Vampires, ghosts and spirits in a Thai light bulb commercial

Check it out. The first creature that appears in this commercial, the krasue, is a variant of the self-detaching, flying mananagal or penanggalen -- a southeast Asian type of vampiric creature -- that I've mentioned earlier. I love how dismissively the family reacts to the mythical beings. 

Vampires are people too in Vivian Vande Velde's Companions of the Night

Velde reimagines the vampire romance genre with Companions of the Night, a 1995 story of teenaged Kerry, whose trip to the laundromat to retrieve her little brother's teddy embroils her in torture, kidnap, robbery, arson and murder. When she defends Ethan against vicious kidnappers, she discovers that she got more than she bargained for, as Ethan is sneaky, unreliable and vampiric. Nevertheless, she must trust him and even adopt some of his tough, duplicitous ways if she is to rescue her family from an unhinged vampire hunter.

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Dark Needs at Night's Edge

While I was at W**-M**t buying my own copy of Twilight, I noticed an infestation of OTHER vampire romance novels all over the bestsellers shelves. I poked my head into Dark Needs at Night's Edge by Kresley Cole because it sounded vaguely promising. Neomi, insubstantial and glammy ghost ballerina, is bound forever to haunt her property, unseen by all. Fortunately, entertainment arrives in the form of Conrad, a slightly looney vampire whose specialties are frothing, gnashing and -- hooray! -- viewing Neomi. Plot ensues.

This one was hilarious, primarily because of Conrad. If you follow the link, you can read an excerpt from the book, which portrays his internal monolog as follows: "Tales of his insanity spreading once more. I've never missed a target -- how insane can I be? He answers himself: Very fucking much so." To such inane rhetorical questions, Cole also adds constant, redundant commentary on the action: "Just as his hands are about to meet around the Lykae's corded neck, the beast claps something to his right wrist. A manacle? Clenching harder, he grates out a rasping laugh." Furthermore, Cole makes Conrad curse constantly, just in case you haven't realized how BAD-FUCKING-ASS he is, okay? Conrad, incidentally, does not come across as particularly bad-ass. He comes across as a weirdo with a puppet show in his head.

I can't tell you what happened in the rest of the book because I didn't have time to finish it, but I assume that Neomi and Conrad had sex [somehow] and then lived happily ever after, at least until Neomi caught a whiff of his internal monolog and laughed so hard that she dissolved.

Enemas for inspiration

Nick Lowe, in an article entitled The Well-Tempered Plot Device [in an old 1986 issue of Ansible] in which he is ranting against hackneyed sci-fi/fantasy, terms worn-out literary devices [e.g., red kryptonite] as "little enemas to the Muse." HAH! Poor Muse, don't eat cliches, or you'll leak plot out your ass.

Twilight as fan fiction

Twilight is fan fiction, and from this fan fictional identity derives both its strengths and its weaknesses.

While fan fiction may be strictly defined as unauthorized literary activities with someone else's characters, I would also define as fan fiction a self-insertion story where the writer uses time-worn literary devices to stick him- or herself into a story, thus fulfilling his/her wishes. This definition of fan fiction thus includes Twilight.

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