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So what do you do if your daughter gets bitten by a vampire ... and starts turning into one of the Undead?  Do you let her go to the Dark Side?  Or do you wear garlic necklaces, make her blood smoothies and fight the evil vampires?  Fang Face ... humor vampire.

Well, my last two columns were fun, huh?  Interviews with best selling authors Christopher Moore, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson.  I hope some of that best-selling stuff will rub off on me. 

Anyway, I have a treat for you this month ... well, another treat.  As you may know, or probably not since, as we discussed, I’m not a best-selling author ... yet ... my new vampire humor young adult book Fang Face is out. 

It’s not “Twilight”  -  it’s vampire fun stuff.  People just never look at vampires from their point of view.  Like how important clean necks are to your vampire.  Like if someone doesn’t shave, they will give the vampire razor rash.  Like how you never see a fat vampire, because they’re all on the Atkins diet.  Fun stuff. 

Here’s a sneak peak:

“Aw, crap.”

Dracula’s last thought before he crumbled to dust.

“I am not going to sleep in a coffin,” Erin screeched.

As any attendee of a High School Musical concert can tell you, there’s nothing like a teenage girl’s shriek to wake up the auditory sensors. Every dog in the neighborhood simultaneously yipped in pain, except old Dork, a deaf Chihuahua from up the street.

Her sister, Alex, ducked, even though the shriek wasn’t directed at her. It whizzed by her ear with a whistling sound and went looking for another eardrum to pierce.

Immune to the sound, their father calmly leafed through a magazine. “Hey, this one looks nice. It’s the King Tut model.”

Erin whirled around and snapped, “King Tut was a boy. Do I look like a boy to you?”

Their mother, Beth, interrupted softly, trying to reduce the sudden tension, “They actually have one shaped like a Coke bottle. It’s attractive.” The faint frown line between her eyes indicated maybe she thought otherwise.

“Mom! This is ridiculous. I’m not sleeping in a coffin!”

“But, honey, I think you’re supposed to.” Her father twisted his finger in the ugly necklace hanging loosely around his neck.

“Hey,” Alex interrupted, looking at another magazine, “here’s a biodegradable one.” She grinned impishly. “Good for the environment when we bury it.”

Erin gritted her teeth. “Even if I slept in a coffin, we wouldn’t bury it!”

She glared at everyone around the kitchen table, turned around and stalked to her room, slamming the door. Then she opened it again and slammed it with more force than a teenage girl should possess. The oak door splintered but held.

Silence hung over the dining room table like a heavy cloak.

Finally Alex said quietly, “I vote we just go ahead and cremate her now.”

Part One
Chapter 1
Several months earlier.

Ian Trug was quite possibly the ugliest kid in the entire country. Of course, in these politically-correct days, there’d never be a vote, but if there were, even Trug would have cast a reluctant vote for himself.
By all accounts Trug had been a very cute baby. But as a toddler, things began to go very wrong. First, parts of his body began to grow at a different rate. One arm grew longer than the other. Then, as if through some kind of spastic physiological competition, the other arm caught up and passed it. Feeling left out, his head got into the contest and ballooned, leaving his body behind. Of course his body rose to this new challenge and caught up in fits and starts. Trug could only watch in horror as the competition continued for a couple years until his head and body obtained what might generously be called symmetry.

To complete the picture, thatches of coarse black fur sprouted like weeds from the backs of his hands, and another strip marched down his back like that of an Arkansas razor-back. It would be cruel to mention the pimples on pimples, but, well.…

Anyway, by the time he crashed into teenagerdom he’d reached a plateau of ugliness he fervently hoped would never get worse.

He and his ugliness sat alone together in covert surveillance next to a potted fern that somehow flourished despite, or perhaps because of, copious amounts of milk dumped on it every day. That’s when the subject of his surveillance showed up.

“Oh, my God,” he thought to himself as Winifred Mandrake glided through the busy room. Obviously, he thought this to himself. He couldn’t think it to anyone else, unless some mind readers were in the room.

His eyes followed Winifred, and as always, the sight seemed to stun his lungs into inactivity, leaving him gulping for breath. Or maybe she simply drew all of the oxygen out of his immediate area. She had entranced him since he first inhaled the sight of her a couple months before.

“Wow,” someone breathed.

Who said that? Trug looked around. There was no one there.

His heart lurched. Had he said it out loud?

Gulp.

He looked around in panic. Whew, nobody had heard him.

He turned his attention back to her and suddenly his vision started blurring.

Aaagh! I’m going blind.

No wait. Breathe, dummy! Got to remember to breathe.

