As most of you know, I am not a fan of Stephanie Meyer's writing. Having said that, I am progressivly disturbed by the hype and excitement surrounding the release of the movie "Twilight." After watching an interview with the young man chosen to play the character of Edward, I am more convinced than ever that these books should be avoided. He tells of his experience at the movie's premiere, where a 7 year old girl, upon seeing him walking up the red carpet, bares her neck, and pleads for him to bite her. He says she was dead-seious.
Am I the only one who finds this disturbing? This is a child.
But on the same note, I know of many grown women who might feel the same way, as they are just as obsessed with these stories.
I recently was made aware of another blog that shares my same view. I am adding it to this space because I don't think I could say it better. However, I have gone through and cleaned it up a bit, mostly removing explitives. Please, share your comments with me, for or against.
NOTE TO READER: WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ WAS WRITTEN BY ANOTHER BLOGGER, NOT KRIS THORNE.
Spoiler Warning: I am about to tell the entire story in detail. If you have plans to read Twilight, stop here.[Photo]A few days ago, one of my coworkers at the library approached me with an almost evangelical recommendation for the book Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Meyer is a Mormon who describes the book as a story of forbidden love, hence the picture of the apple on the cover which of course also symbolizes mankind's fall from grace via the pernicious effects of knowledge. Her efforts to create a vampire romance story while faithfully avoiding anything objectionable to delicate, white bread Mormon sensibilities provide some of the most unintentionally hilarious (and creepy) parts of the book. Although Twilight is classified as 'young adult', meaning 'teen' at our library, several of my adult coworkers are reading it and fawning over it.When my coworker first approached me, she told me my wife would love Twilight.'My wife hates children's books,' I said. Cassie was crestfallen. 'She's a real literary snob,' I added, thinking that might make the previous statement seem less harsh.'You're not a snob about reading young adult, are you?' she asked. I told her I'm not, and that I'll read anything so long as it's well written.'Well then you must read Twilight,' she said. 'You will love it.'I've noticed a recent, I dunno, trend, in which it's chic for grown adults to read children's books. The most obvious example is the Harry Potter series, but, at least in the case of my coworkers, it's not limited to that. Cassie reads exclusively 'young adult' fiction as far as I know, and she's not the only adult I've encountered who is infatuated with books for teenagers, either. There's something about this that troubles me. I can remember when I was 16 or so, and all I wanted to read at that point were adult books. I didn't care about the adventures other kids were having. All the cool stuff, the sex, the violence, the best stories, revolved around grownups. I think I started losing interest in fiction targeting juveniles when I was around ten. I find this seemingly recent adult interest in juvenile books a bit alarming; I worry that it's a harbinger of some Idiocracy-like dystopian future where forty year olds award the latest Miss Spider book a Pulitzer.Nevertheless, I agreed to read Twilight because Cassie was raving about it, along with all the other women at the library, and it was constantly in circulation so it must be very popular (10.5 million copies sold!). There are no hard and fast rules in fiction. So I brought Cassie's copy home. The first thing I noticed, with some amusement, is that although the book is quite thick and by all appearances of real, grown-up novel size, the text within is large and double spaced. I was reminded--not for the last time--of a high school student trying to pad a book report. When I told my wife how Cassie had originally recommended it to her, she was surprised. 'Has she met me?' she had asked in the same tone she might have used if Cassie had offered her a plate of bushmeat with a side of the clap. She took the book from me.'No reason you should suffer alone,' she said. 'Let's see just how bad this piece of @#$% is.' (she really hates juvenile fiction). She started reading the book out loud, and thus began our adventure with Twilight, a novel that has provided one of the most unexpectedly gratifying literary experiences of my adult life.Before continuing, I should say that it's not unusual for one of us to read out loud to the other. Any time we come across a cool part of a book, we'll just start reading it out loud. This, however, was to be the first time Jill would read an entire novel out loud.