Maybe if I had a bookish teenage daughter I would know this, but the boarding-school-for-vampires (etc.) genre has exploded.

Here is a typical cover blurb:

Two years after a horrible incident made them run away, vampire princess Lissa and her guardian-in-training Rose are found and returned to St. Vladimir’s Academy, where one focuses on mastering magic, the other on physical training, while both try to avoid the perils of gossip, cliques, gruesome pranks, and sinister plots.

Margot Adler and I were discussing vampire books about four years ago, when her quest to read them all had passed ninety titles. Cradle-Marxist that she is, she was trying to understand the vampire craze as being somehow a critique of capitalism.

I don’t think so—and definitely not in the Young Adult classification. Check out this list of suggested titles, linked from a website of a public library near me.

It could be more work for Joseph Laycock, the go-to guy in religious studies for vampire-ology, but he has moved on to otherkin, of which more anon.

RELATED? “We are more interested in the zombie at times when as a culture we feel disempowered,” [Clemson professor Sarah] Lauro said. “And the facts are there that, when we are experiencing economic crises, the vast population is feeling disempowered. … Either playing dead themselves . . . or watching a show like ‘Walking Dead’ provides a great variety of outlets for people.”