Some books are good. Some books are not and read sort of like self-insert fanfiction from the early days of AO3, but even though you recognize that they aren't objectively filled with literary merit, you can't stop reading and enjoying them. Dark Moon: The Blood Altar is one of those. Created with the Korean boy band Enhyphen, the story reimagines the members as preternaturally beautiful vampire boys at an exclusive boarding school and then, for good measure, throws an ordinary(ish) young woman named Sooha among them. Naturally, all of the boys are attracted to Sooha, as are the rival werewolves from another school. (The werewolves are based on the boy band team members, because why not.) But Sooha has had bad experiences with vampires, throwing in a moderately artificial stumbling block to the budding reverse harem romance. It's silly and overblown and impossible to put down.

Despite Enhyphen's involvement with the series, you don't need any familiarity with the group to pick this up. I assume there will be Easter eggs for those who are fans – each vampire has a distinct look and personality likely intended to play up some aspect of the member who inspired them. That also goes for the werewolves, although we don't know them nearly as well as the vampires by volume two. The main boy is Heli, the collected leader of the group. Heli (based on Enhyphen's Heeseung) has telepathy as his supernatural power, and he's the one who first encounters Sooha when she arrives at Riverfield and takes her under his wing. Heli is drawn to her in ways he can't explain, and to say that he's troubled when she reveals her hatred of vampires may understate the matter. It's not that he doesn't understand – her story about being ostracized in her hometown because people accused her of being one only gets worse when the one person who believed her, a boy named Chris, was killed by a vampire. She only knows them as murderous monsters, and if that's in part fueled by the prejudice where she grew up, Chris' death did absolutely nothing to convince her that vampires can be quite human. Granted, Heli isn't in the habit of revealing what he is to people, but it's still upsetting that the girl he's beginning to crush on hates what he is so passionately.

That means Heli and the other boys spend a book-and-a-half trying hard to keep Sooha from figuring out the truth. They tell her about their various special powers, and there's a sense that they do that because it would be too hard to hide some of them (Shion's gravity manipulation especially), but also because they want her to know what they are and accept them anyway. Heli's telepathy provides an easy route to intimacy, allowing him to press forward with forming a relationship with Sooha while also helping her get used to the idea that he's harmless and careful not to abuse, or even just overuse, the skill. What comes across the most clearly in these two volumes is how badly the boys want to be accepted, specifically by Sooha, and to know that their vampiric nature doesn't mean they have to live on the outskirts of society forever.

The more we learn about their past, the clearer it becomes why this is so important to them. The group grew up at what they politely call an orphanage, but in volume two, we discover it was more like a prison to hide the vampire children from the rest of the world. This doesn't appear to have been done for their own good; there's a real sense that they were incarcerated there to keep humans from knowing about them. Their presence at Riverfield doesn't mean they were released from the headmaster's care. It means they escaped him and his "orphanage" at some point, although precisely how isn't yet known. Every day is a game of keeping their vampire selves hidden, and the temptation of having someone who knows and accepts them is too much to bear, although they try very, very hard. Sooha does learn the truth, but it's not because they decide to tell her, which raises the tensions considerably in the second half of volume two.

The final piece of the puzzle, which creator HYBE still has us trying to turn to make it fit in, is Chris. Sooha's one childhood friend, Chris was the only person to believe that she was just unusual rather than a vampire, and his loss has shaped Sooha's life. When she arrives at Riverfield, she begins seeing someone who looks like a teenage Chris on the periphery of her life, but that should be impossible: she saw him after a vampire killed him, lying in his coffin with a precautionary stake through his heart. How, then, could that little boy wander around as a young man? And if it is him, why isn't he trying to initiate contact more concretely? We can make some targeted guesses (and I think we'd be right; the mystery isn't this series' strong suit), and as of volume two, he seems to exist to help Sooha grapple with the idea that vampires aren't all the same. It also raises the question of whether vampires are born or made, which Heli and his adoptive brothers don't know. It's not deep lore or even particularly innovative, but it's still enough to make things interesting.

Dark Moon: The Blood Altar can feel woefully self-indulgent. Sooha's astounding variety of suitors (although, again, Heli and werewolf Khan seem to be the main romantic interests) smack of self-insert fanfiction, and there's nothing all that new or interesting about the plot. The art is nice, and the boys are all easy to tell apart. I like how it uses blues and purples for mood, though it makes some unfortunate costume choices, mostly for teenage Chris. Despite these issues, this is almost compulsively readable, the sort of light reading you can consume alongside a tray of brownies. If pretty vampires are your thing, or you're just in the mood to indulge in professionally edited fanfiction, this is a fun series to pick up.