[Photo]Bella is joined by some of her goth friends The book opens with the main character, 'Bella' (short for Isabella), moving from Arizona to the small Pacific Northwest town of Forks, Washington to live with her policeman father. She complains that Washington is too dreary and cloudy, and that she misses the 'valley of the sun' not long after informing us that her fair skin is almost transparent. We immediately wonder what she's going to miss about the desert sun if she's been avoiding it to the point of skin transparency. Bella is, I suspect, what happens when a particularly prudish individual attempts to create a 'goth' character. She is pale and kind of dour and whiny, but she dresses in what sounds like a slightly modernized variation of the cartoonish prairie dresses worn by those members of the recently exposed polygamist cult in Texas. I begin to suspect that 'Bella' is actually code for 'Stephanie Meyer'.My suspicions increase as Bella frets about the disturbance she'll cause the small town yokels of Forks. She appears to be laboring under the delusion that her arrival will be greeted with the same kind of hysteria reserved for a visit from the Pope (or perhaps Prophet, Seer and Relevator). She turns out to be mostly wrong, though every male student she meets takes an instant romantic interest in her, except the strange, pale, hot-in-that-sulky-way that says 'vampire' student who sits, isolated with his similarly strange, hot, sulky 'family' members at lunch. Edward and Bella finally meet when he saves her life by shielding her from a van. Later he saves her from some poorly written thugs who seem intent on raping her. If this sounds exciting, it isn't. Rather than using his preternatural strength and vampire agility, he gives her a lift in his car.All the while Jill has been reading, I have begun to notice the adverbs laying a relentless siege. Bella does nothing unless it's done 'slowly', or 'quickly', or 'swiftly' or 'excitedly'. When such obvious adverbs fail her, Meyer attaches 'ly' to whatever word is handy for a quick, convenient way out of demonstrating any writing talent. The adverbs add nothing to the story. They're like the double spacing and the large text; they're there to pad the book. They are not writing; they are a substitute for writing. Often, just after Bella has done something 'quickly' or 'swiftly', Jill or I pause to ask 'Was she in a hurry?' We have no idea.There is a reason why excessive use of adverbs is discouraged in writing and Meyer is a perfect case study. Her book should be required reading for composition classes. Writing, to be sure, is not something in which there are any unbreakable rules, but there are some very reliable and sensible rules of thumb, and the bit about using too many adverbs is one of the first things anyone teaches you about writing. It seems hard to imagine that a woman who received a college degree in English should never have heard this, as I did many times, in many composition classes.Consider the following two passages:Bella got dressed quickly.vs.Bella tried to put her jeans on, both legs at the same time. This seeming time saver turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, and she hopped around like a contestant in a potato sack race. As soon as her feet cleared the legs of her jeans, she switched to hopping on one leg, as she tried to force a shoe on to her raised foot while it slipped again and again from her grip like a freshly caught fish.'Quickly' tells us nothing in the first example. You could drop it from the sentence entirely and still get the same meaning. It's superfluous. The second passage describes Bella getting dressed. We understand how she is getting dressed because all of us have tried to rush into our clothes like that. You may not find that bit of prose to your liking but hopefully it illustrates the point: writing is creating an image in the mind of a reader. Adverbs used repeatedly, like 'quickly', are just a cop-out to avoid painting that mental image. At one point, Jill reads a portion of the book with the adverbs stripped. It is a marked improvement.'I'm gonna need a beer,' Jill says when we are a couple of chapters in.'We should drink every time she uses an adverb,' I say. Thus is born the Twilight drinking game. We each finish a beer in 3 pages, in spite of taking baby sips.'This book is awesome,' I say, buzzing slightly from finishing my beer so quickly. We realize that we're on to something.'We should have friends over for this,' Jill says.Incidentally, there are many drinking games one could play with Twilight, if one were so inclined. A good variation would be drinking whenever Meyer uses a substitute for the attributive verb 'said'. Characters in Twilight 'grin', 'lie', 'laugh', 'chuckle', 'explain', 'blush' or 'shrug'. Meyer avoids the word 'said' as if, ironically, she is worried that using it will make her seem hackish. I was tempted by the thought that she went through the book at one point, madly replacing every instance of 'said' with something else to avoid seeming repetitious. She's wrong for the same reason that using excessive adverbs is bad form, however; it's a copout. To make matters worse, she uses variations when they're redundant such as:"I'm sorry," I apologized.and"I'm sorry," I apologized again.But the penultimate abuse happens near the end of the book when Meyer gives us this turd of sentence:"Shhhh," he shushed me.Jill modifies the rules so that we must finish our drinks entirely when this sort of thing happens.Drinking is the only way to get through the book and making a game out of it is so much fun we decide to test the concept on a friend. We invite a test subject over. He is initially skeptical, but after a few pages, he is getting into the spirit of things. Meyer's prose is so awful and amateurish that scarcely a sentence goes by that we don't have to stop, drink, and