Fifty Shades of Gray

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

In My Sleep

In My Sleep is what you get when a mediocre filmmaker gets entirely too excited after seeing Memento for the first time: cheap, confusing, and kind of shitty. In fact, you could say that if you watch this movie, you'll be in your sleep in no time! Ha! I got a million of 'em, a-cha-cha!

A guy who looks enough like Helo that I was continually annoyed he wasn't Helo stars as Marcus, a shallow, self-hating sex addict who is also a sleepwalker who continually wakes up in various embarrassing places with no memory of how he came to be there. If that doesn't sound like enough crippling mental issues for one indie film protagonist, trust me, it's more than enough. And if you haven't already started writing the plot for this movie in your head, then you're probably a happy, well-adjusted person who hasn't spent her life watching terrible indie suspense thrillers.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, not-Helo awakens in bed covered in blood with the Fuzz beating down his door. Our hero hides his bloody knife and cleans up a bit before letting the Man in. While one of the Po-pos glances briefly around searches the apartment, the other gives one of the most jaw-droppingly awful performances you've never seen as he interrogates Marcus with all the intimidation that his utter absence of acting talent can muster. Marcus stands in awe of the bad acting clinic the 5-0 puts on, gives him some bull, and sends him and his partner off none the wiser. Soon enough Marcus finds out that his best friend's wife Ann, with whom he just had a one-night stand, has been knife-murdered, and the best friend (a certain Justin) is increasingly suspected of being the culprit. Except when the schizophrenic detective handling the case has another episode and decides to treat Marcus like the prime suspect instead. It's that kind of movie.

Marcus worries that he may have murdered his best friend's wife in a sleepwalking stupor, so he does what any of us would do: He gets Mako to handcuff him to his bed every night so he won't go out a-murderin'. Mako clearly wants to jump his bones, but being that he's a sex addict, he flatly rejects the advances of his hot, unattached, and obviously (and I mean obviously) willing upstairs neighbor. No, instead he goes to Sexaholics Anonymous (I'm serious) where he immediately puts the make on fellow sex addict and lifelike mannequin Gwen (Abigail Spencer), who is emphatic that she will only be friends with men from this point forward--no sex, no siree! Marcus invites Gwen to totally-not-prelude-to-freaky-sex dinner at his apartment, but then Mako appears at the door with handcuffs asking if it's time to "lock you up", and Gwen leaves in a huff. See, it's funny because she's jealous and thinks he's going to have intense light bondage sex with Mako, when really he's only trying to avoid sleepwalker murder! Oh Gwen, you've got it all wrong!

Once he finds out Gwen is a nurse, Marcus gives her a sample of the blood he was earlier covered in to find out if it's his or not, despite the fact that he clearly has no injury that would've produced that much blood. (I assume the film's budget didn't cover the forensics lab in his bedroom in which he stored this sample for several days.) Turns out it's someone else's blood (bum bum bum!), but then Gwen implies that she won't send the sample off for the necessary further testing to find out whose blood it is unless he sleeps with her. Now that the movie has finally had a decent scene and built a modicum of interest and dramatic tension, the next scene immediately undercuts it all by revealing that Gwen is in fact Ann's previously-mentioned but unseen sister who has been spying on Marcus. See, Ann confessed her one-night stand to Gwen just before her murder, so Gwen infiltrated the SA meeting on suspicion that Marcus was involved.

Um...then why did Gwen get all huffy when Mako showed up with the cuffs? And why did she hint that she would help Marcus in exchange for sex? I think writer/director/producer/caterer/Grand Moff/Supreme Overloard of the Tripton Lineage Allen Wolf indulged in about 68 too many script re-writes. You've got your sex addiction plot and your murderous sleepwalker plot, and they seem to exist in separate movies. Equally boring, stiffly acted, boring movies, but separate movies. The one point at which it seemed these two plots might intersect in some way (Gwen's demand for sex in order to continue helping Marcus despite her earlier dedication to not engaging in such relations) is undermined by the sudden and highly moronic revelation that Gwen is Ann's sleuthing sister and not a sex addict at all, utterly ruining the film's one chance of rising to the mediocrity of your average Hitchhiker episode.

Oh, and once Gwen reveals her secret truth, she disappears from the movie. That's right, her sleuthing, her accusations, the whole whose-blood-is-it bit--all of it gets dropped like a smart bomb on the Middle East. Gwen doesn't factor into the reveal of the killer at all.

If you care about the resolution of this story--and God help you if you do--Marcus reads that sleepwalkers don't swim during their episodes (both Marcus and Justin were established as swimmers early in the film), so he places the knife in the drain at the bottom of the pool in his apartment complex. When Justin confronts him over Ann's death, Marcus calls Mako to check on the knife, which she immediately does. Man, this chick changes into a swimsuit and goes downstairs to the pool and dives to the bottom of it to root around in the disgusting pool drain to see if the knife Marcus may or may not have murdered someone with is still safely hidden on demand, and the guy won't even return her flirtation. Men. Amirite, ladies?

Anyway, when she tells him the knife is missing, Marcus knows he's innocent after all (so then whose blood was he covered in, and why?) and goads Justin into revealing that he's actually the killer. (I hope you were sitting down for that shocking revelation.) They fight, because you have to fight in these things, and then the bronze show up just in time for Justin to accidentally fall on the knife and die. The film's final scene has Mako revealing that Marcus did sleep with her some days before--in his sleep (like in the title!)--but doesn't remember. (Rob Ford might want to give this "did it in my sleep" excuse a try.) They embrace in a way that (I guess?) means Marcus is going to try to have an actual relationship for the first time. Because nothing gets you to settle down with a girl like sleeping with your best friend's wife, thinking you might have murdered her, concealing your possible murderin' from the police, and watching your best friend die in your arms after a struggle over the knife he tried to kill you with, amirite? Guise?

You know you're in trouble when Mako gives by far the best performance in the movie. She's genuine, likeable, and believable in the role, none of which describes any of the other actors. The better ones (Justin, Ann, Marcus) are stiff and awkward, while the less said about the rest (Gwen, the schizo detective, the kid playing Young Marcus in the repressed memory scene that reveals why he's both a sleepwalker and a sex addict*), the better. In fact, the less said about this movie, the better.

Now how about a romantic comedy starring Helo and Mako? Helo is the intergalactic bounty hunter, Mako is the Cylon infiltrator who falls in love with him, and somehow the whole thing ends with Cylon raiders attacking the Death Star.

"You're far too trusting. Caprica is too remote to make an effective demonstration, but don't worry. We'll deal with your toaster friends soon enough."

======================================================

* Spoiler: He has daddy issues.

The Host

No, not that one, this one.

That's right, it's the new awful film adapted from the latest female disempowerment classic of the greatest setback to women's liberation since Ann Coulter, our own Stevenie Meyer.

The world of The Host is a peaceful paradise, with no suffering or want or discord of any kind. Everyone is perfectly nice and beautiful and healthy. According to the opening narration of Jeb Stryder (A Wooden Plank), "there is no hunger. There is no violence. The environment has healed. Our planet has never been more at peace." I knew it! Mormonism wins out and converts the planet. You heard it here first.

No, it turns out that nearly all of humanity has been wiped about by parasitic clouds of glowing sperm. These aliens take over host human bodies when surgically implanted into the back of the neck while the hosts, after a certain amount of time spent trying to win the psychic war for their own bodies, just "fade away", which sounds suspiciously like "die" to me. Think of a Trill symbiont, only instead of a slug that melds its memories and personality with yours, it's luminous ejaculate that kills you

Just when you thought "Bella Swan" was embarrassingly hamfisted in its symbolism, Meyer tops herself by naming this story's protagonist central character "Melanie Stryder" (Waify McBlankexpression). Get it, strider, because she goes on a journey? (Never mind that Meyer's characters never grow or change in any way.) We meet her fleeing in terror from the aliens as she leads them away from her younger brother (Typical Child Actor) so he can escape. In accordance with the most noble feminine virtue in the Meyerverse, Melanie sacrifices herself by leaping from the building to her death. She doesn't die because if she were killed by a seven-storey plummet to the concrete below, the movie would be over. Instead, she's captured and implanted with an alien that calls itself Wanderer. No, I don't know why the aliens exclusively use English and even give themselves English names like Wanderer. Oh wait, yes I do, because coming up with alien-sounding words is, like, hard, and if there's one consistency of bad writing, it's laziness.

