Twilight, Chp 7

In which your fearless blogger commits grievous self-injury. 

There's foreshadowing, there's roadmapping, and then there's just plain laziness. Guess which one Twilight picked?! Eddie is a bloodsucker. Jacob should invest heavily in body-hair trimmers. Bella will eventually (if she doesn't already) want to bang both of them. Hey look, a not-at-all cliched love triangle! But no, that turd-pit of a dream sequence is still too subtle. Clearly Mrs. Meyer worries that her audience hasn't quiiiite eaten what she's dishing out. So let's toss in the names of the classic novels that she's using as inspiration / blatantly ripping off for this little shitshow. Still not enough?!?!? Jeez, she must think her readers are complete fucking idiots. It's ok though, here's the single dumbest depiction of the internet ever delivered in fiction to make it all so very, very much worse. Somewhere, William Gibson just threw up in his mouth.

In case anyone is still wondering, this chapter sucks.

Now, I'm not one to argue that fiction should be solely concerned with delivering plot. Many authors get trapped on that particular hamster wheel, and end up re-jiggering promising stories into an escalating series of shocks, with diminishing returns (paging George Martin….). But there has to be some element of surprise / mystery for a story like this to work. That's the fuel for maintaining reader interest, for creating that sense of urgency to make some poor teenager huddle up with the book all night before a trig test. I can now predict the plot remaining in this novel, and I'd happily bet a kidney I'm right. It's just so easy, so lazy, so insultingly dumb. That little scene of Bella web-searching made me want to lobotomize myself so I wouldn't have to keep reading these books. Last week I questioned whether Stephanie Meyer had ever been to a party as a teenager. This week's question: Has she ever used Google?

Oh, so you're all aware….. Teenage girls discuss what dress they'll be wearing to the next dance, to the exclusion of all other topics and interests. Teenage boys switch infatuation from one girl to another in the time it takes a butterfly to fart, and with no sign of bitterness, disappointment, or sadness whatsoever, because hormones or something. I'd start ranting about misogyny, but let's be real. This book is insulting to everyone, of every gender and orientation. It fetishizes physical beauty and wealth, refusing to ackowledge any other positive qualities. Every time she even hints at liking a character, Mrs.  Meyer has them act in the most vapid, shallow, fucking stupid way imaginable, because anyone who isn't a Cullen must be a worthless walking turd.

Now, let's talk about the worst part of this chapter. What, you thought I'd led with the truly awful stuff? Oh no, kids. The early going is shitty and the ending is materialistic cliche that insults every high-schooler is the history of the world, but whatever. It's her first book, and it I can't hold it against Mrs. Meyer that some editor was dumb enough to remove this from the slush pile where it belongs. But…. But there's a little scene in the forest, with our fearful heroine out for her walk. She's thinking that maybe it's time to kick Eddie to the curb. But no, she's in too deep. Fearful of him getting hurt. Obsessed with the beauty of his face and the force of his personality. In short, she's in love with him.

Hang on a second while I hit myself in the face with a baseball bat.

Ok, we're back. Edward has been an asshole to Bella since day one of school. A raging fucking asshole. He saved her life, which is nice, but two seconds of reflexive action shouldn't excuse months of deliberate douchebaggery. Look at the descriptors she uses when lusting after him. Voice, face, magnetic force of the personality etc etc bullshit bullshit. Superficialities, every one of them. There's nothing about his personality, because they don't fucking know anything about each other. They've never had a real conversation. In a better book, I might extend the benefit of the doubt and say that it's trying to depict the first rush of hormonal lust or something. This isn't that book. These two idiots are on a collision course, one that ends in insipid declarations of mutual wanting-to-bone. But, one minor problem, every scrap of Bella's agency, dignity, and intelligence has to be shredded, burned, and shat on to get them there.