I hate to break it to nervous studio execs, but that ship has sailed. "Twilight" hoopla has been bonkers for years, and the "New Moon"-specific hoopla is really only noteworthy for being even more so. The L.A. Times article notes that "more than a week before its release, the film sold more than four times as many tickets as the original 'Twilight' at MovieTickets.com at the same point in the sales cycle." And it's not just teenage girls driving the frenzy; MovieTickets.com's latest data said 27 percent of the buyers were women between 25 and 34 -- the slightly embarrassed but no less addicted demographic Sarah Hepola reported on for Salon earlier this week.

Another 35 percent are women under 25, though, and altogether, 87 percent of advance ticket holders are female. That's no surprise, but a majority-female audience breaking sales records left and right certainly is. "Let's just think about that," wrote Melissa Silverstein at her blog Women & Hollywood last week. "A franchise fueled by girls and women has the potential of beating the machines for the box office record. This movie could potentially be 'guy proof' meaning they won't need guys to see it for it to kick some box office butt. Whereas the other franchises NEED women to make their numbers."

Having seen the first movie and read the first two books before officially determining that neither the lols nor the thought of blogging furiously about the wildly popular series' gender messages held my interest enough to continue, I never imagined I'd find a reason to see the "Twilight" phenomenon as a potential triumph for women. In the books, at least -- far more than in the first movie -- heroine Bella is spineless and infantilized, while dreamboat vamp Edward is stalky and emotionally abusive. The thought of the effect those characterizations might have on young girls who see it as a depiction of "true love" pained me. But Silverstein makes a great point: What about the effect the "Twilight" saga's success might have on Hollywood's confidence in female-oriented films?

"New Moon finally give us an apple to apples comparison with other types of fan-driven films," she told me in an e-mail. "The biggest films in Hollywood are the ones that come out of comic books, toys and books. Starting last year with 'Sex and the City,' 'Mamma Mia' (and both those can be dismissed because the targeted audience was older), but now with the two 'Twilight' films, it shows that female filmgoers can be as rabid in their fandom as male." The question is, will the powers that be recognize young women as a robust market that's been largely ignored and condescended to, or will they write it off as a limited phenomenon? "Studios should look at this as a golden opportunity and not a fluke!" writes Silverstein. But tapping into the passions of young female audiences means "working to try and uncover things that are bubbling in fandom and even trying to come up with exciting ideas to engage the audience," not just waiting around for the next runaway bestseller.

It might also mean sticking with what works, especially when it's a female director who's demonstrated a knack for understanding teenage girls. Unfortunately, Catherine Hardwicke, director of "Twilight," was replaced by Chris Weitz for the second installment, despite the first film's having grossed $383.6 million worldwide -- and the series seems to have suffered for it artistically, if not financially. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek enjoyed Hardwicke's movie as an "unapologetic, unembarrassed foray into teen-heartthrob territory, hitting the sweet spot where pop culture, teenage curiosity about sex, and vampire lore meet," but says Weitz's "offers few of the juicy, go-for-broke romantic pleasures of its predecessor." 

Zacharek's not alone in her disappointment. Granted, popular teen-oriented franchises hardly need critical acclaim to succeed, and the first film only earned 49 percent positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes -- but contrast that with the 30 percent rating "New Moon" has. Positive word of mouth may be no more than the icing on the cake for such a big movie, but it's nevertheless likely to be absent this time, even though Weitz had far more money and momentum going into the project. Says Silverstein, who saw an advance screening, "I think they really miscalculated in not keeping Hardwicke. The budget for this film was $50 million up from I believe $39 for the first one and one of the things that the studio and Hardwicke were fighting about was budget. She really seems to know how to tap into the teen spirit and that was missed here. She just knows how to elicit emotions from young people. It's her thing, and that's what worked best in the first movie and worst in this movie."

So even if the studios do learn something about the power of female audiences from the "Twilight" saga, they seem to have ignored any lessons the first film offered about the capabilities of a female director. Nevertheless, Silverstein is optimistic about "New Moon's" potential to improve women's lot in Hollywood across the board -- as long as executives recognize its tremendous appeal as more than a fluke. "Hopefully, this success will infiltrate the minds of Hollywood number crunchers and seek out products for the female audience," she says. "If people start thinking and making more movies that star women and are women driven, it can only help women at all levels of the business." 

