Pete Hautman's Sweetblood does a pretty accurate job of showing a lost teenager while half playing the vampire game, and not really committing. Lucy Szabo is a sixteen year old diabetic only child with useless parents and a pretty erudite shrink. This doesn't stop her from almost killing herself by not maintaining her insulin, but then again, it is the teen years of experimentation.
lucy's theory is that the legend of vampires evolved, like many myths, not just from Vlad Dracula the impaler, but from people dying of diabetes. The essay she writes about it gets her suspended, which seems a bit extreme to me. Maybe goth girls get expelled for writing non threating essays about vampires. who knows these days.
The most intregueing part of the story is the creepy old guy who hosts parties and has been stalking her on the internet claiming to be a vampire named Draco (orignial, ain't he?) It's so creepy it makes my skin crawl. The 40 year old after the 16 year old. At first she finds him interesting, but she's a lucid enough person to realize that any forty year old having parties to collect all the teen goths is a little freaky. the power the character of Lucy has is the fact that she has no friends, and is used to not having any, so that she has nothing to lose therefore can tell everyone off.
It's not a bad book, but it's non committal. Lucy doesn't die from forgetting to take her insulin, realizes the error of her ways, stays away from the bad kids, stops dying her hair black, and does her schoolwork. Does the normal thing.
She was better as a caustic vampire, I think.
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