Write to the Audience

Alison had a fascination with reading monster stories.  Not an uncommon obsession, but a bit strange for a vampire to be obsessed with reading fiction about vampires written by humans who had obviously never met one.  Her big sister (or at least, that was what she called Melissa) laughed at her for it, but Alison didn’t care.  Melissa didn’t have to read them.

She fit the bill for reading these books perfectly, too.  Dark hair, dark circles around her eyes, and she inevitably wore dark colors a lot, since they absorbed the light around her and left less to touch her pale skin.  No one thought twice about a girl like her buying usually drab, depressing books about monsters.  Just for kicks, though, sometimes she bought cheesy romance novels just for the reactions of the person behind the counter.

The books were not just hunt-and-kill-the-monster types like Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  She also read those with vampire protagonists, like the whining emo vampires of Anne Rice, and the very human (despite the many protests of Meyer in the prose) and ridiculous vampires of Twilight.  Although popular media ridiculed Twilight for many different reasons, Alison liked it simply because the vampires acted so human.  So normal.

Well, except the ones that actually drank human blood.  Those were just monsters, except the ones who had decided to stop, no matter what their background was.  Alison did not agree with that.

Melissa asked her sometimes why she bothered reading them.  It wasn’t an easy question to answer, since Alison had never thought about her reasons before, but she ultimately decided to say, “Because I want to see if anyone can get it right.”  She liked to think of it as the reason criminals watched cop and criminal movies--to see if the writers were smart enough to say something accurately that they had no experience with, but that their audience did.

She wanted to read a book where vampires were just other people, only with a different menu.