But there's a cloud over this "New Moon," and it's a big one. Hardwicke (who'd previously made the overwrought cautionary teen drama "Thirteen") was originally signed on to direct this installment; she was fired early on and replaced by Chris Weitz, a director with a varied list of credits, "About a Boy" and "The Golden Compass" among them -- he also co-directed "American Pie" with his brother, Paul Weitz. (Melissa Rosenberg has written the screenplays for both pictures.) "New Moon" features the same cast as the first movie. And the "Twilight" books have proved so frighteningly popular to begin with that the studio, Summit Entertainment, probably figured it could resurrect Ed Wood from the grave and still get a hit. How much difference could switching directors make?

Although it's hard to answer that question definitively, "New Moon" offers few of the juicy, go-for-broke romantic pleasures of its predecessor, and the movie is so badly shaped that it's hard not to blame Weitz as a director. Kristen Stewart returns as Bella, the high-school student who's been smitten but not bitten: Her boyfriend and true love is 109-year-old Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), part of a wandering vampire family that has taken up residence in her Pacific Northwest town. Bella has just turned 18, and after some convoluted and confusing dribble-drabble about Bella's not being "good" for him, Edward decides to leave her in order to protect her -- whatever that means. Before vanishing, he warns her not to take unnecessary risks.

Depressed Bella responds by spending October, November and December staring, quite literally, out of her bedroom window. When she finally does go out, she imperils herself by getting onto a motorcycle with a local goon, and Edward's face appears before her, a shimmery vision, warning her of the danger. Seeing a window of opportunity here, she collects a bunch of old motorcycles and asks her friend, the sweet, caring, good-with-his-hands Native American Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) to help her fix them up. Bella's motives aren't completely clear -- she seems to have a bit of the thrill seeker in her, anyway -- but the suggestion is that if she saddles a rebuilt two-wheeled death machine and rides it really fast, perhaps she'll get to see more of these smudges of Edward.

Jacob, of course, has a mad crush on Bella. And as the two of them tinker with their junkyard toys, Bella comes to realize she likes him too. The complication, as was pretty much revealed in the first movie, is that Jacob is soon to be part of a tribal werewolf pack -- except, when these guys aren't werewolves, they're running around the landscape in bare chests and cutoff pants, scowling and growling at one another and at everybody else. Jacob can't resist the clan of the shirtless -- it's in his blood -- and so he joins their grumpy number, in the process changing from a cheerful, caring, open-faced kid to a sullen, pissed-off J.D.

One with giant, rounded biceps and Hulk-style pecs, I might add. And that's just the beginning of the problems with "New Moon." Bella's eyes pop when she gets a load of that chest, and she gets to see a lot of it, as we do. Forget that wan Victorian valentine Edward -- the movie only wants to hammer on the notion that women feel conflicted between sensitive, skinny pale guys who'll protect them with their mad vampire skilz and brawny bruisers who'll protect them with muscle, either the wolf or the human kind.

In the "New Moon" world, there's no in between. These movies, and the books they're based on, are all about veiled sexuality, with all its thrills and threats: There's no sex in these pictures, only the vague, gauzy promise of it -- predicated on the way young girls often dream of being swept off their feet by a handsome, laconic hunk but don't want to think about what might come after.

But the problem isn't that "New Moon" takes an uncomplicated view of sex; it's that it doesn't even bother to take a romantic view of romance. Weitz appears to have paid no attention to pacing here: The movie is essentially a string of brooding speeches, often delivered in the woods, with very little interesting connective tissue in between. The dialogue consists of numerous variations on two lines, the first being "I love you, but I'm a vampire, and I can't protect you," the second, "I love you, but I'm a werewolf, and I can't protect you." The proceedings perk up a bit in the later scenes, set in a mysterious Vatican-type place in Italy: There, Michael Sheen holds court in silly priest's robes, and powerful vampire temptress Dakota Fanning shoots daggers, figuratively speaking, with her eyes. But she's also wearing a tight upswept hairdo that makes her look a little like Cloris Leachman in "Young Frankenstein," and where's the romance in that?

