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Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2000
$9.95 hardcover
184 Pages

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Jessica has a secret. Even though she is still in high school she has already written and published her first novel. She can't explain where she gets her ideas; when she writes it's as if she were gripped in a mysterious compulsion and the stories almost write themselves.

Other than that, it looks like business as usual as she starts her senior year. Everyone dislikes her and she despises every one. No one will even speak to her except for two new students who have made an attempt to be friendly. Jessica could care less about Caryn, but Alex . . . Alex, now, is the very image of Aubrey, a vampire from her book. But Jessica knows vampires don't exist. Do they?

They do. Every word Jessica has written about them is true and the vampires don't like it one bit. As soon as they figure out how and why Jessica knows what she knows, well . . . The only things standing between Jessica and certain death are a young witch and the vampire villain from her own book!

Like Jessica, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes is a teenage author. She got off to a strong start in 1999 with her first novel, In the Forests of the Night, a subtle and deceptively simple vampire story. Demon in My View is a coyly self-conscious sequel of sorts, more ambitious but less successful. It is a vicarious wish fulfillment whose ending is obvious as soon as we are allowed to realize vampires are real; Jessica and Atwater-Rhodes are too much caught up in the romanticized vampire myth to expect otherwise.

As is often pointed out, it is hard to do anything truly new in vampire fiction, and Atwater-Rhodes owes a debt to such probable influences as "Vampire: The Masquerade" (a "World of Darkness" role-playing game from White Wolf) and Anne Rice's popular novels (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and others). Although her witches and vampires are nothing new, Atwater-Rhodes pulls off a pair of reasonably solid vampire novels for young adults; and she does propose a couple of interesting twists, which to reveal here would spoil one of the secrets from Demon in My View.

The reader was willing to go along with Atwater-Rhodes in In the Forests of the Night as she imagined what it might be like to be a vampire. Her human interactions and reactions in Demon in My View are less believable. Jessica, for instance, wallows in anger and self-pity, apparently blind to the fact that she has some responsibility for her own problems. Atwater-Rhodes, at that age herself, lacks the perspective or skill to handle the irony, and provides no new insights from the immediacy of her teenaged viewpoint.

That In the Forests of the Night was good does not automatically make all subsequent efforts equally worthwhile. Atwater-Rhodes still has a lot of room to grow, but it is a measure of her skill already to say that she is worth continuing to watch.

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes's vampires:

• In the Forests of the Night. Delacorte, 1999
• Demon in My View. Delacorte, 2000

Dustjacket art by Cliff Nielsen; image used courtesy of Delacorte.

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