TWIHARD-ON | In the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time repeating these five words to myself over and over: “you aren’t what you read,” “you aren’t what you read,” and it’s all Stephenie Meyer’s fault.
JAIL BAIT | 17-year-old Taylor Lautner plays shape-shifter Jacob Black in "New Moon"
For the last month my entire life hasn’t been my own, it’s belonged to a family of vampires in a town called Forks, where one accident-prone human girl met the love of her life in the form of a Vampire who was doomed to repeat high school for all of eternity all because he was dying of the flu during that pesky turn-of-the-century pandemic.
Yes, my name is [redacted] and I am a fan of “Twilight.”
“But what exactly is ‘Twilight’?” I know, the thought plagues a lot of you. Some may think that they’re too old, too learned, or just too cool to care about this, the biggest literary phenomenon not involving Jesus or a boy wizard, and to those people I say this: you’re probably right. But after I say that I’m also going to tell you that maybe Stephenie Meyer has something. Like the Osmonds and Julie from the “Real World: New Orleans” before her, she has proven that Mormons can do more than just kill marriage equality in California: they can also entertain the masses.
Over the course of four books I have followed dutifully the many twists and turns that the journey of Bella and Edward’s love has taken, and though it might be easy to dismiss the series as just one in a stream of vampire related texts that have come into being over the last decade–”Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “the Vampire Diaries,” Eddie Murphy’s star turn as “Vampire in Brooklyn,” and “True Blood”–what Meyer has done is actually tap into the core of our emotional register. She has reached into the heart and soul of millions of boys and girls yearning to find their own true loves and shown us that even in the face of the many dangers that face the immortal ones that love can and will prevail…