Book Review: Twilight

First, a few warnings:

1. This is a review of all four books in the Twilight saga, and it will treat the individual books and the narrative as a whole.

2. To suggest that this is not a positive review would be a gross understatement.

3. This review ABSOLUTELY contains spoilers, so if you want to read these books for yourself–or if you want to see the movies–and you care about things like spoilers, you should go read something else. I do attempt to explain the story for those of you who haven’t read the books and don’t want to, though, so while it’s full of spoilers, it was also written for people who are pretty unfamiliar with the specifics of the story.

4. To date, I have not read anybody else’s review of any of the books in the Twilight saga or even the movie, so if you don’t like something you read here and feel like accusing me of jumping on the anti-Twilight bandwagon, that’s not the case. I’m sure most, if not all, of what I have to say about Meyer’s books has been said before, but at the time of writing, I am unfamiliar with any common threads that may run through other people’s critiques of the series.

If you’ve read the above warnings and feel like you want to proceed, then, by all means, let’s get this party started.

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For those of you who don’t know (and I believe there are plenty of you out there who have avoided this series like the plague it is), Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga is about an average girl named Bella and Edward, the vampire she loves. The series consists of four books, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, which encompass a surprisingly short amount of time in the characters’ lives considering all the stuff that happens.

In Twilight, we meet Bella Swan, a clumsy seventeen year old girl who is clumsy and way more mature than everyone and clumsy and smart and clumsy and who reads totally mature books like Wuthering Heights and who is clumsy and clumsy. Don’t forget that she’s clumsy. Meyer decided that it’s not so much a character trait as a plot device. Bella’s just moved from her mom’s house in Phoenix, Arizona to her dad’s house in Forks, Washington, a small town where the sun almost never shines. Bella’s also totally independent and used to taking care of herself and everyone else around her, which is why it totally makes sense when she becomes incapable of doing anything by herself after she meets Edward Cullen, the sparkly vampire of Stephenie Meyer’s dreams.

No, really. That’s how all this shit started. Stephenie Meyer had a dream about a “girl” (read: Stephenie Meyer) in a meadow with a guy who tells her he’s a vampire. And that whole sparkly thing is totally not a rumor. In the Twilight universe, vampires sparkle in the sun. All that stuff about them turning to dust is a bunch of crap made up by people who aren’t Stephenie Meyer. Vampires just sparkle. And garlic and crosses don’t repel them. In fact, only a vampire can kill another vampire. Having taken away every single weakness the otherwise kick-ass mythical vampire possesses, Meyer has succeeded in making vampires grass-growing boring. Even the worst Dracula movie is more interesting than Meyer’s vampires. The worst thing any of them might have to suffer is a bad hair day.

Oh, except they can’t, because Meyer’s vampires are beautiful, or, at least, the Cullens are. That’s the family that Edward, Bella’s Swarovski vampire, belongs to. In addition to Edward, the Cullen family includes Carlisle, a doctor, Esmee, a housewife, and their “adopted kids,” Rosalie, Emmett, Alice, and Jasper, a bunch of characters who have way cooler stories than either Edward or Bella, so, of course, they each get about a page and a half to tell them. Because who wants to hear about Alice’s pre-vampiric stint in an insane asylum or Rosalie’s post-vampiric Kill Bill-style murder spree when we could get multi-chapter descriptions of the way Edward’s perfect everything makes Bella feel like she’s about to have a heart attack?! Twelve year old girls, that’s who!

Anyway, in Twilight, Bella starts at her new high school, meets Edward, obsesses about Edward, and then realizes Edward is a vampire with the help of Jacob Black, a teenage member of the local tribe, who tells her a story about the “cold ones,” and then mentions that the Cullens aren’t allowed on the tribe’s land. Cue Bella becoming even more obsessed with Edward when she finds out he sneaks into her room at night to watch her sleep. If your heart went pitter-pat reading that sentence, please seek help. Add in Edward’s almost immediate possessiveness and the way he eventually seems to control nearly every one of Bella’s moves and you’ve got enough evidence to seek a millennium-long restraining order. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this whole series was an epic letter written to the guy at the Psychotic Letters From Men blog.

Edward is attracted to Bella because she smells better than any other human he’s met. Also, he can read everyone’s mind but hers. I think this is just evidence that Bella is an empty-headed moron, but Edward seems to think it makes her special. Hey, whatever you’ve got to do to get through the tedium that must have been your pre-Twilight life, Stephenie. I’m sure Edward would think you’re special, too.

Eventually Bella’s scent attracts another vampire named James, who, seconds after meeting her, decides that he wants to kill her. Honestly, I’m a little surprised that doesn’t happen to Bella more often.

