Bad Books: Twilight Is Terrible

So just before we left for Lon­don we poin­ted you towards books — a new fea­ture we’re try­ing to get off the ground. So far it’s pretty sparse with only the links and pic­tures sec­tion set up but hope­fully that will begin to change with the intro­duc­tion of bad books our one stop shop for inform­a­tion and reviews of the books you should try to avoid.

Today it’s The Twi­light Series — a lit­er­ary saga so ter­rible it’s inspired hor­rors like this or this and can only be explained ration­ally like this.

Long, insipid and writ­ten by a lun­atic the Twi­light Saga beck­ons you for­ward into it’s nest made of spit and torn up books. So get real comfy, settle down and pre­pare to be amazed.

(Major props go to Alex at Rowdy Media for the links and brain dam­age they caused us.)

836 pages. That’s how long Stephanie Meyer’s Break­ing Dawn is.

It wasn’t like that in the beginning.

Her first story Twi­light was by com­par­ison tiny at only around 250 pages. Her second, New Moon was around 20 or so pages longer and almost as tol­er­able due it’s brev­ity. Her third, Eclipse was 368 pages in length– a num­ber I believe to be push­ing it when you have very little to actu­ally say.

But Break­ing Dawn, her mag­num opus as it were, is 836 pages long and it is with great dread and hor­rible foresight that I con­sider read­ing the first words of it.

All told and then regret­tably com­bined that’s around 1700 hun­dred pages of teen­age mas­turb­at­ory vam­pire fantasy writ­ten by a woman who seems to hate teen­agers more than any­thing else on the planet. 1700 pages penned by a woman pos­sessed by the hor­rid urge to con­tinue to write des­pite the fact that she ran out of plot at around the 100 page mark and con­tin­ued to sub­sti­tute it for self insert fan ser­vice and name dropping.

These are 1700 pages writ­ten solely for Stephanie Meyer to read, and re-dream the dream that led to the pen­ning of the Twi­light saga. A dream of vam­pires and Wash­ing­ton so per­sonal that it reads like a live­journal entry.

Her main char­ac­ter, the insipid dish water brown Bella Swan is sup­posedly self­less bey­ond all other his­tor­ical fig­ures. Ever. On the planet.

And that she is.

She is actu­ally so devoid of a self as to be utterly char­ac­ter­less. Of course this explains per­fectly why her super nat­ural boyfriend’s tal­ent of read­ing the minds of every per­son in the world ever whether they like it or not doesn’t work on her. There is no mind there to read.

This is of course des­pite the con­stant allu­sions to her intel­li­gence or fem­in­ism or advanced matur­ity. Mind you these things are only ever poin­ted out dir­ectly, in some fine examples of telling not show­ing, in order to let you how know the humans she’s forced to spend time with are stu­pid, small minded and just ‘don’t get her’. She simply wanders around all day, every day being nar­rated in the first per­son so that every page (of which, I would like to remind you, there are around 1700) is an end­less list of things which “I did” or “I saw” — the things which Bella and by exten­sion, Meyer observes to be true.

But Bella is a 17 year old girl dreamt up by a 40 year old woman trapped in the mind­set of a 14 year old girl who has only recently learned what adject­ives are and yet doesn’t quite under­stand them.

In this world of home spun hor­mone infused folk tale the per­cep­tions of Stephanie Meyer are those of god. A creepy, Mor­mon and per­man­ently pre-menstrual God who peers down out of the hole in the sky mor­al­ising her dif­fi­cult teen­age years into a night­mare of pubes­cent fantasy.

Edward, Bella’s 100 year old tra­gic golden eyed hero is a marble Adonis — in the authors own words the exact rep­lica of Michelangelo’s David — who’s nasty tend­ency to sneak unbid­den into the rooms of teen­age girls to watch them sleep is endear­ing instead of threat­en­ing and obsess­ive. He’s a GOOD VAMPIRE after all and only feeds on Deer and Moun­tain Lions and it’s not like his attrac­tion to her is ini­tially based on his magical VAMPIRE sense of smell which makes his every wak­ing moment a con­stant battle not to lit­er­ally eat her. And I mean every wak­ing moment because that is pre­cisely what they spend together it being much health­ier to con­stantly stare tor­rid sexual danger and anni­hil­a­tion in the face than it is to occa­sion­ally walk away and take some time out for biscuits.

