The Night World series is by 90’s Teen Vampire Writing Queen , L.J. Smith. She is also the original writer of The Vampires Diaries series and her name is still attached to the ghost written books of today.
This particular series contains 9 books with a 10th book named Strange Fate to be released at a N/A date.
Books 1-9 were written in the 1990’s with Strange Fate originally meant to be released in 1999.
If it’s been so long why do you still have a strand of faith?
It’s more hope, but honestly what’s the harm in running an update blog in the chance it ever happens?
DEC 2024 UPDATE
Strange Fate is finished! It's so big it became 2 books in general, as well as Lullaby which originally was split from it as well. All 3 appear to be finished, and are currently with her agent.
The names for Strange Fate are now Strange Fate:
Mystic and Strange Fate: Apocalypse.
MARCH 2025 UPDATE
RIP Lisa Jane Smith. To keep it brief for this update post, her books are with her publisher and her family believe they will be published.
In 2008, the books were republished at the beginning of a new Vampire craze. The Vampire Diaries tv show was announced and L.J. Smith ended her hiatus that started in 1999 (due to her caring for sick relatives).
In an interview in 2012, LJ Smith was “halfway” done with Strange Fate in the quote below:
“Out of all the Night World? To be honest, my favorite is one that you haven’t seen yet, because he’s in Strange Fate (670 pages so far and still only halfway done). His name is Kierlan, he’s a wild and crazy guy, and—to say more would be to give the plot away. BUT soon, when Night World 3 comes out (in April I think) you can see him for yourself, because the teaser in the back is from Strange Fate and it’s all about him—and Sarah, the heroine.”
Later she realized that the story had evolved so much that it was basically a completely different story, which she named The Last Lullaby. She took the chapters that became their own and wrote a different ending for it. She planned to publish that book in 2014, but for some reason this didn’t happen either. It seems some of this was published online but it doesn’t look like it was by Smith herself.
This is a story from the Night World book Strange Fate about the future—the future which awaits the world if the Apocalypse is not stopped.
During 2011 at the height of Vampire Diaries fame, and after being essentially asked to write more books to extend the series, Smith was actually fired from her books and a ghost writer was hired. She however did not lose the rights to every book of hers, and can still legally finish The Night World. I don’t know if this caused another shift in her focus, but she did write her own additional books and then swapped her focus to her own “fanfiction” verisons of the books. Which while originally able to be purchased on Amazon, is not gone. However links to Paradise Lost and The War of Roses still exist online. The books pick up where Midnight (the last book in the series written by her) take place.
Around 2016, L.J. Smith popped back up, once again active and informed her readers she almost died on a facebook post that can be found here. She really had mostly remained inactive, save the very occasional and unrelated post on facebook that stopped in 2018.
What are The Night World books about?
The Night World series is about a modern world where witches, vampires, werewolves, and shapeshifters love secretly along side mortals. The Night World has twos in rules which are 1. Do not allow humans to find out about the Night World and 2. Night World members are forbidden from falling in love with a human. Something in recent times has shifted though, causing members of the night world more frequently to find soulmates in humans. Each book gives us a Night World member and a human couple who fall in love in with varying reaction to it (some are more open to human love interests than others, some even are well known human haters). Aside from this, another interesting idea in the book (that differs from even other LJ Smith vampire books) is the idea of both made and born vampires. The born vampires, called Lamia, are just that. They can eat food and age, until they decide not to. Made vampires are pretty stereotypical vampires, with the added detail that only youthful people can survive the change therefore making all made vampires appear to be around teen age.
Why do I care so much still?
The Night World series has definitely aged but the ideas and stories are so dear to me to this day. I really would love to encourage a focus on the series and let LJ know fans are still to this day looking forward to her finishing, but that we also wish her and her health well! I hope this blog points people towards one of my favorite fictional worlds.
LJ Smith has killed off most of the named villains in the Night World. Hunter Redfern and his daughters, Maya… most of the named baddies have been vampires, come to think of it! This leaves it quite mysterious who the villain will be in Strange Fate… but there are other Night World stories that need villains: your Night World stories! So let’s cook some villains.
Apocalyptic Baddies
A dragon awakens. It wants to rule over whatever it beholds. It won’t grow into its full powers for a little while though, so there's a chance for it to be defeated!