The performers struggle along in their silly hairdos and bad makeup. (It's possible that the pale vampire makeup here is even worse than in the first picture; Sheen, in particular, looks as if he's wearing a thin coat of Queen Helene Mint Julep Masque.) Pattinson really needs only one expression to play the tortured Edward -- he lowers his eyes and peers out from beneath fringey eyelashes -- and he's mastered it. He's completely serviceable in terms of what he needs to do here, which is basically to wander around, to borrow a line from Keats, alone and palely loitering. Stewart is much better than she needs to be for this material: Even in the most emotionally heightened scenes, she intuitively eases up on the clutch -- miraculously, nothing she does feels overdone or overthought. Lautner is cute as the eager, playful, pre-wolf pack Jacob and numbingly dull as the supposedly sexier wolfen one.

Some of the effects are perfectly adequate: When those hot-pants tribal hoodlums finally turn into wolves, they're magnificent beasties with sturdy, prancing paws. But mostly, Weitz seems to think he can get away with trotting out the "greatest hits" moments from the first movie: Showing Edward drift through the high school parking lot in slow motion, like a teenage god crossed with a pop star; fixing the camera on Bella and Edward as he stares into her eyes and murmurs one version or another of his patented tortured-vampire speech. "Twilight" was a pleasant surprise, a dish of cream-heavy teen romance that had at least been made with a guiding sensibility behind it. "New Moon," on the other hand, merely follows a dictated formula. It's a cheap, shoddy piece of work, one that banks on moviegoers' anticipation without even bothering to craft a satisfying experience for them. Its pandering is an insult. "New Moon" moons its audience, and makes them pay for the so-called privilege.

In fairness, though, he's right that Bella, "Twilight's" protagonist, is attracted to Edward Cullen "because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her." He writes: "This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet." Sure, a similar scenario can be found among the pinups of effeminate teen idols gracing young girls' walls -- but the fantasy isn't about gay men so much as it's about boys and men who represent true romance, as defined by fairytales.

After all, Edward does desire Bella -- more so than he has ever desired anyone else, we're told -- but his everlasting love for her overrides his lust, at least temporarily, because he doesn't want to get lost in the heat of the moment and hurt or kill her. He fights to keep his passion (for blood, for sex) at bay; he is, essentially, a guy who's willing to wait for it. Now that's a way to make teenage girls' hearts flutter -- just look at the Jonas Brothers and their, swoon, promise rings.

All that said, one need only look at the abundance of "Twilight" slash fiction, in which fans imagine Edward getting it on with dudes, for proof that gay sex can titillate women. On a similar note, some ladies love gay male porn because it provides sexual entertainment without requiring a woman to picture herself in a scene that might otherwise be rife with unsavory sexual dynamics (as is often the case with straight porn). These sorts of fantasies allow for intense erotic passion without a real sexual threat. Undoubtedly, though, Bella does face a sexual and mortal threat, because she desires Edward, a vampire who could bite into her neck mid-coital.

With so much ink already spilled on this cultural phenomenon, it's tempting to lean on hyperbole as a way to say something new, or seemingly so, on the topic. The truth, though, is that sexual desire -- oftentimes polysexual, sometimes homosexual -- has always loomed large in vampiric legend. Lusting after men's and women's blood, penetrating victims' flesh and sucking the life from their bodies? It has all the sexual subtlety of a triple-X flick. Vampires are far from newcomers in the world of queer theory and gender studies. But it's a complicated metaphor, one that isn't easily reduced to "women want sex with gay guys."

Beyond the sensationalistic declarations, Marche makes a great point about how vampire tales can be especially appealing in "moments of carnal crisis." He describes HBO's True Blood as "a perfect encapsulation of the American bedroom at this moment: Everyone is a freak, even the people who claim to rail against freakiness." Maybe some of the current blood lust in pop culture satiates underlying anxiety about changing social and sexual mores. Now that's an intriguing idea -- too bad he pushes it to the point of intellectual dishonesty.

