A Story to Sink Your Teeth Into...

This story from today's New York Times, appropriately titled "A Trend With Teeth," explores the current cultural obsession with vampires-- or, as the author puts it, this "pandemic of unholy proportions."

And what a great lede for a feature story...

"THE symptoms are unnerving: a taste for fresh meat — rare, if you please; an aversion to sunlight; and a passion for spectral-looking, fine-boned rakes. All are indications that the sufferer has been bitten by the vampire bug."

And though it takes a little while to get to the nutgraf, it is clever and brilliantly done:

"Sookie Stackhouse, the feisty young heroine of “True Blood” on HBO, risks doom whenever she visits with her otherworldly beau. And Oskar, the adolescent misfit of the Swedish art film “Let the Right One In,” a favorite in fashion circles, courts extinction each time he ventures out with Eli, the eerily ageless shape-shifter he befriends.

Sookie and Oskar are in the throes of vampire lust, a pop-culture contagion being spread via television, films and fiction. What began with the Twilight Saga, the luridly romantic young-adult series by Stephenie Meyer, followed by “Twilight,” the movie, has become a pandemic of unholy proportions."

The article (though accompanied by very cool stylized pictures from Italian Vogue) is really about more than fashion, and it connects the trend back to larger societal and political concerns. Someone might be interested in reading it, even if they weren't a vampire fanatic or interested in pop-culture. And even if you are sick of hearing about the Twilight Saga and "True Blood," how could you not be sucked in by such a provocative lead?

 

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