Our Bella Melanie is able to resist Wanderer's mind mojo, so she spends the rest of the movie talking in voiceover while Wanderer talks back to her out loud. Why does Wanderer have to speak to Melanie aloud instead of communicating through thought, as Melanie does? Because having the same actress doing both roles in voiceover would be impossible to follow. Instead, Melanderer just comes across as a girl with severe schizophrenia, and the voiceover only gets more annoying as the film drags (and I do mean drags, Oh My Brothers and Only Friends) on, especially since 90% of Melanie's dialogue consists of her mentally shouting at Wanderer not to do something which Wanderer then proceeds to do. Yeah, the alien ignored you the first 300 times, but if you keep shouting at it to stop, no, don't, STOP!, it might actually listen the 301st time!

Wanderer has access to all Melanie's memories, so it reveals the name of Melanie's boyfriend (Trunk Slamchest) to the chief antagonist alien (Diane Kruger). I don't know what position this alien has, if it has any. It just hates and pursues Wanderlanie through most of the film. Later Kruger tells us that this information has been of great help in crushing the human resistance, though I have no idea why. All the aliens wear godawful blue contact lenses, making humans identifiable on sight, and there appear to be no humans who aren't part of the resistance (i.e., collaborators). Nor do the aliens appear to care to spare human collaborators if there were any. So why would the spermaliens need to know Trunk's name?

Wanderer starts to sympathize with Melanie and the humans because...um, and so it steals a car. (Well, it asks a passing motorist if it can just have the car. Being Mormon an alien, the motorist happily hands over the keys and wishes Wanderer on its way.) It drives toward where the human resistance is hiding, until it realizes Melanie is leading it the wrong way. It turns the car around, but before it can head back, Melanie uses her ability to control her body whenever it's convenient for the writers and intentionally crashes the car. Wanderlanie gets up and wanders (hey!) randomly in the desert until she/it/they are found by her/its/their uncle Jeb (the aforementioned Wooden Plank, making its first appearance onscreen) and a small group of humans. Everybody wants to kill Wanderer because of its ugly contact lenses, but Wooden Plank overrules them because if they killed it the movie would be over. He gives it some water and they take it back to the humans' little community hidden under desert rocks. So I guess Melanie was leading Wanderer to the humans, since she let it get more or less within walking distance of the resistance settlement before deciding to wreck the car.

And now the movie gets weird. In the humans' spacious and idyllic underground desert caverns, where they have a river of rushing water complete with bathing pools and a towering waterfall and an entire field of planted wheat, Wanderlanie reunites with Melanie's boyfriend Trunk Slamchest, but Wanderer finds itself falling in love with Another Guy (Smoke Manmuscle). Come on, it's a Meyer work. You knew there had to be a love triangle with absolutely no tension or drama because a brain-damaged centipede knows exactly who will end up with whom.* And do I even need to say that, like Jacob, the "loser" of the triangle gets a happy ending deus-ex-machinaed to her? (Well, it.) In fact, as soon as it became clear that Melanie wanted Trunk and Wandererererer wanted Smoke, I guessed that Kruger's "bad" alien would be removed and Wanderer transferred to its host body, because she was the only other hot girl in the movie and that would wrap everything up in a nice neat bow with no negative consequences whatever. That's how things work in the Meyerverse, where the good guys never really get hurt and no true sacrifice is ever made. The joke's on me, though, since that doesn't happen. No, what Meyer pulls out is even dumber.

But first we have to have some fake drama that we know will immediately be resolved with everybody happy and loving and with no bad things ever XOXO hearts unicorns. Melanie's brother Typical Child Actor is with the survivors, and he gets an infection. Everybody's worried because Doc (Token Black Guy)--come on, you've got to have an older, somewhat grizzled guy called "Doc" in these things--doesn't have the medicine to treat him. Of course Wanderer likes humans now because...erm, right, and she deliberately injures herself so that she can be treated by an alien healer and their magical "fix any disease or injury" device, which she steals as soon as the healer leaves the room. Wow that was...too close. There isn't even a scene where the alien equivalent of cops (yes, they have such, even though they've established that the vastly superior alien race has no crime or disease or bad things of any kind, apart from the deliberate and systematic genocide of entire sentient species for the sake of their own self-empowerment) appear and the audience worries if she'll be able to get the medicine past them. In fact, since the aliens don't use money (we see Wanderer go into an alien store and simply take what she wants and leave), can she even be said to be stealing the medical doohickey? Of course, Wanderer, despite not being a healer, knows both how to operate the thingamabob and how to implant an alien parasite into a human host, the only two things we ever see these "healers" do. So what the hell does it mean to be a healer when the other aliens are just as capable of doing their jobs as they are?

Later there's a highly silly scene that has Wanderer having a fit at discovering the humans have been removing the alien parasites from infected people, effectively killing both alien and whatever's left of the person. Err...what did it think we'd do? Wanderer implies the aliens have conquered at least 12 planets. Has there never been an attempt by conquered species to combat them? And it's okay for the aliens to kill us, but not for us to kill them?

I'm not saying Wanderer should be okay with people killing the aliens or that it shouldn't be angry or upset, but I am saying it shouldn't be so omg SHOCKED! and HORRIFIED!. Let's see, we invaded their planet and murdered literally billions of them, and then when I see two or three of our guys dead, I can't believe it's happening! And this from an alien that has supposedly lived for more than 1000 of "our" years. Why do all Meyer's characters come across as mentally stuck in middle school?

I'm not even going to get into how Meyer once again can't separate herself from her characters. They're all the same as each other, and so are the same as all the Twilight characters, because Meyer doesn't create actual characters, who have their own personalities that emerge in such a way that they move the story in ways she didn't expect it to go. She invents ciphers to march her story to its predetermined conclusion.* This naturally means the characters in this film know things they couldn't possibly know from what we've seen onscreen, but they know because Meyer knows, and having people just know things when they need to know them sure makes the whole writing thing a lot easier.

Let's just get to the end. Kruger gets captured by the humans and her alien parasite is removed by Wanderer in a way that doesn't cause harm. (Wanderer coaxes it out by directing loving thoughts at it. I so wish I were joking.) Kruger, like Melanie, turns out to be resistant to the mind mojo, too, but since this is the Meyerverse, she exhibits no psychological trauma from years of her will being subjugated by an alien presence that invaded her very mind and controlled her own body while she struggled futilely against it, to say nothing of being completely cut off from communication with anyone but her controller, if it ever bothered to communicate with her at all. But with Kruger the human saved, there's no hot young white women for Wanderer to inhabit so it can be with its man Smoke Manmuscle! Oh noez, mild disappointment!

As it turns out, Doc didn't kill all the people he de-parasitized. He's got one braindead human left. (So they can't treat an infected wound, but they can perform invasive surgery and keep a braindead person on full life support.) And that human just happens to be a young, attractive white woman! Just like Melanie! What are the odds? At least 3 to 2 against, gotta be.

So Melanie gets back with Trunk, and Wanderer can be with Smoke without any clutter, like her being in the body of, say, a man, or an old lady, or *gasp* a woman with a high melanin content. And so The Host just sort of limps off the screen, letting everything intriguing about its premise go utterly unexplored, its major characters all blissful and happy (a couple of humans died, sure, but they weren't major characters and are quickly forgotten), safe and consequence free.

Supposedly, Stevenie Meyer doesn't want to write any more Host novels because that world is "a dangerous place" and she doesn't want any of the characters to die. I don't know what's more absurd: that Meyer is so attached to her "characters" that she'd rather not write about them at all than see anything bad happen to them,** or that Meyer actually thinks anything bad would happen to any "characters" in one of her stories.

Forget it, Jacob. It's the Meyerverse.

========================================================
* Meyer claims that Another Guy (the one played by Smoke Manmuscle) had a small part in her original workup of the novel and that his "character" demanded additional attention, including involvement in the romance stuff. I find it hilarious that this "character" who supposedly had his own voice such that she had to alter the story led her to exactly replicate the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.