Alice and Jasper drive Bella to Phoenix while Edward and the rest hunt James (who’s hunting Bella) and Victoria, James’ vampiric sugarboo. They lose track of James, who realizes Bella’s in Phoenix, so Edward and Co. hop the first flight to Arizona where Bella and Co. are supposed to meet them at the airport. At 9:45 in the morning.

Yeah. Seriously. And here we have it, folks: proof that nobody, not even Stephenie Meyer, read this book before it got published. How the fuck are a bunch of vampires flitting their diamond-encrusted asses around Phoenix, Arizona at 9:45 in the morning? Had Stephenie Meyer ever been to an airport before she wrote Twilight? I’ve been to at least half a dozen of them, and they all had windows. And half the flights I’ve ever been on deplaned on the tarmac, not at a gate, which meant all the passengers had to walk around outside for a couple of minutes before even getting inside of the airport.

But Meyer handily avoids dealing with how five vampires manage to avoid the sun in Phoenix, Arizona by having Bella sneak off to meet James, who she thinks has imprisoned her mother in a ballet studio. A huge bloody fight ensues, James bites Bella on the arm, Edward and Co. swoop in to save the day, James done gets kill’t, and Edward sucks the vampire venom out of Bella’s arm before it can circulate through her bloodstream and change her into a vampire. Why? Because Edward wants her to remain human. Why? Because Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon, and biting Bella is a thinly veiled metaphor for having sex with Bella, and Edward doesn’t believe in that. Biting Bella, I mean. And sex, too. For the record, he does neither until after they’re married.

Yeah. Seriously.

One of the things my coworkers love about this book is that Bella and Edward abstain from premarital sex. They don’t even kiss that much because it’s “dangerous” and Edward is too tempted to “bite” Bella when they do. In other words, kissing could lead to the thinly veiled metaphor for sex. So not only is premarital sex bad, so is kissing. But not stalking. Stalking someone is totally fine as long as you love them. Oh, and as long as you’re totally hot.

In the second book, New Moon, Bella gets a paper cut at Edward’s house, and Jasper attacks her. This made me think about a few things.

1. If Jasper is so unable to control himself, why is he allowed to attend a public high school full of other kids who must surely injure themselves now and then? Why wouldn’t he stay away from all humans lest one of them get a paper cut or scrape their elbow or suffer any number of other minor, but still bloody, injuries?

2. If it’s not just any human who can make Jasper go all feral, if it’s just Bella, what happens when she gets her period? I realize that’s hardly a delicate question, but I think, given what Meyer has provided all of us to work with, it’s a fair one. If a paper cut makes Jasper freak out and makes all the other vampires in the vicinity have to catch themselves lest they go into a frenzy, too, surely, at least three days a month, Bella takes her own life in her hands just by being a mature female human.

3. If, as Edward states flat-out in the first book, vampires don’t need to breathe, but they do it out of habit and because not breathing weakens their sense of smell, WHY DON’T THEY ALL JUST HOLD THEIR FARKING BREATH WHEN THEY’RE AROUND BELLA? Carlisle tells Alice to do it at the end of the first book when Bella’s bleeding all over the place, and it seems keep her from going nutso-crazy and feasting on Bella’s jugular. If Bella’s blood smells so good that it’s difficult for a number of the Cullens to be around her sometimes, it’s not like it’s a difficult problem to solve. For crissakes, does becoming a vampire destroy a person’s cerebral cortex?!

Anyway, after the attack, which he fended off, Edward breaks up with Bella before disappearing completely, and she goes into a three-month walking coma. This prompts Bella’s father Charlie, an otherwise extraneous character, to make one of the only sane observations in the entire series, when he threatens to have Bella committed if she doesn’t nut the fuck up and at least try to get over it. She retaliates by acting recklessly, especially after she realizes that she has auditory hallucinations of Edward’s voice whenever she does something stupid, like ride a motorcycle. To aid her in her recklessness, she enlists Jacob Black, the minor character in the first book who kick-started Bella’s realization that Edward and his family are vampires. Jacob is but-crazy in love with Bella, but Bella doesn’t get this at first because Jacob doesn’t stalk and control her the way Edward does. Jacob just spends time with Bella, makes her laugh, and teaches her a bunch of really cool things. Jacob’s obviously a total pussy. Real men assert total physical and psychological control over the women they love.

Jacob, as it turns out, is a werewolf. So are several other of the younger members of his tribe. The werewolves exist because they’re the only natural enemy of the vampire. So, to contradict what Stephenie Meyer says in the first book, vampires CAN be killed by something other than vampires. They can be killed by werewolves! OMG, it’s a totally hot love triangle now! Like Meyer’s vampires, Meyer’s werewolves are completely different from the creatures of legend. Jacob and his friends can change at will, not just when there’s a full moon, and they become giant wolves. Giant wolves who hunt vampires. The wolf pack discovers that Victoria, the shmoopsiepoo of James from the first book, is hunting Bella to get back at Edward. Bella, too preoccupied with hearing Edward’s voice in her head, jumps off of a cliff and into the Pacific Ocean. Jacob saves her from drowning, and Bella goes home to find Alice, Edward’s psychic sister, waiting for her. Alice saw Bella jump and assumed she was committing suicide. Eventually this gets back to Edward, who decides to kill himself, too. Off Alice and Bella go to Italy to save Edward from some ancient vampire family who wandered into New Moon from an Anne Rice novel and decided to stay a while.

