Stephenie Meyer zeroed in on one of the most popular aspects of the Buffy saga — Buffy’s torturous (and mostly chaste) romance with a “good” vampire, Angel — and spun it into a Gothic love story for a new generation of teens. Less genre bending than Whedon’s tale, focused more on romance than on fantasy world building, Twilight works on a level of pure emotion. The series’ brooding young hero, Edward Cullen, stands firmly in the literary vampire tradition: a clear line runs from Edward back through Angel and Barnabas Collins all the way to Varney, the first of the sympathetic vampires. Like Varney, Edward has struck a chord with readers of all ages and backgrounds, not just traditional fans of vampire tales; and like Varney (and every other beloved literary vampire from Lord Ruthven onward), he will help to shape the vampire legend in the years to come.
Regardless of how you feel about the Twilight books and films, whether you passionately love them or passionately hate them (and there are vast numbers of vampire aficionados in both camps), we all have reason to be grateful to Meyer. The extraordinary success of the Twilight series has placed a huge spotlight not only on modern vampire tales but on the urban fantasy genre as a whole — and that, in turn, is bringing new readers, and some terrific new writers, into the field. Some of those talented new writers can be found in the pages of this book — alongside writers who have long been working in the vein of urban fantasy fiction. (If any of these authors are new to you, we highly recommend seeking out their prior novels and stories.)