Why Twilight?

As an educated woman over thirty, my romantic vampire phase peaked with Anne Rice back in high school, following bouts of swooning over Zorro, Star Trek and Batman. (Yes, I was an am one of those tragically nerdish girls galumphing along a wavelength completely other than popular culture and thus my peers. We can move on from the vague horror of high school now and back to the car wreck of fiction at hand.) I can even recall a horrid piece of writing I penned my junior year, telling the story of Raven and her great undead secret. (No tragically nerdish girl can avoid traipsing morosely into the gothic nor avoid head-on collision with purple prose. Or the name Raven.)

Eventually I found grateful surcease with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and steered out of ultimate Losertown and back onto my engeeked , awkward path. I openly mocked the goth scene that rose from the fringes of subculture and spasmed melancholy in the spotlight. The vampires I wrote were clever monsters, dark sidhe, and only ever attained heroic beauty when stricken with soul, (R&B or otherwise.)

Busily ensconced in adulthood, a crumbling marriage and Dungeons & Dragons, the Twilight phenomena whooshed passed me completely. All I recall of the brief encounter with the trailer for the first movie was a sense of generalized confusion as to which one of the leads was the vampire, and why they were cavorting about in daylight. I'm going to call this the first warning flag, which I as an obedient nerdish girl dutifully obeyed and avoided the hell out of the movie and books.

Flash forward to 2010 and the end of my marriage, joyful if exhausting relocation to Las Vegas and brand new job as a bookseller at Borders, and I am choking on fucking Twilight. I can't sell anything without one of my beloved, crazy patrons trying to hook me on Meyer's books. And when a surge of potential sales floats beyond me because I don't know who the hell Bree Tanner is and why her novella should be a part of anyone's Twilight collection, the problem, dear reader, is not in the movie stars, but in myself.

Last night I brought home a copy of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight with the intention of learning the truth; is her storytelling atrocious? Is this version of the vampire myth any more bastardized and hackneyed than Rice or White Wolf? Am I justified in judging the series that is bringing more and more young readers into my bookstore the way Rowling did in the previous decade?

Come with me and follow my journey into Twilight.