Our Vampires Show Up in the Mirror: Literary Responses to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
1882 political cartoon, San Francisco, California, depicting San Francisco landlords as vampire bats squeezing the rent out of tenants, enjoying a fine meal, then being taken by death and thrown into hell.
Content Warnings: This essay contains discussions of sexual assault, racism, xenophobia, and eugenics; some extremely 2000s images that include homophobic slurs, flippant mention of suicide and ableist language; and potentially disturbing imagery of stabbing and fire
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The year is 1888. The USA is in the throes of national troubles that may seem familiar today: economic depression, capitalist monopolies, an ever widening gap between the rich and poor and, subsequently, the rise of the labor movement. And for a brief blip of time, undoubtedly fueled by such national discussions, all the people wanted to talk about was a little novel called Looking Backward: 2000–1887.
Author Edward Bellamy had little going on pre-smash hit novel. He worked as a journalist and had previously written several non-genre novels to little acclaim. Only through his shift to science fiction did he find his big break. Though largely forgotten today, Looking Backward was enormously successful— the third bestselling novel of its age, behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur.
It follows a young man named Julian West, who falls into a hypnotically-induced sleep in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000 to a perfect and amazing socialist-but-Bellamy-didn’t-like-that- word, Nationalist-with-a-capital-N (unrelated to nationalism, lowercase) American society! That’s about as much plot as you’re getting. Bellamy was not really concerned with writing a page-turner— he was here to share his opinions.
Like all good sci-fi, Looking Backward came onto the scene ready to tackle the big questions. In particular, the novel grapples with society and human nature at its core. It was very much reacting to the aforementioned troubles of its time. The Gilded Age was dark and tumultuous, with little end in sight. The people wanted answers. How will humanity, animals that we are, ever be able to make a better world without exploiting each other?
Bellamy’s answer was simple: We all, just, kind of. Decide to not do that.
"On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, "there was absolutely no violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it. There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by argument.”
– Looking Backward, Chapter V
Society if we all just cut it out
Bellamy’s novel was, to put it kindly… not very prescient. Laughably naive in hindsight. But it told the people what they wanted to hear— radical enough to stir controversy, not so radical as to be, like, socialist or anything.
Looking Backward inspired a fervor across the nation, and internationally as well [1] . Bellamy’s novel gave birth to a nascent political movement, and Nationalist clubs filled with “Bellamyites” were birthed across the states.
Sequels and reactions poured in. In keeping with the nature of the original novel, most of such works were used as tools for activism before they were stories in and of themselves. Looking Backward was a rare novel, like the aforementioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that carried real political consequences (though much less than one would expect). But it also, more relevantly to my point here (I promise I have a point), birthed a whole lot of bizarre takes and science fiction tropes. We still live in the aftermath.
The result was a "battle of the books" that lasted through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th. The back-and-forth nature of the debate is illustrated by the subtitle of Geissler's 1891 Looking Beyond, which is "A Sequel to 'Looking Backward' by Edward Bellamy and an Answer to 'Looking Forward' by Richard Michaelis".
In 1890, Ignatius Donnelly wrote Caesar's Column, a brutal deconstruction of Bellamy’s silly far-flung vision of the future— which might’ve had a point about the oppression of the working class if it didn't have such a hard-on for justifying societal ills through eugenics.
Some wrote in-universe works of fiction. Some wrote sequels, following the wacky adventures of Julian West’s son. There were parodies poking holes in Bellamy’s flawless worldbuilding. One, published in 1997, claimed to be authored by Bellamy’s reincarnation.
Bellamy did not invent the Utopia, nor did he do it particularly well. But it didn’t matter, ultimately, the quality of the original work, nor any individual author’s feelings towards it. Science fiction writers, publishers, and readers for a short time post-Bellamy were like rock musicians in the 1960s— love or hate them, you’re probably still thinking about the Beatles.
Stories by their very nature are viral. They infect others, sneak in through the cracks. An artist cannot escape the pull of other works. Any attempts to create a work untouched by the influence of others would only end inscrutable, a modern Voynich Manuscript. Here, I want to examine a particular work, its own influences and how it would go on to turn others— like a certain brand of horror movie monster. A book that is not necessarily remarkable on its own, but for half a decade or more was inescapable through its gravitational pull.
In order to keep this within a doable scope, my focus will be on cultural reactions, especially focused on the online sphere, and resultant trends within traditional publishing. Certain novels will be given close readings, while others only mentioned in passing.
Would you look at the hour? It’s almost Twilight!
Before Twilight
Sometimes, when you’re a poor farmer in medieval Europe with little access to things like healthcare or books, your family members are going to die for one reason or another— and good luck figuring out what it may have been.
Even worse, after one person in the house goes, so do the others. And maybe your cows start dying, too, and the fields are blighted and you’re all so hungry that all this death and disease gets harder and harder to fight off, and without that gumption comes more death. What is there to do when times get this rough?