** I mean, not everybody has to be George R.R. Martin, but yeesh.

Twilight: My Dinner with Vlad

Twilight, pp. 196-206.

Bella awakens the next morning, fighting the belief that it was all a dream. I don't know what was so dreamlike about it--the almost-rape seems like something that would be etched in memory--but there you go. Edward is there, ready to take her to *snicker* school.

When I first read this novel, it was Edward I hated. His emotional power games, his use of his powers to manipulate and deceive, his commanding and domineering manner, his casual disdain for everyone outside of his own family, his whiny "but I don't wanna be a monster!" bullshit, his domination of Bella's sexuality--he really is a fucking tool. But this second reading is making me hate Bella a lot more. In fact, this chapter does something I didn't think possible, which is to make me, for a very brief moment, almost kind of like Edward. Why? Because he continues to be the voice of reason when it comes to Bella's inhuman nonreaction to his vampirism.

He turned to smirk at me. "What, no twenty questions today?"

"Do my questions bother you?"

"Not as much as your reactions do." He looked like he was joking, but I couldn't be sure.

I frowned. "Do I react badly?"

"No, that's the problem. You take everything so coolly--it's unnatural."

Do you think he'll ever figure out the reason for this, that she's an empathy-less pathological narcissist who views other people entirely as tools to be manipulated for her own ends? Yeah, I don't think so, either.

In another indication of the Cullens' wealth--substantial in the first book, though it reaches positively O'Leary-an heights as the series wears on--the other Cullen kids are forced to take Rosalie's car, a red convertible that Edward tells us is very, very expensive. The vampires have this expensive car because they like to drive fast, even though later in the series it will become clear they can run faster than a car (that, or Stevenie Meyer can't be bothered to indicate the passage of time when they travel somewhere), so I don't know why they like driving a fast car. Usually the Cullens take the sweet ride (by which I mean the Volvo) to school instead of the convertible since it's less conspicuous (even though Bella noticed it immediately on her first day at Forks High), but they had to take the convertible this time since Edward took the Volvo just to pick up Bella. That's right, he tells her, "I'm breaking all the rules now". Oh, snap! I think Edward's a little too good at wooing insecure fourteen seventeen-year-old girls, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Bella has been ruminating over what she will tell Jessica when they meet, since the latter will undoubtedly want to question her further about last night's interview with the vampire. My first thought was "The truth?", but then I remembered who we're talking about here.  Jessica appears and so Edward naturally reads her mind because he's a dick. After Jessica hands Bella back her jacket--thank God Meyer didn't leave us hanging about whether or not Bella got her jacket back--Edward tells Bella that Jessica won't ask her about their situation in front of him but will do so at the first opportunity, in the trigonometry class she and Bella share.

And now it's time to play our favorite game, What Will Bella Do? Get this one right, and you move on to the next round! Here we go: When faced with this gross invasion of her best friend's privacy, What Will Bella Do? Will she

a) ...angrily demand that Edward no longer read her friend's intimate thoughts and respect her privacy?
b) ...tell Edward that, while she may be powerless to stop him from reading her best friend's mind, she doesn't want any part of using that ability against her?
c) ...not react at all?
d) ...angrily demand that he tell her more specifically what her best friend was thinking so that she can more effectively prepare responses to avoid honestly answering Jessica's questions?

D is your final answer? You're correct! What's our contestant won, Johnny? That's right, you get to continue to read snippets of Twilight!

"So what are you going to tell her?"

"A little help?" I pleaded. "What does she want to know?"

He shook his head, grinning wickedly. "That's not fair."

"No, you not sharing what you know--now that's not fair."

That's right, in Bella Swan's world, it's wrong to use your magic powers to enter without permission and steal from the most intimate space a person has--her own mind--if you don't use those powers for her benefit. That's our Bella!

It turns out Jessica wants to know if Edward and Bella are dating and how Bella feels about him. Wow, he needed vampire mind-reading powers to know that? I'd better check to see if I'm a vampire. Edward gets the last laugh, though, because he tells her he'll be reading Jessica's mind when she tells her how she feels about him, so she'll effectively be telling him, too. Of course, knowing this, Bella could tell him not to do that, or tell him her feelings right there, or refuse to tell Jessica her feelings, but then Jessica would lose her narrative function of "serve as a vehicle for Bella and Edward to play out their dominance/passive-aggressive power games", and Stevenie Meyer isn't about to let that happen.

The conversation with Jessica goes about as you expect, with Bella being evasive and telling half-truths, only this time, in what may be the most off-putting use and abuse of the Jessica character yet, she's actually talking to Edward through Jessica's mind. So she tells her things like Edward's driving is scary and drops really, really obvious hints that she wants him to kiss her when they go out on Saturday (even though she said immediately before this that "it's not like that") because she wants Edward to know these things. I thought Bella was a terrible person when she constantly ignored her alleged best friend, but now she's talking to her on the surface while in reality actually talking to Edward. A conversation between Jessica and Bella is in reality a conversation between Edward and Bella. I told you he takes over the novel. Not only does Meyer not show us any conversations that aren't about him, but now she doesn't even give us any conversations that don't involve him.

Bella makes sure to point out to us that she thinks Jessica would forgive any of Edward's flaws simply because he's, as Jessica says, "unbelievably gorgeous". And while that may be true, I'd just like to point out that that's exactly what Bella's doing. Oh, she pretends it's because he's a monster trying not to be a monster by saving people's lives (by which she means, of course, her life, because that's the only one he's ever saved or will ever save, and that's the only one that matters, so it's the same in her mind as saving "people's lives"), but really, I've been leaving out all the times she's talked about his gorgeous face, his muscled chest, his ripped torso, etc. etc.. Go ahead, go back through the novel and add up the number of times Bella talks about Edward's physical appearance, and tally that against the number of times she talks about how attracted she is to his good vampire-ness. I fucking dare you.

Bella tells Jessica that Mike asked her if Jessica said anything about her and Mike's date, and so the conversation moves to trying to figure out how much Mike likes Jessica. Of course, since this directly involves neither Edward nor Bella, we don't get any details of this, just a paragraph saying it is discussed. Remember, Jessica only speaks when it concerns Edward, and she's talking about Mike now, so her dialogue disappears. The bell rings for lunch, meaning Bella is finally free of having to talk to her best friend so she can bounce off to see her creepy stalker, and I'm finally free of this tripe for another week.

Twilight: Crazy Talk

Twilight, pp. 136-139.

Bella, becoming enraged with herself for reading about vampires on the Internet, storms out of her house and plunges into the forest.

It was all so stupid. I was sitting in my room, researching vampires. What was wrong with me?

Well, your old friend Jake did say the Cullens were vampires, and they certainly are an odd family, and oh yeah, you did personally witness Edward stopping a van with his bare hands. I think Meyer got her characters mixed up. Shouldn't Bella be trying in vain to get other people to believe her? She watched him do something superhuman! I don't think it's unreasonable to do a little Googling.

The next couple of pages are a description of the forest, as Bella wanders in the woods until her frankly unwarranted anger and embarrassment subside. She takes shelter under a fallen tree when it begins to rain and regrets fleeing into the forest, considering she just had a nightmare about vampire Edward that took place in a forest. There's nothing particularly wrong with these passages, except that they're clumsy, again making it seem the book was never shown to a professional editor. Credit where it's due, though: There is one well-written paragraph on these pages. Just one, but hey, that's one more than we've had since Chapter 1:

Here in the trees, it was much easier to believe the absurdities that embarrassed me indoors. Nothing had changed in this forest for thousands of years, and all the myths and legends of a hundred different lands seemed much more likely in this green haze than they had in my clear-cut bedroom.

Not bad, particularly the "green haze" bit. Sure, Meyer misuses the phrase "clear-cut", but what, you expect a writer to be able to use words properly? Geez, you people are so demanding. If you think this writing stuff is easy, where's your bestselling novel, huh?

Of course, Meyer immediately ruins my goodwill with the very next sentence: "I forced myself to focus on the two most vital questions I had to answer, but I did so unwillingly." Um, if you're forcing yourself to do something, then by definition you're doing it willingly. In fact, you could replace "forced" with "willed" in the sentence and the meaning would be exactly the same! "I willed myself to do it unwillingly." Meyer really needs to get a handle on this whole "knowing what words mean" thing.