Every decision Edward makes is solidly backed up by the psychic powers of his adop­ted sis­ter. Together these two super human jokers co-operate to bring Bella into their fam­ily using meth­ods oddly remin­is­cent of some sort of mes­si­anic cult. The age dif­fer­ence between the two (that of roughly 83 years but who’s count­ing any­way) is writ­ten off due to Bella’s immense matur­ity which is appar­ently the product of being made to pro­tect and oth­er­wise look after her child-like, selfish mother. She is the real adult of the story, being in pos­ses­sion of the sort of old souls enthu­si­ast­ic­ally talked about by the kind of people who routinely take time out to view the girls swim wear sec­tion of the Lit­tle­Woods catalogue.

In Meyer’s fic­tional world of Forks Wash­ing­ton it is clearly accept­able for things like this to hap­pen. Restrain­ing orders are a thing of myth and legend and child­ish exper­i­ment­a­tion reaps no con­sequences that can­not be com­pletely ignored due to the omni­science of VAMPIRES.

VAMPIRES are fant­astic. VAMPIRES fear noth­ing. Espe­cially not con­sequences, con­cerned fath­ers or stat­utory rape laws. The only thing they could pos­sibly fear is other VAMPIRES.

And around these uni­ver­sal max­ims grows our story which will encom­pass obsess­ive jeal­ous Nat­ive Amer­ican were­wolves, equally obsess­ive and venge­ful EVIL VAMPIRES and mul­tiple crimes against grammar.

Not that there’s any­thing wrong with escap­ism. (Which is what Meyer is writ­ing about here.) Not that there’s any­thing wrong at all with a bit of fantasy. (Although in this case it might be neces­sary to replace a bit with ‘a fuck­ing ton’.) And what was I doing read­ing a col­lec­tion of books (sup­posedly) writ­ten for teen­agers anyway?

To be hon­est I don’t really know. It star­ted with a You­Tube video of the by now fam­ous base­ball scene from the movie adapt­a­tion of Twi­light. It fea­tured sparkly pho­toshopped 20 somethings pre­tend­ing to be teen­agers, like most movies for the teen demo­graphic. It was hor­rific and yet fas­cin­at­ing at the same time. So obvi­ously when the movie appeared on gen­eral release I had to see what exactly was going on with these ‘sparkly fag­got vam­pires’ and so I watched it.

And then after I’d watched it I some­how decided that read­ing the books would be a good idea. I will never know where ideas like this come from — whether it’s wholly formed out of the ether or from inside the part of my own brain that hates me bey­ond meas­ure and wants me to suf­fer. Regard­less those ideas are always ter­rible, as I have dis­covered before and was about to dis­cover again around two pages into what I would like to call ‘my hor­rible jour­ney of discovery’.

It’s not that I hate Stephanie Meyer — even though there is a lot to hate. I’ve never met her so it would fol­low that hat­ing her wouldn’t be entirely rational. I have frankly no idea what she must be like as a per­son apart from the vis­ion of her I have man­aged to pull together from her writing.

If any­one read­ing this is famil­iar with Viri­gina Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ then you are prob­ably equally famil­iar with her sup­pos­i­tion that any novel writ­ing that res­ults in the reader form­ing a pic­ture of the author in their mind is tech­nic­ally bad. Shakespeare, in Woolf’s opin­ion is the per­fect example of a writer who avoids this trap — there is very little which can be taken from his work of him­self and there­fore the man remains a mys­tery, which is the goal of writ­ing good fiction.

Not so for Miss Meyer whose car­digan shrouded, round shouldered pres­ence was so recog­nis­able in her cameo appear­ance as ‘silly cow eat­ing bur­ger in diner while look­ing massively fuck­ing smug and out of place’ in the movie adapt­a­tion of Twi­light that it was impossible to miss her. She’s just that type of woman.