OK, this one is in Korean, which maybe you weren't expecting. And its vampire hero is a Roman Catholic priest, which admittedly might not go down big with the family-values crowd. It comes with a heavy dose of religious guilt, some bizarre sexual slapstick involving a leering, drowned ghost, unpredictable explosions of violence and a black-comic satire of middle-class family life. It's called "Thirst," and it's partly based on Emile Zola's 19th-century novel "Thérèse Raquin," of all things. Its cinematic daring, narrative wildness and, yes, full-throated romance make it the best vampire love story of the year. (If you're over the age of 14, that is.)

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes earlier this year, "Thirst" is the newest (and in some sense oldest) film from Korean director Park Chan-wook, who almost single-handedly seems to embody this decade's prodigious East Asian cinematic renaissance. Best known for the "Vengeance" trilogy, a series of interconnected, ultraviolent, moral fables that included the international cult hit "Oldboy" -- which a few media hysterics briefly, and irresponsibly, linked to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre -- Park has already become a singular figure in film history. It's difficult to think of another director who's been so widely embraced by the global art-cinema scene and by horror-thriller genre buffs. Hitchcock? Kurosawa? Roman Polanski? Quentin Tarantino? Maybe if you Cuisinart those guys together and ferment the mixture in the cultural hothouse of contemporary South Korea, you get Park Chan-wook.

Even in jest, such a formula seems like diminishing an artist, and Park is very much his own creation. Both in person and in his films, Park comes off as completely committed and sincere. He hasn't made a movie about a selfless priest who dies of a horrible skin disorder after a failed medical experiment, only to be reanimated as a vampire who seems to have supernatural healing powers, and who then embarks on a doomed love affair with a bitter and lonely middle-class wife -- all while trying to square his bloody and sinful existence with his abiding faith in God -- out of some jaded, meta-B-movie impulse. If "Thirst" can be described as a wild, nearly crackpot assemblage of different kinds of stories, they're all addressing a set of basic human questions about love, sex, violence, guilt and redemption that have preoccupied Park throughout his career.

I think "Thirst" is a brilliant and gruesome work of cinematic invention as well as a passionate and painful human love story. Park is so often celebrated as a stylist -- some of the credit should go to his cinematographer, Chung Chung-hoon -- that people don't notice how wonderfully he works with actors. The central couple in "Thirst," leading Korean star Song Kang-ho (who plays the priest) and one-time beauty queen Kim Ok-vin, are marvelously matched as they veer from living to undead, from love to hate and back again. I'd qualify that glowing endorsement by saying that Park's risk-taking doesn't always pay off. "Thirst" goes on too long, drags in places, and can't always manage its unstable balance of horror, romance and comedy. When the result is a daring crazy-quilt of a movie that's not quite like anything you've ever seen before, I'll take it.

I met Park Chan-wook at his midtown Manhattan hotel during his recent American visit. Sober and soft-spoken, dressed in a turtleneck and suit jacket, the 45-year-old director could pass for your average visiting Asian businessman. Although he appeared to understand my questions in English, he responded through an interpreter. This might sound implausible if you haven't seen his films, but Park is a major classical music buff. He told me his principal regret about his brief New York stopover was that he had no time to catch a concert at Carnegie Hall. "I walked by there yesterday, and there were so many posters on the walls for artists I admire," he said. (Indeed, a Bach cantata forms the basis for the score in "Thirst.")

Mr. Park, your reputation in the United States is mostly as a director of violent thrillers or horror films. Is that how you think of yourself?

Well, it would be hard for me to say that I'm a horror film director. But it would be equally hard to say that there's no violence in my films. Of course I would like to emphasize that there are many other elements in my films, and I would also like you to think about how I use violence in my films. It's not about a release. If you watch these films just for the sake of violent release, it isn't there. There is no big, beautiful, violent gunplay. I don't try to make violence look beautiful. Just because there are scenes of violence in my films, you can't lump my films together with every other film with violent scenes. In a sense that is a violence of categorization.

