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To Bite, or Not to Bite; That is the Question

by Janette Rallison

What’s your definition of a bad day? A fight with a friend? A speeding ticket? How about being attacked by a vampire and painfully turned into the undead, then realizing you must wander for eternity fighting off a craving to kill people? Yeah, that would pretty much be a bad day.

Carlisle, the leader of the Cullen clan of vampires had this bad day and (we can assume) many other bad days that followed. Stephenie Meyer doesn’t skimp when dishing out problems for her characters. Seriously, if you were Cinderella and could choose someone to be your fairy godmother, you wouldn’t want it to be Stephenie Meyer. Sure, she could come up with the ultimate Prince Charming to take you to the ball, but he might kill you afterward.

Anyway, this particular bad day of Carlisle’s, when he was attacked and transformed into a vampire, started the ball rolling for the Twilight …

Available Until Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

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A Glossary of Ancient Greek Myth

by Nigel Rodgers

A

Aegis

A sacred adornment of great importance, normally worn as a medallion or necklace around the chest of a god (or a man worshipped as a god, such as Alexander the Great), or carried on its own in solemn procession. Zeus, king of the gods, first gave an aegis to his daughter Athena, patron goddess of Athens, which made her invulnerable even to his thunderbolts. Fringed with snakes’ heads and decorated with images of the Gorgon—the dread creature that turned viewers to stone—the aegis brought victory to whichever side the god wearing it supported.

(See Athena, Perseus)

Aegean Sea

The main sea around Greece, which took its name from Aegeus, King of Athens. When Aegeus’ son Theseus, as a young man, sailed off to Crete as part of Athens’s tribute to the Minotaur, he promised his father that he would change the color of his ship’s sails from the normal black …

Available Until Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

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Introduction: A New Dawn

by Ellen Hopkins

Tread carefully, dear readers. There’s a new vampire in town, and Edward Cullen is so not your mother’s vampire. Okay, he does have a few things in common with more classic bloodsuckers like Anne Rice’s Lestat. He’s cultured. Insanely alluring. Downright dazzlingly sexy. Drop-dead gorgeous, in fact. (Sorry, couldn’t help the double entendre, and you’ll find more in this book. Authors just love stuff like that.) But what makes Edward so damn addictive is not his undeadness. It’s his abiding humanity. Okay, confession. I was at first dumbfounded by the success of Twilight and its sequels, Eclipse, New Moon, and Breaking Dawn. Oh, I’ve always understood the lure of the vampire. For many years I was, in fact, a dedicated horror reader. Stephen King and Dean Koontz were always at the top of my reading lists, along with classic authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley. When …

Available Until Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

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Not So Weird Science

by Cara Lockwood

I will admit right now that I am entirely too critical of most sci-fi. I’m the one sitting in the movie theater grumbling, “that could never happen.” Or, more concisely, I’ll just say: “Seriously?”

Could there be some crazy disease somewhere in a lab that would turn the entire planet into brain-eating zombies or sunlight-fearing vampires? No way. Beefing up shark brains to make them super-smart predators? I don’t think so. Crazed prehistoric- sized piranhas that will devour anybody with an inflatable floatie and a cooler? Please. They want us to believe this stuff?

Like take the insane DNA-spliced mutant monsters that make terrifying cameos throughout the Hunger Games. I’m supposed to believe that one day we could be ripped apart by mutant wolves with tribute eyes? Stung by poisonous and relentless tracker jackers? Or get devoured by giant lizard men?

Seriously?

As it turns out . . . maybe so.

Not only do muttations—“mutts” for short—already exist in our world, but the stuff real scientists are …

Available Until Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

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Introduction: The Girl Who Was on Fire

by Leah Wilson

You could call the Hunger Games a series that is—like its heroine—on fire. But its popularity, in itself, is nothing new. We live in an era of blockbuster young adult book series: Harry Potter, Twilight, now the Hunger Games. It’s more unusual these days for there not to be a YA series sweeping the nation.

