If You Like The Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer…
Try These Authors/Titles
“Bella Swan’s move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Bella’s life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. Up until now, Edward has managed to keep his vampire identity a secret in the small community he lives in, but now nobody is safe, especially Bella, the person Edward holds most dear. Deeply romantic and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.”
If you’ve gotten hooked by Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, and its three follow-up volumes, you’re not alone. Meyer’s angst-filled vampire teen love stories have connected with readers beyond just their intended teenage audience, particularly after the success of the 2008 feature-film adaptation of the first novel. In addition to a rather chaste and “Romeo and Juliet”-like love story, the books feature several other major elements: coming-of-age, paranormal experiences, vampires, werewolves, Native American mysticism, the Pacific Northwest, the trauma of high school, the “outsider” trying to fit in, and a strong young female narrative voice. The titles and authors listed below include many of these same elements, although some of the authors listed may write works that are similar to the Twilight books in only tangential ways. We recommend reading the full jacket blurbs on any of these authors’ works before you commit to an entire novel.
We’ve included a number of titles in this list which are not currently owned by the Lincoln City Libraries. All books owned by Lincoln City Libraries are hotlinked to their entries in our library catalog, so that you may check on their current availability. If you see a title on this list that is not hotlinked to our collection, please consider ordering it through our Interlibrary Loan department.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ Demon in My View (Seventeen-year-old Jessica Allodola discovers that the vampire world of her fiction is real when she develops relationships with an alluring vampire named Aubrey and the teenage witch who is trying to save Jessica from his clutches.)
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ Hawksong (In a land that has been at war so long that no one remembers the reason for fighting, the shapeshifters who rule the two factions agree to marry in the hope of bringing peace, despite deep-seated fear and distrust of each other.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ Midnight Predator (Turquoise Draka, a mercenary trained to fight vampires, witches, and shape-shifters, infiltrates a vampire stronghold, but ghosts from her past and new possibilities for her future threaten to distract her from the work at hand.)
Holly Black’s Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie (Seventeen-year-old Valerie, who has befriended an unusal group, now is bound into service with a troll.)
Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty (After the suspicious death of her mother in 1895, sixteen-year-old Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school where she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world.)
Meg Cabot’s Jinx (Sixteen-year-old Jean “Jinx” Honeychurch, the descendant of a witch, must leave Iowa to live with relatives in Manhattan after the first spell she casts goes awry, but she will have to improve her skills to stop her cousin from practicing black magic that endangers them and the boy they both like.)
Stephen Cole’s Wounded (Kate Folan comes from a family of werewolves. The last thing she wants is to give in to her evil heritage. Then she meets Tom Anderson. Tom is a wereling-a werewolf who retains his humanity even in his wolf form. Tom and Kate can’t help falling for each other. But if they give in to their feelings, Kate will become the thing she hates most. Unless they can find a cure..)
Melissa de la Cruz’s Blue Bloods (Select teenagers from some of New York City’s wealthiest and most socially prominent families learn a startling secret about their bloodlines.)
Marianne Curley’s Old Magic (Together, Jarrod and Kate embark on a remarkable journey — one which will unravel the mystery that has haunted Jarrod’s family for generations and pits the teens against immense forces in a battle to undo the past and reshape the future.)
Clare B. Dunkle’s The Hollow Kingdom (In nineteenth-century England, a powerful sorcerer and King of the Goblins chooses Kate, the elder of two orphan girls recently arrived at their ancestral home, Hallow Hill, to be his bride and queen.)
Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (For the coveted prize of his beloved Victoria’s hand, young Tristran vows to retrieve a fallen star and deliver it to his beloved. It is an oath that sends the lovelorn swain over the ancient wall, and propels him into a world that is strange beyond imagining.)
