The Burr in the Burbs

So I finally read Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, the vampire mega-hit that is so popular today with early adolescent girls. I give it a B-.

Until about the last twenty pages, the plot remained strong and engaging. I appreciate the unique remote Northwest setting, with its rain-drenched gloomy atmosphere. Vampires, it seems, do well under overcast skies. Meyer incorporates enough twists and turns to keep the general reader interested. But since I’m not a fourteen-year-old girl, I have a few criticisms.

Every vampire story constructs the mythology a little bit differently. For me, Meyer does the genre a disservice by overly romanticizing.  Most vampire stories are romantic in more than one sense. The original 1931 Dracula movie starring Bela Lugosi (note the actor’s first name) was not promoted as a horror flick, as it would have been today. Horror was not conceived of as a unique genre until later. It was originally billed as a dark romance. Vampires are romantic in the sense that they embody passion over reason. Van Helsing, in the original, represents science. Dracula ends with reason overcoming passion. But passion never dies.

In Twilight, the narrator is 17 year old Bella. She’s a little bit socially awkward, unfashionable, and from a dysfunctional family. In her new school, she falls in love with a hunk of burning vampire love named Edward. Bella ends up wanting to become a vampire and it’s hard to blame her. Immortality. Amazing powers. Physical beauty. Lots of money. Heightened senses. Superiority in intelligence, strength, and grace. What’s not to like? The fact that Edward and his crew are vampires is almost arbitrary. They could as well be elves or fairies or any other species of supernatural creature. It’s somewhat incidental that their nature is to drink human blood. There is none of the traditional vampires as agents of Satan or evil demonic life-sapping figures in this. But there are good vampires and bad ones. To be sure, the baddies do make an appearance and there are genuine moments of tension. But this is mostly a sappy adolescent love story, make no mistake. There is way too much breathless eye gazing, tingling surreptitious touches and fawning over Edward’s gorgeousness in this book to seriously appeal to heterosexual males.  At least this one.  But that’s OK, I reckon. Stephanie Meyer has become one rich chica writing this mush.  I still give a B-.

Stories about inwardly tormented vampires who become the equivalent of vegans and swear off killing humans for food are not original to Stephanie Meyer. What does seem particular to her books, however, is the high school setting. At least, it’s new to me. When Edward refrains from ravishing Bella and making a feast out of her, it comes across as a metaphor for a teenage boy working to control his raging hormones. Vampirology frequently has sexual intercourse as the underlying theme. Edward’s bloodlust is representative simply of lust. And to it’s immense credit, this is a chaste romance.

I’m now about twenty-five pages into the sequel, New Moon, and I’m already pretty irritated by Bella. I hope it improves.