These days, we have a tendency to want a scientific explanation for everything—even in our most outlandish fantasy stories. Writers of vampire fiction, in particular, have come up with myriad explanations for how vampires come into existence, whether it’s a genetic mutation or some blood-borne disease. In Peeps, Scott Westerfeld has a particularly unsexy explanation: parasites. Through the eyes of teenage protagonist Cal, Peeps gives us the scoop on being a vampire, including the good, the bad, the awkward, and the gross. Continue reading Review of Peeps–Unsexy Vampires
Tag: Scott Westerfeld
Afterworlds Review–All of the Genres
Some of you may be familiar with Scott Westerfeld from his delightfully disturbing dystopia series Uglies. In Uglies, we saw that Westerfeld has the potential to get very dark in the doom and gloom of a futuristic totalitarian government kind of way. Westerfeld’s latest book, Afterworlds, goes down a completely different path, but may be equally entertaining to dark-minded readers.
I don’t even know how I would classify the genre of this book. There are really two different stories going on in alternating chapters: a simple realistic coming of age story of Darcy Patel—a teenage writer struggling to navigate the adult worlds of New York City, publishing, and true love; and then you have the story of Darcy’s novel about a teenage girl named Lizzie who becomes a psychopomp and falls in love with a death god as she struggles to come to terms with her new relationship with the dead. It’s really in this second story that the darker elements come into play.