Bella finally, finally mentions Edward's "impossible strength" as a reason to think he might be a vampire, though I immediately put head to desk when it became obvious she puts "impossible strength" on the same level as "his eyes change colour".

I again listed in my head the things I'd observed myself: the impossible speed and strength, the eye colour shifting from black to gold and back again, the inhuman beauty, the pale, frigid skin.

You know, one of these things is not like the others. If you take out "impossible speed and strength", Meyer is telling me that if I see Winona Ryder wearing coloured contact lenses, I should assume she's a vampire.

I think this goes back to my old hobby-horse of Meyer not knowing her vampire lore, nor making effective use of what little she does know. Observe how Fright Night (the real, Colin Farrell-less one) slowly reveals to its protagonist that Jerry is a vampire. There are plenty of little things that suggest vampirism to one in the know, and with the power of the Internet at her fingertips (on her dial-up modem!), Bella has instant access to all that knowledge. Oh wait, I'm sorry, part of the way Jerry reveals his true nature is by killing people, and since Edward is a Good Vampire (I throw up in my mouth a little every time I have to put those two words together), that's off the table. So yeah, his skin is cold, so he's a vampire. That sure is an airtight case. No wonder Bella doesn't want to tell anyone about her suspicion. (Hilariously, it never occurs to her to talk to Jacob about this, even though he told her that his tribe believes the Cullens are vampires!)

And more--small things that registered slowly--how they never seemed to eat, the disturbing grace with which they moved. And the way he sometimes spoke, with unfamiliar cadences and phrases that better fit the style of a turn-of-the-century novel than that of a twenty-first century classroom.

Wait a minute, back this crazy train up! I've already mentioned that plenty of kids I went to high school with didn't eat, at least not at school. Once again, Bella went to high school in a major city, and she never knew of any girl with an eating disorder, or a guy who used the lunch period to smoke? And since when was the grace of the perfect Cullens "disturbing"? Bella never indicated anything disturbing about it! And speaking of no indication, what's this about Edward talking like he's from the 19th-century? When did this happen? When has he ever said anything that "better fit the style of a turn-of-the-century novel"? I think somebody just tried to sneak in a little ret-con. Wait, no, actually, he doesn't say any "unfamiliar phrase" from the 1800s from this point on, either. I believe we have ourselves a jin-yoo-wine example of an Informed Attribute.

Don't get me wrong, Edward does use unfamiliar cadences and phrases, but they're less "turn-of-the-century" and more "written by a hack writer".

Bella also notes that Edward "seemed to know what everyone around him was thinking...except me." Well if he can't read you, how do you know he can read anyone else? What if he just made it up? It's not like you talked to anyone he read to see if he was right. And do I really need to point out that not only is telepathy not a vampiric power, but it didn't even come up on the "academic-looking" web site Bella Googled up earlier?

For all her protestations of its absurdity (the lady doth protest too much, methinks), Bella pretty quickly decides Edward is a vampire, at long last catching up to the slow 8-year-old who figured this out 6 chapters ago.

And then the most important question of all. What was I going to do if it was true?

If Edward was a vampire--I could hardly make myself think the words--then what should I do? Involving someone else was definitely out. I couldn't even believe myself; anyone I told would have me committed.

There's an "if" there, but it doesn't matter. Bella is convinced she has three options, and none of them is "Find out if Edward is really a vampire." She doesn't consider this option because she already knows he is, because Meyer knows he is, and all this hand-wringing over how unbelievable it all is has been much ado about nothing. Bella doesn't have any more information about Edward than she had before, and her Google search militated against his being a vampire (because, of course, he's a Twilight vampire, so the traditional vampire legends are of little help in identifying him as a creature of the night). But she accepts it now because Meyer says she does.

Bella, being an amoral narcissist, immediately rejects the option any sane person with any modicum of concern for their fellow human beings would choose because of how it might reflect on her. Again, referencing Fright Night, when the protagonist (who, like Bella, is a high school student) discovers Jerry is a vampire, he tells everyone: his mother, the police, his girlfriend, the actor who played his favourite vampire hunter, everybody. They all think he's crazy, but that doesn't stop him from trying to get people to listen. Because vampires are dangerous. Vampires kill people. And trying to warn people they're in danger is the right thing to do. Even if it means people think you're crazy. Even if it might get you locked up.

Now, we readers know Edward is a Good Vampire (*ulp*), but Bella doesn't have any reason to believe that. She's heard Jacob's telling of the legend that the Cullens don't eat people (and even Jacob is sceptical that the Cullens are Good) but that isn't supported or backed up by anything else, not even by Edward himself. Bella was just thinking about how he'd told her he's "the villain, dangerous..." and now she knows this is more than just adolescent posturing. Edward really is a villain. He really is dangerous, because he really is a vampire, and so are all the other Cullens.

But Bella isn't concerned that the Cullens are eating people. She isn't worried that her father, as chief of police, would likely be the first to die if word of the Cullens' true nature got out and they decided to strike first. She's not troubled that the boy she likes is a walking corpse who, for all she knows, has killed thousands of people and will continue to kill thousands more.

Nope, all she's concerned about is what might happen to her. She might be committed if she tells anyone (as if "the Cullens are vampires!" would even warrant a mandatory visit from the school guidance counselor, much less institutionalisation), so telling anyone is right out, not even considered.

Now, some commentators have taken me to task for continually pointing out Bella's selfishness, saying it's unfair to single her out for behaviour that's typical of teen-age girls. That may be a fair criticism elsewhere in the novel, but not this time. After all, there's normal selfishness, there's extreme selfishness, and there's pathological narcissism, and that last one is the level Bella Swan is on. To ignore what appears to be a clear danger to the people around you--including your own father--due to fear of a wildly exaggerated negative outcome for oneself isn't just unusual, it's inhuman. Now I know why Bella, having discovered that her crush is a vampire, isn't afraid for her immortal soul.

She doesn't have one.

Twilight: Blood Appeal

Twilight, pp. 85-90.

The rest of the morning passed in a blur. It was difficult to believe that I hadn't just imagined what Edward had said, and the way his eyes had looked. Maybe it was just a very convincing dream that I'd confused with reality. That seemed more probable than that I really appealed to him on any level.

We open this week with another piece of unintentional irony. Once again, Stephenie [sic] Meyer manages to get both aspects of a particular situation wrong at the same time. She has even odds to get at least one right, but Twilight is such a masterpiece of suck that it's consistently wrong at a number of levels simultaneously.

It is true, of course, that Bella shouldn't appeal to Edward "on any level". First among these, of course, is that vampires eat people. Edward's attraction to Bella is like a person falling in love with a deer. Would you feel anything approaching romantic love for something that you hunt, kill, and eat? Now, to make the vampire mythos as sexually neutered as possible in this story, we'll eventually find out that the Cullen clan don't eat people anymore. (Come on, not even a Dexter or Morpheus the Living Vampire we-only-prey-on-bad-people thing? No. The vampires must be as nonthreatening as possible for maximum faux-bad boyness.) But as we'll discover, this doesn't in any way decrease their desire to eat humans. It's just that these are Zen vampires that hold their desires in check. So the point still stands. Edward has eaten lots of people, and he'd still eat people now if he didn't practice safe feeding. The notion that he'd have true romantic feelings toward a person is unthinkable. (Again, the Edward-as-villain plotline is just straining to come out here.)

That the prey animal Edward has a totally unbelievable fixation on is Bella makes it even more ludicrous. In all his decades of unlife, he's never come across anyone as enchanting as a 17-year-old girl he's shared probably four minutes of conversation with? I guess her high school-level command of the process of cell mitosis is pretty impressive stuff where Edward comes from! We'll be told later that Edward is drawn to Bella primarily because he can't read her mind. (Because Edward does that, you know.) Now I know I'm hardly the first to make this observation, but really, it's too easy:

Maybe he can't read her mind because there isn't anything to read.

