Coven Chronicles | Verve Magazine
India's premier luxury lifestyle women's magazine
Screen + Sound + Stage
May 30, 2014

Coven Chronicles

Text by Nittal Chandarana

Verve gives you a guide to the best vampire and witch sagas doing the rounds, with one starring Angelina Jolie arriving this weekend

Hollywood has come out with a new spate of money-spinners. They have a knack of sniffing out the next big viral trend, which then pervades the rest of the world and enters the SYSTEM. Books – check. Television – check. Films – check. Merchandise – check. Suddenly, it is everywhere and all you can do is bide your time till the plague perishes and resurface a few months later when something else becomes popular.

You thought you wouldn’t have to encounter blood, razor-sharp canines, unlikely (which became so very likely that you almost wished for one yourself) romances, near-death experiences…but no such luck. Authors and filmmakers have worked overtime to present to us this dreaded genre of entertainment – Vampire Sagas. Dracula is a one-off. Ask someone to read Bram Stoker’s fine classic and they groan. Give them another installment of Twilight and the world will be divided into Teams Edward and Jacob once again. When even popular TV show Game of Thrones had a vampire appearance in its first installment, we sat up and took notice. Of course, Castle had already struck the iron while it was hot, all the way in 2009. And then there was no stopping. Being Human, True Blood, Vampire Diaries… the audience lapped it up. Throw in a couple of witches and you’re at a teenager’s fantasy theme party. We give you some vampire and witch offerings doing the rounds…

1. Diary of a Wimpy Vampire by Tim Collins– This one seems like a sane, humorous account of a teenage vampire. Stuck at fifteen, Nigel Mullet will have to deal with puberty issues forever. Acne, girls, voice change… the likes. To top that off, he has to keep worrying about his parents eating one of his human friends. The teens weren’t an ideal time. To be captured in that limbo – preposterous. Why not give it a shot?

2.  The Vampire Stalker by Allison Van Diepen – This one’s for all those who’ve fallen for a fictional character. Amy falls in love with the protagonist of a novel – Alexander Banks. He proceeds to jump out of the book (If only. Sigh.) in quest of wicked vampire Vigo. She plays his partner sleuth. “His profile was straight and chiseled” they say. We’ve read that before in Twilight, we say.

3. Half Bad by Sally Green – The first book in the Half Life series, Half Bad traces the life of Nathan, the child of a white witch and the fiercest Black Witch – Marcus. Trapped in a cage since he was 14, he must find a way to escape before his seventeenth birthday. Gaining immense popularity, the one’s been compared to the likes of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Orwell’s 1984. There must something there.

4. Witches of East End by Melissa de la Cruz – There’s the books. And later on, the television series. The Beauchamp family, a family of witches, is forced to hide their powers. An unlikely engagement, lust, betrayal, guilt and they gradually find themselves being pulled to the life they had forgotten. The series premiered in 2013. Not too late to catch up with the current episodes!

5. Maleficent by Robert Stromberg – It’s Disney. That alone is enough temptation to make a trip to that room-full-of-strangers-with-popcorn. Angelina Jolie plays the antagonist in this larger-than-life rendition of Sleeping Beauty. The trailer is marked by Jolie’s haunting voice and seems as dark as Disney could possibly make it. It’s out end of May. Something to darken the summer.

Secretly love vampire and alien romances? We decoded the Pandora box of magic and romance here: Pixie-dust Romances.

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