Now, "Thirst" is being called a vampire film, which I guess it is. But isn't that an inadequate way of describing a movie that covers so much narrative territory and so many different styles and moods?

That's true, but also, when you think about all the genre names, they never manage to represent everything that's in a film. It would be grossly inadequate to call "Brokeback Mountain" a western. Even if you add another word and say it's a gay western, it still wouldn't adequately describe the film.

I understand you've been planning "Thirst" for many years, since before the "Vengeance" films and even before you made "Joint Security Area" [the film that first brought Park international attention in 2000].

Yes, I started thinking about this film 10 years ago, but not every story element was there. And it's not as if I was thinking about it constantly for 10 years. The first things that came to me one night were the first sequence, how the priest becomes a vampire, and the climactic sequence, in which the woman who is his lover becomes a vampire. The rest of the story was blank to me.

Then one day I came across a book called "Thérèse Raquin," and the details of that story started to fill in the gaps left in my vampire story. That's when I started to write the script properly. It hasn't actually been that long since then.

Maybe the influence of that Zola novel explains this, but "Thirst" strikes me as a romance more than anything else. Yes, it's a violent and bloody vampire story, it's a story about religious faith and it's an erotic story. But first and foremost it's a romance, it follows the arc of a love affair between a man and a woman.

Yes, that's actually one of the most important elements. It's as important as the religious aspect, or the vampire aspect. So much so that I contemplated calling it a "vampire romance" when we were trying to categorize the film. If we had called it that, it might be too reminiscent of something like "Twilight." [Laughter.]

That might not be a bad thing.

Then I wondered whether I should call it a"vampire romantic comedy." No, I couldn't really do that.

You mentioned the religious element of the story. Why was that important to you? Is this the story of a priest who loses his faith?

Well, you could view it that way, that the main character loses faith, but in another light he really doesn't. This character very much tries to make an effort to bridge his faith and his identity as a vampire, to try to bridge these two opposing ideas. It's important to see that he makes that effort. It's almost impossible to mix these two concepts in the human brain, in any logical way. In order for him to preserve his faith and at the same time suck the blood of other people -- or to commit suicide -- all of it goes against his beliefs. At the same time, he tries to reconcile these aspects of himself. This desperate attempt, this struggle to make sense of these two opposing ideas, is the backbone of this film. It provides the energy for it to move forward, and the comedy is born out of such efforts.

Your two leading actors, Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-vin, have wonderful chemistry together. Sexual chemistry but also a very complicated emotional chemistry, which is more important. I understand they collaborated with you a great deal in creating the film.

Yes, but I don't want to talk about only those two actors. I'd also like to talk about Shin Ha-kyun, who plays the husband of Kim Ok-vin's character. I've worked with both Shin Ha-kyun and Song Kang-ho since "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" [the first film in the "Vengeance" trilogy, although released second in the U.S.] and the three of us are best friends. Kim Ok-vin is a relative newcomer to the mix, but the four of us spent a lot of time together, reading the script. We made excursions to rural areas and camped out. We met up often to go drinking. We did that countless times! [Laughter.] Throughout this process we developed a bond, like brothers and sisters, like family members. In those sessions we had lots of discussions, lots of debate about the characters. That was the foundation on which those characters were built.

"Thirst" is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It opens Aug. 14 in Chicago, Honolulu, Seattle, Washington and Austin, Texas; Aug. 21 in Boston, Portland, Ore., and San Diego; Aug. 28 in Denver, Detroit and Philadelphia; and Sept. 4 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Minneapolis and St. Louis, with more cities to follow.

Whedon's original idea, to take "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie" and make her the hero of the story, mutated into a remarkably flexible and inventive way to portray the terrors of adolescence. The supernatural elements of the stories provided Buffy and her friends with more than just monsters to kill; they served as metaphors for everyday identity crises and social anxieties, most famously when Buffy and her boyfriend, the redeemed vampire Angel, consummate their love, whereupon a gypsy curse renders him suddenly cruel and hateful.

