The Twilight Effect

In response to my Harry Potter post I had a request to write about 'Twilight.' Here it goes.

As far as getting children or people who don't read to read I'm on board with anything, in this case the Twilight series. BUT I have problems with it both logistically and philosophically. I will also preface this response by saying I read the first book only. My knowledge of the plot of the last three books is based off of descriptions from friends and the Twilight episode of the Stupid Nerd Podcast. Which you can access here- http://stupidnerdpodcast.blogspot.com/

1. Co-opting Mythology- Meyer takes a mythology that were all familiar with, vampires and werewolves, and creates a whole new set of rules. Some of which are absurd, stupid, or nonsensical. Shining like diamonds in the light as opposed to being burned. Being able to feed on animals etc. She changes so much the 'vampires' don't resemble vampires anymore. It seems to me she picks and chooses different vampire conventions to move her narrative forward not because she's particularly interested or invested in vampires. The story at it's base isn't even about vampires. It's more a 'Romeo and Juliet' not a 'Dracula.'

2. Bella- The main character isn't likable. I've posted before about how this is a huge dealbreaker for me. Bella is whiny, entitled, irrational, dangerously impulsive, standoffish, and what...cute? I mean is that the big draw that she's hot? I don't get it. In the first book and from what I understand of the other three Bella has no redeeming qualities. She never does anything that warrants the Team Edward/Team Jacob fervor.

3. Sexuality- What the book actually is about is combining love and sex in a very non-threatening way. I imagine that's why the book appealed primarily to girls and young women. For me I found this aspect of it very frustrating and unsatisfying. Meyer doesn't spend a lot of time on the vampires, fine. But she doesn't really spend much time on the sex either(at least in the first book) Edward and Bella kiss a couple times and there is a lot of tortured caressing. There are pages and pages of tortured caressing. I don't understand the appeal to women in my age bracket but many women I know read and enjoyed the entire series. Evidently there is a lot of sex in the last book but I'm not going to read 1200 pages in order to get to it. For me if you don't have good vampire stuff and you don't have good sex stuff your left with boring whiny high school kids. Woof.

4. Bad Writing- Stephen King said it first "Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good." The book is poorly written- it's muddled, it meanders, the characters are underdeveloped. Edward comes off as more of an idea than a person. There is no variation in sentence structure so it reads like it was written by a middle-schooler. The narrative structure as well has no sense of rising action, tension, or climax(similar to the sex scenes). There's never any payoff. In the first book specifically we finally get a vampire fight but its only partially written because Bella blacks out so we skip it. It's almost as if Meyer knows she can't handle writing that scene so she just fast forwards. I thought at least the book would be a page turner because of how fast my friends had devoured the books. I found I had to force myself to finish it. To quote Truman Capote "That isn't writing at all, it's typing."

If people are engaged by the story I'm all for that. I just wish they were engaged by a better story. For me the J.K. Rowling/Stephenie Meyer comparison...

Is no comparison at all.