I know I’m running the risk of being entirely too trendy, but I just have to say it: Twilight sucks.
I also know what you’re about to say. Let’s see if I can cover all the outrage all quick-like….
You read that crap?
No. No I didn’t. I tried. I couldn’t. Three pages into Twilight, and I could feel my brain screaming and trying to squelch its way out of my skull through my ears like a desperate, enraged, hungry shoggoth trying to fit through the Eisenhower tunnel.
You had the same problem with Harry Potter and you ended up enjoying that when you read it. And you just said you didn’t read it, so you can’t know that it sucks.
Indeed, I am well and truly pwned. Except Harry Potter didn’t suck nearly as much as these books. And I was able to read them after listening to the audiobooks [as read by Stephen Fry, who is undeniably awesome].
Hey, look at that word. Audiobooks. They’re also kinda cool. ‘Audiobooks’ are how I’m able to say that I’ve never read these four ever-expanding yet nearly identical piles of florid crap.
Not even Stephen Fry’s incredible awesomeness could’ve saved these audiobooks. I’d love to say that Kathy Bates could’ve done something for them, but that might be a lie. Also, I wouldn’t want to taint the other good audiobook experiences I’ve had at her voice’s expense.
The reader was an annoying, tween-voiced individual. Most of the time. When she didn’t sound like she needed a lozenge. And when, in the last two books, there was a guy reading different parts.
…which kinda brings us to the contents of the books themselves.
All four start the same way, with a Preface that’s supposed to be suspenseful and hinting at an ending event. Except it’s more like a ‘climax event’, with a dénouement that forgets to stop happening, becoming mired in its own high fructose corn syrupy excrement.
Between that attempted climactic tease and the actual climax are way, way too many pages of whatever crap that book happens to be about. I’ll probably have to go into each one individually. Then, maybe I’ll try to wipe this crap from my mind. I believe it’s a classic internet tactic to talk about drinking at this point….
Twilight
I’d never given much thought to how I would die — though I’d had
reason enough in the last few months — but even if I had, I would not
have imagined it like this.– Twilight Prologue
We’re all praying for death now. Some of us may even be a little more proactive about it, looking for sharp objects like spoons to shove into our eyesockets instead of leaving it up to the cruel, capricious deity that allowed for not just the publishing, but the underwhelming popularity of this first installment in this repulsive, bloating cashcorpse of a series.
If you kept reading beyond that point, you’re far tougher than I am; I didn’t make it past the first couple of pages of the first chapter. What could I do? Give up? The hell you say. I didn’t give up on Celebrian [don’t ever click on that link]! The solution, obviously, is to obtain the audiobooks, and subject myself to these stories that way.
Ilyana Kadushin was kind enough to drag me through this story [and the other three, except for the parts read by some guy]. I can’t place all the blame on her, though – Stephenie Meyer’s the one that wrote the words that kept hauling me back from my blissfully near-comatose state that first night.
I’m not kidding. I kept trying to go to sleep while listening to it, and I kept twitching awake.
The first book is a lot like the movie, except, instead of having to sit there and watch poor Cedric Diggory look [and sound] like he’s suffering as much as you are, you have nobody. Nobody appears to be suffering with you.
Unless you’re taking turns reading the book out loud with a group of friends. In that case, you’re either a member of a very obnoxious demographic that inexplicably needs to change its collective panties every three pages, or you’re stationed at Gitmo, and various groups would like to have a chat with you about human rights and torture.
Yes. I really am going on like this so I don’t have to remember it. Me. The girl who reads bad fanfiction, begs others for bad fanfiction, and giggles with schoolgirlish delight at the cries of horror when I subject others to bad fanfiction. I don’t want to think about this shit.
Because that’s all this is. Fanfiction. Really bad, mixed up, alternate universe Mary Sue having fanfiction.
I’m sure most of us know the plot of this one, because, at some point, most of us have tried to get through the terrible movie they made out of this abominable collection of words.
Our dear Mary Sue, or ‘Bella’, as she prefers to be called, is portrayed as your average world-weary teen who can’t possibly fit in because, oh dear, she’s so pale, so quirky, and likes to read the classics. She’s leaving her mom to move in with her dad, possibly because she’s sick of raising an adult toddler, and would prefer to play parent to an indifferent adult teenager for a while.
