Vampires

Vampires function in the novel as an image through which Grace Town’s mystery, her changing appearance, and her thoughts about death come into view. The references invite supernatural speculation but do not establish that vampires exist in the story’s world.

Costume and Image

For Halloween, Henry Page expects Grace to choose an unusually obscure costume. Instead, she returns dressed as a vampire, with a red ribbon tied around her cane. The transformation surprises Henry because it departs from the kinds of eccentric literary or cultural figures he had anticipated. The costume gives him a strikingly different view of Grace, but it remains a deliberate disguise rather than evidence of a supernatural identity.

Supernatural Speculation

Grace’s secrecy prompts Murray Finch to wonder whether she might be a supernatural creature, including a vampire or a fallen angel. The thought belongs to Henry’s imaginative attempt to make sense of the secrets he associates with Grace’s house; the passage offers no supernatural explanation for those secrets. Vampires therefore help express the distance between what Henry knows and what he suspects, without resolving that uncertainty through the fantastic.

Immortality and Mortality

Later, Grace refers to people who read about Vampires and desire immortality. She sets that longing against her own view of death as an end to pain and exhaustion, while explicitly clarifying that she is not speaking with suicidal intent. The contrast makes Vampires a point of reference for imagining endless life, not a model Grace wishes to follow. Across the costume, Henry’s speculation, and Grace’s reflection, the image shifts from theatrical disguise to a way of framing the novel’s concern with mortality.