Rules for Vampires

Alex Foulkes's Rules for Vampires is a darkly funny adventure for 10 year olds about a vampire girl who really, truly doesn't want to eat anybody.

What happens

Leo is six feet tall and grey-skinned, with clawed fingers that reach past her knees and a smile full of needles. She has been eleven for exactly one hundred years. Her mum is the Great and Terrible Sieglinde, who once wiped out a whole small country in three days. Leo just calls her Mum.

On her one hundred and eleventh birthnight, Leo has to do what every young vampire does. Go out alone and catch her first human. Every Von Motteberg passes first time, Mum reminds her (no pressure then).

The problem is that Leo isn't sure about the whole eating people thing. Blood in a cup is one thing. An actual person, walking and talking and burping, is quite another.

So she creeps down to the town orphanage, where things go wrong very fast. She forgets the first vampire rule (no going in uninvited). She meets Minna, a stubborn orphan girl with a strange old dagger in her pocket. And then the terrible man who runs the place wakes up.

The voice is what makes it. The narrator talks straight to you ("Human, come closer"), and there are lots of little jokes. Leo lost a leg to a flock of bats, for one thing, and her dad made her a wooden one in his lab. Her nanny is a knight in full armour who fusses like a grandma.

Under the jokes Leo is lonely and desperate for her mum to be proud of her. Plenty of kids will know that feeling!

There's a flip side too. The whole story starts with a girl setting out to kill a child, and the book never pretends otherwise. The opening chapter explains how to stake a vampire in cheerful detail. The orphanage owner is properly cruel, and a fire breaks out with him trapped in a wardrobe inside the burning room. A child who's easily frightened might find it a bit much.

If your reader already loves stories where the monsters are the heroes, they'll find it very funny. The darkness is played for laughs and Leo's heart is in the right place.

What to read next

For another heroine who much prefers gloom to sunshine, try Fiendish Deeds. Joy Wells lives in a crumbling town on a hill, next to a cemetery she thinks is wonderful, and looks down her nose at the tidy new houses below.