marvel at the fact that she was published at all. Jill wonders if there's some kind of youtube opportunity in trashing a book in real time like this while getting drunk. We decide that literary drinking games are awesome.We invent variations. For example, you could play to drink whenever Edward's eyes are described. They're black when he hasn't fed, 'ochre', 'butterscotch', 'golden' or other color names normally found on paint swatches at Home Depot when he has. They flash and glitter and swirl and god knows what else constantly and we are informed every time. We also considered a variation that relies on drinking only for the adverbs 'quickly', 'slowly' and 'swiftly' for people who did not want to get drunk too quickly, but it seems that she relies so heavily on just these three that even with the constraint, you're still getting hammered in no time.The thing with the attributive verbs and the adverbs is, by itself, enough to make Twilight, if not the worst book of all time, at least one so unremarkable as to belong with the endless jumble of romance novels that flourish in mass market paperback form, the literary equivalent of mold, fecund but unpleasant. Instead it's been an astounding success, with a movie version arriving in theaters soon.I realize that bad prose is not, for reasons that mystify me, enough to deter many readers. For them, it's not how the story is told that matters, but whether or not it meets certain requirements of the genre, and if this were the case, I probably wouldn't have bothered writing this. You would think, for example, that, being a vampire romance story for teens, Twilight delivers on the sort of action we've come to expect from vampires: smoldering sexuality, the act itself metaphorically represented by the drinking of blood, the impossible yearning between the immortal and the mortal, and of course the scary tension when the mortal comes face to face with the immortal monster that regards her as prey.Unfortunately, Meyer delivers on none of these points. This is the blandest and most boring vampire story I have ever read or heard or seen. It's not just Meyer's dreadful prose that fails; it's her obvious and annoying efforts to keep the story wholesome. The irreconcilable conflict between the need for sexual tension and Meyer's prudish, white bread Mormon sensibilities has creepy results. Instead of hot and heavy groping and gasping orgasms, we get lots of chaste cuddling. Worse yet, Meyer, in her apparent neurotic terror of the sexual, transforms Edward and Bella's relationship from romantic and sexy to more of a parent/child dynamic. Edward spends a disturbing amount of time carrying Bella about like a child, either balled up into his chest like an infant or slung over his back like a four year old. She falls asleep in his lap as he hums lullabies to her. Actually, all the vampire characters carry Bella around. I doubt she travels more than twenty feet under her own steam for the last half of the novel. She's more of a suitcase or an accessory than a person. Why, we wondered over and over again, is everyone carrying this boring, whiny @#$%& around?At one point, Bella dresses 'up' for Edward in a long khaki skirt and 'dark blue blouse'. One suspects her lack of detail here, as elsewhere, is due not merely to a lack of writing talent, but also to a lack of any interesting details worth mentioning. 'You're indecent,' Edward says. I wonder what would qualify as 'decent' and the only thing that seems more modest sounding is a burka.Essentially what Meyer has done is steal the basics from other popular vampire stories and drained them of anything offensive (i.e. interesting). The glaring similarities to other works in the genre smack us in the face with all the subtlety of a transvestite with a beard. Don't confuse Bella the Vampire Dater with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Bella lives in the Pacific Northwest, while Buffy resides in sunny California. And don't confuse sulky vampire-with-a-soul Edward with Buffy's ensouled beau, Angel. Although both are conflicted about having sex with a 17 year old, only Angel has a good reason.It would, of course, be rude to suggest that Bella is a mere rip-off of Buffy. Meyer has also incorporated elements of Anne Rice's vampire ethos, just stripped of the angst. At least Rice made a case that centuries of living would grow tiresome. Meyer's vampires are untroubled by such thoughts. In fact, they're unburdened by any thoughts. This appears to be the consequence of being created by a writer similarly unburdened, but perhaps I overstep my bounds. Nothing is made of the struggle these vampires went through to overcome their appetite for human blood. On a few occasions, Edward warns Bella that he's 'dangerous' but whatever 'danger' he represents is blown off seconds later in the same conversation, with about as much fanfare as you'd expect for changing dinner plans. Bella is entirely unthreatened by Edward, but that's probably because he pays such half-assed lip service to presenting himself as a threat. Even the threats vampires must face are muted or transformed into non threats. While most vampires live in terror of the sun, Meyer turns that frown upside down for maximum blandness. Her vampires can go about in the sun with no harmful consequences at all. Instead, in some kind of bizarre