He took a deep breath and turned his attention back to the goddess.

Winifred wore a dark green skirt with a form fitting black top. It was the only possible look for her. Then again, she had a way of making anything she wore look like the only possible look. With black glossy hair and perfect white skin, her onyx eyes effortlessly enchanted boys, and gave the girls plenty to be catty about.

She sat down at the Becky table. Beckys are the perfect girls. Popular, pretty, cheerleaders. Better than anyone else in school. They looked down their noses at the normal students, particularly those whose acne regularly overwhelmed their acne cream.

Well, they weren’t totally perfect. Half of them had metallic smiles. But eventually they’d be perfect. At least until their twentieth reunion-after they’d had a few kids. Small consolation, because for now they looked perfect. Even worse, they knew it.

The Beckys rarely actually ate lunch and generally kept aloof as if their table ranked as some kind of throne. Only their personal knights from the Jock-table had the courage to draw their disdainful interest.

That didn’t stop Trug from admiring her from afar. The Gamer’s table shielded him from the Becky table, so he could usually watch her with impunity. Gamers lived for video games, and devoted their lunch period to peanut butter sandwiches and tales of conquests and cheats. They wouldn’t notice a lovestruck nerd staring past them.

“Hey, Trug. Whatcha doing?” Brian Slimnan’s tray clattered noisily on the table as he thumped into the seat across from him.

Trug started and hastily scooped up his wandering eyes, put them back in, and looked at his friend.

“Hi, Slim, what’s up?”

Slim is slim the same way some huge guys are often called ‘Tiny.’ He’s not fat, he’s more…

…well, okay, he’s fat.

But he carried it well, and wore loud shirts advertising his presence, just in case you didn’t notice two hundred and fifty pounds when it showed up next to you.

For all that, Slim was the most graceful person of his size Trug had ever seen. A diver on the school’s swim team, somehow, when he sliced into the water, there’d only be a blip of a splash. This didn’t make him look any better in a swimsuit, but Trug still thought him somewhat a freak with his physical ability.

Slim’s eyes slid across the room, taking in Winifred as she slipped into a seat with feline grace. His lips pursed, “Whoa, she’s something, huh?”

Trug’s face colored. “Uh, who?” he stammered.

Slim shot him a knowing grin, but didn’t say anything as he watched the pretty girl chatting with the other Beckys.

A whirlwind blasted into the room, and shot towards them through the milling crowd. It thwapped into the next seat. Slim’s tray slid from the impact, but he managed to catch it before it could fall. He gave the whirlwind a reproachful look. Okay, not a whirlwind, just Nevin, but most kids don’t move this quickly. “Hey, guys! What’s up?”

Trug grunted a hello at Little Nevin, though he continued looking at Winifred from the corner of his eyes.

Nevin noticed, and he turned around to see who Slim and Trug were looking at.

“Oh, ho, there’s a babe,” he said cheerfully, staring straight at her.

“Don’t let her see you looking at her,” Trug hissed.

“A babe? Did you just call her a babe?” Slim asked, an incredulous grin spreading across his face.

“Yeah, a babe.”

“Nobody says ‘babe’ anymore,” Slim said.

“Why not? She is a babe, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, I guess so, but you can’t call her that.”

“Why not?”

“Uh, I don’t know, but it’s just not right.”

“You call people ‘dude’ all the time and no one does that anymore.”

“That’s different!”

“Oh, yeah? Why?”

“Um, uh I don’t know. It just is.”

“Okay, you find out something else to call her, and I’ll call her that, as long as it’s the same thing as ‘babe,” Nevin said.

“Chick?” Slim suggested.

“Chick?” Trug and Nevin chimed, laughing.

“Yeah, ‘chick’,” Slim said defensively.

“Chick is even more outdated.”

Winifred noticed them staring and gave them a sulfurous smile from across the room. Her friends’ heads whipped around like meerkats.

“Agghh,” Trug yelped.

Slim’s eyes skipped down to his tray, which reminded him of his food. He grabbed a spork and started shoveling.

Nevin wasn’t embarrassed. He waved cheerfully at Winifred, whose smile brightened, as if it was possible for a supernova’s light to grow more intense.

“She likes me,” Nevin announced.

…

Well, thanks for reading the beginning of Fang Face.  If you want to read more, come visit my website http://www.fangface.homestead.com.  Or get it on Amazon, or your local bookstore (if they don’t have it, they can order it).  Or save a tree and download it from my publisher’s website (http://www.echelonpress.com).

See ya!

Norm

http://www.normcowie.com