Lindsay Merbaum: On Emotional Manipulation, Cruise Ships, Confidence and Embracing Your Nature, and Her New Novel ‘Vampires at Sea’

I first met Lindsay Merbaum, High Priestess of Home Mixology and author of Vampires at Sea (Creature Press, 2025), in one of her Study Coven classes. Immediately I was struck by the inviting environment of writers focused on the weird and unusual. She encourages writers to push the boundaries of their ideas. Nothing is too “out there” for the Study Coven. In researching for summer 2024’s Vampires & Cannibals class, Merbaum saw her story take shape: two emotional vampires on a cruise ship. 

The laugh-out-loud journey, narrated by Rebekah, details the 14-day cruise she takes with her beloved, Hugh. On the ship, Rebekah and Hugh meet Heaven, a nonbinary influencer and love interest for the couple. Under the lighthearted surface of the novella, Merbaum explores jealousy and polyamory, unfettered consumption, and coming to terms with the self. 

As I read the novel on the South Carolina coast overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, I was reminded of the deep hunger I have to know the unknowable and how we can all learn something from Rebekah. 

Sydney Bollinger: Why did you decide to set Vampires at Sea on a cruise?

Lindsay Merbaum: The cruise was one of the original parts of the story idea. When I originally conceived it, I imagined two human people in a marriage who go on a cruise and meet a third. I was really inspired by Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, where a woman becomes obsessed with this guy she’s writing letters to that she doesn’t really even know.

Cruise shops are a wonderful example of conspicuous consumption, greenwashing, rainbow washing, and they are places of severe human rights issues. A lot of the people who do the grunt work on these ships are being paid miserably and are being exploited. That was really highlighted once COVID happened. There were suicides from people on board who were stuck [on the ships]. It’s just really grotesque and I thought that would be the perfect carnivalesque backdrop for this story to unfold. 

SB: How did you know Hugh and Rebekah were emotional vampires? 

LM: I think emotional vampires are more fun. There’s so much you can do with that, and I love the idea of beings that feed off of people’s emotions… I just thought, what if I took the blood out of it? What if they didn’t kill the people they feed off of, but there are other consequences?

They can also go out in the sun. They’re able to do a lot of things that make this trip realistic for them. Their quality of feeding off emotions fits well with the setting because they’re on this ship with thousands of other people who are just trapped there having all kinds of feelings. It’s a great feeding ground. If they were bloodsuckers, people would start noticing that people were disappearing. 

SB: Hugh and Rebekah meet nonbinary influencer Heaven while on the cruise, and Hugh quickly becomes infatuated with Heaven. Rebekah, however, notices something about Heaven is amiss. Specifically, that Heaven isn’t human. Why is Rebekah so astute at this moment whereas Hugh falls under Heaven’s spell? 

LM: Hugh is looking for answers. He’s looking for a way to not be what he is. Rebekah is a hunter and she’s a predator, so she’s pretty good at assessing threats. Also, she isn’t searching for something the same way that Hugh is. Rebekah is confident in who she is and what she wants, but Hugh is not. For a vampire that feeds off suffering, Hugh suffers a great deal. I had fun when writing these two characters thinking about the dynamic between Louis and Lestat in Interview with a Vampire. I think you can tell which one would be which in terms of the totally narcissistic vampire that revels in their nature versus the morally conflicted one who doesn’t necessarily want to be what they are but also is not going to commit suicide. 

SB: I remember reading the acknowledgements where you mention Interview with a Vampire. I made a note to read it because I never have. I’ve only seen the movie. 

LM: It’s actually so good. I went back to read it when I was researching for the Study Coven’s Vampires and Cannibals class, which ended up being research for this book, too. I just didn’t know it. I read it for the first time since I was in middle school and I was really worried that I was going to hate it because not all of her books are stellar in my personal opinion, but Interview with a Vampire is really beautifully written and she handles the moral quandary in an interesting way. 

Also, it’s just a historic book because it was published in the 70s and it’s homoerotic as hell. It features one of the first gay families you see in the media because you have two male vampires and their vampire daughter. It’s a gay family. 

