* * * * * *
Video interview with "Insatiable" author Meg Cabot:
* * * * * *
With a slew of best-selling young-adult titles on her résumé, including uber-hit “The Princess Diaries,” Meg Cabot might have been expected to stay in that genre when she turned her attention to vampires.
But Cabot — who also writes best-selling novels for adults — admits that, vampires being sexy and all, she wanted some sex scenes in her newest novel, “Insatiable.”
“And you know, parents get so upset when you try to do that in your teen books,” she said with a laugh.
“Insatiable” focuses on the travails of heroine Meena Harper, a soap opera writer who has been outmaneuvered for a promotion and now is being forced to add vampires to the story line of her soap, “Insatiable.”
Meena doesn't like vampires. She thinks the whole idea of women falling in love with people who then kill them is creepy.
Cabot, who said she enjoys the horror genre, said the “beautiful woman as victim motif” was the reason she always enjoyed “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the cult TV show that upended that cliché.
“I wanted to do something like that, with a feminist twist,” she said.
Early on in the book, Meena rails about pop culture's current obsession with vampires — until she meets one, and he's gorgeous.
The recent vampire boom isn't the first, Cabot pointed out.
“‘Interview with a Vampire,' which was in the late 1990s, also released a huge frenzy,” she said. “A lot of kids got really into that and were dressing in black. Actually, kids in the dorm (at New York University) where I worked started sucking each other's blood and passed around hepatitis. ...
“This is so mild compared to that,” she said.
Dissecting the popularity of the romantic vampire, Cabot pointed to the recession, the fact that more women are in the work force and that so many men are unemployed.
“Women are working so much and I think fantasizing about a really rich, hot guy coming and taking them away from all that,” she said. “And I think it's really funny, because something nobody's mentioning is that he's dead, and he's killing these women. ...
“I mean, wait, come on, back it up. Do you really want to be dead, with the dead guy? That's something that I mention in the book, and something that the heroine feels very strongly about.”
Despite that, Cabot believes strong female characters are not rare in vampire fiction, going from “Twilight” and “True Blood” all the way back to Meena's namesake, Mina Harker in Bram Stoker's “Dracula.”
“There are a lot of women who are out there in vampire fiction who are out there taking a stand, but people don't really talk about that a lot,” she said. “It was something that I wanted to do, and my heroine is certainly one of those ladies.”
“Insatiable” (Morrow, $22.99) is in bookstores now.
Contact the writer:
444-1074, john.keenan@owh.comxx
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
