mandatory “fun.” I can, therefore, relate to Merbaum’s incipient horror of a cruise ship, as paradoxical as it might seem. When I consider it, of course, vampires would love a cruise ship: all that delicious humanity packed together like briny tinned anchovies, dangling like bait. But Merbaum’s vampires are not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, bloodsucking creatures of the night, and Vampires at Sea isn’t your customary rehash of stake-through-the-heart vampire lore. Unfazed by sunlight, vampires Rebekah and Hugh are special, unique, and only as horrifying as they are relatable. As for Heaven, the supernatural being: they’re something completely different than what their name implies.

I sat down with author Lindsay Merbaum to talk about her novella, discuss her creative inspiration, and dish the dirt on creating—and destroying—eternal beings. I’ve never before read anything like Vampires at Sea, nor, I would guess, have you. It’s smutty, funny, quirky, and altogether unforgettable.

Chelsea G. Summers: First, I’d like to congratulate you on writing a funny, sexy, smart, and sophisticated vampire tale. Now, I’d like to ask: what drew you to vampires? 

Lindsey Merbaum: The vampire is such a fascinating, malleable figure. Does it suck souls, or blood? Is it a ghoul, a child of Lilith, a demon? Or something else? 

And then there’s the vampire’s nature. I wanted to explore the dynamics between a contemporary, moralized vampire alongside the more traditionally confident and unrepentant vampire. Turning my characters into emotional vampires, where they feed off certain flavors of feeling, made things even more fun and flexible.  

CGS: Let’s talk about the setting. I find cruise ships to be innately terrifying, but there’s also the cognitive dissonance of a bright, sunny, tropical cruise and some dark, creature-of-the-night vampires. What made you decide to put a pair of vampires on a cruise ship? 

LM: Cruises horrify me. They’re floating shopping malls with a cult-y culture. They go around expelling waste, over-working and under-paying staff. There’s also something nightmarish about being trapped in this huge but very confining ship. What an odd place, I thought, to find vampires. Then again, there are sea voyages in several classic vampire novels. Traveling to a new place and bringing their vampirism with them is a motif of vampire fiction. Some strains of vampirism spread like sickness. In any case, a vampire aboard a ship usually means danger for the passengers, and this story is no different, but the vampires are also trapped in their own way. The horror of the ship extends to all. 

CGS: Vampires at Sea has a very mysterious, very magnetic non-binary character, Heaven, who is more than a little supernatural. I have to ask, why “Heaven” and what was the impetus to create a very powerful non-binary supe?

LM: I wanted Heaven to have a chosen name that was also a real word, and I wanted it to be completely over-the-top. “Heaven” being a perfect place is also an ironic nod to the “unicorn,” the mythical third partner who can magically solve a couple’s problems.  

Heaven was always non-binary, but I didn’t know they were a “supe” until later in the writing process, after I determined Hugh and Rebekah were emotional vampires. I think Heaven’s powers complement their identity, or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, they embody multitudes.  

CGS: How did you come up with your two main vampire characters, Rebekah and Hugh? Did you draw on any specific inspirations, whether from real life, page, stage, or screen? 

LM: I wanted to write a book about a couple who’d been together a long time and meets a third partner. I was inspired by the relationship dynamics at play in Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. 

I confess I also imagined early on who would play these characters in the film/tv adaptation. Hugh is a slimmer, less scruffy Pedro Pascal while Rebekah resembles a young Anjelica Huston. And Heaven would be played by Johnathan Van Ness. 

CGS: Forgive me, but I’m going to take a turn into the academic. Nina Auerbach, one of the great Dracula scholars, famously said that “every age embraces the vampire it needs.” Why does our current age need Rebekah and Hugh?

LM: I want to point out psychic vampires/emotional vampires are “real” in the sense that these terms characterize the behaviors of some actual humans who will bleed you dry, so to speak. Like these human vampires, who can control you and exhaust you, Rebekah and Hugh hide in plain sight. They live openly as the monsters they are, that no one believes in, which is a big part of how they get away with it. And then they manipulate your emotions, control your behavior without a single touch. (They will touch you, of course. But they don’t have to.) 

Ours is a monstrous age. An age of freakish technology and large-scale emotional manipulation, where no one can agree on what truth is. Everything is big and fast and the everyday terrors are so much more than we can process. Rebekah and Hugh aren’t trying to process it, they aren’t concerned with the moral crises of our age. Though they don’t understand social media very well, they’re the most perfectly chic narcissists—beautiful monsters who are so well suited to survival in this world of ours that they don’t truly inhabit.  

CGS: While your book skirts the graphic gore that most readers associate with horror, it still holds notes of the uncanny and the fear-inspiring. How does this novella explore or expand contemporary ideas of queerness and horror?

LM: It’s a queer book in many ways: It inverts expectations regarding what a vampire is, and how a female figure is supposed to feel about herself. Rebekah is free of self-doubt, self-loathing—all these very “feminine” traits. She is attracted to humans, vampires, and other beings of any gender; her palate is refined yet broad. Meanwhile, there’s Heaven, who’s the villain or the hero, depending on how you look at it, who’s also non-binary. 

I want to create complex, entertaining queer characters who are also magical and who do not succumb to the pressure to be queer role models. These characters are not good people—that’s part of the fun.  

CGS: When you talk about Vampires at Sea, you often call the book “smutty.” What’re the challenges of writing about sex, and how do you understand the connection between vampires and sex?

LM: I like to give people an idea of what they’re in for. 

Writing sex scenes and sexy characters comes naturally to me. My first book is also sexy and while it’s very serious, I still managed to work in a room full of dildos. 

I’m interested in the vampire as a sex symbol who exists on the edge of creepy and thirst trap. Just look at Dave Egger’s Nosferatu. The vampire is about taboo desires: to have sex with a non-human, to experience pain, and/or bleed, to cross barriers around what is sanitary and “normal.” The vampire makes these deep-seated, taboo fantasies possible, often via total surrender.

In Rebekah’s case, her victims fall under her spell; they’re hypnotized. Her sex appeal is reminiscent of Carmilla, with the snobbish pride of Count Dracula.  

CGS: I know that you’re a mixologist and you enjoy crafting bookish cocktails. What’s the ideal companion drink for readers of this novella who are not themselves vampires?

LM: I actually crafted a set of “Signature Drinkies” to accompany Vampires at Sea. My favorite is probably the Lilitu mocktail, which is made with elderflower tea, yuzu juice, and jasmine green tea syrup. 

CGS: Finally, when readers close the last page of your deliciously twisted and funny Vampires at Sea, where should they turn for their next book, movie, or television show? In other words, what’s the perfect chaser for Vampires at Sea?

LM: White Lotus, of course. A lot of people have compared the vibe of that show to Vampires at Sea. Though I confess I haven’t seen the latest season yet. 

The film Triangle of Sadness features a model, his influencer girlfriend, and a bunch of filthy rich people on a yacht. Conspicuous consumption at its most grotesque. 

What We Do in the Shadows the movie, the film that started it all. 

For more weird, sexy fun on the page, I recommend Sara Gran’s The Book of the Most Precious Substance, which does feature witches and sex magic, though no vampires.