SB: We learn early in the book that Rebekah had a lover prior to the story who burned Hugh’s artwork. Rebekah mentions it flippantly, like, “Oh, we just need to get over these memories. It’s whatever. Now we’re on a cruise. We’re going to have fun on vacation.” 

Does this speak to how love differs for immortal beings or is this just Hugh and Rebekah’s relationship? 

LM: Hugh and Rebekah are very dangerous to humans, and they’re dangerous in ways that are different than just they’re going to drink your blood and you’re going to die—which is super dangerous, don’t get me wrong—but is also very familiar. 

The past lover is a sign of how messed up things can get and how dangerous things can get for humans who tangle with emotional vampires. The book doesn’t really dwell on it because Rebekah doesn’t care. But there’s a number of people stumbling around that ship, not knowing exactly where they’ve been or what they’ve done or what room they’re in because of Hugh and Rebekah. Rebekah more so than Hugh. It speaks to the danger of getting involved with these two. 

Also, one trope of polyamory I wanted to explore in this book is the unicorn, where a couple seeks this magical third person who’s somehow going to resolve all the problems in their union and not have any needs or feelings of their own that are in conflict with the couple’s needs and feelings. This is something people warn against in polyamory. Unicorns are called unicorns because they don’t exist. We see this play out big time with Heaven and the way Heaven navigates the situation. Heaven, of course, being completely unlike Hugh and Rebekah’s other lovers because Heaven has their own magic. 

SB: We find out Heaven is a shapeshifter and they can turn into a myriad of different living beings. At one point, Heaven shapeshifts into Rebekah, and then Rebekah and Heaven-as-Rebekah have sex. Rebekah is super into this and loves seeing Heaven as herself. There’s a lot of humor in it, but afterward Heaven says, “I thought you might not like what I would do, as you. Then I tried it. Oh my god! It’s like so delicious, but you’re never full… it’s always so good, the way things taste when you’re starving.” 

That hit me because it speaks to Rebecca’s insatiable desire, but also to Hugh’s rejection of not wanting to be who he is. He also has an insatiable desire, but he doesn’t want to fulfill it. What does this say about Hugh and Rebekah’s struggle to be satiated? 

LM: I don’t think they ever can be. That’s their curse. They’re always hungry and they have to spend so much time of their lives searching for what they’re going to eat. It’s this really prehistoric aspect of the vampire. The vampire spends so much time trying to secure food and human culture has mostly moved beyond that. It reveals that being a vampire isn’t the most awesome thing. Sure, it’s cool to be immortal, but there are downsides. Rebekah doesn’t remember things, because how could she possibly remember everything? 

Hunger defines her in a lot of ways. She’s really driven by her hunger and it’s incorporated into her personality. Hugh resists that hunger. He’s in conflict with that hunger. 

SB: Hugh is an artist and has a very famous photograph that everyone knows. It’s so famous that people recognize him and know his name. At Heaven's behest, he gives a lecture near the end of the cruise. As Hugh is talking on stage, the room experiences this collective outpouring of grief. Only Rebekah can see through the emotional outpouring that Hugh is feeding. She’s really the only one who understands him, but he rejects this piece of himself. What does this say about their relationship, but also their vampirism? 

LM: The book has a lot of jokes about modern art and how people respond and react to modern art. Hugh’s photograph evokes feelings about war and violence… Art can be so provocative, but there’s also this question of, how are we changing the world through art? Especially when there are so many gatekeepers to accessing art. 

The audience is having one experience, not realizing they’re being manipulated by an emotional vampire. Rebekah’s the only one in the audience who recognizes what’s really happening and I think that’s a symbol of their irrevocable bond as vampires, but is that the only thing that unites them? Is that the only thing they have between each other, that they know each other’s nature? If Hugh rejects his nature, where does that leave their relationship? Where does that leave Rebekah? It’s a good metaphor for being in a relationship with someone who’s in the closet. How together can you be if you can’t accept we’re both gay? 

The scene with Hugh’s artist talk is one of my favorite scenes.