But Meyer can't just get this wrong. No, a rich, powerful, dark, and mysterious man falling in love with the heroine for no discernable reason is part and parcel of hack romance novels. (Novels of this type written by good authors provide female protagonists who are believably irresistable to such men.) Any old crap writer can be not bothered to craft a plausible scenario in which two characters in a romantic story could actually fall in love with each other. It takes someone as monumentally untalented as Meyer to both do that and have an unbelievable scene in which the heroine recognises this fact, but for no reason at all! As noted, if you know Edward is a 100-year-old vampire, you can't believe his attraction to Bella. But Bella doesn't know this. All she knows is that Edward is a year ahead of her in school, is hot, and is kind of a creepy jerk. Why wouldn't she appeal to him? So far, every boy at the entire school has been asking her out! The most popular girl in school has made her her best galpal. And if that isn't enough, she's new to this tiny, isolated town that probably hasn't had any new blood since the Carter administration.

To cut Meyer as much slack as possible, this could possibly work if Bella were sheltered, naive, and socially inept, the way good Mormon parents like to think their good Mormon girls are. (They aren't.) In short, maybe if Bella had actually lived in Forks her whole life and been raised by Charlie, maybe I could buy that she reached age seventeen without seeing herself as attractive. But Bella grew up in Phoenix, raised by her pseudo-hippie New Age mother whose first question when she hears Bella likes a boy is, "Are you being safe?" I can't believe I'm saying this, but "he really likes me?"  is immature for high school. Think about what that means.

Even if Bella consciously rejects relationships, dating, and the high school social scene, it's not credible that she has no understanding of how it works, and since her arrival in Forks, she has shown she does know how the game is played. Once again Meyer wants to have her cake and eat it, too. She wants Bella to be popular and liked and desired even as she's standoff-ish, tragically hip, and withdrawn. She's written Bella as both naive and jaded, narcissitic and empathetic, passive-aggressive and...well, she got that one consistent. Bella has belief and understanding that she could never have formed without going through experiences that can't possibly have left her as innocent as she has to be to keep this "I don't know know why boys like me" foolishness going.

At this point Meyer informs us that Bella's mooning over whether or not Edward really said he wasn't going to talk to her because they shouldn't be friends hasn't been taking place in solitude. No, she's been doing this while--and I hope you're sitting down as you read this--ignoring the person she's with. That isn't my judgement; Bella tells us so. It's poor Jessica she's ignoring, again. Jessica, who apparently has no friends other than Bella, despite Bella's never once so far listening to anything Jessica had to say that wasn't about Edward. This time "Jessica babbled on and on about her dance plans...completely unaware of my inattention." That's our Bella!

Jessica finally stops "babbling" when she mentions Edward (because all talk that isn't about Edward is babble by definition), who's sitting alone instead of with the rest of the Cullen clan. He motions for Bella to come over, and Jessica reacts to this with "insulting astonishment", even though Bella is "star[ing] in disbelief". Right, so Jessica's disbelief that Edward would want to see Bella is insulting, while Bella's disbelief of the exact same thing at the exact same time is not. That's our Bella: She's right and everyone else is wrong, even when they have identical thoughts. I mean, I can't think of a more naked sign of authorial favour. When you're wrong, I'm right, and when you're right, I'm right. Isn't this the same person who earlier on this very page declared it more likely that she hallucinated an entire conversation than that Edward would find her appealing "in any way"? Yet Jessica's "astonishment" at this very thing is "insulting"?

Edward wants to see her because he "decided as long as I was going to hell, I might as well do it thoroughly". When Bella rightly points out that he's not making sense, he says, "I know[!]" and leaves it at that. Then why did he say it in the first place? Because he's the kind of person we here in normal-people land call something that rhymes with "brass pole". He eventually says he's "giving up" on trying to stay away from her. The two then descend into a bottomlessly silly exchange in which he says it's a problem that he says too much around her, so he says it so that she doesn't understand what it means. So why is it a problem? And how can he accidentally say "too much" if it's nonsensical? Then we go over the "I'm warning you, I'm dangerous" rigamorole all over again, because we readers are too dumb to get it the first 37 times.

Or maybe Meyer thinks that if she keeps saying it, we'll believe Edward really is dangerous.

===========================================================
*Okay, I know I've said that attending high school for eternity would be a horrible fate. I mean, listening to teen-agers prattle on about nothing day after day as year after year slips past....So, Edward doesn't do that. I get it. But what exactly does he do? He doesn't talk to anyone, doesn't appear to study (he just reads the teachers' minds to find out what the answers they want)...what does he do in school for seven hours a day?

Twilight: The Abuser's Handbook

Twilight, pp. 74-84.

I know what you've been missing: Edward's controlling mind games and Bella's humiliation of romantic rivals. Well, your prayers are answered by the little spread of pages we have for this week. We've got plenty of both coming at us!

Back in biology class, E and B play peekaboo with each other, some more Bella's heart in palpitations that the creepy stalker is looking at her "for the first time in a half-dozen weeks" (half-dozen?).


I couldn't allow him to have this level of influence over me. It was pathetic. More than pathetic, it was unhealthy.


Occasional flashes of seeming self-awareness creep through in this section of the book. This is the sort of thing that I used to think indicated the author was intentionally portraying an emotionally disturbed young girl being tormented by an expert manipulator. Out of the context of the novel as a whole, you too, my little droogies, might think the same thing upon reading such lines. By the time we get much farther, though, it will become clear this is not the case. We are meant to be (mildly) frustrated that Bella doesn't see that only a man who truly loves you controls you. Rather than "unhealthy" or "pathetic", it's supposed to be romantic.

It's not.

Now as noted, Edward hasn't so much as looked at Bella for "a half-dozen weeks" (half-dozen?). Of course, after giving her the silent treatment for a while (Abuser's Handbook p. 121), he realises she's too passive to initiate contact herself (Handbook p. 124) and so he has to do even that for her (p. 127, sub-paragraph c). He does this by addressing her by name, which author Stephenie [sic] Meyer follows with two paragraphs of Bella mooning over how handsome he is. She then manages to say:

"What? Are you speaking to me again?" I finally asked, an unintentional note of petulance in my voice.

His lips twitched, fighting a smile. "No, not really [!]," he admitted.

I closed my eyes and inhaled slowly through my nose, aware that I was gritting my teeth. He waited.

"Then what do you want, Edward?" I asked, keeping my eyes closed; it was easier to talk to him coherently that way.

"I'm sorry." He sounded sincere. "I'm being very rude, I know. But it's better this way, really."

I opened my eyes. His face was very serious. "I don't know what you mean," I said, my voice guarded.

"It's better if we're not friends," he explained. "Trust me."


My eyes narrowed. I'd heard that before.


"It's better if we're not friends", even though I'm talking to you again for no reason other than to tell you we won't be talking. Which we haven't been talking for a half-dozen weeks (half-dozen?). But now that we're talking, I want you to know that we won't be talking. Again. You know, after this.

Mixed message much?

I also can't figure out any way to picture Bella carrying on half of this exchange with her eyes closed the entire time that isn't hilarious. Especially when she could simply look toward the front of the room where the teacher is.

She then ludicrously accuses him of regretting his decision to Superman the van away from her, at which point it's his turn to be petulant with a "You don't know anything" that, well, I guess a real seventeen-year-old might come up with. Bella drops her books (endearing clumsiness, her humanising flaw!*), and Edward uses his vampiric speed to stack them and hand them to her before she even decides to bend down to pick them up. This use of vampire powers to complete mundane tasks will be a recurring motif of this book, and it just gets more infuriating every time. I'm continuously amazed by how wrong Meyer gets everything in this book. She's somehow able both to make vampirism more appealing (by removing all the drawbacks associated with it, like drinking human blood, dying in sunlight, and oh yeah, eternal damnation of your immortal soul) and simultaneously less appealing (by making it prosaic and banal). Instead of living in castles, hiding in shadows, swooping down on unsuspecting humans to feed on, and seducing people with their mysterious powers, Twilight vampires go to high school, show up to work, commute by car, and use their powers to stack books, play baseball, and watch young girls sleep in their rooms.