It all ends well. Edward didn’t really mean to leave Bella, it’s just that he puts her in so much terrible danger. He decides to solve this problem by becoming even more possessive of Bella in the third book, Eclipse. He promises to turn Bella into a vampire as long as she marries him, and, after a minor freak-out stemming from her parents’ divorce when she was young, Bella relents. It’s cute how he brow-beats her into marrying him! Just remember, kids, if at first you don’t succeed…

Eclipse mostly focuses on Bella waiting to graduate from high school so she can marry Edward and become a vampire. In the background are some other vampires, created by Victoria (remember her?), and it pretty much doesn’t matter. There’s a fourth book, so you know, after 200 pages of Bella not being able to handle how perfect and beautiful Edward is, the good vampires, along with the werewolves, who’ve joined forces with the good vampires, save the day. Oh, and in an effort to keep all of her readers from screaming, “WTF?! Is Bella stupid?! Jacob is a million times cooler than Edward!”, Meyer tries to sully Jacob’s character by having him almost sexually assault Bella, who then realizes that she loves him, too.

Yeah. Seriously. If you want Bella to like you, all you have to do it stalk her or assault her. There’s a scene in the first book where it looks like Bella’s going to be assaulted by four guys at once until Edward saves her. It’s a good thing he did, or there’d have been four more love interests in the series and these books would have gone on forever.

But that whole thing with Jacob totally didn’t work on me. I knew he was still cooler than Edward, and I think Meyer realized that, too, which is why she saved the best for the last book. And by “best,” I mean “totally fucking worst.”

In Breaking Dawn, Bella and Edward get married and go on their honeymoon to a private island owned by Carlisle and Esmee Cullen. (Did I mention the Cullens are not only beautiful vampires, but rich ones too? Did I honestly need to? Dream big, little girls.) They have sex, and Edward leaves bruises all over Bella afterwards because he can’t control his awesome vampire strength mid-coitus. Bella says she doesn’t mind. It’s okay if he leaves bruises as long as he says he loves you.

Bella eventually realizes she’s pregnant with Edward’s horrible demon vampire baby, which is killing her from the inside. I told you I was surprised more people didn’t want to kill Bella right after meeting her, but I didn’t tell you that her baby seems to hate her most of all. According to Edward, though, the baby loves her, it’s just that it’s a horrible freakazoid vampire baby from Hell and it doesn’t know what it’s doing to its blood-filled mommy popsicle. ‘Cause, apparently, newly-formed fetuses can have coherent thoughts about abstract concepts like love. Smooth, Stephenie. Shoehorn that Mormon ideology right into that shit. I’m sure no one will notice.

The baby grows super-fast–as hellish demon vampire babies do–and, before we know it, Bella’s ready to pop. We know this, because, hugely pregnant, Bella trips, falls, and… pops.

Remember how I said being clumsy was more of a plot device than a character trait? I wasn’t lying.

After one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read (the baby breaks Bella’s spine and Edward performs a caesarian section… with his teeth), Edward jams a hypodermic needle full of his venom into Bella’s heart, thus saving her life by ending it and turning her into a vampire. Along the way, Jacob, the guy who is totally way cooler than Edward, “imprints” upon Edward and Bella’s baby girl, whom they christened “Renesmee”, an amalgamation of their mothers’ names. (Renee and Esmee.) At least the whole “teenagers give their kids stupid names” part of Twilight is accurately portrayed.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, imprinting. Imprinting is something that werewolves do involuntarily, according to Jacob. They meet someone, the imprint happens, and they are tied to that person forever. In Jacob and Renesmee’s case, he will be a big brother to her until she comes of age, and then they will bone like bunny rabbits. How is Renesmee going to come of age? She’s a horrible vampire spawn, right? She should stay a newborn baby forever! Well, sort of, but she’s also half-human, which means she’ll age for a while and then stop. Like, at age seventeen. So she’ll perpetually be just under the age of consent. Jacob has temporarily stopped aging as a werewolf, but he will eventually start aging again. And, BINGO, Stephenie Meyer just ruined the character of Jacob forever and ever, because that’s just about the creepiest thing in the entire series, not to mention the entire universe.

Also, why seventeen? If Renesmee’s half-human, she should age halfway, say, to about forty or forty-five, and then stop aging. At least throw Jacob a bone (Ha! Get it? He’s a wolf!) and let her get to nineteen or twenty.

