Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I’d like to begin this post by explaining to you how Stephanie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, might re-imagine some fantasy classics:

• The Little Prince. The Prince travels nowhere, and does nothing interesting or thought-provoking.
• The Bicentennial Man. Our robot protagonist loudly expresses an explicit desire to become human, over and over. Other people gladly help him achieve this goal over a couple of centuries. Eventually he becomes physically indistinguishable from a human being, plus robotic immortality. Perfectly satisfied and yearning for nothing else in all creation, he continues to live forever indefinitely, rich and awesome.
• Rosemary’s Baby. Her unborn child is still the Devil, but that’s not as evil as it sounds, really. And that pudding is delicious. More delicious than Rosemary deserves, but who is she to complain?
• Flowers for Algernon. The retard gets all smarted up. He marries the researcher who gave him his brain. They are so happy together. The end.
• The Lord of the Rings.  Frodo and company have got to get this ring to the fires of Mount Doom. Except the Ring doesn’t whisper darkness into your heart and twist your mind, Gandalf doesn’t have to sacrifice himself to defeat the Balrog, and the Nazgul don’t show up until page 900. We’ll also nix any metaphors about the folly of man, and for good measure, Aragorn and Arwen get to rule Minas Tirith forever. Frodo retires happily to Bag End, completely unscathed by the ordeal.
• Harry Potter.  Harry demonstrates absolutely no intelligence, physical ability, self-confidence, bravery, or competency in any realm. There is no Prophecy that demarcates him as the Chosen One. Voldemort folds like a bad poker hand anyway, thanks entirely to Dumbledore, who is now straight. When faced with a climactic choice between destroying evil or attaining ultimate power for himself, a fateful decision that seven books have been building towards, Harry simply does both. Also, the books are unreadable.
• Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. The reader is told, from the perspective of Louis and Lestat, that human beings are “impossibly, gorgeously tasty” and “heartbreakingly delicious.” Being a vampire is totally amazing. You are super strong. Your senses are enhanced in every domain. Sunlight actually makes you prettier. You can have sex, eat food, and abstain from killing humans provided that you’re a good person. There is absolutely no downside to being a vampire.

OH WHOOPS. THAT LAST ONE IS TWILIGHT.

If you’re thinking of reading Twilight, I say to you, “Stop. Wait. Have you considered beating yourself to death first?” You could do that instead, and it would be more enjoyable than this horrible book.

I realized I was in trouble almost immediately, when it is revealed, without irony, that the protagonist’s name is Bella Swan. Meyer might as well have named her Ugly Duckling Specialgirl. Except that she isn’t. Her character is a cipher, describing herself as not particularly smart, not particularly self-confident, plain, clumsy, awkward, and faint of heart. She is also obsessed, in a fairly realistic teenage way, with Edward Cullen, who is perfect, perfect, perfect, and just a little undead. He literally glitters in sunlight, is indescribably attractive (though Meyer sure does adjective the place up trying!), graceful, charismatic, rich, intimidating, physically indestructible, well-spoken, and oh yes, telepathic.

Why this hundred year-old superbeing would bother going through the motions of high school is never explained, nor why he would fall so madly in love with the willfully uninteresting Bella. Edward’s expressions of love are appallingly condescending, and at times take on a creepy, paternal vibe. We’re supposed to believe that Bella is Edward’s One True Love, but the sentiment is sabotaged when Edward lets it slip that he finds the scent of her blood positively irresistible. Meyer seems not to notice the flaw in her own premise. Edward, like every teenage boy, is interested in Bella simply because she’s the tastiest snack he’s ever seen. Much has been written about why Twilight is a feminist’s nightmare, but I prefer to hate this book purely for its staggering literary ineptitude.

