Books Like Interview with the Vampire: 12 Queer, Gothic & Immortal Love Stories to Read Next (2026)
Books like Interview with the Vampire are in demand again because AMC’s series just changed shape. After two seasons of Louis de Pointe du Lac telling his story to Daniel Molloy, season three, retitled The Vampire Lestat, premiered on June 7, 2026 on AMC and AMC+, with Sam Reid’s Lestat waking in the modern world as a rock star and the story swinging between 1980s San Francisco and eighteenth-century France. If the show has you hungry for immortal devotion, toxic love that lasts centuries and vampires who are more romantic than human, this list starts with the Anne Rice books the series is adapting, then moves to the queer vampire novels, gothic classics and dark immortal love stories that hit the same vein, with heat levels on every pick.
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What Makes Interview with the Vampire Work
Anne Rice’s 1976 novel is a love story disguised as a confession. Louis, made a vampire by Lestat, spends the book trying to explain why he stayed with a man he resented, and why he couldn’t leave him even after he tried to destroy him. The AMC series, with Jacob Anderson as Louis and Sam Reid as Lestat, made the romance explicit, moved the turning to 1910s New Orleans and framed it all as an interview decades later. Season three shifts to Lestat’s own version of events, adapting The Vampire Lestat, with Sheila Atim as Akasha and Christopher Heyerdahl as Marius.
What readers want next is the same mix: immortals bound by love and resentment, a narrator who can’t be trusted, centuries passing in a few chapters, and desire that’s tangled up with feeding and power. The best readalikes are often queer, often literary and almost always about a relationship that should have ended a century ago.
Start With the Vampire Chronicles
Rice wrote thirteen Vampire Chronicles novels. The first six are the core, and the ones the show is drawing on:
- Interview with the Vampire (1976)
- The Vampire Lestat (1985)
- The Queen of the Damned (1988)
- The Tale of the Body Thief (1992)
- Memnoch the Devil (1995)
- The Vampire Armand (1998)
The series continues with Merrick (2000), Blood and Gold (2001), Blackwood Farm (2002), Blood Canticle (2003), and the late trilogy Prince Lestat (2014), Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016) and Blood Communion (2018).
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
Lestat answers Louis. He wakes in the 1980s, becomes a rock star and tells his own story: a nobleman’s son in eighteenth-century France, his mother Gabrielle, the theater in Paris, and his search for Marius, the ancient who can tell him where vampires came from. It’s the book season three is adapting, and it turns the villain of Interview into the most charismatic narrator in vampire fiction.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Vampire Lestat on Amazon →
The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
Lestat’s music wakes Akasha, the mother of all vampires, and every immortal in the world feels it. Rice widens the canvas to dozens of narrators across six thousand years, and the vampire family the show has been building finally comes together. Read it right after Lestat; they’re really one story.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Queen of the Damned on Amazon →
The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice
For everyone the show made into an Armand person. Armand tells his own history at last: taken from his home as a boy, raised in Renaissance Venice by Marius, and turned into the cult leader Louis meets in Paris. The most openly sensual of the Chronicles, and the one that explains why Armand loves the way he does. Includes dark material about his youth; read the reviews first if that matters to you.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See The Vampire Armand on Amazon →
Books Like Interview with the Vampire: Queer Immortal Love
A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson
The closest modern match to Louis and Lestat. Constanta is turned by an unnamed vampire lord (Dracula in everything but name) after surviving a raid on her village, and becomes the first of his brides. Over centuries he adds Magdalena, a Spanish noblewoman, and Alexi, a young artist’s model in 1919 Russia. Constanta narrates as a letter to the husband she finally left, and the book is about how devotion turns into control and how three people get free. A 2021 novella that became a word-of-mouth hit.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See A Dowry of Blood on Amazon →
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab
Schwab’s 2025 vampire novel braids three women across five centuries: María, a Spanish peasant who escapes a suffocating marriage in the 1500s and becomes Sabine; Charlotte, a young Englishwoman in 1827 London whom Sabine turns; and Alice, a Scottish student at Harvard in 2019 who wakes up changed after a one-night stand. Hunger, loneliness and sapphic love stretched across centuries, with the same unreliable, seductive narration Rice made famous.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Open door
See Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil on Amazon →
The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
A Black lesbian vampire classic from 1991. In 1850 Louisiana, a young woman escaping slavery is taken in by Gilda, a vampire who runs a brothel; she later takes Gilda’s name and her immortality. The book follows her in vignettes from 1850 to 2050, through California, Missouri, Boston and New York, building a chosen family across two hundred years. A gentler, more hopeful counterpart to Louis’s long, lonely century.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️ Mild
See The Gilda Stories on Amazon →
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
The lightest pick, and an MM vampire romance at heart. Simon Snow, the Chosen One of the Watford School of Magicks, spends his final year sharing a room with his nemesis Baz Grimm-Pitch, who is very possibly a vampire. Rivals to lovers with fangs, a murdered mother to avenge and two sequels (Wayward Son, Any Way the Wind Blows). Young adult, but much loved by adult readers.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Carry On on Amazon →
Suck by Cora Rose and E.M. Lindsey
Not strictly vampires, but feeding is the whole premise. In this May 2026 MM monster romance, portals open in the sky and the Vyastil of Erethar arrive needing something only humans can provide. Everest Hale volunteers for the government ritual; Rathyn of the Dark Vale is the monster commander he’s paired with. Antagonists to lovers, a secret romance and explicit heat, for readers who wanted the show’s hunger with a guaranteed happy ending.
