So Over Vampires

I picked up Stephanie Meyer's Twilight this week after reading rave reviews. It took me a long time to decide to pick it up - it was supposed to be so good, and yet... vampires. Again.

I like to be proven wrong, but this time I wasn't. Sure, I liked Interview with the Vampire when I was in grade 9, but that book came out twenty years ago. Am I the only one who thinks vampires have been done to death and beyond?

(And those books weren't great either. Remember the one where Lestat was a rock star? No, wait - a huge international rock star with no media attention, PR flacks, groupies, general hangers-on, or musical/vocal talents. Even in grade 9 I knew that was a lame plot.)

Maybe it's different when you're a teenager (and let me say that this is a young adult book), but the older I get, the more thready the vampire plot seems. In this one, the teenage vampire boy falls in love with the teenage human girl. Sure, until he reveals that he is actually 100 years old. What would a hundred-year-old superhuman creature see in a seventeen-year-old girl? Did he find her school lunches and possible dates to the prom that interesting? Was he not bored by her subterfuges to get out of her dad's house? And what was he doing in high school? Doesn't he know all that stuff already? Why doesn't he just go get a job on a night shift?

How are you supposed to be scared of a character who keeps saying how dangerous he is? I think the most dangerous thing he did in the whole book was break a tree branch. Dude, Dracula ate people. He infected their brains with incurable madness. He was no poser.

I guess the fog of adulthood has forever ruined the vampire book for me. I can't buy the rebel-teen fantasy anymore. I'm going back to my romance novels, and their adult fantasies, instead.