How vampires show us God’s mercy: Nun who writes vampire novels concludes trilogy

Sister Allison Regina Gliot, a Daughter of St. Paul, speaks on God’s mercy and creativity as she concludes her Catholic young adult vampire trilogy.

Vampires can teach us about ourselves and about God’s mercy, at least according to Sister Allison Gliot, a religious sister who wrote a vampire trilogy that concluded this summer.

Gliot is part of the Daughters of St. Paul, a religious order with the mission to evangelize through media. The vampire trilogy is a part of that evangelizing mission.

Gliot’s “In Aeternum” trilogy begins with Elizabeth, a Catholic teenager caught up in a fight between vampires who goes on the run with a vampire outcast named Christopher. The story concludes in the third book, “The Dawn We Seek,” which was released July 24.

In an interview with EWTN News, Gliot shared about the spiritual journey of her writing process, what Catholics can learn from cryptids, and a prayer request.

EWTN News: As you conclude this trilogy, what stays with you from the spiritual journey of writing it?

Gliot: When I first started writing this series, it was a solitary endeavor — just me and Jesus. When I shared the books with my publishing house, the circle grew to include my sisters and editors.

But now that actual readers have been engaging with these stories and sharing their thoughts, hopes, and spiritual struggles with me as a result, Jesus has really been encouraging me to carry the readers in my heart and prayers in a special way.

This story isnʼt just mine anymore.

I surrendered it to God and to the readers when I published it, and itʼs beautiful and profoundly humbling for me to see the fruit it’s bearing in so many lives.

How can writing be a spiritual experience and how do you as a religious sister connect your faith with your writing?

For me, storytelling is a spiritual experience because itʼs something I do with Jesus. He provides the initial inspiration and asks me to trust him enough to put the time and effort into writing it down. Then he stays with me during the writing, teaching me things through the experience and helping me make connections I never would have been able to see on my own.

Writing stories that involve my faith helps me to explore and live that faith more deeply, and, at the same time, I often notice my spiritual struggles and faith epiphanies from religious life trickling into my writing in various (and sometimes surprising) ways.

How does the trilogy deal with sin, redemption, and our relationship with God, and what can we learn about ourselves through fictional cryptid characters?

In the “In Aeternum” trilogy, vampires are a mirror of our wounded humanity at its worst. They are an exploration of just how far we can fall when we truly make the choice to embrace sin and evil.

But because vampires embody such an extreme, they also provide an opportunity to show the extremity of Godʼs mercy and the lengths he will go to save us — if we let him. And if weʼre willing to change our ways and step toward Godʼs goodness, even if weʼve gone very far in the other direction, even if itʼs just a tiny step.

No reader will have committed the same atrocities as the vampires in my books (I hope). But if there can be a possibility of repentance and redemption even for them, then I pray that even readers who feel like theyʼve hit rock bottom can find a ray of divine hope through these books.

How does Catholicism invite us to use our imagination and creativity? How does it expand our imagination rather than limit it?

The Catholic Church teaches that God created our imaginations and gave us gifts of creativity — gifts that he desires us to delight in and to use for building up his kingdom.

But God is the ultimate Creator, and his imagination far surpasses ours. He can speak to us through so many means — including beauty, story, and imaginative play. Catholicism, far from limiting our imagination, puts us in touch with Godʼs imagination and communicates his very life to us through the grace of the sacraments.

When we fully embrace our faith, allowing God to infuse us with his grace and inspire us with his divine love, we find ourselves on fire with the same creativity he used to make the world and everything in it. Exercising that creativity through our minds, wills, and hearts in harmony with God is a powerful force to draw us even closer to him.

What does the field of fiction-writing look like for Catholic authors?

I’d like to ask anyone reading this to say a prayer for Catholic authors who are seeking to bring God and the faith into popular genres. Since I began publishing Catholic urban fantasy stories, I’ve had so many authors and aspiring authors reach out to me to share their hopes and dreams for their faith-based stories. But even though these stories are so needed in our world today and have so much evangelizing and catechetical potential, it isn’t an easy field to navigate or break into. So please pray for Catholic authors and storytellers, that the Holy Spirit can bring much good out of the work we strive to do in his name.

To learn more about Gliot’s new book, visit Pauline Books & Media.

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