Since the Wild Powers’ power is in their blood, what would happen if a vampire drank all their blood? Would the vampire find itself drinking blue fire and just burn up? Would the vampire get the power? Could many vampires drink from the same Wild Power and power themselves up? Most likely this would be an evil vampire, keen to get power for himself, but what if it was just a vampire who thought “I’m old and powerful, I have a better chance to save the world than some teenagers. They shouldn’t be trusted with this kind of responsibility!”
Witch Baddies
“We want revenge for the Burning Times” is a pretty solid motivation for witches to turn villainous, and “I just wanna mentally dominate humans to have a cushy life” is also quite understandable! Add them together and you get “humans owe me a cushy life because their ancestors murderized my ancestors” and that’s a philosophy that could lead to villainy.
Witches also have some sufferings in the present time. Having to hide your true nature and being surrounded by people you think will straight murderize you if they know the truth is not great for anyone’s mental health!
There’s also the tiny one-line about how boy witches don’t “live to grow up” as often as girl witches, leading to a gender inequality. We can extrapolate that to girl witches fighting over any boy witch they come across, some of them maybe going to quite unhinged lengths to get the guy because this may be their only chance to have a boyfriend who they’re allowed to fall in love with! And then the boy witch turns out to be soulmates with someone else… oh, the chaos that would result!
We can also imagine tragic tales of witch mothers who fear that their newborn sons are starting to fade and turn to evil to save them. Perhaps an evil spell that sucks health from the rest of the babies in the maternity ward to help save the witch’s baby? Maybe some creepy blood concoction invented with the help of vampires?
Vampire baddies
We don’t know if LJ Smith ever read Vampire the Masquerade (and now we can’t freaking ask her! T_T) but I sure read it, and it has some crackerjack ideas for vampire baddies. I quite like the idea that vampires get strange when they get old enough. They forget how to be human, becoming more monstrous even in appearance.
But we’ve got no antediluvians in the Night World. The two oldest vampires, Maya and Thierry, are still walking around with their human minds intact and their powers not much greater than that of your average vampire. So we can’t power up our ancient vampires, but we can make them go feral. Just say that Thierry keeps his humanity because of his bond with Hannah and Maya keeps hers though sheer determination to finally kill Hannah off for good. They both have strong connections to humanity, is what I’m getting at. But imagine a made vampire pulled into the Night World and taught that human are vermin for a few hundred years. All the humans they knew pass away, they have no reason to have any empathy towards humans, and their human minds begin to degrade. It’s a reasonable headcanon.
So we could say that these vampires that lose touch become feral, like the “rogue vampire” that Rashel kills in the chosen, who “lives at the fringes of the human world and the Night World.” This vampire lives in a filthy hole and hunts human children, it’s clearly lost its faculties. And while it might be fun to make this the oldest vampires, we could also say that some people just aren’t mentally suited for vampirism and can’t handle the separation from humanity and needing to drink blood.
We can also have very old vampires who just have baggage from earlier times. The world has changed fast. Technology, rights for more people… pants! These was a time when no self respecting masculine man would wear pants! Real men wear togas! Or kilts! I’ve worn this kilt for a hundred years and now I get funny looks when I go out in my kilt! Or when I treat those peasants the way I always treated them! This modern world has lost its mind, with its equal rights for peasants stuff!
My headcanon is that this type of stuck-in-the-past vampires are the ones who live in the Night World enclaves, where they can live in ways that make sense to them. And we could have a fun story inspired by Haddix’s Running Out of Time: a young vampire raised in an enclave starts dreaming of someone in the human world. It’s their soulmate, and they’re in danger! The vampire has to escape to find their soulmate, but they don’t know much about the human world. Will our vampire be able to fit in well enough to find the human of their dreams? And what are they in danger from?
Shapeshifting baddies
The Night World books don’t mention the “werewolves, protectors of the wild” trope, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t shapeshifters living in the wild who would get very grouchy if human logging or construction got too close to their home. Just ‘cause none of the books covered them doesn’t mean they aren’t out there!
The Night World books also don’t really mention magical places that humans have to be kept away from, but we could easily enough add one in. since ghosts stay near the place of their death, maybe a truly evil witch died and her spirit lingers, filled with rage against all humans. But she has no rage against werewolves so the Joint Council asks a family or two of werewolves to go live in this spirit’s haunting ground and make sure she doesn’t figure out how to leave and no humans come in and get killed. But then a human logging company decides this is just the forest to cut down, maybe a human forest ranger tries to stop them, and somewhere there's a teenage human about to cross paths with a teenage werewolf in the middle of it all.
