Meg Cabot stakes out fresh territory in the overcrowded vampire field with her delightful — and scary — new novel, “Insatiable,” which was published by William Morrow on Tuesday.
Cabot is best known for her hugely popular young adult books — including the “Princess Diaries” series — but she has made regular forays into adult fiction with charming contemporary love stories, including a cyber romance series that began with “The Boy Next Door.”
“Insatiable” is a big book — 454 pages — but it is so funny and so suspenseful that most readers should polish it off in a few sittings.
The novel grows out of the “Twilight” and “True Blood” overkill in pop culture right now — vampires as sexy bohemian loverboys rather than the mass murderers of the past.
Cabot’s heroine has the same first name as the heroine of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” but it is spelled differently — Meena rather than Mina — and she has zero interest in vampires.
In fact, Meena loathes the genre and she hates the fact that the New York City-based daytime drama that she writes for — “Insatiable” — is about to introduce a handsome young bloodsucker in an attempt to boost their anemic ratings (like all other daytime soaps, the show is on life support).
Cabot is terrific at setting the contemporary New York scene, with Meena love/hating her glamorous job and the fact that her chronically unemployed brother Jon has moved in with her.
What starts as a vampire send-up cleverly morphs into a superior example of the genre when Meena’s neighbor invites her to a dinner party where she meets a Romanian historian/prince named Lucien Antonescu, who quickly sweeps her off her feet.
Meena is already hopelessly in love with the guy when she finds out he is a real vampire — indeed, the son of the notorious Vlad the Impaler — who is in Manhattan as part of an upheaval within the community of the undead.
Lucien has made his followers swear off human murder, but some vampire has been murdering girls in the city.
The way that Cabot re-invents vampire lore within the context of a sexy, funny Manhattan adventure is quite amazing.
Like her smart, psychically gifted heroine, readers who begin the book thinking they’ve had it with vampires will quickly find themselves racing through this impossible-to-put-down comic thriller.
It’s a perfect beach book for the summer of 2010.
