I suppose this Blog title is misleading, but no, for once I don’t actually mean Darth Dick Cheney.

Twilight the series, literally arrived on my front doorstep last month, courtesy of my sister Ann. She sent a note with the books on CD, saying they had been her guilty pleasure this summer, and she thought I might enjoy them, too. If not, she’d pick them up on her next trip south, and donate them to her town’s  chronically underfunded public library. The giver surprised me almost as much as the gift, since Ann is a more left-wing feminist than I am, usually. But a guilty pleasure—I can get the attraction of that, no problem.  I’d heard of the Twilight books, of course—I work in a library.  We have to order about fifty or sixty copies of each volume system-wide to accommodate the 250 person waiting list that accumulates by the time each new book in the series arrives.   The last series to cause such stir and such massive ordering of copies had been the Harry Potter series. Without a particle of embarrassment and much enjoyment, I purchased and read all seven Harry Potter books even though strictly speaking, I’m not in the children’s book  demographic anymore. I just don’t see why kids should have all the fun.  I was hooked on Harry and didn’t care who knew it.  I kept reading Harry Potter partly because I had to find out whether Harry himself would survive when he socked it to Voldemort and partly because well… the Harry Potter books make me laugh out loud on a regular basis. I value that in a book.

 For the  Twilight  series though, most of the  people who come to the reference desk to ask A,  if we owned the series, B, where they were shelved and C how they could get on the waiting list for the latest book, are teenaged girls—a demographic into which I emphatically no longer fit. (I didn’t fit the mold all that well when I was in my teens for that matter despite being an inner fool for historical romance.) I try never to criticize a book I haven’t read myself.  With some books though, not reading them becomes a form of criticism in and of itself.  That, and waiting my turn as the 250 people ahead of me in line each get the three week checkout period they’re entitled to, it just wasn’t worth it, to me. There are so many books and too little time to read them, already.  I didn’t hate the Twilight books on principal—the strongest emotion they aroused in me was indifference.  But neither did I make an effort to learn more about them than the information that came to me through cultural osmosis.  

It’s not really Stephanie Meyer’s fault if I was already a bit tired of the “Vampire as creepy sex-symbol” romantic literary genre.  The responsibility for that belongs to Anne Rice.  I enjoyed her Interview with the Vampire and the early parts of The Vampire Lestat, but by the time I finished Lestat, I knew I had had enough. Even more questionable than Twilight in my eyes is the Immortality Bites series, featuring such titles as  Bitten and Smitten, Tall Dark and Fangsome, and  Stakes and Stillettos.  I can understand writing paranormal fiction and paranormal comedy.  But I’ll never forgive anybody for being cutesy. It veers all too closely to being Vampire Barbie, complete with her own pink plastic coffin and Dream Transylvanian Castle.

Pity poor Bela Lugosi, the original movie Count Dracula from 1931. He played Dracula as the mittel-European blood sucking monster who can turn into a bat, spends the daylight hours in his coffin in his spooky dark castle on the mountain crags of the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe.  You know, the creepy, old-school,  Old Country vampire, with a black satin cloak drawn up melodramatically across the lower half of his face with the crook of his left arm and you never  see him in daylight. Obviously, Lugosi was never all that worried about the sex-appeal quotient of being a vampire. (Didn’t do so badly at it, though.)  Now he’s stuck as the permanent undead Ugly Duckling.  (Oh boy, I think I just blew a few hundred gray cells with the combination of Hans Christian Andersen and Bram Stoker.)  

Actually, the title of Undead Ugly Duckling probably belongs to Nosferatu, from the 1922 German silent movie.  He’s after dinner I feel sure, but he’s nobody’s idea of a dinner date. I’d be scared silly if I saw Nosferatu coming after me.

Here’s Edward Cullen as played by Robert Pattinson.  A new-school American vampire with a much bigger sex-appeal quotient--kind of an Abercrombie & Fitch model with fangs. As a human female, I’d give him a second glance. And possibly a third. He’s the teen vampire who can walk around in broad daylight as long as it’s cloudy, and has the face of a Botticelli angel, and the body of a perfect Greek statue, except that he can move. In addition to his physical beauty, he  has nicer clothes than everyone else, drives the nicest car at school. Edward is sensitive, protective, gentlemanly, mysterious and emotionally tortured by having to live as a monster. He doesn’t hunt humans, and even drinks soy milk. He can smile without showing off his abnormally long, sharp canine teeth. Which makes me wonder—are they retractable, like the fangs of certain snake species?  He seems to be precisely the sort of guy Arnold Schwarzenegger was thinking of when he came up with the epithet, girly-man. And he appears to be the perfect fantasy boyfriend in the eyes of millions of teen girl readers.

I’m now about half-way through Twilight, the first book, listening to them on my car stereo while commuting between work and home.  Unless things really pick up in the second half, I’m not sure I’ll be continuing on to the next book.  I confess the immortally perfect Edward and his mortal inamorata, Bella Swan, are starting to grate on me.  Let’s take on Bella, first.  According to Meyer, Bella (a mental kick-back to Bela Lugosi, I wonder?)  was a sort of mother to her own scatterbrained mother until her mother met and married Bella’s new stepfather.  We meet the two of them as they say farewell at the Phoenix Arizona airport before Bella leaves to go live with her father, whom she doesn’t know well and isn’t close to, in the overcast, rainy depressed and depressing town of Forks, Washington, giving up her mother and the life she loves in Arizona.  If a book character is making a sacrificial move that seems counter-intuitive for them, the author had better come up with a compelling reason why they’re doing it.  I found the explanation Meyer did provide four or five chapters into the book anti-climactic. Bella doesn’t get on well with her new step-father who’s on the road with his minor league baseball team most of the time, anyway.  It felt contrived by the demands of a plot that dictated Bella had to move to Forks Washington in order to meet Edward. Phoenix just isn’t a vampire-friendly burg--too much sunlight.  

