Claire Danvers is a moron.

And it’s okay that she’s a moron, she kind of has to be a moron in order for her vamp-ridden tale to work, but since she is also a scientific prodigy who has been let into college several years early based on her general and abiding genius, it’s a little frustrating that she’s such a massive moron, nonetheless. (On the other hand, she is 16: weren’t we all morons then?)

Claire’s parents are also morons.

Despite their little girl being offered early placement at such prestigious institutions as Yale, MIT and Caltech, they want their precious Texan darlin’ to stay closer to home lest she be corrupted by those far off bastions of higher learning, so instead have her enroll in a little-regarded and widely-acknowledged party school that is still 300 miles away.

Now, again, for this story to work, she couldn’t have gone to Yale, or MIT, or Caltech. Because surely Rory Gilmore would have noticed if there were vampires at Yale; Chuck Bartowski would have realized there were vampires at MIT; Apu would have caught on to the vampires at Caltech. (Oh, wait: perhaps it was the California Institute of Technology and not the one in Calcutta to which Claire was accepted; okay, that guy from Numb3rs would’ve identified the vampires for sure.) So instead she goes to the fictional Texas Prairie University in a town called Morganville where she is plagued by the Oh So Mean Girls of her dorm and is eventually thrown down some stairs. Of course, she doesn’t call the police or even tell the doctor who attends her wounds the truth of what happened (‘cause she’s a moron). Instead, she decides to assay off-campus housing, and moves into a large mansion with hot musician Michael (whom no one ever sees during the day), hot and heroic Shane (whose sister died tragically in a fire, and who has only recently returned to town), and goth chick Eve (who first mentions all the vampires to Claire, but is disbelieved. And, okay, fair enough.).

Claire (and we) soon learn that the whole town is infested with--and run by--vampires. The vamps own the Mayor, the city council, the police force, everyone, and all of Morganville's residents exist either under Protection from one bloodsucker or another or on the fringes of society (as with Michael, Shane and Eve). These unprotected souls -- including the majority of the student body at TPU -- are fair game for the predatory vampires -- no synthetic substitute here -- and the University has a deal that a certain percentage of attrition from those on campus is an acceptable loss.

How do they get away with this? Why do people keep sending their precious angels to Morganville, a town in which vampires rule the night quite openly? Why have no upstanding citizens ever left town and spread the word of this den of iniquity to the FBI, or to the media, or to Stephenie Meyers, for Edward’s sake?

Well, it’s cause there is -- naturally -- some kind of spell that means when anyone leaves Morganville, they forget all about the vampires. You get 10 miles out of town, and suddenly you can barely remember your life there. And if you do start to remember, the vampires come and kill you! Which explains, in part, why any humans still live in Morganville at all. (Except, oh, also: they’re all morons.)

But why does Claire stay in town, you may wonder? Even before the vampires, her life was pretty sucky, and surely there is no shame in a 16-year old genius whose parents are reluctant to let her go too far from the nest taking, oh, I dunno, correspondence classes? But, oh no. Claire won’t do correspondence, despite her fear the TPU’s name on her transcript will be a black mark she’ll never erase, because the classes are the best part of school. And when her life is threatened and endangered by the most malicious and impudent of bitchy co-eds, she refuses to run home to safety because she just can’t quit! Oh, and when there are then vampires, when she is exposed to the seamy underbelly of life in Morganville, and learns that her dorm nemesis is the daughter of the town Mayor and not bound by regular human laws, she won’t leave because… oh, yeah, that’s right. She still can’t quit. Plus, of course, she is, like, totally into this, like, guy... And then, at the end of the second book, she gets herself really mired in Morganville’s simmering internecine politics when she becomes sworn unto the service of the town’s oldest vampire, the timeless and oblivious Amelie, and can never, ever leave. Ever.

See? Moron.

The thing is though, she’s an entertaining moron. She and the town she inhabits are almost inconceivably ridiculous, and yet Rachel Caine has made these books into something noteworthy and unusual in the genre (as well as mightily addictive).

Y’see, in Morganville, the vampires are actually what you might call evil. They revel in their dominion over their lesser human neighbors, and are largely unrepentant and brutal. Yes, there are a few sympathetic vamps in play here, but our heroine never loses sight of the fact that they are pretty much just monsters and murderers… and, more importantly, she has yet to hook up with one (though the situation with her deliciously mad vamp tutor, Myrnin, may be heading for trouble). This teen vampire series is far more Urban Fantasy than Romance, more Spine-Tingling Horror than Forbidden Love. Sure, there are the usual precarious adolescent relationships and more than a little nookie, but above all, there is a myth-arc and capital P Plot that sends this series skyrocketing past a certain sparkly vampire chronicle we all know (and which I, nevertheless, love. As you may have noticed.)

Also, Caine has a Voice. For all that her characters are (as I might have mentioned) not always the sharpest stakes in the arsenal, they are also uniquely crafted, well-rounded and oddly believable considering their fraught and improbable lives. Caine writes with zest and precision, and even teeters on the brink of outright, uproarious satire at times. She is both funny and exhilarating, and (most remarkably) is constantly improving. The latest in this series (and the last to be released without a hardcover; a sign of its increasing popularity), Kiss of Death, is the best so far, and that is not something one would often say eight books in, especially when seven of them take place in the one small, unlikely town.

And in which almost everyone is a moron.

  -- Rachel Hyland

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