(I couldn't resist...)

I just finished my token vampire novel of the season, Sweetblood by Pete Hautman. It is about this goth teenage girl who is a diabetic and has a theory that vampires of old were really just misunderstood diabetics suffering from ketoacidosis. The plotlines of the story were interesting enough, but even more interesting was the paper Lucy writes about her theory. In it, she describes the possible symptoms of untreated diabetes; such as "the sweet smell of too much glucose in the blood, the strange, acrid reek of advanced ketoacidosis, the rotten smell of bacterial infection... madness, ravenous hunger, extreme sensitivity to sunlight and sound, bleeding, receding gums (that make teeth look longer), cold, clammy skin, and deathlike coma - all resulting from untreated diabetes. Even the spontaneous, repeated revival from a deathlike coma is possible." Sweetblood is a good read for the vampire curious and the bored at-home-sick library student studying to be a YA librarian. (Thanks for enduring the run-on.) I have to find my vampire novels somewhere else since Anne Rice's conversion.