Twilight (impression)

[KLSymph]

So I'm at a relative's house for the Christmas holiday, and my cousin happened to have the first book of the Twilight saga by Stephanie Meyer on her bookshelf (a friend's copy, she says, but I don't quite believe her). I have only a basic familiarity with the series that comes from idly following popular culture, and had never read any of the books or seen the movies, so I thought I should give it a try.  Sure, the majority of websites that mentioned the books disparaged its plot and writing, but it's popular with enough fans to drive a few films and I don't pass up the chance to analyze popular writing lest my writing models fall obsolete.  So, I read the first five chapters, intending to give the book the full benefit of the doubt.

At first glance, it's not as horrible as Cracked.com makes it out to be in the first five chapters, but that might be a matter of degree.  It certainly wasn't very interesting.  The first chapter was devoted to the protagonist, Bella, internalizing about her move from the city to a small town, getting used to a new school, and meeting an apparently very interesting Edward Cullen who glares at her a lot.  The second chapter was about Edward glaring less.  I imagine this progression appeals to the supposed teenage girl target demographic, which I am not a member of, as I wouldn't dedicate a full two chapters to that much internalization, with almost no action to speak of.  As a writer, I was irked by how the author applied the tell-don't-show, and how melodramatic Bella's mental telling tended to be, but I suppose that may be a high school girl's perspective and my Dragonball-Z-during-high-school self shouldn't judge.  It wasn't so bad that I couldn't keep reading.

The third chapter had Bella almost being run over by accident, and saved by Edward who used super speed and strength.  Okay, finally a threat to the protagonist.  It's not an actual throughline, but there's tension in Bella's confusion at Edward's strange power and a promise of story conflict.  I guess the story is picking up, right?

What happened during the fourth chapter?  Uh... hold on, let me look it up again.  Okay.  Bella has the chance to ask a bunch of guys to a school dance, and she doesn't.  In other words, nothing happened.

Chapter five.  Bella faints during a blood typing test in her biology class.  Edward carries her to the nurse.  And... and....

And suddenly an overwhelming sense of "who cares?" crashed into me that bade me close the book.  At the time I was thinking I might get to that scene where Edward reveals he's a vampire and sparkles, which I hear is a good turning point, but when I turned to the page to see that I'm on chapter six, that I'm already 110 pages into a story whose total action I've summarized in the above four paragraphs, all the writing manuals I've read about pacing, story coherence, and engaging the reader cracked me in the head and sent all that benefit-of-the-doubt flying out of the hole.  I thought it would be the bad stylistic choices that might turn me off the book, but it turned out to be plot drudgery instead.

The "stomach full of butterflies" line that Cracked.com mentioned was in there though, and yes, it was dumb in context too.

To conclude, I don't know if Twilight is as badly written as people say, because it's too boring to finish reading, much less analyze.  Is it because I'm not used to these kinds of stories?  Maybe I should pick up a random airport romance novel on my flight home, though if romance plots really start the way Bella's does then I might not survive the trip.  All I can say is if this book was successfully targeted to a teenage girl audience, then I don't think I'll successfully target a teenage girl audience anytime soon.

Happy 2009!

[Dracos]

Heh.  Twilight is Twilight I suppose.

[KLSymph]

The most notable element about the book that I got from reading it was how in one of the biology class scenes, Edward answered the teacher's question with "Krebs cycle". And I just took a Ph.D. cell biology course this quarter that went over that, so I was kind of going, "Aww yeah, one molecule of glucose equals two cycles of one acetyl-CoA into three NADH, one FADH₂, and one GTP! I know this!"

This moment of personal amusement immediately degenerated into the question, "Who would randomly name-drop the Krebs cycle in a book about vampires?"

It is a mystery.

[Jon]

The blood is the life.

Obviously related.

[Edward]

To me the real mystery is why any sane beingl would choose to spend 90 years in high school.

[KLSymph]

The blood is the life.

Obviously related.

*puts on pedant hat*

Krebs runs in mitochondria, which is not found human blood plasma or red blood cells, so Krebs is mostly absent in blood.

*takes off pedant hat*

Now, if Twilight had those exotic types of vampires that eat livers or such, then it would be relevant. And a lot more awesome, if also a lot more gruesome.

To me the real mystery is why any sane beingl would choose to spend 90 years in high school.

Immortality makes you emo in the Twilight universe.