Vampire story for boyfriends

Let me digress from Edward and Bella for a moment...

I was introduced to the "other Twilight  series" by Arnel long before I've heard of Stephenie Meyer. I'm talking about Sergei Lukyanenko's trilogy--Night Watch, Day Watch and Twilight Watch (really, it should be called "the Watch series"). The first two have already been adapted to film, and the third one I believe is currently in production. Lukyanenko is arguably the most important contribution of Russia to the scifi world, or maybe next to Isaac Asimov who was actually Russian-born.

Now I haven't read the books themselves--the last Russian novelists I read were  Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky; I was 17 and punishing myself for not being pretty enough--but I have seen the movie adaptations of Night Watch and Day Watch! They're in Russian so you watch the action and read captions at the same time. They're darker and  less glossy than Hollywood vampire movies. They're nothing at all like the romantic soft goth that we have come to love, and for which this blog is a shrine. No, this is mean stuff, with blood and gore mixed in the magical and fantastic.

The reason I mentioned the trilogy here is because I thought boyfriends might like this stuff. I think it's the emo-esque portrayal of Edward that puts them off in Twilight. Plus of course the fact that this is really a romantic story. It's just sad that it is exactly the things that we love about it that repel them. I wonder if this is again a nature vs. nurture conundrum.

But Watch is actually watchable, even for us girls. I personally loved the movies and I'm looking forward to reading the books. I hope they have the complete trilogy at Fully Booked.