Edward Cullen has “a face any male model in the world would trade
his soul for.” He is an eternally 17-year-old vampire who lives in the
eternally cloudy town of Forks, Washington. He doesn’t have fangs, he
doesn’t kill humans, and he’s continually described as the most
beautiful man on earth. Sunlight won’t burn him into a black powder; it
only makes him prettier. “Edward in the sunlight was shocking,” his
creator writes. “His skin… literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny
diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the
grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his
scintillating arms bare.”
It is, then, no surprise that on the night of Friday, August 1,
about a hundred girls and women ranging in age from 8 to “mind your own
business”—but largely teenagers—showed up at the University
Book Store for the release of Breaking Dawn, the fourth vampire
romance novel in the Twilight series, from author Stephenie Meyer. They
were joined by hundreds of avid fans at Third Place Books and Secret
Garden Bookshop and Borders and Barnes & Noble. They, in turn, were
joined by hundreds of thousands of like-minded fans across the
country.
Back to Edward. He is in love with a human teenager named Isabella
(“Bella”) Swan, the books’ narrator. They are in love with each other
as only teenagers can be. Their hearts leap from their chests and
fornicate rudely on the ground on almost every page. The catch is that
Bella is torn. A werewolf boy named Jacob loves her, too; and, unlike
Edward, he could give Bella babies and a more normal life. Werewolves
and vampires are, of course, mortal enemies, and Edward and Jacob are
continually at odds with each other for the hand of Bella. The
Twilight movie is coming out this fall, and fans can buy
T-shirts and CDs to supplement the books. In the third book in the
series, Eclipse, Edward gives Bella an engagement ring and Jacob
gives her a charm bracelet. Fans can buy exact replicas online.
There’s not one beautiful sentence in the entire first three books
of the Twilight series. Bella and Edward fall in love immediately and
desperately, for no reason except that they have to in order to get the
damn book started. There’s a big vampire fight at the climax of the
first book, but because Bella is unconscious during it, all the action
is relayed afterward, in flashback. Oh, and none of the books have any
real plot. It is difficult to relay here how enraging it is that
characters either murmur or mutter—or
both!—on nearly every page. Without those two words, the books
would be noticeably shorter.
But the truth of megapublishing is that mega-authors must only do
one thing really well: Stephen King writes a disturbing scene more
effectively than any other author; Dan Brown moves a plot forward with
such velocity that readers don’t have time to realize that nothing
makes sense. What Meyer does, maybe better than anyone else in popular
fiction right now, is capture that sensation of new teenage love, when
one’s genitals have just come alive and the desire to copulate is so
powerful and all-consuming that the teenage brain, still reeling from
the recent passage from childhood, has to interpret it as powerful,
undying love—the kind of love that nobody on earth has ever or
will ever experience again.
Meyer is a practicing Mormon, and the characters are completely
abstinent. It’s all horny foreplay; sexual tension is all the first
three books have to offer. Due to Edward’s blood lust, he can’t even
really make out with Bella for fear of his darker impulses taking over.
Instead, they talk (a lot) about how much they want each other.
Refreshingly for young-adult fiction, Bella objectifies Edward
ceaselessly, and she’s the one who wants to initiate sex. Edward, being
over 100, is the more old-fashioned of the two. But feminists will
spend a generation fighting the influence of these books anyway. Bella
faints and constantly needs saving. She’s forever passive, waiting for
the men to act. Without Edward, she admits, she has no purpose in
life.
It’s a cliché, but their love has to be discussed in
clichés, because the nuance of intelligent language can’t convey
these power-chord emotions:
“Do you really have any idea how important you are to me? Any
concept at all of how much I love you?” He pulled me tighter against
his hard chest, tucking my head under his chin.
I pressed my lips against his snow-cold neck. “I know how much I
love you,” I answered.
“You compare one small tree to the entire forest.”
I rolled my eyes, but he couldn’t see. “Impossible.”
He kissed the top of my head and sighed.
At the University Book Store, scavenger hunts are played in the
stacks and trivia questions are answered for prizes. These prizes
include trips to Forks (it’s on the Olympic Peninsula) to go on the
brand-new Twilight tour, and tickets to Meyer’s sold-out rock-star
appearance at Benaroya Hall on August 12. The youngest girls come
earliest, then the older teens arrive, towing sarcastic boyfriends who
linger at the booth where bookstore employees powder and bloody
people’s faces to “vampirize” them.
About an hour before the sales begin, women in their mid-40s arrive,
one wearing a long black veil, and they stand off to the side looking
mildly embarrassed for being the oldest people in the room. At
midnight, there is a countdown, followed by cheering, and then the
ladies get in line to receive their books. Women in their 20s wander
in, dressed in nightclubbing clothes and slurring a little from time
spent in nearby bars. As the groups mingle, some of the older ones try
to be ironic about it even as other, more serious fans—the ones
who call themselves “Twi-hards” online—impatiently wait their
turn. Within 15 minutes, everyone has headed home to begin a long night
of reading, leaving wearied and fake-bloodied booksellers to pick up
their considerable mess.
The next morning, Hachette Book Group announces the sales: 1.3
million copies sold at midnight. 
I was one of the akward twenty-somethings in line for the book at midnight on the release day. It was true, most of the girls there were under the age of sixteen, but the author herself is a forty something mother of three, and if she can get a thrill from writing these desperately melodramatic tween romance stories, than I can sure as hell get a thrill from reading them!