Twilight - Stephenie Meyer

Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. Little Brown, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-0316015844

“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
~ Stephen King

I thought about splitting this discussion into two answers since there were two questions, but I realized that perhaps the main reason I dislike this series is that I have a strong distaste for Bella as the central character for exactly the reasons that compared to Frankie, she falls flat. Bella seems privileged, like the girl who pouts over not being able to decide if she should pick the Mercedes or the BMW for her daddy to buy her for her sweet 16. She's spoiled, shallow, and weak. She's in a world where she is easily outmatched and powerless unless she gets her way by throwing a tantrum. I see the correlations between her and Frankie (and Katniss) in their internal conflicts about love, but her stupidity that requires constant protection makes her a joke to me as a protagonist. I don't respect her, and I feel like the story was built around me feeling pity for her. If you are going to make a shallow love triangle, then you'd better get creative in its placement. The supernatural elements are novel, but they play out in such a predictable and worn-out pattern that I feel like Meyer stumbled ignorantly into a money pit that hit our popular culture with the right shallow and meaningless drivel at the right time. I really enjoy reading vampire books, so my distaste for the Disney-esque level of these undead creatures of the night (as they WERE before Twilight) is something I tried to suspend for the sake of the novel. However, she completely tears down the tradition of vampire lore and then doesn’t seem to have the writing ability needed to rebuild her own mythology with any more depth than what is required to push the plot forward.

However, as a continuation on the initial quote I lead off with by Stephen King from a later part of the interview he gave, he made some good points as to why these books have hit the popularity level that they did. I felt obligated to include this as well as a bit of a counterweight to my dismissal of the series as junk.
“People are attracted by the stories, by the pace, and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because it’s not overtly sexual.”
He further explains, “A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like, the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s a shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”