effort to out fagify Anne Rice, Meyer's vampires avoid direct sunlight only because it causes them to--I am perfectly serious here--glitter.That's right folks: glitter. What does a Stephanie Meyer vampire and a 14 year old girl's cell phone have in common? Answer: bling. The only consequence of being exposed to the sun is that Edward becomes a candidate for dancing in a cage at a gay bar. Upon discovering this absurd effect, I found myself wishing Edward were gay; then at least the whole sun thing might serve as a useful metaphor for his irrepressibly gay fabulousness, and his aversion to sex (with girls) would be explained..Although having said that, I would also like Edward to stop 'chuckling' and 'laughing' every time he speaks. All of his attributions are 'smirking' and he's always 'laughing softly' at things that appear to be completely mundane and unfunny. I wonder if Meyer ever paused to consider how annoying it would be to have some douchebag giggling at everything you said, or he said, whether there was any joke intended or not. Even things like greetings are not spared. As the following example demonstrates: 'Good morning,' he chuckled. Chuckles; they're what's for breakfast!I actually wished for many things as we read this book. I wished something would happen. I wished there was some kind of obstacle or tension or threat or difficulty posed to the characters. I wished the characters were interesting. I wished they had some kind of chemistry. But chemistry requires personality and none of the characters in Twilight possess that. At one point, Bella asks the question that's been on my mind for most of the book: why does Edward like her so much? The answer is as disappointing as it is ridiculous: She smells nice.To be fair to Meyer, it was probably the only answer she had. Edward and Bella have nothing in common as far as we can see. I still have no idea what either one is interested in. Does Bella like music? Reading? Sports? Art? She likes good looking guys. Presumably she enjoys great piles of free money and delicious food, too. The nearest we get to Bella having any kind of memorable trait is her clumsiness. She's a klutz. Get it? It's cute and endearing because it's a character flaw but not (of course) a moral failing; that would be bad and we do not talk about such things. Why is Edward, a 100 year old vampire in high school? Later when he confesses that he's never been in love or (apparently) had sex, I wonder why he's bothered staying alive at all.Imagine this is you: you're 'unbelievably', 'incredibly', 'amazingly', and a whole other slew of words ending in 'ly' gorgeous. You're over a century old. You have travelled the world. You probably speak many languages, know vast amounts of history, science and art; much from firsthand experience. What do you do? If the answer is 'move to Washington state, go to high school, and hit on boring, white bread, no-personality- chicks', you should kill yourself immediately.Eventually, a threat of sorts does appear in the form of another group of vampires, one of whom is apparently a tracker of sorts. He's also infatuated with Bella's smell (Bella is batting 1000 on guys being into her at this point, by the way). There follows a very boring sequence wherein Bella flees with Edward's boring vampire family members as escorts, only to be lured into a killer's trap when he kidnaps her mother. I say he kidnaps her mother, but that is not quite what happens. Putting mothers in danger is obviously not nice and unpleasant to contemplate seriously, so the killer instead--again, I am not making this up--steals a videotape of Bella's mother and plays a portion of it over the phone. The danger in this story never seems real. The evil vampire knocks Bell unconscious and she awakens to find that everything is okay; Edward and his family have 'taken care' (euphemism for 'killed', presumably) the evil vampire. In other words, Bella (and the reader) is unconscious for the climax of the story. Have I used the term 'cop out' in this analysis?It is astonishing that no part of this book is thoughtfully done. Good writing always seems like a crime of passion, an almost involuntary, primal urge to say something that the writer thinks is so important, so awesome, that it must be told and no one else can do it or possibly even has the nerve. Meyer, by contrast, writes as if she's just trying to get to the end without offending anyone. The shoddy, half-assed, careless disregard for detail or craftsmanship saturates every page. She uses ellipsis incorrectly, over and over again in an effort to distinguish her awful dialogue and all I can wonder is how many times she tried reading it out loud to see how it sounded? She writes of visits to the hospital and the police procedures of Bella's father as if calling a hospital or talking to a cop to find out how they really act in a certain situations were a waste of time. There is no evidence of research of any kind here; it's all pulled out of the author's @$$ as if she went on a writing binge one afternoon and submitted for publication the next day. Bella confesses her eternal love to Edward before they've even kissed, or formed any identifiable emotional connection other than distorted puritanical lust. Their shallow, retard romance, I suspect, could be a metaphor for Meyer's writing career: eternally boring.
