Summary: Vampires, Vamps and Va Va Voom | Rebecca Do Rozario <a name="rebecca-do-rozario" id="rebecca-do-rozario"><strong>Undead Romance Writers</strong></a> This paper examines the embedding of vampire romance writers in Tanya Huff’s ‘blood noun’<a href="#footnote"><sup>1</sup></a> and Katie McAlister’s <em>Dark Ones</em> series. The use of a vampire as a first person narrator in Anne Rice’s work helped establish a new trend of construction of the sympathetic vampire, but whether as first person narrators or characters in someone else’s first person narration, today’s vampire romance writer serves not to create a sense of empathy with the reader by ostensibly writing the book in their hands, but to actually construct the reader as a <em>particular</em> consumer of vampire romance. This reader, engaged in negotiating believability or suspension of disbelief necessary to their position, remains conscious of the female author of the novel, but is also lead down the garden path by the potential metafictional, male vampire romance writer. The paper will discuss the gendered implications of the reader’s position and the metafictional inflections inherent in constructing undead romance writers. Dr. Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario lectures in children’s and fantasy literature at Monash University. She has published in journals such as <em>Women’s Studies in Communication</em>, <em>theatre journal</em> and <em>Children’s Literature Studies</em>.