Werewolves are the second class citizens of the supernatural, most of them relegated to guard duty and mocked for having dumb animal brains. What if a bunch of werewolves decide it’s time for them to be top dog for a change?
Baddies from beyond the grave
We meet two ghosts in the series: Angel, and the witch spirit who Thea accidentally releases.
Summoning spirits seems like an ordinary-ish thing for the witches, they chat with their ancestors every year at Samhain. And Thea’s plan to call on a friendly spirit to protect Eric seems like something that teenage witches aren’t considered old enough to do but not, like, something no witch ever does. So it could be that adult witches call on their ancestors with assistance with spells, protection, and such from time to time.
What powers do these spirits have? The angry witch ghost can do poltergeist stuff to murder people, but not every day. And Thea hoped a friendly spirit would block Blaise’s spells from hitting Eric. So it could be that a ghost can block witch magic.
If that’s true it opens up some interesting ideas for when the witches join Circle Daybreak en mass. The nasty vampires now have to worry about witches cursing them, so could the vampires seek out ghostly protection? Could they enslave ghosts somehow with their telepathy or something like, “if I feed a human my blood then murderize it, its ghost will be my slave!”
Angel is a lost spirit, stuck in the human world by his guilt. He can appear to Gillian and talk to her telepathically, but she has gone to the edge of death and gotten some kind of mediumistic powers, and she’s a witch, and she’s Angel’s cousin. So she’s the person Angel is most able to talk to. He can’t talk to normal people. Being crushed by guilt over his bad choices and then stuck unable to connect with any person is not good for Angel’s mental health and he spirals closer to evil the longer he exists in his ghostly state. The witch Melusine says this is normal for lost spirits, most of them lose their moral sense and become dangerous as their unnatural existence drags on. So we’ve got as many baddies as we want, here! Put together a good story for your ghost, have it do some ghostly stuff, and then either have a redemption or banish it.
I can also imagine that truly ancient lost spirits could fill the role of “the dark forces” if we needed to have a witch baddie reach out to dark forces. Maybe spirits get stronger and more unhinged over time and a witch can call on one for help, “hey, do my bidding a bit and I’ll let you use my powers to do stuff in the physical world.” and then evil and chaos results.
It’s not clear if the Night World has actual demons. There is an actual angel that greets souls at the edge of the great beyond, but I don’t think it is the sort of being that could visit Earth. But does the Night World’s afterlife have a good place and a bad place? We don’t know. The lack of demons is unusual for this kind of setting, and I both like it for being unusual and dislike it because, well, demons are in lots of settings because they’re so darn useful when you need a villain to do villainy!
Human baddies
We need hunters! Ok, we have hunters. Rashel hung out with a lot of vampire hunters and saw firsthand that suffering at the hands of vampires can make hunters quite understandably decide that killing all vampires, and getting a little torture in first, is the right thing to do. It’s also possible that hunters don’t know that vampires exist on a spectrum from total evil to trying to minimize harm while getting the blood they need to live. It’s easy to imagine an obsessed hunter going after the vampires who try not to hurt people, or shapeshifters who live away from civilization and aren’t much of a danger. Those targets are easier, and it’s one more monster removed from the world.
The other fun question is do all the hunters know about all the supernaturals? Rashel hangs out with a group called the Lancers who have cells all over the country and who know a lot about the Night World. They hunt vampires and werewolves, presumably not witches so much because witches aren’t as dangerous to society. But there could be other hunter groups that sprang from, say, one family’s brush with a pack of werewolves, and they know werewolves are real but have no idea that vampires are. Or they think the werewolves are bigfoots and if they shoot one of these bigfoots they’ll have fame and fortune!
But we need hunters with powers! And we can have them, if we make them lost witches. In the witch persecutions I imagine many witches would have died leaving orphans who would have been raised in other families-- very religious families that would have told these children about the evils of witchcraft. So when these lost witches started showing psychic powers they might think it was God’s blessing for the purpose of hunting witches. That’s a reasonable start to a lineage of dedicated witch hunters. The religious aspect could make them less likely to believe reports of vampires and werewolves, and it gives a whole worldview for how witches get their powers be worshiping the devil and such.
Not sure about bringing in religion, as the Night World books are refreshingly free of church vs. witches stuff… but if you’re gonna have witch hunters how do you not have them religious?
