V. E. Schwab: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

V. E. Schwab writes at the seam between literary fantasy and genre adventure — morally grey antiheroes, invisible women, parallel Londons — across adult, YA and middle-grade shelves, plus a turn into television with First Kill. This mix traces the Gothic and comic-book lineages behind her work, the Nashville and Edinburgh roots she claims, and the crossover authors sharing her orbit.

The Kynda mix for V. E. Schwab

• Key Influence · The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890). Schwab's recurring bargain — unnatural longevity bought at a moral price, beauty preserved while the soul rots — is Wilde's premise rewritten. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue trades a portrait for a curse of unmemorability, and Schwab has repeatedly placed her work in the Faustian-deal tradition Wilde modernised. Her aphoristic chapter openings and her interest in art as the only record of a vanishing life both run straight back to Dorian Gray.
• Influencia Obscura · Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). Le Fanu's novella, published twenty-five years before Dracula, invented the queer female vampire and the predator-as-intimate-friend. Schwab's short story First Kill — a vampire girl and a monster-hunter girl falling for each other on their first assignment — and its Netflix adaptation sit squarely in the Carmilla line, as does the Gothic appetite of her vampire novel Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil. It is the obscure root of a whole subgenre she works in.
• Local Roots · Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor (2011). Nashville is Schwab's longtime home base, and Taylor is among the YA fantasy novelists with whom she shares that Southern writing-community circuit of signings, festivals and Parnassus Books events. Daughter of Smoke and Bone's lush, city-hopping romanticism — Prague as a portal, a heroine stitched out of someone else's bargain — is the closest sibling to the European-street-level enchantment of the Shades of Magic trilogy.
• Beyond the Medium · Les Misérables by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil (1980). Schwab is open about writing to music and building books around emotional crescendos rather than plot beats, and her Parisian set-pieces in Addie LaRue — revolution, starvation, a woman surviving centuries of upheaval in the same city — draw on the sweep of the Schönberg-Boublil musical more than on any historical monograph. The sung-through structure, with recurring motifs returning transformed, mirrors how she threads repeated phrases through her chapters.
• Peer · Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo (2015). Bardugo and Schwab rose together as the authors who dragged fantasy's moral centre sideways — crews of thieves and liars rather than chosen ones — and both made the jump from YA to adult fantasy in the same window, Bardugo with Ninth House, Schwab with the Villains books. They have appeared on panels and toured in overlapping circuits; Six of Crows's heist structure and ensemble of damaged specialists is the nearest cousin to Kell and Lila's Red London.
• From the Canon · Vicious by V. E. Schwab (2013). The pivot of her career: her first adult novel and the first published as V. E. rather than Victoria Schwab, written as a deliberate dismantling of the superhero origin story. Victor Vale and Eli Ever, roommates who induce their own near-deaths to gain powers, establish the antihero-versus-antihero structure she returns to everywhere after. It explains her method better than any later book — thesis first, then characters built to argue it.
• Key Collaborator · ShadowLife by Victoria Ying (2023). Schwab has worked extensively in comics alongside her novels, scripting ExtraOrdinary in the Villains universe and the Shades of Magic series The Steel Prince, which taught her to compress her worldbuilding into panels and to write for an artist rather than a reader. Ying's ShadowLife represents the graphic-novel craft side of that partnership tradition — illustrated fantasy with a Gothic family at its centre — showing what Schwab's prose gains in the comics room.
• Legacy · The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake (2020). Blake's dark-academia novel of six magicians competing for initiation into a secret library is the clearest descendant of Schwab's model: an ensemble of brilliant, unlikeable people, morally ambiguous ambition as the engine, and a book that found its audience through online readers before major publication. Blake has been repeatedly positioned by publishers and booksellers as the successor to Schwab's antihero fantasy, and the resemblance runs to structure.

What influenced V. E. Schwab

• J. K. Rowling. The article attributes to Schwab an explicit wish to recreate the effect Rowling had on her. “Schwab stated that one of her central goals is to create a narrative "door" into a new world for her readers, the same way that J.K. Rowling did for her.” (Wikipedia)
• Supernatural by Eric Kripke. Asked about her influences for First Kill, Schwab names Supernatural as one of her two pillars. “I grew up with my two pillars: Buffy and Supernatural . Those are my families; those are my loves.” (The A.V. Club)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Joss Whedon (1997). Asked about her influences for First Kill, Schwab names Buffy as one of her two pillars. “I grew up with my two pillars: Buffy and Supernatural . Those are my families; those are my loves.” (The A.V. Club)
• Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (1904). Schwab explicitly names Peter Pan while discussing the inspiration for The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. “I was inspired by Peter Pan and the loss of memory, by my own grandmother’s dementia and the way my mother watched herself being erased from her memory” (Los Angeles Public Library)
• Watchmen by Alan Moore (1986). Watchmen (Alan Moore) — titan for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) — titan for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (1889). The Starry Night (Vincent van Gogh) — culture for V. E. Schwab (wikidata.org)
• Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu) — ghost for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• Les Misérables by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil (1980). Les Misérables (Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil) — culture for V. E. Schwab (wikidata.org)
• Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro (2006). Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro) — culture for V. E. Schwab (themoviedb.org)
• Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (1996). Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman) — titan for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly (2006). The Book of Lost Things (John Connolly) — ghost for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)

Peers and kindred spirits

• Writing Excuses. Schwab participated in a Writing Excuses podcast panel. “Thank you for being on the podcast with us, Victoria.” (Writing Excuses)
• Cat Clarke. Schwab and Cat Clarke co-wrote The Ending Writes Itself. “Most of the book was written with the two of us sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. Fuelled by many, many cups of tea and constantly distracted by pets.” (She Reads)
• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Schwab is named as a producer of the film adaptation. “Well, I first had the beginnings of the idea when I was 23, and I finished the book when I was 32, so the remarkable thing is that not only did the story shift and grow over time but so did I.” (Los Angeles Public Library)
• First Kill by Victoria Schwab (2022). Schwab was an executive producer and writer on the television series. “The author, who also is an executive producer on First Kill , explains, “I thought I was straight until I was, like, 26 and was just bad at it.” (Netflix Tudum)
• Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite by Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker (2020). Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite (Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker) — collaborator for V. E. Schwab “Vampires Never Get Old includes stories by authors both bestselling and acclaimed, including Samira Ahmed, Dhonielle Clayton, Zoraida Córdova and Natalie C. Parker, Tessa Gratton, Heidi Heilig, Julie Murphy, Mark Oshiro, Rebecca Roanhors…” (V. E. Schwab official website)
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik (2015). Uprooted (Naomi Novik) — peer for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) — geography for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett (2003). The Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett) — geography for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• Pretty Little Liars by I. Marlene King (2010). Pretty Little Liars (I. Marlene King) — collaborator for V. E. Schwab (themoviedb.org)
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor (2011). Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Laini Taylor) — geography for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (2011). The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) — peer for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Six of Crows (Leigh Bardugo) — peer for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• ShadowLife by Victoria Ying (2023). ShadowLife (Victoria Ying) — collaborator for V. E. Schwab

Who V. E. Schwab influenced

• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo (2019). Ninth House (Leigh Bardugo) — legacy for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)
• The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake (2020). The Atlas Six (Olivie Blake) — legacy for V. E. Schwab (openlibrary.org)