Creatures of the Night

First off, Happy New Year!! Now, to the books: About two years ago, a new show came on the WB that seemed to put the teenage community at buzz. The series was The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith. Unfortunately, I am not going to blog about the series now, however, when reading the books along with watching the series faithfully, I realized what a wonderful author L.J. Smith is. So, I came to reading more of her material, and that is what I am going to be blogging on for the next two weeks or more.

The series I am looking at in particular is the Night World series, where a secret society of vampires, shape shifters and witches hide from humans. In Book 1 of the series, there are three separate novels which I will blog about separately. So the first story in the Night World series is called Secret Vampire. In this story, a sixteen year old girl named Poppy North wakes up on the first day of summer vacation to learn that she has a terminal cancer.

She and her best friend, James Rasmussen, look into the options for treatment, and discover that there really aren’t any. But, there is a way for Poppy to live, but it means she has to leave everything behind. You see, James is a vampire; more specifically he is lamia, who are vampires that are born and can grow up. James can turn Poppy into a vampire and cure her, but she would have to leave everything and she would be sixteen forever.

What Poppy doesn’t realize at first is the danger of this. Not only could she die in the process, but turning humans into vampires in illegal in the Night World, and the penalty for it is death to both people. So, even if Poppy makes it through, she would have to run and fight forever as well. It is also strictly illegal for any Night people to fall in love or marry a human, so James cannot use that as an excuse for turning her, even if it might be true . . .

This is a great vampire story, of course, now that our great nation is so obsessed with them. The trio of Poppy, James and Phillip, Poppy’s twin brother, create a huge mess of hatred and friendship before they realize what’s important. Add in James’ crazy cousin Ash Redfern, and you have quite a lot of trouble, but it ends up well. One thing I love about this series is that the characters bleed into the other books, so you are likely to see James, Poppy and Ash again in another book.

RED’S ALL STAR RATING: 3 out of 5 stars.

MASS APPEAL: Supernatural lovers will die for this book (no pun intended). Where a lot of other authors fall short in actual writing ability by covering up with crazy stories, L.J. Smith stands out by not sucking (again, not intended) at all. You’re really going to sink your teeth into this one (wow . . . really?). Sorry, can’t help myself.

This is the link to Amazon for Book 1: Click here!