So, while Jacob commits to sexually assaulting her daughter someday, Bella spends three days transforming into a vampire. When she emerges from the transformation, she finds that she’s become the beautifulest, most sparkliest vampire ever! See! She wasn’t average after all! She only THOUGHT she was! Take that everyone who called Stephenie Meyer a fugtron in high school! Stephenie Meyer’s Bella’s totally hot now!

Some other shit happens, but it changes nothing about the end of the story, which is basically that Bella, Edward, Renesmee and Renesmee’s creepy “Uncle Jake” live happily ever after and have lots of Biblical sex. The end!

So I guess you’re all wondering by now why, if I hated these books so much, did I read all of them? Well, strictly speaking, I didn’t. I read half of the first one, gave up because Meyer’s writing is abysmal, then I picked up the audio books. Okay, so it didn’t happen exactly like that. I never would have cared to finish the series if it weren’t for my friends.

See, my friends love Twilight, at least some of them do. (For the record, Glenn tried reading it and said that it gave him “cancer of the soul.”) And they kept telling me how much they loved it, and I love my friends, so, eventually, I figured I’d give it a try. That’s when I got halfway through reading the first book before giving up. I asked my friends who’d read all four books how they’d gotten through them. How had they ignored Meyer’s buhtarded and cliched storytelling? They told me they didn’t really notice it, they just lost themselves in the story.

Ah, the story! Everyone says that. If they’re willing to admit the author can’t write, they pull out the It’s a GREAT story! defense, like that really matters. Any story can be great if the person telling it has some talent. And, frankly, there are few things more frustrating to me than seeing a story that could have been pretty good ruined by someone who doesn’t have the chops to do something worthwhile with it. If Meyer’s publishers had encouraged her to join a writing group or even take some basic composition courses, if an editor had gone over her manuscript with the dreaded Red Pen of Doom, if even a few pairs of trained eyes had been focused on the Twilight manuscript, it probably could have been something worth reading. That wouldn’t have done anything for the story elements that I find disturbing, but at least the writing would have been good. And, who knows, maybe some careful re-edits would have weeded out the one-dimensional character traits of Bella and Edward, and we would have wound up with two leads who actually deserve to be the stars of their own stories.

But no one did that. It was obvious to me the first time I tried to read Twilight, and it was obvious to me when I listened to the audio book. But I still haven’t gotten to why I did that, have I?

My friends were dismayed by how quickly I’d given up on the story they loved, and when I abused their beloved book, they either begged me to finish it–to see what they saw–or banned me from having an opinion on it because I hadn’t read the whole thing.

I think the latter group of friends knew what they were doing, because, if you know me at all, you know that I don’t care for being told that I can’t do something, even if it’s something I don’t want to do. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll get through all the damn books, and if I still hate them, you have to sit there and listen while I tell you why.” For the record, to this day, none of them have sat through an explanation of why I hate Twilight. The first group of friends, the ones who weren’t assholes about it, are the only ones whose hearts I’ve broken with this review. I’m sort of sorry about that.

I’m lying. I’m not sorry about that. I love you, these books suck. No, I said that the wrong way. I love you, and these books suck. There. Friends?

One of the biggest points of contention between me and the people who love Twilight is my all-encompassing hatred for the lead character, Bella. Nobody can understand why I hate Bella. I couldn’t understand how anyone could NOT hate Bella, but, as I was writing this review, it dawned on me:

Bella Swan is a blank slate. She is devoid of most personality traits. We don’t know if she has any hobbies. We don’t know what her favorite movie is, even though the fact that Alice watches it with her in Eclipse is mentioned. Bella Swan is [Insert Yourself Here]. Anyone reading the books can easily project their own personality, likes, dislikes, hobbies, interests, and motivations onto Bella, and I’m not sure if Stephenie Meyer did that on purpose, or if she’s such an awful writer that she just didn’t think to design a main character with any kind of defining characteristics (other than being kind of klutzy). And that was my problem: I’m nothing like Bella, not even Blank Slate Bella. I didn’t understand anything she did for any reason she gave. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her hard until she either came to her senses or got nauseous and threw up. I can’t relate to her, and I can’t relate to people I’ve known in real life who are like Bella, and so I’ve never been closer to that sort of drama than when I read the Twilight books. And I hated every goddamn, wimpy, obsessive, codependent second of it. I’ve had an easier time with well-developed characters who were my polar opposite than I did with blurry-edged Bella, who was practically begging me to see myself in her.

I could go on (and on and on), but I’m sure I’ve already lost some of you and am about to lose more of you. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have fun writing this, even if I didn’t have fun doing the research necessary to write it. Some of you may disagree with me or take issue with what I’ve said, but… Well, I don’t care. After this entry and the notes it will get, I never want to talk about, write about, or think about Stephenie Meyer or any of her books ever, ever again.