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Sixteen-year-old Hilda has thought she was living with a mental illness for most of her life, but all of that changes when she meets Tyler, who claims to be einherjar, one of Viking god Odin’s warriors.
Can Hilda prevent the world from suffering its catastrophic fate once Ragnarök has begun?
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You can’t hurry love. You also can’t cultivate it over successive manipulations of the timeline. After inventing a time machine, Nigel and Daniel dance a tango through time as they vie for Paula’s affections.
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Heddy is Sad is an excellent book for educating children, youth, parents, friends, and caregivers how to recognize when someone is suffering with depression and how to support a loved one in need.
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All too often, we focus on the negatives that come with a diagnosis of ADHD. It’s time that changed, and we begin to focus on the positives. Harry has a lot of Energy is an amazing book for helping children, youth, parents, and caregivers who have first-hand experience with ADHD to see the positives to this unique condition.
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Astraphobia, an extreme fear of thunderstorms, can be debilitating at times. Most children outgrow their fear of storms, but until that happens, every dark cloud can cause anxiety and fear. Luna is Afraid of Storms is a great book to help children come to terms with their own fears or unease when it comes to storms alongside Luna as she does the same.
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Reading a book in and of itself is a great way to stay occupied, but Luna has Nothing to do will spark your child’s imagination, suggesting wonderfully fun ideas he or she can do to stave off boredom while staying inside.
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Addison Haney is released from a psychiatric ward having suffered amnesia after an unknown traumatic event and embarks on a quest to figure out who she was. Rather than come together, her life begins to unravel. Addison suffers from a strange photo sensitivity to the sun, her boyfriend, Piers, is never around during the day, and Percival, the local club owner, seems to know more than he’s letting on. If that’s not bad enough, people around her start to die horrible, bloody deaths.
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No sooner has Bethany beat the Carrington Pulitzer Revelation Chronicles Online Extended Playpack game than Agents Quinto and Nimoy show up on her doorstep (because that’s not weird). Their offer: serve her government by finding stolen and hidden secrets in the game.
The Lure of the Vampire, or Why We Fantasize about Dead People
Graphic from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burne-Jones-le-Vampire.jpg
Vampire lore owes its popularity to Bram Stoker and the release of Dracula in 1897 at the height of the Victorian Era. At that time there were strict rules for how men and women should act in public, such as women never appearing in public or found alone with someone who wasn’t their father, brother or husband. Women’s clothing was generally quite restrictive with high necklines, bustles (to accentuate the behind) and corsets (to cinch the waistline). Necks and ankles were considered “sexy”, only because they were, for the most part, hidden from view.
In the novel, Dracula creeps into both Lucy and Mina’s rooms whilst they sleep to bite each of them on the neck. This challenged a number of social values including men and women being alone without chaperones and men seeing women in anything other than full dress. Women were expected to restrain their desires, yet the female characters in Dracula welcome his penetration (pun intended). The titillation factor was high as a result, which might account for the popularity of the novel in the long term.
Symbolically, blood and the drawing of it have sensual connotations. Blood signifies a woman’s coming of reproductive age. It is associated with the loss of her virginity and subsequent sexual awakening. It is also spilled with childbirth (Kella), all topics that were not discussed in polite company, yet implicitly referenced in vampire lore.
The main thing that’s changed since Dracula’s heyday on the literary stage is the degree of vampiric humanity. Most vampires are young and attractive. They are driven by their appetite for blood, their lust, and their emotions. Many male vampires (think Aidan from Being Human and Damon from Vampire Diaries) epitomize the leather-clad bad-boy popularized by James Dean in the fifties and which a number of ladies still find appealing.
Modern vampires are tragic figures who, lives cut short and often sired against their will, evoke pathos in their struggle against what they’ve become and what they’ve had to do to survive the ages. They are portrayed as broken brooders in search of the one person on earth who is able to fix them. Though they sometimes mate with their peers, they often desire human companionship. Even then they are forever doomed to play Romeo to a still human Juliet, taking star-crossed lover after star-crossed lover only to watch them grow old, perish and die unless he turns her.
In spite of the myriad books, movies and television shows, vampires are still hot, the object of fear and fantasy for so many of us.
Which vampire or vampire story is your favourite? What was it that attracted you to it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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