Paging Bram Stoker...

"Dang it!" I muttered as the light turned red and I screeched to a halt. I turned down the volume so that The Killers' Hot Fuss came through my mom's car stereo a little softer. I had to get to Target. I had just finished reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. It was a paperback copy, so it had the first chapter of its sequel, New Moon, at the back. I had read that, too, right to its cliffhanger ending, so now I had to go buy the book at Target for $8.79.

I still had several hours before the store closed, yet there was a sense of urgency pushing me, compelling me, even as I sat at an intersection literally two minutes away. After an eternity the light turned green and literally two minutes later I was in the Target parking lot.

I almost ran to the back of the store, for once not even glancing at purses, clothes or shoes, even bypassing a rack of DVD's with a sign displaying their price, a tempting $7.50. I was relieved to find a copy of New Moon in stock in paperback. For a minute I entertained the idea of buying the third and fourth books in the series, too, to avoid repeating the agony I had just been through. But when I looked, I saw that the third book, Eclipse, was completely out of stock and the fourth, Breaking Dawn, its debut being only a couple of weeks old, was only available in hardcover. So, I picked up just the one volume and wandered around for a bit, trying to look casual, trying to convince myself more than the preoccupied shoppers around me.

Finally I meandered to the check-out lanes, grabbing a 20-ounce Coke and a package of Iced Tea Icebreakers on my way. There, standing in line, a morsel of guilt sneaked its way into my mind as I thought of my new copy of I Capture the Castle sitting at home on the coffee table, only the first two chapters having made it to the other side of my Post-it bookmark from the rest of its pages. "I didn't used to be like this," I thought. "I didn't used to abandon classic literature for teen vampire novels. What's wrong with me?"

* * *

That was almost a week ago, and I'm doing much better now. Even though I finished New Moon less than 48 hours after I bought it and then ordered the third and fourth books from Amazon (you save 5% by buying them together), I'm still waiting for them to come in. I've managed to pass the time, though.

I Capture the Castle is a lovely and delightful book, I've found, unlike anything I've ever read yet somehow deeply familiar. (If I had an older sister and a younger brother and a retired-author father and a twenty-nine-year-old stepmother who used to be an artists' model and we all lived together in a rundown Norman castle in England in 1948, this very blog might be remarkably similar to the first-person narrative of Dodie Smith's novel.)

Also in this time of waiting, I've had a chance to think about the dilemma I discovered in the check-out line at Target of reconciling vampires and classic literature. The solution is ridiculously obvious, as I'm sure most of my readers (meaning three out of the four of you) have already thought of and are now furiously shouting at your computer screens: "DRACULA!!!!"

Yes, Count Dracula, the infamous, ever ubiquitous title character of Bram Stoker's classic novel is perhaps the prototype, or at least a reference point, for the multitude of vampires in current pop culture. I first (and last) read Dracula as a high school senior determined to become well-read in classics beyond my Austen-Bronte-Alcott safety net, years before I discovered Buffy. (I was born half a decade too late to be in its initial target audience, so I've been borrowing the DVD's from a friend.) Vampires were completely off my radar, so I came to the novel with only a vague idea that vampire stories were weird and maybe a little creepy. I didn't like Dracula.

Fast forward three (gulp!- almost four) years and I'm hooked on a series of teen novels about vampires that are certainly a little weird (in a good way) but that I wouldn't really call creepy. They are fantasy, suspense, romance, but not horror. I find my Target check-out line guilt unfounded, for they are to me what I've discovered I Capture the Castle to be, though in a vastly different, rather darker package: escapism.