I guess you could have them be debunkers-- in our world people claiming to be psychics or witches do damage by scamming people out of their money, getting people to use magical healing instead of going to the doctor, and giving advice when they don’t really know what they’re talking about. Wanting to fight against that is a hero thing not a villain thing! And skeptics are generally pretty sensible people, not inclined to anything worse than nasty words... But we could go for obsessed debunker, wants to shut down all metaphysical businesses and prove that all magic is fake-- but witch magic is real, and this guy will believe it if he sees it! He could get the whole Night World exposed, and that would be bad!
There is only one LJ Smith’s Strange Fate, and I hope we’ll get to read it soon. But in the 25 year gap between books a number of other people have written their own Strange Fates. Let’s take a look at them!
Here is the list of the top ten things remotely called “Strange Fate” or “Night World book 10” that I could find. I read at least a few chapters of each to get a bit of an overview. There’s a lot of variation in how Strange Fate-ish they are, how good they are, and how finished they are. Fanfics do be like that.
Completed! Witch Sydney goes on a school trip to Belgium and shortly meets her soulmate, the arrogant vampire Alec. They join Circle Daybreak as the apocalypse approaches. This is a good story. It has lore, it has all the characters we know seen through the author’s eyes, it goes all the way to the apocalypse and an appropriate epilogue. Well done!
Completed! Also the first story going down this list to feature Sarah Strange, but she’s an ancient oracle soulmated to a dragon! This is a really original one, and it’s very cool.
Unfinished but very well written with long, meaty paragraphs. This author does the best so far at copying LJ Smith’s actual writing style. Our beloved characters plus some OC soulmates for the characters who need them.
Unfinished. Starring a young dragon born on the side of evil but choosing to become good. This is a neat original idea and I am here for it!
Unfinished, ends on a cliffhanger. POV jumps between all the characters as the apocalypse begins.
Unfinished. All the characters plus some OCs discover how close the apocalypse is as soulmated couples start getting murdered!
Unfinished. Based on the original Strange Fate back cover, Sarah’s soulmates are Blade and Kierlan. Shame this one’s unfinished, it does good stuff!
Unfinished but it gets to 37 chapters and they’re not teeny short chapters, so props for that! Another version of Sarah, Blade and Kierlan and well written.
Unfinished. A third Sarah Blade and Kierlan story, it looks like it was going good places but ends at two chapters.
Unfinished. Our characters are in trouble as the apocalypse begins.
Archive of Our Own delivered zero Strange Fates and Wattpad delivered one unfinished work that had basically nothing to do with the Night World except an appearance by Ash at the end. I liked reading these, seeing all the different ideas everybody had. Now I kinda want to try a good dragon protagonist growing up in an evil society, like a Night World Drizzt.
Another thing I noticed was that two stories kinda dunked on Gillian and David. One had them killed off, and in another the character totally roasted Gillian as being barely a witch who did evil with her powers as soon as she found out she had them. Which… valid, honestly! I think of Dark Angel as being Gillian’s origin story. Like Tony Stark she started pretty self centered and grew into a better person through her first adventure. It also struck me that Gillian could be a candidate for “witch who isn’t a witch” since she’s a witch who never got whatever moral instruction that girls in witch families get. What if now that Angel’s gone she goes looking for another patron creature… and connects with the dragons?? I don’t think so, I can’t imagine Ms. Smith doing that to one of her heroines, but it could be a valid plot!
...we need more Gillian sequels in this fandom. ^^;
But there was one more Strange Fate that I knew about. The one that fan tried to sell on a bunch of websites. Now that would be a unique addition to this post, and my Night World collection! But could I find it?
...well, yes. I emailed the author and she was happy to send me a copy no problem.
I was so excited.
Sadly she wasn’t… chatty-friendly. So it didn’t feel right to ask for details about the whole trying to get it published thing, no matter how much I want to know. Kindness and curiosity are both virtues, but when they come up against each other kindness should win. So we shall never know if she is a true madlass or just somehow managed to write a book-length fanfic without having enough contact with the community to know you can’t publish fanfics.
But was it any good?
Well… yes. To my surprise. It was. My expectations were really low, so I’m really impressed. Measured against traditionally published books the prose isn’t great, it’s clunky and clearly didn’t go through the rounds of edits that publishers impose. But measured against some of the fanfics I just read, it’s very well done. So I’d say it was on the level of other self published stuff. Not amazing, but readable. YMMV.
Sarah has become Davina Strange and she’s the fourth Wild Power, a plot point that makes sense, and by chapter 11 she’s been kidnapped by the baddies and we’re setting up Mal and Kierlan as rivals for her affection. The whole crowd of Night World characters haven’t really appeared yet, just Thierry, so I’m kinda “have fun juggling 18 supporting characters, that won’t be a challenge at all!” but it’ll be fun to see which ones get the spotlight. I don’t know how the rest of the story will go but I’m impatient to read more.