Bella’s parents, it seems, aren’t just characters nearly as…tertiary as the ‘other kids in her new school’ – they’re exactly half of a whole person. Mom is a flighty, indecisive, irresponsible hummingbird who, apparently, would die from a half-baked skydiving attempt if Bella weren’t there to stop her. Dad is mostly absent. He works a lot, can’t cook [of course], and has a strange, erratic temper.
Okay, maybe dad’s less than half of a whole character. But I still think that, if you were to combine the mother and the father, you’d get a far more believable young adult than Bella.
Bella angsts herself to sleep before her first day of school, where we find out how desperately well-read she is [but she’ll do the reading anyway, because she loves the assigned reading! Gasp!]…and how inexplicably attractive she is as the new girl. Because all sorts of less-than-memorable boys keep trying to help her.
Lunchtime, then. And we descend fully into hell, where we’re never more than a few paragraphs away from being adverbed to death. Because, from here on out, it’s all about the perfect, statue of a greek god-like, ‘devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful’ vampires.
Okay. There are adjectives, too. And it’s mostly about Edward. But, still, there’s a lot of repetitive describing.
Also: creepiness. Because, while Bella is becoming more and more obsessed with Edward, Edward is being your basic offputting, stalkery, potentially abusive jerkwad. His behaviour seems calculated to get Bella obsessed with him. He demands to be switched out of the class he shares with her, disappears for a few days, avoids her, and then, for no good reason, saves her awkward, useless, whiny life.
“We shouldn’t be friends.”
“But you saved my life, and I’m obsessed with you!”
“By the way, I sneak into your room every night and watch you sleep.”
…wait, what?
Bella spends about three thousand chapters putting two and two together to get vampire, after ‘flirting’ the story out of one of the reservation boys. Edward saves Bella from some bad people in an alley [I’m not stalking you; I’m following you because you can’t keep yourself alive!]
Oh, and I forgot to mention, Bella faints at the sight of blood. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to be, but it keeps coming up.
Then, they were together. Because Bella figured it out, and, I guess, the ‘get away from me’ game had to evolve into the ‘now that you’re suitably obsessed, I’ll spend time with you’ game.
More adjectives. More adverbs. More words. And sparkling.
Edward in the sunlight was shocking. I couldn’t get used to it, though I’d been staring at him all afternoon. His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.
—Twilight, Chapter 13 [Confessions]
Yes. Sparkling.
After another round of ‘scare the obsessed girl’, possibly to reinforce the ‘want what I can’t have’ obsession, I guess they’re officially together. Time to meet the parents! And hear stories about the ‘father’ of the family, and Edward’s creation.
…and find out that they wait for thunderstorms to play baseball. Because nobody’s ever firing weapons in the heavily wooded regions of Washington. No. They need the cover of the storm for a game of supernatural baseball.
Finally, there’s some badguys. A vampire they refer to as a ‘tracker’, who fixates on Bella. She’s forced to break up with her father [yes, I meant to say that], and run back to Arizona with Alice and Jasper, while everyone else runs around trying to throw the tracker off her trail. Except for Rosalie, who I assume is just off throwing a prettygirl tantrum somewhere.
The tracker lures her using a recording of her mother’s voice from an old home movie. And she dies.
…or, well, she should’ve died. It would’ve been a much better book if she had. But, no, the Cullens swoop in to save the day at the last minute. Except she’s been bitten, which means she’s been exposed to the vampire’s venom.
Because, you see, that’s how vampirism spreads. Through venom. They bite you; you become a vampire. But, no! We must save her! Treat it like a snakebite; suck the venom out.
Seriously.
She’s left with a cold, glittery scar. Also, a cast on her leg, and a story about how she ever-so-clumsily fell down some stairs. And possibly out a window. Then in through another window, through the bottom of an indoor pool, out another window, and into a…wait, no, that was Fantastic 4….
And a date to the prom, which she pitches a fit over. The book ends with a warning from reservation boy about how someone will be watching her, and her wanting to become a vampire.
I’m going to end this here, because this is getting out of hand. I’ll have the other three…whatever these are [they’re more like mocking book reports than reviews] up eventually.