Stephenie Meyer cannot write worth a damn. Stephen King’s words, not mine. Her story reads like half-assed fan-fiction, and Bella is a transparent Mary Sue character (technically Edward is the true Mary Sue, beyond perfect, while  Bella is closer to an Anti-Sue). To make matters worse, Meyer surrounds this flat, boring protagonist with an equally flat, boring world. Edward Cullen is its (meaning Bella’s) only point of interest, but Meyer can’t even get that right. She can barely go half a sentence without calling Edward a “supermodel,” an “Adonis,” or my favorite, “a destroying angel.” Meyer throws around words like beautiful, gorgeous, incandescent, and glorious, all in an amateurish attempt to make a thousand words worth a picture. Even Edward’s handwriting blows Bella away, leaving her too intimidated to mar their shared homework with her “clumsy scrawl.”

Chapter 9 closes with the following gem: “About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn’t know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”

Irrevocably in love? About three things she was positive? I am told that this made it into the movie, proving irrevocably that God is dead. About this I am certain.

I can’t help but compare Twilight to Interview with the Vampire. Yes, Anne Rice’s vampires are strikingly beautiful, but they are also dead. If you saw one under the clear illumination of a light bulb, you’d recoil in horror. Daylight incinerates them, the coming dawn makes them fall unconscious, and every night, there is the roaring hunger that will only be satisfied by human blood. The essential conflict of Rice’s books is how the vampire reconciles his new powers and desires with his old mortal life and his immortal soul. Become a merciless predator, go insane, or let the sunlight turn you to dust.

You won’t see any such philosophical subtlety in Twilight. Edward is pale and a little purple under the eyes, but it’s nothing that would undermine his ability to attract a crowd. He looks even better on a sunny day. The temptation to feast on human blood is a constant threat to the Cullen family’s way of life, but it’s reduced to “OMG I HAVE TO GET AWAY FROM THAT PAPER CUT OR I MIGHT RUIN OUR WAY OF LIFE!!!” A few gulps of bear or mountain lion usually do the trick for a few weeks at a time, which is very convenient. There’s absolutely no way to kill a vampire, short of being ripped to pieces by a stronger one. In Rice’s world, the transformation from human to vampire is an erotic, thrilling, terrifying, near-death experience. To Meyer, it’s more like being bit by a cobra. Supremely uncreative.

About halfway through the book, I started to wonder if the problem isn’t so much Meyer as it is the Young Adult genre of fiction. My only exposure to Young Adult literature was a few novels by Christopher Pike. At fifteen, I loved them. Would they hold up now that I’m older, wiser, and more well-read? As it turns out, yes. Take my old favorite, Monster, which you can read a bit of thanks to Amazon. It opens with Mary, the school’s most popular cheerleader, walking into a kegger and blowing away the football team with a shotgun. It turns out that Mary went postal on the party because she believes the football team are a bunch of predatory monsters (and of course, it turns out that she’s telling a very literal flavor of truth). It’s not the greatest book ever written, but the writing is sharp, the suspense works, and the social metaphor resonates with the reader. The Midnight Club is another good one. Don’t let the hokey cover fool you. This book concerns a group of teenagers who gather at midnight to tell each other scary, often supernatural stories. Oh, and this takes place in a hospice. All the characters are terminally ill, and are using the club to ease the fear of their imminent deaths. So when members of the club start shuffling off the mortal coil at a somewhat accelerated rate, things get complicated. It’s a suspense thriller, but also a tragedy about young love in the face of young death.

In short, teenage readers could do much, much better than Twilight, with its comically unrealistic proclamations of love and monotonous plot arc. A coven of ravenous out-of-towners conveniently wanders in from nowhere to spice things up, and very briefly, the story verges on interesting. But it’s too little, too late, and too convenient. The coven is after Bella for no other reason than she is Bella. Before you get to this mildly interesting third act, there’s no conflict other than the one between Bella’s endless, insipid worship of Edward and her subterranean self-worth. The publishers appended the first chapter of the sequel, New Moon, to the end of this printing of Twilight, presumably to entice the reader into another buy. The chapter shows a tad more creativity, but not enough to justify choking down a series that apparently culminates in a wildly stupid fourth book.

Grade: God is dead.