There’s no escaping the fact that people have written an awful lot of novels in a short space of time featuring human-vamp couplings with Montague-Capulet-scale PR problems.

But how these inter-species soap operas play out can differ in subtle, yet marked ways; Stephenie Meyer does vampires straight up in Twilight; Meg Cabot teases the sub-genre in her affectionately satirical Insatiable series; and, Charlaine Harris strikes many moods with Sookie.

Who do you think does dead better?

My own experience with vampy novels began with the operatic seriousness of Bella and Edward’s world. Almost instantly, her uber-romantic story had its narcotic impact. The background mythologies Meyer created for vampires—the good ones and the bad ones and how they got that way—is solemn stuff. There’s no punch line in this overblown world.

[Why so serious?...]

If you think of books as a ticket to other places, then think of Anya Seton, who wrote twelve historical novels in her lifetime, as a time-traveling tour guide.

Anya Seton was born into a wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, family that consisted of her travel-writer mother and artist/writer father, and she seems to have inherited a sense of writing wanderlust; her lengthy books take place in far-reaching times and places, including Viking communities in the 900s, early New England colonies, and mid-nineteenth Hudson Valley.

One of her novels, Green Darkness, starts in 1960s England and takes a hefty turn to the 1550s for the brunt of the story before returning to the era of beehive hairdos. I was wary, at first, of the reincarnation theme and the idea of past lives wreaking physical havoc on the present.

[Come fly with me...]