Mary Downing Hahn’s Look for Me by Moonlight (When sixteen-year-old Cynda goes to stay with her father and his second wife, Susan, at their remote bed-and-breakfast inn in Maine, everything starts off well despite legends about ghosts and a murder at the inn. But Cynda feels like a visitor in Dad’s new life, an outsider. Then intense, handsome stranger Vincent Morthanos arrives at the inn and seems to return Cynda’s interest.)
Pete Hautman’s Sweetblood (After a lifetime of being a model student, sixteen-year-old Lucy Szabo is suddenly in trouble at school, at home, with the “proto-vampires” she has met online and in person, and most of all with her uncontrolled diabetes.)
Annette Curtis Klause’s Blood and Chocolate (Having fallen for a human boy, a beautiful teenage werewolf must battle both her packmates and the fear of the townspeople to decide where she belongs and with whom.)
Annette Curtis Klause’s The Silver Kiss (Zoe is wary when, in the dead of night, the beautiful yet frightening Simon comes to her house. Simon seems to understand the pain of loneliness and death and Zoe’s brooding thoughts of her dying mother. Simon is one of the undead, a vampire, seeking revenge for the gruesome death of his mother three hundred years before. Does Simon dare ask Zoe to help free him from this lifeless chase and its insufferable loneliness?
Martine Leavitt’s Keturah and Lord Death (When Lord Death comes to claim sixteen-year-old Keturah while she is lost in the King’s Forest, she charms him with her story and is granted a twenty-four hour reprieve in which to seek her one true love.)
Juliet Marillier’s Wildwood Dancing (Five sisters who live with their merchant father in Transylvania use a hidden portal in their home to cross over into a magical world, the Wildwood.)
Meredith Ann Pierce’s The Darkangel (The servant girl Aeriel must choose between destroying her vampire master for his evil deeds or saving him for the sake of his beauty and the spark of greatness she has seen in him.)
Ellen Schreiber’s Vampire Kisses (Sixteen-year-old Raven, an outcast who always wears black and hopes to become a vampire some day, falls in love with the mysterious new boy in town, eager to find out if he can make her dreams come true.)
Cynthia Leitich Smith’s Tantalize (When multiple murders in Austin, Texas, threaten the grand re-opening of her family’s vampire-themed restaurant, seventeen-year-old, orphaned Quincie worries that her best friend-turned-love interest, Keiren, a werewolf-in-training, may be the prime suspect.)
L.J. Smith’s Vampire Diaries series (Popular and beautiful high school senior Elena finds herself torn between two vampire brothers, the dark and brooding Stefan who wants to protect her from the horrors of his past and the dangerously attractive Damon, who is determined to use her to get revenge on his brother.)
Vivian Vande Velde’s Companions of the Night (When sixteen-year-old Kerry Nowicki helps a young man escape from a group of men who claim he is a vampire, she finds herself faced with some bizarre and dangerous choices.)
Patrick Vaughn’s The Cure for the Curse (Warrenna just found out that her parents are vampires..and so is she. They must live in total secrecy, even as they try to protect oblivious humans from the growing vampire threat. But there’s hope on the horizon. His name is Thomas. Can Thomas somehow help Warrenna fight her awful condition? Could he really be The Cure for the Curse.)
Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps (Cal Thompson is a carrier of a parasite that causes vampirism, and must hunt down all of the girlfriends he has unknowingly infected.)
Laura Whitcomb’s A Certain Slant of Light (After benignly haunting a series of people for 130 years, Helen meets a teenage boy who can see her and together they unlock the mysteries of their pasts.)
Chris Wooding’s The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray (As Thaniel, a wych-hunter, and Cathaline, his friend and mentor, try to rid the alleys of London’s Old Quarter of the terrible creatures that infest them, their lives become entwined with that of a woman who may be either mad or possessed.)
Chris Wooding’s Poison (When Poison leaves her home in the marshes of Gull to retrieve the infant sister who was snatched by the fairies, she and a group of unusual friends survive encounters with the inhabitants of various Realms, and Poison herself confronts a surprising destiny.)
Posted and last updated January 2012 sdc
