CNA Staff, Oct 31, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).
When a religious sister felt inspired to write a Catholic vampire trilogy, she knew the inspiration came from Jesus — but she did not know if the other sisters would think she was “crazy.”
Vampire novels are not known for inspiring teens to become Eucharistic ministers, attend Eucharistic adoration, or discern religious life. But the “In Aeternum” series is different. The books aim to draw their fans to Christ.
After she felt Jesus “stir up the story idea,” Sister Allison Regina Gliot, a Daughter of St. Paul, got to writing.
“The nuns are going to think I’m crazy that I wrote a vampire book,” Gliot remembered telling Jesus in prayer.
But after the leap of faith, Gliot’s story has made it into print.
The “In Aeternum” trilogy begins with “The Curse He Chose,” which centers on Elizabeth, a Catholic teenager who gets caught up in a fight between vampires and is forced to go on the run with a vampire outcast named Christopher. The story continues in the second book, “The Light They Left” — announced Oct. 31 — which will be released on Jan. 2, 2026, by Pauline Books and Media, the publishing house of the Daughters of St. Paul.
Why a vampire novel?
The Daughters of St. Paul, also known as the “media nuns,” evangelize through media — from social media to storytelling to, apparently, young adult Catholic vampire books.
“There are a lot of teens and young adults who love fiction, who love supernatural fiction, who love urban fantasy and sci-fi stories,” Gliot said. “And so if we can provide a Catholic option, it can genuinely move them forward in their relationship with God and their relationship with the Church.”
Besides being hugely popular among young adults — especially with the “Twilight” craze of the early 2000s — vampire novels have something else to offer.
Classic vampire stories had explicitly Catholic elements, Gliot noted. In Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” for instance, the Eucharist, holy ground, and a crucifix all help protect against vampires.
Gliot, who grew up reading vampire stories, wondered: “Why did that get cut out?”
The “deep devotion” that the Daughters of St. Paul have for the Eucharist first drew her to the community. By interweaving spiritual realities throughout the novel, Gliot hoped her writing could support young readers in their faith regarding things like the Eucharist.
“By having characters like vampires who are super attuned to invisible spiritual realities, it helps readers see and realize that those realities are actually real,” she explained.
“Vampires are not real, but the Eucharist actually is Jesus,” she said.
Her books deal not only with vampires but also with having a relationship with God — and all the challenges that come with it.
The main character, Elizabeth, struggles with things that Gliot herself has wrestled with in her faith.
“One of the things that Elizabeth fears in showing her anger towards God is: What does that say about her?” Gliot said. “If some part of her hates God, is she going to run into the limits of God’s love? Or is God only helping her because she’s doing what he says?”
Meanwhile, the outcast vampire Christopher “has to learn how to experience” God’s love and forgiveness.
In the story, vampires have “rejected their humanity” to the point that they forget their human past. But in Book 2, Christopher’s memories start to come back.
“He struggles a lot with forgiving himself and struggles to accept forgiveness from others,” Gliot said. “And so accepting forgiveness from God is an even harder thing in some ways for him.”
The story has “organic Catholicism woven in,” she explained. The power of the sacraments and other theological elements are “all wrapped up into the action and the emotional stakes of what’s going on in the story.”
Several other sisters and a priest reviewed the manuscripts to make sure “that readers are not going to walk away with any misconceptions about Catholicism,” Gliot said. The book even includes a “fact or fiction” section at the end as a resource for readers.
The biggest theological idea that comes up in the series is that “God never gives up on us — that you are never so far gone or so far fallen that you can’t come back to him, but you have to make that choice to come back,” Gliot said.
“He’s there, he wants you, but it’s up to you to start taking those steps towards him and responding to that grace,” she said.
For future readers
As she wrote, Gliot felt a call from Jesus to pray for her future readers.
“What future readers?” she remembered asking herself.
But she prayed anyway.
When the first book came out, Gliot began to see these prayers coming to fruition.
Readers have reached out to Gliot over social media and through handwritten letters “to share how much they love the book and cannot put it down and how they’re sharing it with all their friends,” she said.
But what has moved her most is when readers have reached out saying that the book “changed their relationship with God” for the better.
“I’ve had readers share that they have become Eucharistic ministers at their parish after reading my book or that they’ve started discerning religious life or going to daily Mass,” Gliot said.
“God is present with the reader, just like he was present with me when I was working on the book,” she said.
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She’s not a NUN. She’s a religious sister. I’m surprised the writer does not know this.
An interesting dimension of religiosity, meaning expression of belief from a religious sister. She takes up the dynamic, anger at God, an ancient one at that as indicated in several Psalms, Moses’ anger, and several authors latest among them minister Brad Hambrick.
The resolution of most authors is to bring it to God and work it out, that God is greater than we recognize. Vampires however is odd. She has that look conveyed in the photo that says ‘impressed with my zaniness?’ Nevertheless, there is a rationale that has merit as she explains. One is reverence for the Eucharist.
Werner Herzog 1979 director of Nosferatu adds the Eucharist in his rendition as an antidemon substance. His Nosferatu questions the heroine’s faith describing faith as the desire for what one knows does not exist. Faith is a gift. That the Apostle says is evidence for what we hope for.
The tension between a questionable desire and conviction is the assent, an interior knowledge of evidence that has its own, unique intelligibility. An intuitive apprehension, the certitude in which subject and predicate are a singular act of knowledge.
If Sister Allison can weave that into her writings on the seeming bizarre she can likely contribute to understanding the challenge many have with faith in Christ as the resolution to their search for truth.