Art & Creativity Quote by James Patterson

Patterson sells the supernatural the way he sells everything: as a franchise with market share. The “vampire underworld” isn’t just a spooky conceit; it’s a promise of scale, a hint that whatever you’re reading is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. That’s craft, but it’s also commerce. He’s building a world that can sprawl across sequels, spin-offs, and reader imaginations, and he frames it in the language of urban ubiquity: not one haunted town, but “all the cities mentioned” and “many, many more.” The repetition reads like a wink toward the reader’s appetite for endless lore.

The second move is cannier: he drags the fantasy out of the crypt and into the mall. “Teenagers, especially” is doing heavy cultural work. It positions vampirism less as an ancient curse than as a teen-facing mode of identity play - a costume you try on when real life feels too rigid. The subtext isn’t that teens are naive; it’s that adolescence is already a kind of underworld, full of secret rules, appetite, and performance. Patterson taps the post-Twilight moment where vampire myth became a socially acceptable way to rehearse desire, power, and outsider status without naming any of it directly.

And note the “act out.” It’s slightly distancing, faintly diagnostic, as if the author is both indulging and containing the phenomenon. He’s inviting readers to flirt with transgression while reassuring them it’s just fantasy - a safe, scalable darkness, mapped onto modern cities where everyone can believe they’re one bite away from belonging to something bigger.