Dark Lover

"I think Ward did a fantastic job of capturing the complicated zeitgeist in America, post-9/11. This is a vampire book that plays directly into the sort of fears raised by the terrorist attack: the ‘good’ vampires fight ‘bad’ vampires, who merge into the general population and can’t be detected (except by the smell of baby powder, hardly an infallible attribute). My sense is that vampires are waning as a sub-set of romance. That said, I think the vampire, in movies or novels, appeals because he is presented as primitive and aggressive, in a way that would get a man labelled a jerk in real life. In romance, he is often described as unable to exist without the heroine. Christine Feehan’s vampires, for example, see only in black and white until they encounter their ‘mate’. I couldn’t read more than a few chapters of Twilight . My daughter is in 5th grade, as it happens, but she is much younger than I was at that age. She’s rereading the Harry Potter series at the moment, which is just where she should be. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s It Had to Be You . Here’s the opening sentence: ‘Phoebe Somerville outraged everyone by bringing a French poodle and a Hungarian lover to her father’s funeral.’"