The type of woman who wrote a book that, behind all the pre­tend fem­in­ism, dra­matic self indul­gence and self inter­ested self sac­ri­fice, was really about what it would be like to be mar­ried to a VAMPIRE and the magical responsibility-less teen preg­nancy that such a union would res­ult in. It’s pure pulp fantasy trash.

She’s not a hate­ful cow. She’s not a hor­rible human being. She’s just a lady who wrote a stu­pid series of books for teen­agers, which, at the heart of it is why I dis­like her and her 1700 pages of retardo VAMPIRE smut. At the very cen­ter of it I have climbed on to my high horse, not because of her bad writ­ing, but because I’m annoyed at her dis-service to teen­agers in general.

Your teen­age years are the safest place and time for you to do stu­pid things. They’re spe­cific­ally the time in which a young adult is sup­posed to make retarded mis­takes and in doing so learn from them. Bad friend­ships, dan­ger­ous rela­tion­ships with intense older dudes your par­ents dis­ap­prove of, sexual exper­i­ment­a­tion, flir­ta­tion with alco­hol and the wrong type of people. You’re sup­posed to do all this when you’re a teen­ager and it’s ok to be stu­pid — that’s the beha­viour expec­ted from you.

Any sort of young adult fic­tion aimed at teen­agers is going to reflect that. But it’s also hope­fully going to try to edu­cate the idiot kids read­ing it and steer them away from mak­ing stu­pid decisions they can’t undo while encour­aging them to under­stand more about them­selves and the world around them. Writ­ing for young adults is a ser­i­ous job with big respons­ib­il­it­ies. Ped­dling a bit of fantasy is great but you have to back it up with a feel­ing that at the end of the day you don’t jeal­ously begrudge young people their youth, beauty and pos­sib­il­it­ies the way that Meyer does.

She single mindedly sets Bella on top of a ped­es­tal of incon­tro­vert­ible logic — at her mature 17 years of age she knows it all far bet­ter than any adult or in this case super human 800 year old adult.

Bella knows everything. Bella is bul­let­proof and noth­ing, ever can go wrong. She just has to keep on believ­ing that her rela­tion­ship with a giant con­trolling creeper is right for her and no-one can tell her any dif­fer­ent even if they’re older and more experienced.

She knows she wants to become a VAMPIRE instead of going to col­lege. She knows she wants to lose her vir­gin­ity before becom­ing a VAMPIRE even if this means going against her bloody minded prin­ciples and get­ting mar­ried at the age of 18 to a pos­sess­ive, broody twat bag whose 18th cen­tury chiv­alry wont stand for sex before mar­riage or com­prom­ises. Later, after her mar­riage of VAMPIRE con­veni­ence she then knows she wants to give birth to her very own half idiot half VAMPIRE baby, which until it’s delivered by fang cesarean amuses itself by eat­ing her alive from the inside out.

Bella Swan, the lit­er­ary incarn­a­tion of Stephanie Meyer, is a bloody minded, pig headed, arrog­ant teen­age girl. There is noth­ing in her story that couldn’t be fixed with some self esteem build­ing exer­cises like horse rid­ing and a good lec­ture about con­tra­cep­tion. It would be that simple to turn this hor­ror story around.

Through­out her 1700 page jour­ney of selfish­ness she whines, moans and name drops expens­ive yet ter­rible cars for no real reason. There’s no point to any of it save read­ing about a bit of gothic glam­our and dream­ing about how great life would be if a suave well read older man whisked you off to Europe and filled you with babies so that you didn’t have to turn up for your shift at your sum­mer job at Tesco.

Of course there’s noth­ing wrong with that.

As long as you don’t pre­tend to impres­sion­able teen­age girls (and in some cases fully fledged adult retards) that it’s any­thing other than it is.

UPDATE: You may be pleased to know that Twi­light is still ter­rible.