This hybrid of teen angst and pulp adventure may not have made for the kind of mass-market success demanded by network television, but it was too yummy to simply subside into a cultural footnote. The spirit of Buffy Summers is perpetuated not just in official "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" media, but also in a thriving genre of popular fiction, usually labeled "urban fantasy," in which young female protagonists get to battle monsters and demons while working through the conundrums of early adulthood -- which often amount to the same thing. If you don't feel like schlepping to the comics store for the latest sliver of Buffy (or you don't like negotiating the ick factor in Whedon's current series, "Dollhouse") you can satisfy those cravings by getting to know Rachel Morgan, Mercy Thompson or Anita Blake.

Or, for that matter, Sookie Stackhouse. HBO's "True Blood," based on the Southern Vampire books by Charlaine Harris, may have underwhelmed critics initially, but it's proven itself to be highly addictive, like many urban fantasy series. The first episode of the show's second season was HBO's highest-rated single episode since the finale of "The Sopranos." At a time when, except for a handful of shows like "Lost," TV has begun to back away from imaginative serialized dramas, urban fantasy novels make for a tasty substitute. More and more often, on nights when my brain is just too weary for Ian McEwan but not soft enough to settle for "The Mentalist," I find myself switching off the set and nestling into the sofa with a page turner about a girl who reminds me of nothing so much as the savior of Sunnydale High.

"Urban fantasy" may seem a peculiar label for the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which are set in the small town of Bon Temps, La. In fact, the label is contested, since the term "urban fantasy" (meaning fantasies set in the contemporary world) was first applied to the work of such writers as Neil Gaiman and John Crowley, whose aspirations are more literary. Sometimes these Buffyesque novels are called "paranormal romances" after a subset of the romance genre that specializes in human heroines finding true love in the arms of supernatural beings, usually vampires, à la the hugely popular Twilight Saga.

But the genre breaks several of the core tenets of romance fiction, most notably by eschewing the conventional "happily ever after" ending and depicting romantic relationships as uncertain and ambiguous. Bookstores manifest this genre confusion by shelving the books haphazardly, in their romance, science fiction or horror sections, none of which is a perfect fit. With that caveat, since a better label has yet to present itself, we'll stick with "urban fantasy."

Most fans would agree that one of the genre's pioneers was Laurell K. Hamilton, whose Anita Blake series began even before Buffy's television incarnation, with the novel "Guilty Pleasures," published in 1993. Anita is an animator-for-hire, licensed to temporarily raise the dead so that they can be questioned by the living on matters both legal and personal. In essence, she's a private detective of the hard-boiled school, but operating in a version of the contemporary world in which creatures from folklore -- vampires, werewolves and more -- have been uneasily integrated into human society. The early Anita Blake novels are dark and grisly, shadowed by Anita's ambivalent relationship to her own capacity for violence and her fear of becoming "one of the monsters." She's isolated and angry, like many a noir protagonist, with no real love life to speak of. She lavishes far more attention on the finer points of concealed weaponry (at any given moment she's packing a couple of guns and four or five blades) than on the charms of any of the men around her.

If, like me, you approached Hamilton's series haphazardly, reading the first book and then inadvertently skipping ahead to, say, Book 14, "Danse Macabre," you'll be in for a shock. The Anita who hunkered down every night with a collection of stuffed penguins in a poignant effort to cling to the last shred of her innocence in "Guilty Pleasures" had been transformed into an erotic ringmaster. She's sleeping with seven different men, often several at a go, with the occasional one-shot tryst on the side. Hamilton offers an elaborate rationale for this erotic explosion; it involves a communicable "metaphysical" infection Anita contracted from her main vampire squeeze, Jean-Claude, but I confess that I've never been able to make much sense of it.

This change led to consternation among some of Hamilton's longtime fans, who insistently voice their dismay on the Amazon reader reviews for each book. "Orgy after orgy," complains one reviewer of "Danse Macabre," "[Anita] is naked for nearly the whole book. For someone who started out so shy and modest in the first book, she has certainly gone hog wild." The outcry occasionally provokes a grumpy response from Hamilton, who accuses her critics of resisting "uncomfortable" material. In truth, there's far less sex in the later Anita Blake books than there is talking about sex and about Hamilton's byzantine and unfathomable explanations for why Anita has to have it with so many men when she supposedly doesn't really want to. Still, I sympathize with the fans' exasperation. Despite their objections, the most recent Anita Blake novel, the 17th, "Skin Trade," zoomed instantly to the No. 1 spot on Publishers Weekly's bestseller list.

Even if the Anita Blake refuseniks are, as Hamilton maintains, merely a "minority," the fuss over Anita's personal life exemplifies a perennial argument in urban fantasy: the ratio of crime to sex, or more broadly, of mystery to relationships. In a posting in the Publishers Weekly blog Genreville, novelist John Levitt explained that he regards his own books as urban fantasy, as opposed to Hamilton's and Harris', which he considers paranormal romances. Grouping himself with Jim Butcher, whose Harry Dresden novels about a P.I.-wizard in Chicago were inspired by the Anita Blake series, he claims a shared "lineage" with Butcher that includes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The urban fantasy hero, Levitt writes, is a "troubled loner," who "has romantic hopes, but they're never the focus of the books." Harris and Hamilton, he claims, come from "the romance tradition," where "an essential element always remains about whether or not it's a good idea to do the vampire, werewolf, or both."

This grievous misrepresentation of both the Sookie Stackhouse and the Anita Blake books makes sense when you realize that all the other writers with whom Levitt claims kinship are male authors of detective fiction, a far less despised genre than romance. In his haste to dissociate himself from girly books, Levitt overlooks the fact that neither Sookie nor Anita enjoys a love life anything like those customarily depicted in romance novels, and Harris' Southern Vampire novels always revolve around the need to solve a crime. (Harris started out as a writer of conventional mysteries.)

Furthermore, while nothing about Anita's personal life bears much resemblance to the experiences of the average woman, Sookie is another matter. She misses her dead grandmother, worries about her feckless brother, baby-sits her friend's kids, commiserates with her co-workers, goes shopping with her best friend, quarrels with her neighbors and so on, in addition to wondering whether it's a good idea to do the vampire or the werewolf. Like Buffy, she exists in a complex web of relationships, which Harris has the temerity to consider as important as anything else in her imagined world. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was in part a critique of the self-pity and emotional poverty of noir heroism, in which the loner hero's efforts to save innocent people leaves him too damaged to connect with them. Buffy, by contrast, steadfastly refused to give up on having a life. Or, as she once put it while fighting off a demonic attack on her high school prom, "I'm gonna give you all a nice, fun, normal evening if I have to kill every person on the face of the Earth to do it."

The best urban fantasy doesn't just set a detective story in an alternate world where vampires, werewolves, demons and fairies are real. Like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it also uses the supernatural material to reimagine the challenges of young adulthood -- the quest for love among them -- on a heroic scale. Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan series (another bestseller-list staple), about a witch trying to make a place for herself in a world where she doesn't really fit, is one of the most inventive and popular. After getting squeezed out of a job in law enforcement, Rachel hangs out a shingle with two other oddball refugees. Her close friendship with her roommate and business partner, a vampire named Ivy, is complicated by Ivy's history of abuse at the hands of her vampiric mentor and her attraction to Rachel, who considers herself straight, and can't sort out her genuine love for Ivy from the hypnotic attraction that vampires exert over their human companions. Let's just say that -- bloodsucking aside -- it's a situation not unfamiliar to many women during those muddled post-collegiate years.

In your 20s (the age of most urban fantasy heroines), love and sex can seem like a powerful magnetic field, distorting your perceptions of yourself and other people. If you succumb, will you be surrendering control over your own destiny, which is still coming into focus? It's a question with particular relevance to young women, and the mesmeric power of vampires and other supernatural lovers in urban fantasies speaks to the fear of losing your bearings should you fall under the spell of an especially irresistible suitor. Mercy Thompson, the heroine of a series by Patricia Briggs, is a part-Native American shape-shifter with the ability to transform herself into a coyote. Independently minded, she's nevertheless strongly attracted to her neighbor, Adam, the alpha of a pack of werewolves and therefore the absolute head of their hierarchical society. If she agrees to be his mate, she'll become just another subordinate figure in the pack, in thrall to his sheltering, but ultimately controlling personality.

Whether vampire, werewolf or even djinn (as in Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series), the urban fantasy heroine's lovers usually possess superhuman powers, while her own special abilities (Sookie Stackhouse's telepathy, the shrouded heritage of Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels, the hybrid potential of Jeaniene Frost's Cat Crawfield) have yet to be fully explored. He's unlikely to feel threatened or unmanned by her emerging strength, which is nice (this is fantasy, after all), since many of the heroines are formidable, physically as well as preternaturally. Candy, a blogger at the delightful Web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, has suggested that the genre is really "about women, and putting women in control, and how we're still not comfortable enough to put it in real-life/realistic fiction terms yet" -- which is why the typical, kick-ass urban fantasy heroine cuts her swath through a fantastical version of our world.

True, but part of the pleasure of genre fiction is the license it offers to explore the desires we have in spite of ourselves, and urban fantasy seems equally concerned with the erotic allure of masculine power and how women come to terms with it. The teenage narrator of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" may swoon in the arms of her masterful vampire boyfriend without a second thought, but the adult heroines created by Hamilton, Briggs, Harris and dozens of other authors oscillate between resistance and consent, worrying away at insolvable romantic algorithms. Is it possible to bed an alpha male without submitting to his will? Does his protection come at too high a cost? And can a man who sometimes needs your protection ever be quite as exciting?

A surprising number of urban fantasy heroines get into romantic triangles with a vampire and a werewolf, a rivalry redolent of more than a B-movie monster feud. If vampires are upper-class -- rich, well-dressed, owners of nightclubs and vast yet shadowy business interests -- werewolves tend to be blue-collar types, working in construction and driving pickup trucks. Vampires engage in labyrinthine political intrigues, while werewolves prize loyalty to their pack mates over everything else, potentially at the expense of their commitment to the heroine, who can feel excluded from the intense, nonverbal connection they share and their obsession with pecking orders.

Class as much as sex is an urban fantasy preoccupation. Mercy Thompson works as an auto mechanic and owns her own garage, so the self-sufficiency she fiercely cherishes is won by the sweat of her brow. Among the stream of thoughts Sookie Stackhouse unwillingly picks up from the human beings around her is contempt from middle-class people who foolishly regard her -- a barmaid who never went to college -- as negligible. Anita Blake and Rachel Morgan take jobs as bodyguards. Damali, the heroine of L.A. Banks' Vampire Huntress series, is an African-American spoken-word performer. Most of these women (in classic private-eye fashion) worry about paying the rent, which can make the blandishments of those wealthy vampires even more tempting. The werewolf, a creature of the day, feels closer to home, but the nocturnal vampire promises a whole new life.

Where working-class characters in literary fiction are often depicted as tragic and helpless, the urban fantasy heroine gets to surprise everyone by using her talents to save the world ("a lot," as Buffy's famous -- and premature -- epitaph added). Sookie, who turns out to have a good head for strategy as well as detection, consults for the vampire bigwigs, and Rachel bravely rescues a local tycoon from a netherworld known as the ever-after. Which is not to say that our heroines are always virtuous. Like the male protagonists of detective fiction, they tend to be hotheaded, smart-mouthed, petulant and even selfish, flaws that distinguish them from the typical romance heroine, who (to my mind) is a bland goody-two-shoes. Perhaps the trait that most distinguishes urban fantasy from its genre ancestors and bedfellows is its cheeky humor -- sharp-edged, slangy and wised-up, ever ready to stick a pin in the portentous and self-important -- a direct inheritance from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Urban fantasy has its own conventions -- it is a genre, after all -- and like any convention they can be employed mechanically or lose their luster with overuse. You won't find much in the way of deathless prose on these pages. (Harris' and Briggs' books are probably the best written of the bunch while Harrison's are the most original.) Nevertheless, urban fantasy -- a cross of fairy tale, noir and classic coming-of-age narrative -- is peculiarly suited to wrestling with the quandaries of early 21st-century womanhood, which is itself a hybrid of age-old preconceptions and fledgling, undreamed-of promise. Buffy, I think, would be proud.