Anyhow, Bella moves in with her bachelor father and becomes the grocery shopper and cook for them both.  So  she appears to be a young person of some maturity and stability.  Or is she?   We learn she’s clumsy, whether on the dance floor, or the gym floor; blood typing in biology class makes her  almost faint on the spot,  she manages to get in the path of cars skidding on ice. She trips and falls flat when walking on the beach or through the temperate zone rainforest.  In a small, tourist attraction town, she manages to wander into the one bad neighborhood where she absolutely shouldn’t have gone.  Cloud cover and Seasonal Affective Disorder definitely interferes with her higher brain functions, I guess.

Where the book gives me problems is this question; can a gorgeous young male vampire, eternally frozen in time at age seventeen, really turn a young woman of better than average maturity and capability into a helplesss, love-struck dweeb princess on contact? I’ve finally reached a spot in the book where they’ve declared their love for one another after hiking into the wilderness together one afternoon.  It goes on for several pages of description in which   he demonstrates his super-human strength and speed to Bella to warn her of the danger she’s in when they’re together, and impresses on her how fragile she is and if he doesn’t constantly remain conscious of his own strength, he could end up breaking her neck when he only meant to stroke her hair, etc etc. (Proving his masculinity, despite his sensitive angst, maybe?)  Bella watches him,  half terrified, half drooling over his perfect face and body.

 I think I should start a scorecard or a drinking game in which I have to take a sip, every time Bella describes his “angelic face, perfect muscles, crooked smile, golden eyes” and as a “god-like creature” in general. To herself fortunately, rather than to Edward, so far. Edward confesses he’s been spying on her, spending a lot of nights in her room watching her sleep. (I’m guessing Bella would find this information a lot creepier if Edward looked like Walter Matthau. Or Nosferatu.) Edward also reminds her of all the times he’s had to rescue her already, and she faints away in his manly arms when he kisses her for the second time. Excuse me, what century is this again? And who is this guy—the Vamp Nanny?

I’ve been interested enough to keep going though, as there is an element of danger to the relationship.  Edward finds Bella’s scent irresistible.  It’s a constant struggle for him not to bend her over and just do his vampiric thing, except that well, he can’t bear to hurt her. He’s pretty sure he has enough self-control to never to kill her, but should he ever lose that self-restraint, she hasn’t got a prayer of outrunning him or fighting him off.  Edward appears to simultaneously believe he’s her one protection from danger since she’s this helpless little mortal who blunders from one crisis to another and would surely die without his constant loving vigilance.  (Even though she survived without him perfectly well for the seventeen years before they met.) But he also represents the source of her greatest danger as without his constant vigilance, he’d drink her blood if he ever lost control over himself.  In vampiric terms, I guess it’s analagous to a chocoholic falling romantically in love with an animate, accident prone hot fudge sundae. In fictional terms, it adds a certain tension to an improbable story line.

I have some other plausibility problems with Twilight, though. Edward and his unnaturally beautiful “family” of vampire siblings   live in this rainy, unglamorous and overcast town and enroll in High School in order to keep a low local profile and cast an illusion of normalcy.  Which seems like a contradiction in terms, since they keep to themselves on campus; appear to be both admired and feared by the regular student body without actually mingling with them or making much effort to behave like regular human teenagers. This unnaturally beautiful quintet sits together in the high school cafeteria at noon each day, but never eat anything, which piques the curiosity of the mortal students surrounding them rather less than it should. Oh, and they drive very fast in very expensive cars that are out of place in a town full of old domestic model beater cars and trucks.

 Their “Father” is the local doctor, working in the hospital.  A vampire doctor seems to me a catastrophic scandal waiting to happen.  At very least  Doctor Cullen seems pretty bad at avoiding the occasion of sin, surrounded as he is by injured people and blood transfusions, after all. And a hospital would be one of the worst, most conspicuous places for a vampire to lose his control over his most basic instinct. Not to mention that he’d be surrounded by other doctors and nurses who ought to at least eventually notice that there’s something physically different about the guy. Or are Dr. Cullen’s colleagues all less observant than Bella the high school student with no medical training at all?

But what the hell, I’m over half-way through, and once I start, I try to finish what I’m reading. As I mentioned, I can enjoy a love story and am willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief in the cause. Even if that part of me is quarrelling with the part of me that rolls its eyes and keeps muttering  “oh come on!”  Even if that part of me is stronger since reading Tequila and Donuts’  post about her mother and her mother’s friends watching the movie.:  http://open.salon.com/blog/tequilaanddonuts/2009/08/27/mom_day_movie_club_once_bitten_twice_shy Now when Edward is being tortured by his “We shouldn’t be together because I’m dangerous  to you!” feelings, or Bella  keeps internally rhapsodizing over his physical perfection, for some weird reason, I keep thinking of Emus. It’s hard to take anything seriously when you’re giggling like a crazy person.