Lisa Jane Smith
The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, Night World — YA paranormal that built the foundations the current wave is still working on.
L. J. Smith — Lisa Jane Smith — wrote The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle in the early 1990s and her Night World series across the late 1990s, building YA paranormal foundations that the 2000s wave (Twilight, House of Night, and beyond) built directly on. The Vampire Diaries series later continued under ghostwriters after a publishing dispute. Her prose is direct and the romantic intensity is calibrated for the YA register; her influence on the subsequent wave is significant.
For older teen and adult readers. Content stays within the YA register of her era — romantic content handled in the YA tradition, some violence, dark thematic material present but not graphic. The reading experience is reading the source material that shaped the modern YA paranormal wave. Pick this shelf when you want YA paranormal with foundational status, with the early-1990s and later-1990s registers that the current genre is in conversation with.
- Foundational YA paranormal
- Influence on the modern wave
- Vampire Diaries and Night World
- 1990s YA paranormal in original form