I have no idea if the author wants to be put on blast so dm me or whatever if you want a link, or look it up yourself, it wasn’t hard to find.
Hi Shadow! Do you know of any other blogs/networks that make stuff/talk about L. J. Smith’s work? Love your edits! I feel like whenever I look in the main tags it’s all show stuff not book. Thanks!
Hey!
Besides @ljsmithnetmithnet, @ljsmiths-thenightworld, @lady-corrine and @fells-church I don't. I'm sorry.
And thank you! Girl I know how you feel, it's nightmare. I usually type in Book!TVD or TVD Books but 😩😒. It's one of the reasons I started doing my own edits. No prob! I'm sorry I couldn't be more help.
Shapeshifters are the supernatural type that LJ Smith put the least thought into, I think, but what there is is pretty wild. I suspect that Ms. Smith added a whole lot of Night World lore during her absence, she had 25 years to play around with her world and come up with cool new ideas
...and now we can’t freaking ask her about it!
:-(
But let’s look into what we can look at.
In Daughters of Darkness we’re still with werewolves only. Their supernatural weakness is silver and their requirement is to eat the hearts and livers of their victims. I’m not sure they have to be specifically human hearts and livers, and I don’t think they have to eat them every day. You can buy chicken hearts and beef livers at the grocery store so I imagine that shapeshifters use that to supplement the fruits of their hunting. They can change anytime not just at the full moon, and can be human, wolf, or an in-between form. And they can change others into werewolves. Presumably by biting since that’s the lore, but none of the books ever says.
In this first book they’re described as “not people who sometimes turn into wolves, they’re wolves who sometimes look like people.” They’re the most animalstic and, well, stupid of the Night Races, and they are discriminated against. They’re second class Night Worlders and do a lot of guard duty and stuff.
We get a few more werewolf appearances, and the rest of the shapeshifters join the story in the End of the World arc with a werebear and a werehawk. They can also change humans into their type of shifter, which raises some interesting questions about what if someone with a bearish personality got changed by a weresheep. Does your animal form have to be fitting? All the shifters we see are carnivores, so are their herbivore shifters too? Would they have a different diet?
But it’s only in the final book that we get a shapeshifter main character, Keller, a werepanther. And we get a bit of retcon since Keller is smart and has a human mind. This makes me wonder if “we have animal minds” is more cultural than biological. If shapeshifters raise their children that they are feral animals inside and don’t need to bother getting book smarts, they’re more likely to end up that way. But Keller was raised by... humans? Witches? People who thought she could become smart in a human way anyway, so she grew up to be smart in a human way.
We learn that Keller was stuck in her in-between form as a baby so she was abandoned and taken in by Circle Daybreak. So baby shifters can shift but don’t always have control over it until they get older. This would mean that shifter parents shouldn’t send their kids to a human school until the child can reliably stay human!
Keller has the power to look at the dragon and see that it’s still cold, recently awakened. So Keller has heat vision! That’s a neat talent. She also has catlike athleticism while in human form.
This book doesn’t mention the shifters’ dietary requirements but it adds a fascinating detail: the only clothes that will shift with their wearers are clothes made from shapeshifter bodies. Fabric woven from the fur of other shifters, or leather tanned from their skin. This is just one line but it suggests so much possible culture for the shapeshifters. Is every shifter’s body harvested this way after death? Are there funeral rituals involved? Do elderly shifters choose who will inherit their skin as clothing? Does wearing the skin of a shifter of the same animal type make shifting easier? (I, uh, thought a lot about this.)
LJ Smith avoids a lot of werewolf tropes that other writers like to use. She doesn’t go for the alpha/beta thing for werewolves or make any more dominant or submissive to others. She also didn’t make shapeshifters particularly “protectors of the wild,” a trope that’s everywhere because it’s so obvious, but used most loudly in Werewolf The Apocalypse. None of her werewolves mention that they hate being alone and need a pack, or that they are driven to pledge fealty to a pack leader. Thierry’s werewolf employee isn’t troubled by being rejected from her pack and ending up at Circle Daybreak. I’m both glad Ms. Smith avoided these tropes, and sorry she did because these tropes aren’t bad and I think she could’ve use just a sprinkling of them to build some really cool shapeshifter culture.
