Stefenie Meyer

Blogging twice in a day? I know right? But someone pointed out to me that I didn't even mention Stefenie Meyer in my 'top 5' list and I thought I'd do a post in her honour (we'll call her Lizzy for now. So Lizzy, this is for you ... you've been warned).

I'll start with an anecdote to ease you in to my bizarre and contradictory view of Ms Meyer. I was in HMV and saw a spoof called "Nightlight" and decided to buy it. I've got Barry Trotter somewhere too, so parodies aren't completely out of my range. When I got to the counter, the guy told me that he was only just reading the twilight books, had I? And I said yes, and he asked the inevitable 'are they any good?'. My answer (and I paraphrase) was 'it's like a literary chocolate pretzel. You won't know if it's any good until you've finished.'

What I meant was, do you remember when chocolate-covered pretzels came out? And everyone was like 'they're gross' but invariably you got dared to buy and then eat a packet? And when you first take a bite, the combination of salt and chocolate was repulsive. But salt and sugar are two things your body craves, so you're not actually sure if you like them or not, because the connotations of savoury and sweet mixed like that are negative, but they fulfill the sweet vs savoury snack debate. So you eat the whole packet. And by that time, you know you don't like them, but you also know you're going to buy another packet.

But when I was reading them, it wasn't like Harry Potter, where I had to know, like underlined, bold, in italics, in CAPITALS, HAD to know what was going to happen at the end. I exercised extreme will power in not reading the end of those books (except in Tesco's the night HBP came out. I saw the page about Bill being a Werewolf, went 'Oh, poor Bill' in front of these 6 year olds who weren't allowed to even crack the book open and slammed it shut. Heehee). With Twilight, it was more reading in the hope I was getting somewhere good. And at first, it didn't disappoint.

I've always struggled with the 'getting to know you' scenes. I remember one guy I used to email used to talk to me about meeting people, and it was unfathomable to me. It had been so long since I'd met anyone new, I wasn't quite sure of the dynamics of it. And then I met my wonderful friends, but even now I'm not quite sure how I managed to pass off as normal (or maybe I'm like Carter in my fic, in that I'm a complete asshat but you just love the honesty); so for me to read someone constructing those getting-to-know-you scenes, it was like a revelation. I wanted more Edward and Bella too, at that point (I liked the chocolate pretzel). But then ... I don't know, the baseball game was an over-reaction, it was their first date! And whatever happened with Jacob and the Wolves just seemed to be padding until she got to Breaking Dawn. I hated reading the Wolves conversations, Jacob was a douche (though Taylor Lautner does a great job making him likeable in the films) and Bella got even more irritating.

There's other things too. Bearing in mind that the first film came out around three months after I came out of hospital from a blood condition. Bearing in mind that even now, I'm considered in remission (Timothy Spall, the patron of the charity who support the hospital, said he's still in remission and it's been 14 years. I'm sure the count only went up to ten?). I'd heard of the books before, Claire had said girls in her year were obsessed and the message about celibacy was completely derivative - this coming from a girl who attends a church at least three days a week - until I decided I wanted to see the film, I didn't want to read the books. When I did, so many details seemed glazed over. The one thing that stands out more than anything is the lack of research she did. She puts 'coagulants' I think 'do you mean the Von Willebrand Factor?' (the coagulant that was in part responsible for my hospitalisation). Maybe that's too harsh.

But dismissing the silver and cross as symbols that vampires ... not exactly fear, but dislike, that was narrow-sighted. I know she's a mormon, I know she hates the very idea of going against God, but one Vampire myth I heard makes that very point. I heard that the first Vampire was Judas Iscariat, the man who sold Jesus to the Romans (sidebar, Jesus told him he would, wasn't he following orders? What's so wrong with Judas? Not to be blasphemous, I just don't see how he let Jesus down). That when he heard Jesus had been hung on the cross, he hung himself on a cross too, and he was visisted by the devil as the blood left his body and was told that God wouldn't admit him into heaven, despite the decree he would when his son died for him, and that the devil didn't want him in hell either, and he'd live forever more on the blood of the innocent. The silver comes from the 30 pieces of silver Judas sold Jesus out for, the innocents over time have been turned into Virgins ... she could have twisted that so it only affected Judas. (Sidebar again, did the bible have every type of storyline ever invented in it? Look again, I swear down someone was visited by the ghosts of the past, present and future. The first murder, prodigcal son and Joseph are in there after all).

I read another story when I was in year 6, a Victorian Horror book, and one of the short stories was about this village who accidentally opened this crypt, and their sheep started dying off, one at a time, then in twos and threes, and it spread to the pigs, then the cows and horses, and then the people. The Cullens aren't moral, they've just been sleeping a while.

So my point is, I know enough to know she hasn't done her research. Bella would've smelt weird after the Ballet studio for longer than a couple of days, blood takes 10 days to fully recycle itself. It would've taken her that long to replace the donated blood.

I think Twilight's good if what you want to read is the emotional aspect. I think it's poor if you have read so much into, maybe not precisely vampire lore, but other elements that contribute. I think it's poor if you want to read the narration as typical English prose, and speech as colloquial (well done Stefenie, for muddling them up!). I think it's poor that in a saga spanning almost 2000 pages with all elements of blood, horror, death, war, weaponry and practice fights, it ends the way it does. Especially with the themes throughtout Breaking Dawn (sorry, I know one person reading this who hasn't read Breaking Dawn and I promised not to say too much about it). If you're going for escapism, you can't get better than Twilight. It's the books I tend to read between Scarlett Thomas or Christopher Paolini or Phillip Pullman. The fluff between the heavyweights. I know that sounds awful, I do, but always bear this in mind:

I always liked the chocolate covered pretzels.