Could vampire books be in their twilight hour? Perhaps. They may be getting pushed aside by, of all things, angels.
This fall publishers are introducing more than a dozen titles about angels—good ones, funny ones and especially fallen ones, kicked out of heaven. “We've kind of exhausted where we can go with vampires,” said Heather Doss, children's merchandise manager for Bookazine. “Now we're taking the safe characters and making them the bad guys. We're turning that stereotypical angel image upside down.”
Publishers are rushing these new titles onto shelves. Simon & Schuster bought first-time author Becca Fitzpatrick's Hush, Hush in April and—based on requests by indies and chains, led by Barnes & Noble—pushed its release date up from spring 2010 to next month. The announced printing: 250,000. Random House bought Lauren Kate's Fallen in April and is publishing it in December. “[The trend] fits in with the vampire reader who wants something new,” said Liz Marotte, Borders's YA buyer.
Move over, Edward Cullen. Bad-boy angels are the new hotties. Like modern vampires, they can be gorgeous, immortal and otherworldly heartthrobs, unlike, say, zombies. “With all that rotting-off, they’re not very sexy,” said Justin Chanda, v-p and publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, who calls angels “safe gothic” and “romantic.”
A couple of big advantages are that angels are less scary and don't have an “ick” factor. “Some people think, vampires—who wants to deal with the bloody side of that?” said Beverly Horowitz, v-p and publisher of Knopf Delacorte Dell Young Readers Group.
The new titles also star guardian angels and funny angels. Elizabeth Chandler's Kissed by an Angel trilogy, first published in the 1990s, is about a teen whose dead boyfriend returns as her guardian angel. Simon & Schuster reissued a bindup of the books last December; 350,000 copies of the reissues are now in print. “Paranormal plus romance rules,” said Bethany Buck, editorial director of Simon Pulse.
Suzanne Selfors's Coffeehouse Angel (Walker, July), a romantic comedy, also features a guardian angel. And funny celestial beings include the punk angel in Libba Bray's Going Bovine (Delacorte, Sept.) and the plucky one in Sharon Creech's The Unfinished Angel (Harper, Sept.).
“The young books like Sharon's are using angels to suggest the world can be a better place,” said Kate Jackson, editor-in-chief of HarperCollins Children's Books. In YA books, however, she believes angels “are a symbol of forbidden love. What's more forbidden than having a romance with someone who's not human?”
YA angels also appeal because of “the intrigue of fallen nobility,” said Jon Anderson, executive v-p and publisher of Simon & Schuster's children's publishing division. “They sat on high and got cast down.” The “invulnerable factor” may also play a part, said Brian Farrey, acquisitions editor for Flux, which in August published 5,000 copies of Timothy Carter's Evil? set in a Canadian town where a fallen angel is causing havoc.
Authors like Creech had no idea they would help launch a celestial trend. She got the idea for The Unfinished Angel back in 2003. Her then two-year-old granddaughter told her, “Once upon a time in Spain, there was an angel, and the angel was me.” “What a great story opening,” Creech said. “For years, I thought about that line.”
When Fitzpatrick started Hush, Hush, she too was unaware that she would be part of a trend. She said she simply wanted to write about “this ultimate bad boy, but with a twist.” That led to her fallen angel. “When you think of fallen angels, you think of the original bad boys,” she said. “People like to read about characters seeking redemption.”
From Harry to Heaven?
Paranormal books were once as exotic as the shops on Diagon Alley, but since Hogwarts they've become much more commonplace. “Before Harry Potter, fantasy was a genre that people put off in a corner,” said Emily Easton, publisher of Walker Books for Young Readers. But angels go way back: they appear in both testaments of the Bible, classics like Milton's Paradise Lost, movies (Fallen Angel; Heaven Can Wait) and TV shows (Touched by an Angel; Highway to Heaven; Drop Dead Diva).
But this new crop of stars is nontraditional. “These are not your Sunday angels by any means,” said Doss at Bookazine. After all, Candlewick is offering Angel in Vegas (not Bethlehem), and Carter's Evil? tackles such topics as masturbation and homosexuality.
Religious publishers are another story; they've always given angels starring roles. “Our angel books for kids are based on Christian guardian angels that protect and model obedience, worship and rejoicing in our wonderful God,” said Alicia Mey, v-p of marketing for HarperCollins-owned Zonderkidz. But in addition to publishing more traditional angel fare, next May Zonderkidz will issue a YA supernatural thriller by Dawn Miller called The Prophecy, featuring protective and dark angels.
What's next? Fitzpatrick is working on at least one sequel to Hush, Hush. Kate is writing three more books in the Fallen series. Next spring HarperCollins will publish book two of a series following Kim Harrison's summer hit, Once Dead, Twice Shy, about angels and reapers. And in 2011, Flux will come out with Hollyweird, about a fallen angel working as a personal assistant to a TV star.
It all makes sense to Kenny Brechner, owner of Devaney Doak & Garrett Booksellers in Farmington, Maine. “Angels are the logical next move,” he said. “It’s all good with me—if it’s a good story.”
Farewell, fangs; hello, halos?
