Oh, this makes me so happy!

With the serious popularity in teen paranormal reads these days, I was not surprised to see that Harperteen was resurrecting my faves from my own childhood. L.J. Smith quite simply rocked as much as rocking is possible! She was our Stephenie Meyer.

My copies of The Forbidden Game, The Secret Circle, The Vampire Diaries, The Night World, and Dark Visions series were beat up from multiple lendings and re-readings. I passed them on to the Junior Junkies with warnings of guarding the books with their very lives before all the reprints came out! I wanted these books to last into eternity so that I could always come back to them.

It's true, I am and have always been an urban fantasy fan, even before the term was coined. I would consider LJ Smith one of the first of the genre, sort-of. She's urban fantasy in the way Buffy is. Not quite what it has morphed into today, but definitely at the forefront of existing stuff before it became so popular.

I had serious conversations with my college friends about these books. In the midst of the teen horror boom, it was our greatest wish that these books would come back into print and that the film versions would be made. I mean, c'mon, if you're familiar with them you can't tell me that you didn't lust after Julian in The Forbidden Game trilogy, or wish you were the object of Stefan and Damon's affections in The Vampire Diaries, or that you too had witchy powers or esp per the Secret Circle and Dark Visions books.

And, if you were hardcore, you know you're still waiting for the final Night World book - a quick check of her current website promises that it is forthcoming along with other Vampire Diaries titles. Yeah, I've been waiting since high school, so we'll see.