After mutual icy retorts, we're thankfully spared further interaction between our main characters for a little while. Sadly, this is only for poor Eric to ask Bella to the Not Sadie Hawkins Day dance. She of course rejects him, causing him to "slouch" off, no doubt to contemplate suicide. Either that or just to accept one of the invitations from the nicer and likely cuter girls who've already asked him. For added hatred, Edward, somehow there, laughs at the poor kid, knowing that his vampiric powers (I guess?) have already made Bella his. The book is maddeningly vague on whether or not the vampires have the power of hypnotism. Considering they're described as perfectly beautiful and lacking any putrid stench of the grave or icy touch of a body with no hot blood running through it, it seems they would hardly need such a power. Bella has described herself as "unable" not to look at him, but this comes across more as inept "romance" than vampiric power. [Future Carl Eusebius: Plus, Bella will turn out to be immune to all vampiric powers.] Still, I don't know why else Edward would be amused that she turned down the invitation of one guy that she never showed any interest in to a dance she's never expressed any desire to go to. Whatever his reason, though, it doesn't seem anything other than mean-spirited and petty. Which describes, I suppose, the only reasons Edward ever does anything in this story.

Edward uses his Volvo (really?) to block Bella into the car park. She briefly considers ramming his car with her 100% red-blooded American truck--raising the tantalising possibility of making the Volvo "the foreign car it had destroyed" back on page 8--but decides not to. Then Tyler Crowley (the fellow whose van Edward Superman-pushed away from Bella, you'll remember) chooses this moment to leave his vehicle (running) behind hers to approach her truck in the middle of the car park lane and...do I even need to say it?

"Will you ask me to the spring dance?"


Quickly shut down, Tyler promises that "We still have prom" and returns to his vehicle. (Bella has now been asked to this dance by every male in the book so far except Edward, her father, and the biology teacher!) Edward is looking at Bella in his rearview mirror (but vampires don't--oh, forget it!) and "shaking with laughter". Okay, I give up, my droogies. What's so funny about a girl rejecting guys? Why is this so hilarious? A century-old vampire is amused by a couple of guys failing to take a particular girl to a particular high school dance? I know I keep banging on about this high school thing, but really, it boggles the mind. How can you live for a century and then go back to high school even for a month, much less however long Edward Cullen has been doing it? How can you take any interest in anything that happens or anyone you encounter? Maybe I was wrong about Meyer's softening of vampirism. Attend high school for the rest of eternity? These vampires truly are damned.

I can't think of any way "century-old vampire going to high school" can work that doesn't make Edward the villain. Imagine: All his vampiric powers plus one hundred years of experience manipulating people, running amok amongst a bunch of teen-agers with raging hormones, a measure of freedom, and no brains. But Twilight isn't interested in any kind of real danger, because it's born of adolescent fear of maturity: responsibility, committed love, and (ewwwww!) sex.

So its vampire is neutered, its heroine is passive, and its narrative is toothless.

The chapter ends with E and B meeting in the school car park again that next morning. E declares he wants to be B's friend, even though it's "more prudent" for Bella not to agree to this. (Spoiler: She does agree to it.)


"You really should stay away from me," he warned.


I bet Ted Bundy used that line. Of course, in his case, unlike Edward's, it's actually true.



===============================================================
* Flaws not guaranteed to be genuine. Void where prohibited.

Twilight: Look! Up in the sky!

Twilight, pp. 58-67

So, after finding out that Edward's rescue left an Edward-shaped dent in the tan car Bella was nearly smashed against--another dent that no-one but Bella ever notices--we deal with the aftermath.

First, Bella argues with Edward about how he reached her so quickly (and not about how he stopped a speeding van with--okay, okay, sorry) until the ambulance shows up to take her away. Next, her father shows up at the hospital, filled with concern for his daughter, so she does the only appropriate thing: She 'tune[s] him out' so she can think about Edward. Then, the driver of the van is wheeled into place next to her, and he demands to know how Bella was able to get out of the way so fast. I guess I'm confused here, but after having both seen the movie and read the book, it's clear Bella didn't get out of the way at all. Edward got between her and the van and physically pushed it to a stop. Again, though, no-one appeared to take note of this, including Bella herself, despite the fact that the entire parking lot watched this occur. (Note that the van's driver saw Bella quickly move out of the way--ignoring for the moment the fact that she didn't--but failed to notice Edward stop the van with his bare hands.) The driver is apologetic, even though it was an accident and Bella was not seriously injured, so Bella responds by ignoring him as well.

Dr. Cullen puts in an appearance, and...well, I don't have much to say about him. As I noted in a previous entry, the other Cullens are pretty bland and indistinguishable, at least in this first novel. The only giggle-inducing moment is that '[h]e was young', and indeed, in the film he looks practically the same age as Edward. So a man who looks to be in his late twenties at most has adopted a bunch of high-school kids. This doesn't turn any heads, in this small town that supposedly annoys Charlie with its gossip?

They're pretty forgiving up there in Washington.

Dr. Cullen tells Bella she is free to go, so she demands to speak to Edward alone ('Your father is waiting for you,' Edward says, but I think we all know how much weight that statement carries with our Bella) to go over the 'how did you move so fast?' thing again, though at least this time she does toss in that he bench-pressed a van. To add to the hilarity, Edward, who has consistently lied to Bella about where he was standing, balks at lying to her about stiff-arming the van, instead responding with the non-denial 'Nobody will believe that, you know.' That's okay, though, because

'I'm not going to tell anybody.' I said each word slowly, carefully controlling my anger.

Surprise flitted across his face. 'Then why does it matter?'

'It matters to me,' I insisted. 'I don't like to lie--so there'd better be a good reason why I'm doing it.'

Raise your hand if you think he gives her a good reason, or any reason at all. No-one? Good, you've been paying attention. It's even funnier because we know that Bella's definition of a good reason to lie is pretty generous. Plus, and I hate to point this out--oh, who I am kidding?--but in this case, she isn't actually lying. She's choosing not to tell people what she saw, which is understandable since what she saw was impossible and she did suffer head trauma. So far, no-one has asked her, 'Bella, did you see Edward display superhuman strength and speed?' Imagine you saw your boss momentarily float in midair in the middle of the office and then decided not to tell anybody what you thought you'd seen, as none of your co-workers apparently saw it. Is that lying?

This has been such a heart-warming conversation for Edward and Bella that they 'scowl at each other in silence', a silence Bella breaks with a meta-Freudian slip.

'Why did you even bother?' I asked frigidly.

Okay, Novel. If you're going to make the jokes, can I stop reading?

Bella, 'not in the mood for chitchat' such as her father's question, 'What did the doctor say?', 'barely knew Charlie was there' as he takes the ungrateful brat home. She eventually reveals that she is 'consumed by the mystery Edward presented', and I have to admit to be a little intrigued by this mystery as well. Why is he such a colossal jerk? Why does he attend high school? What does he see in an average high school girl that he hasn't encountered in the previous century?

I was consumed by the mystery Edward presented. And more than a little obsessed by Edward himself.

Oh, really? I hadn't noticed.

Twilight: Am I Annoying You?

Twilight, pp. 43-50

At last, twenty pages after they met, Our Heroes will speak to each other. Strap yourselves in. It's not going to be pleasant.

'Hello,' said a quiet, musical voice.

I looked up, stunned that he was speaking to me. He was sitting as far away from me as the desk allowed, but his chair was angled toward me....

'My name is Edward Cullen,' he continued. 'I didn't have a chance to introduce myself last week. You must be Bella Swan.'

Again with sitting far away from the icky girl. I guess vampires can still get cooties.

As I mentioned previously, Stephenie [sic] Meyer has a number of the bad habits of a novice writer. I hate to keep pointing them out, but really, as unprofessional a product as this deserves to be called out for this sort of thing. I noted before that Stephen King likely loathes Meyer's writing because it exhibits in spades so many annoying bits of bad writing that his On Writing warns against. This time, I won't go on about the overflowing adverbs (well, not too much). Instead, I'll go with the dialogue words.