And culture for the shapeshifters is a thing we don’t really get, because we didn’t get a book with a true Night World-raised shapeshifter protagonist to tell us about it. Since eating meat is vital, do shapeshifters have medieval style feasts with a whole cow roasting on a spit? Are there hunting rituals? Do shifters always inherit a parent’s animal form? Is there a cultural divide between born shifters and made shifters, like there is with vampires? How does the Drache family rule and keep order? There’s so much we don’t know!
...at least, if we only read the books themselves. The Ultimate Fan Guide has a bit more.
The fan guide makes it clear that werewolves and shapeshifters are meant to be completely different. Werewolves aren’t just wolf shifters, as I assumed. And is, I think, a natural assumption! In the Fan Guide Ms. Smith says she wishes she’d never said the “wolves who sometimes look like people” line because the nasty violent werewolf is not like real wolves. Nasty violence is more a thing for wolf-dog hybrids, she says.
I’ve heard it suggested that this means the stupid, bestial werewolves in the Night World got that way by interbreeding with dogs, but I can’t find where I read it. Was that something Ms. Smith said or something a fan extrapolated? ‘Cause that would take us down a whole strange pathway.
Does this mean that shapeshifters fall in love and raise families with creatures of their animal shape sometimes, rather than with humans? Are there shapeshifters who just say nah to humanity and live in the wild full time? They could be out there doing the “protectors of the wild” thing in their own enclaves, occasionally eating poachers and innocent campers. Now there’s a whole new setting for fanfics! There’s a very basic story there, teenagers lost in the woods, shapeshifters hunting them, one teen and one shifter are soulmates… go forth and write that fanfictions!
And then there are the dragons. Added in book nine of a ten book series, they’re the most powerful shapeshifters, but they’re also their own thing. They really are dragons who sometimes look like people, or anything else they want to look like. And it sort of reads like the dragons are the progenitors of the shifters, their powers were passed down to all the shifters in a lesser form. So did one of these dragons mate with some other creature to create the shapeshifters in a literal bloodline sense? Or maybe they did it with magic, but I’m not sure why they would. Or maybe the ancient witches stole some of the dragons’ shapeshifting power and created shapeshifters to be like dragons but good. That headcanon works well. But I wish we could ask LJ Smith about it!
The Drache family has more dragon blood so they can choose their animal form while other shapeshifters are born with a form. What if a Drache gave birth in animal form, would the baby be able to choose what its human shape would look like? That’d be neat. How does shapeshifting work with pregnancy? Probably not something Ms. Smith ever had to think about since all her characters are teenagers, but your Night World characters can be any age. I like imagining how life works for grownups in the Night World, and kid lamia at school and senior shapeshifters. And I bet LJ Smith did similar imaginings and I wish she’d had a chance to tell us about them.
I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on dragons sometime, but this seems like enough shapeshifter thoughts for one post!
“Julian” from one of my favorite books series ever called “The Forbidden Game” by LJ Smith. Found out she passed away a couple weeks ago so I’ve been going through and rereading her books which also include The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle. Her books were unbelievably important to my formative years and really molded me as a person and artist. I’ll always be grateful for her inspiration.
Very sad to hear about the passing of L. J. Smith.
She was the author of The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, Night World, and more... books that were a big part of my teen years. When I was 16, I even won a fan art contest she ran on her website.
In her memory, I decided to redraw one of my old illustrations from that contest—Kaitlyn Fairchild, a character haunted by her ability to predict the (often tragic) future through her drawings, from the book Dark Visions. Her stories were filled with great characters, and I loved getting lost in the worlds she crafted. She’ll be sorely missed.
rest in peace Lisa Jane Smith. you contributed so much to the world of vampire/monster fiction since well before 2000 and beyond. so many decades of stories. I deeply admire your work, I always will.
you gave us so many favorite characters. so many perspectives from different monsters. so many beautiful love stories. from the vampire diaries (which i refused to read part book 4 because it wasn’t your writing anymore and they did you so dirty) to your night world short stories, to the secret circle books, you’ve had me entranced.
you and your imagination will forever be missed. thank you for getting out one last book i know you worked so diligently on, refusing your illness to prevent you from finishing it. us readers will always be grateful. rest easy LJ, I can’t wait to meet you in a world better than this one ❤️
Rest in Peace, L.J. Smith - Thank you so much for these entertaining and amazing characters and the universe you worked hard on to share to the world. Your legacy will live on. Thank you for everything, truly.
