So totally not Twilight

I'm interested to see that my good friend Sebastian Rook's Vampire Plagues series has apparently been repackaged as Vampire Dusk. This is quite a coincidence because there is already a quite successful series for children, also about vampires, currently available and named for a time of day. In fact, a time of day when the sun isn't quite shining. I'm sure that the merest possibility of any kind of association has never at any point crossed the mind of anyone at Scholastic.

Suspicion of bandwagon-jumping recedes further with even a cursory examination of the covers, which have gone from this:

... to this.


(Having a passing acquaintance with the text, I'm curious to know what happened to the second boy. The three heroes stick to the magic Harry-Ron-Hermione formula for pre-teen adventures of 2 boys to 1 girl [though there is a guest extra girl in the second book]. This is because boys only want to read about boys whereas girls will read about either gender: so, you get a boy for the boys, a girl for the girls, and another boy to make up for the girl. Sad but true.

Maybe he's on the back.)

To continue with the covers for the books I wrote the first three written by Sebastian:



Not only will you will discern a total absence of fruit, chess pieces and the like, but while the Twilight covers go out of their way to hide the fact that they are about a boy and a girl who have the dead hots for each other, Vampire Dusk advertises the total absence of sexual frisson by showing a couple of complete strangers who were photographed in the same room together one day, coincidentally whilst wearing sort of Victorian clothes. Also, by miniscule fractions, the boy's expression changes. A bit. So, really, about as far from Twilight as you can get.