Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Author Robin McKinley has enjoyed many years of success based on her books marketed toward younger readers — novels that have topped the New York Times bestseller list and been awarded Newbery Medals and Honors.

McKinley’s myth- and fairy tale-inflected works include fresh spins on Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood and Beauty and the Beast.

Now the Warren, Ohio,-born author turned England-dwelling expatriate has composed a novel directed at a different readership.

Sunshine (Berkley, 389 pages, $23.95) is a dark, sensual vampire fairy tale that courts her younger readers’ parents.

McKinley’s vampire theme and young, female narrator invite comparisons with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"My best friend told me I should watch Buffy," McKinley recently told ThisWeek, "and I said, ’Don’t be ridiculous.’ You know, southern California girl as vampire slayer — this is far too cute for me. She was right : I have been a passionate Buffy fan. One of the things about Buffy that appeals to me so much is that it is not gruesome. It suggested you might be able to do something with vampires that would be creepy rather than disgusting."

Sunshine tells the tale of a young woman working a wage slave, get-out-of-bed-early job at a coffee shop that benefits from Rae "Sunshine" Seddon’s flare for whipping up righteous, artery-clogging confections — her speciality is something called "Cinnamon Rolls As Big As Your Head" (inspired McKinley, said, by those served at an actual truck stop in Maine).

The young baker’s shift necessarily puts her out on the streets well in advance of sunrise — indirectly setting her up for a kidnapping that keys McKinley’s novel.

Having dropped us in a world we take more or less to be our own, McKinley steadily, deliberately shifts the terrain, unveiling more and more supernatural themes as the book unfolds.

Sunshine fills her non-work hours reading novels about vampires — fictional works she buries her nose in to escape her all-too-real world in which vampires not only exist and control a significant portion of the world’s economy (behold the happy collision of immortality and compound interest) but also wage wars against humans.

Sunshine’s tan-challenged abductors are revealed to be a roving band of vampires who chain her in a room with a half-starved, rival blood drinker.

The vampire for whom Sunshine has been set out as a meal is a predator with a code and a conscience. Also, extraordinary self-control. The vampire and his potential entree forge an unlikely bond over a night of shared fairy tales — chiefly Beauty and the Beast — and eventually set off on a crusade to vanquish their undead mutual foes.

Vampire tales comprise a hard-worked mine, fueling several best-selling series — from the Catholic-inflected, philosophically driven novels of Anne Rice to those of Laurell K. Hamilton to the franchise-that-refuses-to-die that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Throw in other successful series by Poppy Z. Brite, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Nancy Collins, and you’re looking at a crowded field of long-toothed, animated cadavers.

McKinley said in writing her vampire novel, rather than trying to graft some revisionist, modern elements to the myth, she was more interested in going back to the Gothic and Victorian models of Bram Stoker, Sheridan LeFanu and Lord Ruthven.

"One of the delicious tensions of, let’s say, Victorian vampires, is that the whole Victorian era didn’t want to admit that sex existed, so you get that lovely tension of all of that not-allowed but terribly fascinating stuff," McKinley explained. "Vampires bite you on the neck. Well, how convenient. But it’s about something much deeper and scarier that gives you a wonderful tension that graphic gore and disembowelings don’t."

McKinley’s spin on the blood-sucking tradition hinges on the notion that vampires and other supernatural beings have become known to the public at large... political hot-potatoes who inspire their own Patriot Act-style federal initiatives and government-directed strike forces.

In Sunshine, vampires have emerged as the supernatural realm’s ultimate outcasts (The pharmaceutical industry has raced to the rescue for werewolves — in McKinley’s dark, sly world, market forces favor the mangy).

McKinley’s other great achievement is Sunshine’s narrative voice. The shell-shocked young baker/cum vampire slayer speaks convincingly with the voice of a 20-something young woman marked by a broken home and talents which have yet to find their proper expression.

McKinley is now wrestling with the possibility of a sequel or two. "I would love to write another novel about Sunshine," she said "but, it’s not only that stories have to come to me, but I have absolutely no control. I admire people who write sequels and series. I don’t think my writing brain is up to it."