"The Dangers of Literature" is a short story written by Elizabeth "Dante668" Einspanier, as a Take That! against modern vampire romance novels.
Tina Williams is a teenaged girl who prefers to go by Lachrymosa, and has a morbid interest in death and vampires. In fact, she dreams of having her very own vampire boyfriend, just like the ones in the paranormal romance novels she likes to read.
Unfortunately, she's about to discover that real vampires don't follow the rules laid out in her favorite novels...
"The Dangers of Literature" can be found at Dark Fire Fiction, here
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"The Dangers of Literature" contains the following tropes:
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Lachrymosa wishes to meet an actual vampire and does. Unfortunately for her, it turns out her "knowledge" of vampires hasn't prepared her for the much nastier real thing.
- Boy Meets Ghoul: Lachrymosa tries to set up a gender-inverted version of this romance.
- Goth: Lachrymosa has an unhealthy fascination with death and vampires.
- Meaningful Name: "Lachrymosa" presumably comes from the word "lachrymose" which means "sad" or "tearful", an appropriate name for a girl who loves angst.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Lachrymosa thinks they're handsome angsty souls with an addictive bite. Turns out they're little more than predatory blood-drinking corpses. Who can use the internet.
- Parental Abandonment: The reason why Lachrymosa seeks a vampire boyfriend. Her father died shortly before the story and she doesn't get along with her mother.
- Shout-Out: A lot of vampire novelists are mentioned as contributing to Lachrymosa's vampire fantasies.
- Take That!: To vampire romance in general. The actual vampire Lachrymosa meets at the end of the story laughs at how stupid all the vampire lore she recites for him is.
- Too Dumb to Live: Even if the person Lachrymosa was meeting hadn't been a vampire, meeting a stranger from the internet secretly in the middle of the night could easily go horribly wrong...and it does.
- Vampire Vannabe: Lachrymosa dreams that someday her vampire boyfriend will turn her into a vampire.
