For this week I read "Thirsty" by M.T. Anderson, and I read the whole thing and was flipping though the last pages and came across the other things the author has published. I didn't even realize that he wrote Burger Wuss, Feed, and the two volume The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. I have to say that I enjoyed the book, but initially I did not buy the Lord of the Vampires, Tch'muchgar, is going to come back and destroy everything. When Chris, the protagonist, describes the rituals that his town did, I just thought that his town was crazy, but then I was supposed to believe in it. Sorry, I just don't. I might just have a problem with naming things that I'm supposed to be scared of. Then he gets the holy plot device and they give it a name and how to "activate it" (Moon Prism Power!!! :p ) and I just find that so corny (out of Sailor Moon, of course).
What I did like about this book is how Chris' life is presented. I genuinely found his struggle to exist in the human world while slowly becoming a vampire intriguing. I know that if I had read this when I was in high school, I probably would have sat back and day dreamed for hours imagining what I would have done in his situation.
As for the article, I have to say that nothing in particular stood out to me. In my last undergraduate year I took a course on vampires in literature, so the article is pretty much a repeat. It did alert me to some interesting book that I want to read though.
(I had a nice long paragraph that was deleted randomly, and no amount of undo/redos will get it back. So I'll try to sum up my brilliance again.)
I particularly liked how the article discussed how young adults may not associate themselves with/as adults; therefore, they may not readily swallow the morality that adults are giving them (especially considering that adults will reinforce that young adults are not yet adults). In the last paragraph it reads that young adults need these types of novels because "the paradoxical questions of emotional and moral struggle as well as the contradictory issues of humanity may be asked and thought about without cynicism or deprecation." Vampire/paranormal fiction has always been one of my favourite types of literature, and the reasons why are always hard to articulate for me. I like the complete differentness of the world being presented; it is unlike what everyone has told you what life will be like. It gives you different sets of morals. The end of Carrie Jones Need makes you stop and think, wow, seriously, she did that? Anne Rice's Lestat drinks from morally corrupt people, so does that make him, as a vampire, morally acceptable? Though not supernatural, Hannibal Lector eats the "free-range rude" which makes you reconsider him as a moral character (fourth year honours seminar on cannibalism in literature...good times). Something that literature concerned with the supernatural offers is new moral stances in a new world that is available to them.
So my re-typed thoughts about the article are not quite as great as they were originally, so maybe I'll fill in my thoughts some time tomorrow. I swear the moment I fall asleep I'll remember something epic...
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