King wrote that there is rarely any reason to use any such word besides 'said'. 'She agreed' is a word you use when you're omitting the dialogue in question, not one to be tacked onto the dialogue. Since this is a dialogue-heavy scene, Meyer's egregious misuse of dialogue words slaps you in the face with a living trout. No-one can merely 'say' anything. They must, instead, 'agree', 'disagree', 'continue', 'correct', 'command', 'challenge', 'blurt out', 'persist', 'insist', 'press', 'ask', 'answer', 'reply', 'mutter', 'murmur', 'mumble', 'admit', or 'surmise'. This is in only eight pages, mind you.

This is symptomatic of neophyte fiction writers' confusion of variety with skill. (Neophyte nonfiction writers often confuse obscure words with skill. So do many professors.) Of course, no-one wants to read repetitive writing. But writing the same old crap with different words is still repetitive. The reader should understand from context whether your characters are challenged, persisting, pressing, answering, or admitting. There are exceptions (a character just making the scene might 'bellow' rather than merely 'say' that she killed the hero's brother and is now going to kill him), but generally, less is more. Let the reader infer that a character is surmising, or pressing another character on a point. Describe characters' body language: A character admitting a point may draw back a little, while a character agreeing might nod slightly while speaking. Help the reader visualise your scene. A common mistake in writing is to think the audience won't 'get it'. Of course, being too obscure can also be a problem, but again, less is usually more. At least if you're a little on the obscure side, your reader doesn't feel insulted that you're explaining everything to her like she's in grade school. Trust your reader.

Moving on from the bad writing, let's talk about the reprehensible characters. Notice here that Edward 'didn't have a chance to introduce myself last week'. This is, of course, a bald-faced lie, since Edward had ample time to do this. He met Bella in class, and if he didn't want to talk to her during a lecture (the century-old vampire being intimidated, no doubt, by the aura of authority that emanates from your average public high school teacher), he saw her again in the embarrassing 'put me in a different class' scene. I'm not sure why Meyer wants Romeo's first words to Juliet to form a lie. Even 'We got off on the wrong foot last week' would be better, though it still ignores that Edward was a jerk for no reason. What he really should be saying is, 'I'm sorry I behaved like an utter twat before', but that would require an acknowledgement of imperfection in our Edward.

Bella, naturally, will not call Edward out on this lie since she herself is a chronic fibber. Instead, she likely files this deception away for a future passive-aggressive episode.

The soon-to-be couple then go through the tiresome Bella-Isabella rigmarole one more time and then complete a biology lab assignment together. (Well, not so much 'work together' as 'separately complete the assignment and then try to one-up each other on getting it right'.) The unnecessary adverbs come fast and thick for these two pages, and there's a hilarious bit when he grabs her hand and his fingers both are 'ice-cold' and give her a feeling like 'an electric current', which seems like it would generate a feeling of heat, if only momentarily. Our heroes finish the lab long before anyone else, without error, and correspondingly annoy the teacher, who instantly deduces from this one correctly completed lab that Bella was in advanced placement in Phoenix. Sherlock Holmes has nothing on this biology teacher!

Edward then asks Bella a series of questions, including why she came to Forks. Actually, a few times he asks questions, while at other times he makes assumptions and states them as fact. Some of these are warranted, like his brilliant 'You don't like the cold' when she says she's not unhappy that the snow melted away. Others are not, as when she tells him that her stepfather travels frequently and he assumes that her mother sent her away(!!).

Bella's stepfather is, she tells us, a baseball player. In a moment that made me laugh out loud, Edward asks, 'Have I heard of him?' Yes, Edward Cullen may drink the blood of the living and sleep in a coffin during the day, but he knows his Major League Baseball, hellish unlife or no hellish unlife! Actually, he doesn't drink human blood or sleep in a coffin or even seem affected by daylight, and his unlife, while hellish to me personally (perpetual high school in the Pacific Northwest sounds like something Satan would cook up in anticipation of my demise), doesn't seem like the fate of a damned soul. But he is a vampire. Really.

Sadly enough, that crack about Edward being a baseball fan is...well, that's coming.

Determined to make me loathe the main character further, Meyer has Bella say that her stepfather is not in the major leagues because 'he doesn't play well' (emphasis original) and is therefore '[s]trictly minor league.'

Meyer has some real cajones here, dismissing minor league athletes for being unskilled when she has the writing skills of a penguin with a concussion. Not being in the major leagues doesn't mean one doesn't play well. It means, at worst, that one isn't among the top 1% in the world for that sport. (I won't even get into the huge helping of luck anyone needs to break into the major leagues, in addition to a whole lot of talent.) Take any given player from any minor league in the country, and that person is a better player of her chosen sport than Meyer is a storyteller.

I tried to play ice hockey when I was in my early twenties. I was terrible, but nothing teaches you about any sport like playing it yourself. I played in a pick-up game with a fellow who skated circles around everyone else on the ice. Of the sixteen or so of us taking part in the game, he was clearly at the top, and no-one else was even close. He was good enough that he was eventually offered a spot on a European team. A few weeks later, I saw him go head-to-head with a player from the Columbia Inferno, the local East Coast Hockey League team. The ECHL is on the lowest tier of American professional hockey, below the American Hockey League (which is itself a minor league, below the major league, the National Hockey League). This minor leaguer made the guy from my pick-up game look like he was standing still. He beat him every time, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. The professional player was just as untouchable to him as he had earlier been to the people in the pick-up game I played it. A minor leaguer, part of the lowest level of North America's professional hockey, outclassed every amateur at the local rink by a large margin. Later he played in that rink's amateur tournament (having retired from professional play at this point), and the organisers put all the least skilled and least experienced players on his team as a handicap. His team won the tournament anyway, because he was unstoppable, even by the team the organisers put together made up of all the best amateur players so they would be sure to win.

Minor league players are no joke, and to see a hack writer like Stephenie Meyer dismiss them as untalented when she herself can barely write a grammatical sentence irritates me. Fortunately, Edward acts like a buffoon in the next couple of lines, and my irritation fades as I laugh at the idiocy of the supposedly suave vampire.

'...He moves around a lot.'

'And your mother sent you here so that she could travel with him.' He said it as an assumption again, not a question.

My chin raised [sic] a fraction. 'No, she did not send me here. I sent myself.'

His eyebrows knit together. 'I don't understand,' he admitted...

What's not to understand, you twit? Your first assumption is that a mother sent her daughter away? Sure, that happens, but should that really be your first guess? Maybe Bella didn't want to travel around. Or, as it turns out, she might leave so her mother would be free to travel around. Really, though, what's so hard to understand about 'I sent myself' in this context? Is it the best or even a sensible way to put it? No, but the meaning is pretty clear. I also got a good laugh out of the misuse of the verb 'to raise'. I'm picturing Bella's chin lifting up a giant pink fraction (that fraction being 3/4 in my imagination) against her will while she frantically looks around for someone to help push her chin back down and get the fraction off it.

More pap to make younger readers identify with Bella (that being so much easier to write than 'character' stuff):

His gaze became appraising. 'You put on a good show,' he said slowly. 'But I'd be willing to be that you're suffering more than you let anyone see.'

I swear, it's like Meyer's speaking to me.

'Am I annoying you?' he asked. He sounded amused.

We Are Not Amused.

Twilight: O Edward, Where art Thou?

Twilight, pp. 29-36

We have arrived at chapter 2. It gets a little better for a while, because Edward is absent. He's already begun to take over the story, since Bella has to moon over him, but at least he's off-screen for a few pages. Still, we have to read about Bella thinking incessantly about a man who has so far acted like an utter tool towards her for no discernible reason.*

First, we get a little reminder of how thoroughly unlikeable our main character is.

Mike came to sit by me in English, and walked me to my next class, with Chess Club Eric glaring at him all the while; that was flattering.

Oh, just ignore the incorrect comma use. And the pretentious (and unnecessary) semicolon. I'm talking about the 'I like it when guys fight over me' attitude. It's all the more interesting because Bella has no interest in these two boys (she will 'successfully evade' Mike when she leaves school for the day), but she's still flattered by one's resentment towards the other. There's an element of foreshadowing here, as Bella will have precisely the same reaction in Book 2 when Jacob Black enters the picture as a romantic rival. (Only in that case, she is interested in both men, so she...well, I'll steal a line from The Foywonder's hilarious and spot-on Eclipse review and say that what she does rhymes with 'rock peas'.) When good writers use foreshadowing, it's intentional, but we're talking Meyer here, so it's probably unconscious (i.e., she only knows one type of twisted relationship behaviour and so that's the one Bella has).

