Twilight

                               by

                Stephanie Meyer

 

The Twilight Series

Meyer, S. (2005). Twilight. New York, NY:

Little, Brown and Company.

 It’s quite an accomplishment to write a book folks can really sink their teeth into, but it’s even more impressive to launch a worldwide thirst for your subject matter.  Yet that’s what Stephanie Meyer did when she was willing to stake her career on a book called Twilight.

 Although vampires have been a part of folktales, books, movies and the like for centuries, they have traditionally been personified as middle-age folk who just hang around the house all day.  But it’s been difficult for young readers to get batty over characters who are the same age as their parents – or, as teenagers refer to them - the “undead.”  What 14-year-old girl dreams of Bela Lugosi giving her a hickie?  But Stephanie Meyers created a vampire who is not only handsome and sexy, but a real young-blood – young enough attend high school – except on those sunny days when he thought it wasn’t a bright idea to go.  And the fair young heroine who is willing to stick her neck out for a chance at love is another high school student named Bella Lugosi…I mean Swan.  Plus, the author wisely gives her heroine the same social problems that so many children her age face:  loving a vampire, parents who don’t understand you, loving a vampire, feeling like a misfit, and…loving a vampire.  You know – all those problems that really suck.

 By focusing her story on teenagers in a high school setting, then adding the kind of fantasy that has enthralled readers for centuries, Stephanie Meyers created an upscale vampire yarn that has had adolescents coffin up millions of dollars in book sales, which must keep the author smiling all the way to the blood bank.  I wonder if she was inspired by the way Franco Zeffirelli broke worldwide box office records when he made a movie version of Romeo and Juliet that used actors who were the actual ages of the teenage characters they portrayed, instead of the adult actors who had hitherto played these roles in a way that was deadly dull.  Meyer’s Twilight has launched an avalanche of copycat books, movies, television shows, etc. that demand such late-evening reading and viewing habits that teenage devotees are now all children of the night.      

PICTURE SOURCES:

demureconnoisseur.blogspot.com

allweirdnews.com

chernobogslair.blogspot.com

en.wikipedia.org