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Explicit
See Suck on Amazon →
Gothic Classics Rice Built On
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
Published in 1872, twenty-five years before Dracula. In a lonely castle in Styria, a young woman named Laura welcomes a mysterious guest, Carmilla, whose affection is intense, possessive and unmistakably romantic, while the girls of the surrounding villages start dying. The original queer vampire, short enough to read in an evening and still genuinely unsettling.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Carmilla on Amazon →
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The 1897 novel every vampire story is answering, told in letters, diaries and newspaper clippings. Read it after A Dowry of Blood and you’ll see how much Gibson’s unnamed lord borrows from the Count, and how much Rice rebelled against him by letting the monster speak for himself.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Dracula on Amazon →
Modern Vampire Fiction With Teeth
Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
In a near-future Mexico City that has tried to keep vampires out, Atl, a young vampire, is on the run from the Godoy family, the rival vampire clan that killed her family, in a city caught up in the drug wars. Domingo, a seventeen-year-old who collects trash for a living, lets her feed on him for money and finds himself protecting her. Several species of vampire, a noir plot and an unlikely bond. More thriller than romance.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See Certain Dark Things on Amazon →
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
The antidote to Lestat’s glamour. In 1990s small-town South Carolina, Patricia Campbell’s true-crime book club is the only thing keeping her sane, until a charming stranger named James Harris moves in and children in the neighborhood start dying. Funny, furious and frightening, and a reminder of what a vampire looks like to the people he feeds on.
Heat: 🌶️ Closed door
See The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires on Amazon →
Read Next: Hotter Picks From Fractal Enigma
Our vampire shelf is sapphic, and it runs on the same things the show does: immortals who remember centuries, mortals who walk in with their eyes open, feeding as intimacy and power that has to be negotiated. For the Louis and Lestat dynamic between two men, we’ve added our darkest MM romance, a morally grey devotion story with blood on the marble. All Inferno heat with a guaranteed HEA. For more, see books like Twilight for adults and our spicy Halloween romance list.
A Taste for the Widow — Maeve Hollow
Thirteen nights, one immortal widow and a house that wants a bride. Estate attorney Mara Ellison drives up the coast to inventory a dead woman’s cliffside house and sell it before the cliff takes it. Then she reads the codicil, written in 1849, and learns what she has actually inherited. A sapphic gothic vampire romance with an ice-queen immortal, written terms and power exchange. Available at all major retailers.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Vampire Romance, Gothic, Haunted House, Immortal × Mortal Age Gap, Ice Queen, Written Terms
Start reading A Taste for the Widow →
The Vampire’s Private Detective — Maeve Hollow
An interview of a different kind. “She hired me to solve a murder. Hers. In 1798.” Private detective Sloane Barrett has three rules for clients: no lies, no touching, no wanting them. Lucasta Vale, who owns Vesper, the most exclusive sapphic club in Saint Orison, has all three in trouble before she sits down. Vampire noir with a cold case two centuries old and explicit, consent-first feeding. Available at all major retailers.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Vampire × Private Detective, Noir Mystery, Cold Case, Immortal × Mortal, Explicit Feeding, Power Exchange
Start reading The Vampire’s Private Detective →
Bite the Hand That Feeds You — Isla Wilde
For three centuries Countess Vespera Saint-Clair has ruled the northern vampire province of Belladonne from a black-stone estate above the sea. Humans call her a monster; the vampire council calls her dangerously sympathetic. Iris Morcant enters her household as a blood courtesan with a contract and a silver blade, sent to kill her. Gothic age gap, enemies to lovers and feeding as the most intimate thing two people can negotiate.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Vampire/Courtesan, Hidden Assassin, Gothic Age Gap, Enemies to Lovers, Feeding Kink, Touch Starved
Start reading Bite the Hand That Feeds You →
Crown Him in Blood — Rafe Calder
No fangs, but Louis and Lestat would recognize the dynamic. A small-town innkeeper inherits his murdered father’s crime family and thirty days to claim it, and the man assigned to guard him is the family’s consigliere: older, morally grey and very dangerous. “He handed me a loaded gun so I’d follow him home.” An initiation into a world of blood, a protector who falls first and two men who are each other’s worst idea. Available at all major retailers.
Heat: Inferno 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Tropes: Reluctant Heir, Consigliere × Heir, Morally Grey × Morally Grey, Age Gap, He Falls First, Power Exchange
Start reading Crown Him in Blood →
FAQ: Books Like Interview with the Vampire
Do you need to read the Vampire Chronicles in order?
Yes, at least the first three. Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned build on each other, and later books assume you know them.
Which book is season 3 of Interview with the Vampire based on?
The Vampire Lestat (1985). Season three, retitled The Vampire Lestat, premiered on June 7, 2026 on AMC and AMC+, with Sam Reid’s Lestat as a rock star. Seasons one and two stream on Netflix and AMC+.
Which book should I read first after the show?
The Vampire Lestat if you want more of these characters, A Dowry of Blood if you want the toxic immortal romance in one sitting, and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil for a sapphic version across centuries.
How spicy are the Anne Rice books?
Sensual more than explicit. The AMC series is more open about Louis and Lestat’s relationship than the novels, and The Vampire Armand is the most explicit of the early books. Our spice levels guide explains the ratings above.
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