Vampires have always had a weird romance with the Catholic Church – holy water, crucifixes, and the Eucharist were always seen as the proper weapons against the legendary demonic creatures, but this began to change in the 1990s.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced the character of Angel – the vampire with a soul – and the villainous vampire Spike fell in love with Buffy even before he regained his soul later in the series. Buffy herself stopped wearing her cross soon after leaving high school.

“Good vampires” hit their peak in the 2000s, when the Twilight series of movies showed the love between a vampire and a human woman.

The Catholic trappings of the evil bloodsucker’s mythology seemed to be disappearing forever.

However, one Catholic religious sister is hoping to bring vampires back to their Catholic roots, only with a modern twist.

The Curse He Chose is a new book by Daughters of St. Paul Sister Allison Regina Gliot, which was published by Pauline books at the beginning of August.

Gliot said the idea was planted by “very ridiculous hypothetical conversations” when she was at the Catholic University of America, admitting she was talking with “theology nerds.”

“Well, if the Eucharist is really the Body and Blood of Christ and vampires subsist on blood, what would happen if… X, Y, and Z kind of hypothetical things,” Gliot told Crux.

She said she asked God in prayer what to do during Advent when she was a postulant.

“So Jesus proposed that I write a vampire novel that was based on some of these theological reflections that I’ve been having over the years about the connections between vampires and theology,” the nun said, laughing.

Her book features the human character Elizabeth, a faithful teen navigating change, grief, and growing up. When she encounters a vampire who refuses to feed on blood and hides a tortured past, their lives become entangled in a supernatural conflict. When they are forced to take shelter in a Catholic church, the reality of evil, grace, and Christ’s presence in the Eucharist becomes more than just doctrine, it becomes their only hope in The Curse He Chose.

“This is the story of how I, an ordinary, living person, got caught up in a world so far beyond me that, by all accounts, I should have died. But I didn’t. That’s all due to the grace of God – and the efforts of one very not-undead vampire,” Elizabeth says in the book.

Gliot said her book is based on the premise, “What if being a practicing Catholic could save your life in an encounter with hungry vampire?”

“It’s kind of about their journeys, their journey with each other, but also with trying to figure out, well, what does this all mean, and what does it mean to be a good person or to be human? And they’re grappling with that together while trying not to die,” she told Crux.

Gliot said the Elizabeth in her story is a recent high school graduate and a normal person.

“She’s trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life, and she has a pretty solid relationship with God and with her faith, but she definitely has questions about that, too, that maybe she doesn’t even necessarily recognize herself or want to acknowledge,” the religious sister said.

She also said Christopher is not that great at being a vampire and has started developing a conscience and having reservations about some of the choices that he’s made and the evil that he’s embraced in his life.

“This happens all in the first couple chapters, so It’s not a major spoiler, but he has the realization that holy ground is not harming him the way it would harm normal vampires, and that really freaks him out, because … ‘Why? Is God singling me out? What does this mean? I’m not a good person. What’s happening here?’ And so through different circumstances, he and Elizabeth are thrown together and trying to survive attacks from other vampires,” Gliot explained.

She also said young adult readers have a reason for being interested in books involving fantasy and science fiction, since it is when they grow in their faith for the first time by themselves, “not just what their family taught them.”

“And it’s also a time when many of them fall away from the faith, but they’re starting to grapple with these bigger questions about what does my life actually mean? Why am I here? What do I want to become? What do I want to do with my life? And also these questions, bigger questions about the way the world works and how existence works,” the nun said.

She said fantasy and science fiction are all over our culture today.

“Different fascination with the occult and invisible realities, whatever those may be, whether it’s manifesting through an interest in a fantasy storytelling style where you have lots of mythological creatures or things like that, or an interest in witchcraft or witchy things, is very popular today,” Gliot said.

“And I think that that kind of points a lot of times for this search for truth, like this intuition that there is more to this world than what I could just see on the material level, and wanting to understand that or tap into that in various ways, those deeper, bigger longings in our hearts that don’t seem to fit into the normal school schedule or nine-to-five work day,” she said.

“Because as Catholics, we do believe in invisible, spiritual realities, like God created all things visible and invisible. We do believe that angels and demons are real, and that the choices that you make matter, not just for the things that you can see in front of you, but they also have a supernatural, eternal weight,” she continued.

Gliot explained her book is fiction – vampires are not real – but the themes she is exploring , from the faith, God the Church, and the kinds of challenges her characters face, are very real. “[E]ven the way that the vampires are kind of created according to the world building that I’ve used,” she said, “it’s being used very intentionally to reflect the true nature of how evil actually works in the world and in our lives and how we can interact.”

When asked how being a religious sister affected her writing, she said she wouldn’t be a writer otherwise.

“Honestly, because so much of the inspiration for my stories and even how I kind of pray them out, really has a lot to do with my relationship with God and the things I pray about,” she told Crux.

Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome