Jackie Brighton woke up in a Dumpster this morning, and her day has only gotten weirder. Her familiar B-cups have somehow become double Ds, her sex drive is insatiable, and apparently she had her first one-night stand ever... with a fallen angel. All she remembers is gorgeous Noah's oddly hypnotic blue eyes... and then a dark stranger whose bite transformed her into an immortal siren with a sexy Itch. With help from Noah, Jackie begins to adapt to her new lifestyle—until she accidentally sends Noah into the deadly clutches of the vampire queen and lands herself in a fierce battle for an ancient halo with the queen's wickedly hot righthand man. Who just happens to be the vampire who originally bit her. How's a girl supposed to save the world when the enemy's so hard to resist?

This is the publisher's blurb for an upcoming novel called Gentlemen Prefer Succubi by Jill Myles. This is not some genre fantasy novel for the nerdy kids on the bus but a mainstream romance, ostensibly written for adults, sexy angel, vampire queen, ancient halo and all.

Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's the national malaise, or maybe it's just too much time on our hands, but mainstream America has plunged headlong into the kind of escapist entertainments that used to be the ghetto of guys in clamdiggers and girls in Snoopy sweatshirts. Boy wizards, teen superheroes, lost islands and (ugh) sparkly vampires are now our must-see viewing. There is no appreciable difference between the hours spent in World of Warcraft and the hours spent obsessing over stats for our make-believe football teams or pretending to be mafiosi on the Faceyspace. No longer do the cool kids rule the school. The star-bellied Sneetches don't own the beaches anymore. We are now Geek Nation.

Therefore I can tell you about a novel, based on a comic book, about an epic struggle between a fairy tale and a tongue-twister without a smidge of embarrassment. Which is great because Bill Willingham's Peter & Max: A Fables Novel (Vertigo, 2009) is a whole lot of fun.

Even if you've never read the comic (which I haven't, but I really want to now), Willingham brings the reader up to speed handily in the first chapter. The conceit here is that all our fairy tales, nursery rhymes and folk yarns are distillations of events that actually happened to people and creatures from other worlds who have taken refuge among us. In a pocket of Manhattan lives an enclave of immortal heroes, Snow White living side-by-side with Little Boy Blue and Jack the Giant-Killer, while on a secluded farm upstate live the Three Little Pigs and all the other talking animals of yore. All of them have adjusted well to life in the 21st century, under a universal truce enforced by a reformed Big Bad Wolf. These are not Disney toons, however—their stories are deeper, grittier and often bloodier than even the Brothers Grimm imagined.

Case in point is Peter Piper. All we know of Peter is that one time back in the day he picked a peck of pickled peppers, but what we didn't know was that he did so while his family was on the run from a savage army overrunning, raping and pillaging the Hesse, the world from which our German fables come. We didn't know Peter was the finest player in a family of traveling musicians, gifted with the family heirloom, a flute with magical properties. And we didn't know that jealousy and the ravages of war had driven his older brother Max insane and sent him on a quest to find an even more powerful instrument, one which over time gave him the power to bend reality to his will, as the rats and the parents of Hamelin Town learned to their sorrow as Max the Pied Piper stole their children to repay the dark forces that gave him his magic.

Willingham cuts back and forth between the past, where Peter and his childhood sweetheart Bo Peep become lost and separated and forced into lives of crime, while mad Max stalks them to claim Peter's flute as his own birthright, and the present day in our world, where Peter and a scarred and crippled Bo prepare for a final showdown against an enemy grown so powerful that no one among the Fables, not even the Big Bad Wolf or the puissant witch Frau Totenkinder (the statute of limitations having run out on the whole Hansel and Gretel business), can possibly stop him. The result is an exciting and surprisingly emotional adventure that takes the most threadbare of concepts and runs gloriously with it.

Fans of Neil Gaiman, Angela Carter and, especially, Gregory Maguire know the kind of magic I'm talking about here, and Bill Willingham slings his spell with just that kind of wildcat skill. Granted, there are no sexy vampires in it, but if you need one of those, just look up—they're freakin' everywhere.

In Other News of the Not-So-Geeky Variety: Acclaimed poet Dorianne Laux, National Book Award finalist and winner of the Pushcart Prize, headlines an evening of readings at Ciné on Friday, Nov. 13, with Heather Cousins opening. The program begins at 7 p.m. and looks to be an outstanding evening of great poetry.

John G. Nettles