Marked - PC and Kristin Cast

The concept for the House of Night series is not a promising one; Vampyre Finishing School. It just shouldn't work. Apart from being an obvious Harry Potter moneyspinner rip-off, it just feels like there is something basically wrong in the concept. Vampires are solitary creatures of the night, predators, driven by bloodlust, so how many lessons are you going to need to learn how to suck blood from a neck?

Evidently the concept needs a twist and it's in the fact that we are in an alternate world here where vampyres are if not an acceptable part of society, at least one that dominates the arts, with nearly every prominent musician, movie-star and writer (going right back to Shakespeare) having been chosen to wear the mark of the Vampyre. So when a dead man appears and places the mark of the crescent moon on her head, 16 year-old Zoey Redbird Montgomery almost welcomes the opportunity to escape from an unhappy life with her weak, inattentive mother, religious fundamentalist Step-loser father, her hateful siblings and her Jock boyfriend - even if she is made to feel like something of a freak.

And that's how Marked works. It's not an original idea – teenagers realising they are creative and different and finding a need to live outside the normal rules of society - but the situations are easy for a teenager to identify with. The snappy pace of the plot and the authenticity of the dialogue (helpfully proofed by the author's daughter Kristin who gets a co-writer credit), also helps, managing to sound real without being forced, getting beneath the surface of a teenager’s attitude to the underlying emotions and confusion beneath.

Unfortunately, that's also the drawback of the House of Night series (or at least the first part of it in Marked), since although it's nominally about vampires (and not even then that aspect isn't terribly plausible), there is nothing really all that different here from any other high-school dramas. True, instead of math and geometry they do drama, fencing and horse-riding, but the authors find nothing more interesting or deeper in the vampire twist than combining normal American high-school teen lust with bloodlust, Zoey endlessly drooling over hot movie-stars, hot teachers and hot enigmatic older boys while she tries to keep out of the way of dorks and slutty blonde-girl cliques.

The series is for young adults of course, but it has a very preachy and condescending tone (it’s all about controlling your urges until you’re mature enough to handle them), which is not helped by the tiresome conversations of limited vocabulary between Zoey and her friends that become like totally irritating, okay? Whatever. The writing is also lazy, falling back on stereotypical characters and a strong, beautiful central figure who has no real challenges to face, supported as she is by a network of trustworthy friends and an understanding mentor. It might suit an American readership, but with its childish tone I think it's unlikely to be as successful with a more mature British teenager, and its quite frank depiction of sexual situations will make it unsuitable for a younger age-group.