Daily Archives: March 27, 2009

Vampires In Christian Fiction

One of my blog readers was surprised that I’d mentioned Twilight on this blog because Twilight is about a vampire. Well, coincidentally, I was reading this article yesterday, and discovered that Thomas Nelson, a large, well-known Christian publisher, has a Christian vampire series called Jeruselum’s Undead Trilogy by Eric Wilson. How in the world do you Christianize vampires? I haven’t read these books because, as I stated on this post, I don’t read many vampire/creature-of-the-night novels. If you’ve read this series, I’d be interested in knowing if they’re good, riveting stories? Do the plots draw you in? Here are the book covers and the summary of one of the novels from this series. The covers look pretty scary to me! I’m not sure if I’d want to read this before going to bed at night! I might have nightmares. If you like scary stories with a message, then I think you might want to read these. I might read one of them and then decide if I want to read the other two:




Field of Blood – Jeruselum’s Undead Trilogy Book One
From Barnesandnoble.com
Synopsis

Judas hung himself in a place known as the Akeldama or Field of Blood.

But what if his death didn’t end his betrayal?

What if his tainted blood seeped deep into the earth, into burial caves, causing a counterfeit resurrection of the dead?

Gina Lazarescu, a Romanian girl with a scarred past, has no idea she is being sought by the undead.

The Collectors, those released from the Akeldama, feed on souls and human blood. But there are also the Nistarim, those who rose from their graves in the shadow of the Nazarene’s crucifixion–and they still walk among us, immortal, left to protect mankind.

Gina realizes her future will depend on her understanding of the past, yet how can she protect herself from Collectors who have already died once but still live?

The Jerusalem’s Undead Trilogy takes readers on a riveting journey, as imaginative fiction melds with biblical and archaeological history.

Forever Knight, The Trilogy Part Two

Haunt of Jackals – Book Three

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I watched the Twilight movie On Demand yesterday. Surprisingly, I wasn’t intending to watch it. I was going to watch another movie – a foreign film about a cult, but the movie I was hoping to see wasn’t listed On Demand anymore. I’m off from work this week, my husband and child were both out of the house, so I was guaranteed watching a movie with no interruptions. I’d already made my popcorn, and was bummed when I couldn’t find the movie that I wanted to watch. So I decided not to let this movie-watching opportunity to pass me by, so I chose to watch Twilight. It pretty much stayed with the story-line in the novel with a few exceptions.
1. Bella, the main character, is a vegetarian in the movie and her and her dad eat at the diner every night. In the novel, Bella cooked for her and her dad. I don’t recall any scenes at a diner. I kind of liked how they had her cooking meals for herself and her dad. I guess the scriptwriters made her a vegetarian because Edward, the hero, eats animals instead of people, which kind of makes him a vegetarian vampire? This makes both Bella and Edward to have a common bond?
2. The trio of evil vampires don’t appear in the novel until about half or three quarters of the way into the story; when Edward, Bella, and his family are playing a baseball game. In the movie, they added a thread where the evil vampires are killing people in town, eating them. This thread of murders is not included in the book.
3. In the movie, Edward’s family are foster kids to the doctor and his wife. In the book, I don’t recall their being known as foster kids. Everybody was under the impression that they were a natural family?

Those are the main differences that I can recall. I preferred the book over the movie, though. The book drew me in more, and I guess that’s because reading leaves more to the imagination.

If you saw Twilight, and read the novel, which did you prefer, the book or the movie? If you had a preference, could you tell me the reasons behind your preference?

This blog post about vampires has got me to thinking about stories I’ve read in the past that had vampires, but, I’ve come up empty! Vampires and creatures of the night just don’t make my regular list of reading material! Maybe it’s because I used to get scared when I was a little kid when people mentioned vampires! My father, if he came home from work early enough, used to watch a soap opera about vampires called Dark Shadows. I used to cringe when he’d watch it and I hated it when he came home early enough to watch! I wanted to watch The Flintstones, but he’d turn the channel to Dark Shadows! Barnabas Collins (not sure if that’s spelled right) was a vampire in Dark Shadows. This show was on a long time ago, back in the early seventies. I was about four or five at the time.

I also read a novel called Frankenstein by Mary Shelley several years ago. That novel wasn’t very scary, and I recall that the writing was strong, and it’s considered a classic. Frankenstein isn’t a vampire, though, he was a monster.

That’s about all I can say about vampires. The other things about vampires that I’ve been exposed to is stuff you see on TV and in the movies; like using garlic to ward off vampires – weird stuff like that…
~Cecelia Dowdy~