I decided to do my Roswell High re-read this week because I would spend most of it dogsitting in the backwoods, so deep into the green that there would be no internet. My evenings would therefore including reading and rubbing dog bellies. I opened the ottoman where I keep what remains of my middle school & high school libraries and threw what I though was the entirety of my Roswell High collection in a bag. I unwittingly threw in In the Forests of the Night with them. This book fascinated me in early high school when I read it, because the author was very near my age: as someone who wanted to be a writer himself, I was amazed it was possible to publish so early. I was drawn to In the Forests of the Night by its title: an X-Files novel had previously introduced me to Blake’s “The Tyger” (no, not kidding), and that poem was the first I ever memorized. I recognized the phrase immediately, and opened the book to find a…..vampire drama. Huh.

In the Forests of the Night is the story of Risika, a woman who was unwittingly enrolled in the “Devil’s Book” when a vampire gave her a black rose and it drew blood. A young Puritan girl, “Rachel” was trapped and pursued by an older female vampire, who sensed she would become, in time, an incredibly powerful creature of the night That proved to be true. The novel goes back and forth between Rachel’s slow death to Risika, the vampire she became, and her ongoing rivalry with her brother-in-the-night Aubrey, who is also the creature she hates most in the world. He preyed on her family, killing her brother and breaking her father’s heart by costing him all of his children. Aubrey is a vain and arrogant vampire whose pride is justified by his power, and although Risika knows he can destroy her, her own hatred for him and knowledge of her own gifts keeps pushing her to provoke him. One lone piece of her humanity she retains is love for a creature known as Tora, a Bengal tiger at the local zoo whose beauty mesmerizes her. Eventually, Risika and Aubrey go head to head in a vampire cafe.

Reading this as a teen, I was fascinated by it because I’d never read any fantasy beyond Redwall, and I’d certainly never gone near any vampire novels. I was aware of the tropes, I think, and Atwater-Rhodes’ vampires played with them. Her vampiric mythos is somewhat unmoored from their foundation — her vampires are not bothered by holy water or the Eucharist, unlike Stoker’s original — but there are still some bits of the classical demonic inversion, such as Aubrey wearing an upside-down cross. One of the few tropes that Atwater-Rhodes retains is vampires fading in mirrors: Risika comments that this is something that happens with age and power, and that their aversion to sunlight and garlic is merely a consequence of their augmented senses. As for wooden stakes through the heart, she says, it’s very likely that would kill her, but as a rule she avoids people wielding stakes.

Were I to read this for the first time today, I don’t know how much I’d enjoy it given the darkness. The writing is still compelling, especially the character drama between Risika and Aubrey. Dark fantasy is not my thing, but I found the author interesting enough that back in 2009 I read a followup novel, Demon in my View, in which In the Forests of the Night‘s author finds her fictional creation Aubrey confronting her in the real world. In reading this again, I was struck by how some of Risika’s observations — the author’s observations — were wise for a fourteen or fifteen year old, like the way humans waste their mortal lives in constant mindlessness, never existing in the moment but fretting about the future or the past or distracting themselves with work and pleasure.