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Last
month, Stephenie Meyer published Eclipse, the third
installment of her best-selling Twilight series, to
much fanfare. Working in education, I've seen the fervor first
hand. Since the book's August 7 release, I have been surrounded
by girls swooning over this teen vampire romance series—and,
by girls, I actually mean my teen-and-'tween-aged students
and my twenty-something-aged coworkers. To this crowd,
Meyer has been almost as important as J.K. Rowling, and her
characters instigate as much hormonal hysteria as a shirtless
Brad Pitt.
The gist
of the Twilight series is simple: teenage narrator
Bella Swan falls for Edward Cullen, a devastatingly handsome
but aloof schoolmate whom she discovers to be a vampire with
an abnormally strong attraction to her blood. He resists the
temptation to kill, however, because he and his vampire family
refuse to feed on humans. Instead, he falls in love with her.
 Unfortunately,
fraternizing with a coven of beautiful vampires means exposing
herself to other, less humane vampires and jeopardizes Bella's
safety. Complicating matters is the presence of werewolves—a
vampire's natural enemy—in a nearby Native American enclave.
In the second book, New Moon, Bella finds herself stuck
in the middle of this conflict when she discovers that her
best friend, Jacob Black, is a werewolf. That Jake is in love
with her doesn't help the situation, nor do the vampires hunting
tasty little Bella.
But the
heart of the books is the romantic vampire hottie, Edward.
In him, Meyers delivers the perfect boy: handsome, intelligent,
devoted, passionate…and inherently flawed. Like Pride and
Prejudice's Mr. Darcy, Edward broods and smolders as he
resists his amorous feelings for Bella. When he finally does
give in, he practices a restraint that is as much a matter
of life-or-death as it is gentlemanly propriety.
Instead
of exploiting the sexual liberties taken in modern YA lit,
Meyer relies upon the appeal of sensuality to convey passion.
Unlike some of her contemporaries, Meyer remembers that many
girls do not grow up consciously looking forward to sex—they
aspire for love foremost. Thus, rather than kiss Bella's lips,
Edward touches her face, nuzzles her neck, and brushes his
lips across her clavicle…and Meyer's besotted female readership
responds by clutching their books to their chests and breathing
deep, bosom-heaving sighs.
Admittedly,
I have also been afflicted with Twilight-related bosom-heaving.
But unlike most other readers, I feel a little something else
towards Stephenie Meyer and her creations, and it isn't pleasant.
It is jealousy tinged with just a trace of bitterness. You
see, she took just about all of my ideas.
In the spring of 2006, I began writing a YA vampire story
of my own, inspired by one of my students, Corn (which is
her actual nickname, not some silly pseudonym created to protect
her identity). Corn was (and still is) a precocious and quirky
middle schooler with a predilection for vampire stories. At
the age of eleven, she had already read Anne Rice's Interview
with the Vampire and was working her way through The
Vampire Lestat, hiding the novel under an opaque pink
book cover to fool her mother.
Corn's
fascination became common knowledge in my classroom one February
afternoon, before class had begun. Some of my students were
discussing the seemingly aloof qualities of a male coworker,
gossiping as only middle school students can over a person
to whom they'd never spoken. After one girl confessed that
she found him "handsome but too old," Corn blurted out a sentence
that would change the scope of my classroom for months to
come:
"I think
he's a werewolf."
[continued
on page 2]
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