All of these series have certain things in common: compelling characters; complex worlds you want to spend time exploring; a focus on family and community. But the Hunger Games is, by far, the darkest of the three. In Twilight, love conquers all; Bella ends the series bound eternally to Edward and mother to Renesmee, without having to give up her human family or Jacob in the process. In Harry Potter, though there is loss, the world is returned to familiar stability after Voldemort’s defeat, and before we leave them, we see all of the main characters happily married, raising the next generation of witches and …

Available Until Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

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My Boyfriend Sparkles

by Anne Ursu

Each night I ask the stars above Why must I be a teenager in love?

—Dion and the Belmonts

Bella Swan thinks of her relationship with the vampire Edward Cullen in great sweeping terms—Romeo and Juliet, Catherine and Heathcliff. And their story certainly has echoes of those iconic lovers; they are star-crossed, ardent, destined for each other, eternal, doomed. But as extraordinary as their relationship is, it is also quite ordinary, and familiar. The overwhelming intensity of their romance makes sense because Bella and Edward are teenagers, and never is the rhetoric of star-crossed love and eternity so plausible as at that time in life. And while Edward isn’t exactly human, their relationship is very much so, and its course closely follows familiar tropes of teen love, for better or for worse. Bella Swan’s relationship with Edward Cullen is immortal, dangerous, forbidden, impassioned, allconsuming—in short, exactly like first love.

I Was …

Available Until Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

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Don't Be Fooled by that Noble Chin: Stefan Sucks

by Kiersten White

Ah, Stefan Salvatore. That hair! That jaw! Those soulful green eyes that spend absurd amounts of time per episode directing agonized and/or lustful looks toward the object of his love and obsession! He keeps a journal, he broods, he sheds manly tears, he (generally) doesn’t drink human blood. He is a paragon of vampire virtue and a shining example of what a boyfriend should be.

Except, not so much. And I’m not talking about how, when force-fed human blood, he went all crazy-junkie on us for a few episodes. That I can forgive. He’s a vampire, after all, and he can’t help being drawn to blood. No, it’s the rest of the time that Stefan creeps me out. Forget lovely murderous sociopath Damon—it’s Stefan who is the true villain of Mystic Falls. He uses guilt as a tool for manipulation (of himself and others) and, more dangerously, as an excuse to …

Available Until Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

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The Emotional Pleasures of Reading Twilight

by Peter Stromberg

The Twilight Saga is, simplified, a tale of the romance and adventures of a young woman and an immortal vampire she meets at school. Readers of the novels do not reject this premise out of hand—“regular old teenage girl falls for ancient vampire”—because by now we are so used to the strange rules of romantic tales that this seems completely plausible. Indeed, a stock convention of the contemporary romance novel is the dark, mysterious, and potentially dangerous male (and in fact vampires and romance have gone together like burgers and fries since the nineteenth century¹). The potentially dangerous, inappropriate male character provides one of the essential ingredients of the formula: romantic stories require a seemingly insuperable barrier to the couple’s desire for union. The actual romance is generated by the description of the couple’s burning desire for one another, not tales of their enjoyable companionship walking the dog and picking …

Available Until Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

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Missing the Point

by Sarah Beth Durst

Remember Bambi? Cute deer. Cute bunny. Cute skunk. Very scary forest fire. Very traumatic death of Bambi’s mother. . . . Yeah, I don’t actually remember that last part. Seriously, when I saw Bambi, I didn’t realize that his mother died. I thought that Bambi’s parents were simply divorced and now it was time for his dad to have custody. Later, I was the kid in high school English who argued that Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” wasn’t about suicide. I thought it was a very nice poem about a pretty New England forest like the one behind my house, which was quite lovely, dark, and deep. So as you might imagine, I was also the kid who totally missed all the religious symbolism in the Narnia books.

But I still loved the books.

Why? Why do these books hold such sway over the hearts and imagination of …

Available Until Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

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