Bella's confidence boost from the jealousy of one person she doesn't want towards another person she doesn't want is disturbing enough, but it's compounded by chapter 2's beginning with day 2 at Forks High. These two boys have known her for at best a couple of hours and have talked to her for, what, five minutes? Ten minutes? Each? And one of them is already shooting the other jealous looks? I feel like I'm reading the Cliff's Notes of The Great Gatsby.

Do I even need to mention that neither of these guys (but especially Eric) got anywhere with Bells on day 1? They didn't exactly hit it off right away.

Bella then proceeds to whine about what makes today worse than yesterday before we reach this bombshell.

And [today] was worse because Edward Cullen wasn't in school at all.

In the name of Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming in the sunken city of R'lyeh, why? I really don't understand this. Why is she sad he isn't there? He's been inexplicably cruel for the whole hour or so that she's seen him. She has never spoken a word to him, nor he to her. Please, someone tell me how this day could possibly be worse than the previous day because the guy who looked at her like he wanted her to die at every opportunity is absent?

Yes, she is clearly physically attracted to him. In fact, as TheSpoonyOne has pointed out in his wonderful reviews of New Moon and Eclipse (warning: strong language), Edward and Bella's attraction never goes beyond the purely physical. We'll delve into this more later, but trust me that these two never share anything deeper than the desire to have sex with one another because they're both hot. (But Meyer is Mormon and, as I noted in my first entry, her writing keeps The Faith even though her characters inexplicably don't profess it, so they Wait.)

This is totally out of place for the goth subculture, which rejects relationships like this, but I'm sure the pseudo-goths eat it up. All the sexy black clothes and dark eye shadow and freedom from having to go outside or exercise without any of that 'hard' stuff like writing bad poetry and suicide attempts.

The next page has Bella ignoring her supposed friends' conversations (get used to it) while she pines for the stranger that looks at her with hate-filled eyes, hoping he will appear to ignore her rather than barely tolerate her very existence or, worse, not appear at all (oh come on, now). This comes complete with the worst simile** I've read in a published novel: 'I made the Cowardly Lion look like the terminator [sic].' Oh, ho! What a hilarious bon mot! How about this one: George W. Bush makes Hitler look like Mother Theresa. Zing!

Blah blah Edward doesn't show up, blah blah Bella 'had no practice dealing with overly friendly boys' (this from a girl with whom this entire school is instantly smitten), blah blah Bella gets home and goes immediately to the kitchen to do her female duty of preparing a meal for her man, that being her father** as she's yet to get hitched. (A Mormon aged seventeen and not engaged? For shame!)

There's also another bit of (presumably unintentional) foreshadowing here. Bella opines that '[i]t seemed excessive of [the Cullens] to have both looks and money.' Money? Where was there any indication the Cullens had--oh, right, the Volvo. Anyhow, remember this bit when I talk about the vampires' powers in a few weeks.

Charlie comes home and he and Bella chat, but not much. Each character is private, we've been told (though indirectly, for once), and they're each more comfortable being silently in the other's presence rather than chatting. This page-and-a-half works okay. It's natural and conveys the emotional distance between father and daughter without having either the characters or the narrator recite clunky exposition. But then the Cullens have to show up and torpedo any sense of realism or humanity.

'Do you know the Cullen family?' I asked hesitantly. [Again with the adverbs!]

'Dr. Cullen's family? Sure. Dr. Cullen's a great man.'

'They...the kids...are a little different. They don't seem to fit in very well at school.'

Charlie surprised me by looking angry.

'People in this town,' he muttered. 'Dr. Cullen is a brilliant surgeon who could probably work in any hospital in the world, make ten times the salary he gets here,' he continued, getting louder. 'We're lucky to have him--lucky that his wife wanted to live in a small town....'

So much wrong in only a few lines. Where to begin?

First, why is Charlie's voice getting louder as he talks? It could be a mark of Charlie's anger issues, just as Edward's future alternating attitudes towards Bella are indicative of his being an abuser, but again, it doesn't come across that way.

Second, what about Dr. Cullen makes him 'a great man'? He's a really good surgeon who gets paid less than he might. Swell. Somebody get Obama on the phone. We've got a Real American Hero here!

Third, in the very last exchange Bella and Charlie had, which happened all of five seconds before this one, Bella mentioned Mike and Charlie instantly declared that Mike was from a 'nice family'. Okay, so you judge Mike's family, but 'people in this town' are wrong for judging the Cullen family. (It's a minor point, but I love that Charlie immediately knows which 'Mike' Bella was talking about when 'Michael' tops the list of American male names, but he adds a 'Dr. Cullen's family?' to make sure she wasn't referring to some other Cullen family in this tiny town.)

Fourth, how does Charlie know that Cullen is a 'brilliant surgeon' who 'could probably work in any hospital in the world'? Surgery isn't exactly a skill that the untrained can easily evaluate. I had a fantastic surgeon in Malaysia who took care of an eye infection I had, but I'm no expert and simply judged him by the ease of that particular procedure. There's no way I would go from 'I thought he was a great surgeon because my operation went off without a hitch' to 'he could work anywhere in the world if he wanted, he's so good.' And in my case, the procedure was observed by my girlfriend, who has had surgical training, and I still wouldn't resort to this level of breathtaking hyperbole. What's Charlie basing his lofty opinion of Dr. Cullen on? I think Charlie has a direct line to the author of the novel.

Fifth, ten times? Now, my mother worked with medical doctors. My close friend's parents are both doctors. These people earn a lot of money. But honestly, ten times is just absurd. I find it difficult to believe that, barring some kind of circumstance that has nothing to do with skill (such as being the personal physician of someone of great wealth), in America, any surgeon in a particular speciality would ever make ten times what another surgeon in the same speciality makes. That means that if Dr. Cullen makes $60,000 (a pretty sad sum for any medical doctor, much less a surgeon), he could be making $600,000 somewhere else. That's what a neurosurgeon makes. Neurosurgeons do not earn $60,000 no matter where they are, unless they're not doing neurosurgery. And if they aren't, then they're doing the world a disservice, since there aren't many people who have the talent to do it, and even fewer who have gone through the extensive training to acquire the necessary skills. If you have a skill the world desperately needs that it took you almost two decades to acquire at great cost in resources that few people can acquire even with the necessary time and resources...you'd better use it. Not to do so would be a callous act of inhumanity--but wait, you say, Cullen's a vampire! He is inhuman.

Oh just you wait.

So, Dr. Cullen could make twice what he's making in Forks? Sure. Three times as much? Pushing it, but conceivable. Ten times? This is where Meyer's hyperbole for her nothing characters is particularly embarrassing. Bella can't just be a quirky smart girl who's cute but a little stand-offish; she has to be beautiful and smart and deep, the girl that every boy wants and every girl wants to be. Edward can't be a handsome but socially awkward fellow whose crippling self-doubt makes it difficult for him to establish an intimate relationship; he must be the sexiest boy at school who runs fastest and jumps highest and is strong and brave and reads minds and knows all kinds of stuff about stuff and doesn't want to do...you know...it. Even Dr. Cullen can't be just a doctor; he has to be a surgeon in a town too small to need a surgeon (and who appears not to be a surgeon in Forks, instead serving as your typical GP). In fact, he's the bestest surgeon evar, so that he could make ten times what he makes now if he went, y'know, anywhere.

Now if Charlie were just the best cop in the world, who could be making ten times what he makes in Forks if he went to New York City, I do believe all of our characters would be The Best.

So, um, where is the conflict is this story again?

=========================================

*It should be noted that he will at no point provide any explanation for his behaviour.

** Similes suck anyhow, unless you're Raymond Chandler or part of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 cast. Metaphors are where it's at. And if you're going to reference something, don't make it so obvious. Like the translation of Classical Chinese I just submitted in which I worked in an entirely appropriate 'We will crush the rebellion with one swift stroke!' Now that's how you drop references, Steffy!

*** Because the poor guy, well, you see, he's a man and men can't cook, a-hyuck!