So as a result of my request for female authors one of my off-line friends decided it would be a lark to say “you know, you really *should* read Stephanie Meyers.” And after the requisite laughter that follows such a suggestion, I said “yeah, right-o” and promptly organised to borrow a copy of Twilight from my sister (who had, in turn, borrowed it from a friend, and wishes it to be quite clear that this is not her book I am borrowing; she was lured into reading it by its popularity among non-reader friends, and her response to the novel are probably even more negative than most).
To be honest, the book wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I mean, it didn’t touch me anywhere inappropriate or threaten to eat my children or anything like that. It just kinda ambled along telling an familiar-if-unpretentious story for the first half in which Bella and Edward stay away from each other, then turned into overblown teenage angst which made me want to slap the characters as they referred to one another as heroin addictions and such, then had an inexplicable vampire-attack-chase-scene-watchamie to come to its unlikely conclusion without any real meaning ’cause, yo, the bad guy was just there to make for an ending, yeah?
Then there was prom.
I could gripe, because this is a very easy book to gripe about, but I figure there’s enough of that. And, honestly, after years of reading some of the more florid ends of the gothic romance I can even understand the appeal, especially if I were part of the target demographic. Lets just say it’s not my thing, and that I’d probably need some kind of bribery to convince me to continue with the series. Instead I’m just going to wander off and quietly contemplate how much more awesome this book could have been if it was written from the POV of, say, Billy or Tyler-who-cannot-drive-on-ice, becoming the friend and confidant of his neighbour Edward Cullen, who is in the process of going all Jay Gatsby for the new girl. ‘Cause I think Twilight by way of the Great Gatsby would have been awesome, and it would have spared me the interminable angst that made up the middle portion of the book. Plus, then, the stalkery stuff would actually be a literary homage rather than just plain creepy.