SB: Reading it, I felt myself slow down to really take it in. The book is so light-hearted, fun, and silly on the surface. Rebekah is so over-the-top, but in that scene, everything came to a point and was very real for me as a reader and for Rebekah. 

LM: It’s also a moment of Rebekah recognizing she’s losing him. She then has to figure out how she feels about that and how she reconciles being dumped, basically, with being a badass bitch. Those things don’t go together in Rebekah’s mind. It’s a poignant moment and everyone is experiencing some intense feelings, including Rebekah and Hugh. The audience just doesn’t know the difference. They don’t realize that their grief is not the same grief as the vampires. It’s about what sets Hugh and Rebekah apart and how they’re living in our reality. They’re living in our world, but it’s not the same world. 

SB: Rebekah also meets Misha. Can you speak on his character and his relationship to Rebekah? He’s much more aligned with her view. He feeds and doesn’t deny himself. 

LM: I felt like the book needed another vampire as a point of comparison. I picture Misha as a combination of Tilda Swinton and David Bowie, like, if they had a baby. Imagine what an incredible being that would be. 

That’s Misha, but Misha has no manners. Misha unabashedly feeds and feeds off Rebecca. That’s a serious faux pas. Throughout the whole book, Rebekah pokes fun at Hugh for being stuffy about things, but when she meets Misha she realizes there is a line she doesn’t want to cross. I think it was also a helpful test for her to meet someone else and see how that went and how that felt for her, considering the situation she is in. Meeting Misha is helpful for Rebecca, even if it ultimately doesn’t work out with them. 

SB: At the end of Vampires at Sea, Rebekah leaves alone. Why did this feel like the right ending? 

LM: As I was writing it, I wasn’t entirely sure how it was going to end. At the end, Rebekah strips herself of all human artifice. She doesn’t have money. She doesn’t have stuff. She’s let all of that go, along with Hugh. It’s as if Hugh, by having such a struggle with his nature, domesticated her a bit. Now she’s shedding all of that and is just feral vampiric Rebekah. She has to be on her own for her to truly embrace her own nature. She’s not the kind of character who’s going to go through this big emotional change where she’s going to realize the errors of her ways. This is not Twilight. 

I wanted her to still have an emotional journey and for her to change. She goes from “I am a badass” to fully embracing her vampire goddessness. To do that, she has to let go of some baggage. Hugh was part of that. They’re very bonded and she loves him as much as she’s capable of love, but she is cool with being who she is. He’s not. 

SB: The book is an exploration of knowing when you need to move on and when things are ending. 

LM: It’s about choosing yourself, but exaggerated because Rebekah is a total narcissist in the most fun way. But, there’s a little bit we can take from her. She has so much chutzpah. We take just a little scoop of that and I think it might be enough to help some people out of some bad situations. 

SB: I loved being in Rebekah’s head because she thinks so differently from me and how I would approach a situation. She is very much herself, sure of herself, and knows what she wants, but there’s a piece of her that is so frustrated by Heaven’s existence and that she doesn’t have the same connection to Heaven as Hugh does. She doesn’t understand why, and this goes back to Hugh seeking something else and the rift that causes between them. 

LM: He doesn’t want to fully embrace his nature and Rebekah unabashedly embraces her nature, which made her really fun to write. I’m used to writing super self-doubting, anxious characters who maybe have some little quips in there but don’t have the confidence of Rebekah. She is obnoxious in her way, but that is the point. She is supposed to be. That’s the joke. It was fun to just write someone who doesn’t give a fuck. It was liberating. 

SB: I haven’t thought about how it could be liberating to just write a very different type of character than you normally write. 

LM: I feel like I spent years writing my way through my own trauma and writing characters that had a lot of things in common with me, like they had anxiety or they had self-doubt or they kept getting in their own way. I wrote through my trauma that way and I think, now, I’m done. It’s really refreshing to write a character that has a completely different perspective and is so not you. 

*

Lindsay Merbaum is a queer author of strange tales, the founder of Pick Your Potions, and the high priestess of the Study Coven. Her first novel with Creature Publishing, The Gold Persimmon, was a 2021 Foreword Indies Finalist. Lindsay lives in Michigan with her partner and cats.