Well, maybe the only thing you can do is gather all your buddies and some shovels and disinter your loved ones. And when you finally dig them up, you may be dismayed to find something bloated with blood, long-haired and red-lipped where the visage of your loved one should be. And then there’s nothing you can do but stake it through the heart and try to move on.
Melancholia by Hendrick ter Brugghen
These are the humble origins of the modern vampire— an attempt to explain natural, tragic phenomena. The people of the past may not have had an understanding of decay or germ theory, but they understood simple cause and effect. If everything around you is falling apart, it might just be an undead revenant, rising from the grave every night to torment its former family.
The idea of a vampire targeting blood relatives was a common part of vampire lore that has since fallen by the wayside. Even into the late 1870s (when the only people still believing in vampires were those dirty backwards New Englanders) this idea is flirted with as just one of many vampire traits in J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, when our narrator learns she and her new definitely-human friend are descended from the same noble family.
It was a small picture, about a foot and a half high, and nearly square, without a frame; but it was so blackened by age that I could not make it out.
The artist now produced it, with evident pride. It was quite beautiful; it was startling; it seemed to live. It was the effigy of Carmilla! …
“And now you can read quite plainly the name that is written in the corner. It is not Marcia; it looks as if it was done in gold. The name is Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, and this is a little coronet over and underneath A.D. 1698. I am descended from the Karnsteins; that is, mamma was.”
“Ah!” said [Carmilla], languidly, “so am I, I think, a very long descent, very ancient.”
– Carmilla by J.Sheridan le Fanu, Chapter V - A Wonderful Likeness
By le Fanu's time, vampires had become a part of literary canon. The idea of vampires as mindless undead beasts— more equivalent to our modern zombies— had fallen out of fashion. Now, vampires were aristocratic. Beautiful and alluring, like Lord Ruthven in John Pollidori’s The Vampyre. Their nature changed. The vampire had become someone you thought you could trust— with fatal consequences.
Who could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and toils to recount—could speak of himself as of an individual having no sympathy with any being on the crowded earth, save with her to whom he addressed himself… in fine, he knew so well how to use the serpent's art, or such was the will of fate, that he gained her affections.
– "The Vampyre" by John Polidori
Of course, all these earlier works pale in comparison to the bombshell dropped in 1897— a little book you might’ve heard of, called Dracula.
The effect Dracula had on vampire fiction is incomparable. This mf is the vampire— you know it, I know it. Quite possibly every modern image pop culture has of vampires has its origins in this novel or one of its many, many adaptations. Vampires killed by sunlight? Comes from Nosferatu, an unlicensed German adaptation. We got the garlic, the cape, the three brides, Transylvania, Van Helsing and all vampire hunters that came after him. It drew on the old tropes, but was undeniably modern— a true Victorian novel. Like Looking Backward, Dracula posits the idea that science, and scientific thinking, is the way forward— the way to kill the vampire.
Vampire II by Edvard Munch
The uncomfortable subtext of Dracula is the change in fears the vampire represents. The novel is distinctly xenophobic and antisemitic— literally a story about a foreign man spreading disease to London shores. Public fears at the time were often focused on so-called “reverse colonialism” — that what Imperialism had done to the Other would soon be done to them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
– The War of the Worlds by H.G Wells, Chapter I. The Eve of the War
Coupled with the xenophobia came another racist fear that has persisted long after the racial (and, especially in Carmilla’s case, queer) coding of the monster has been softened: the vampire as a sexual predator. Because, of course, fear of foreign men always comes with a moral panic for the sake of the sweet innocent Anglo-Saxon woman. In general, the novel yo-yos back and forth, between an earnest sexual desire and repulsion for the vampire. The subtext in how Dracula pursues Mina is unmistakable.
With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.
– Dracula, Chapter XXI
Later works would take these ideas, even out that push and pull of Stoker’s writing (Victorians, amiright?) and have the vampire transformed from an object of fear to an object of desire, and use this same metaphor to show sexual liberation. The danger, and the beauty, to be found in covetous desire.
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
Twilight has nothing to do with any of this.
Twilight
I’ve never been in love with a vampire before, so why do I feel like I have? It seems I am yet another victim of American author Stephenie Meyer. Her weapon of choice? Her debut novel, Twilight, a sensual, inspired, young adult romance, has been widely described as “a vampire story for people who don’t like vampire stories.”
Stephanie Meyer never read vampire books. This she will admit to. But every break-out Young Adult author needs a mythos, of course!
The story goes that in 2003, she had a dream about a girl in love with a boy who wanted to kill her. A boy whose skin sparkled like diamonds. This was the birth of her magnum opus. Just like that!
It was two people in kind of a little circular meadow with really bright sunlight, and one of them was a beautiful, sparkly boy and one was just a girl who was human and normal, and they were having this conversation. The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I'd be dreaming about vampires, and he was trying to explain to her how much he cared about her and yet at the same time how much he wanted to kill her.
The book, soon turned series, was immensely popular. Twilight-mania burned hot and bright— a flash in the pan, with the black grit of nostalgia and critical evaluations still bubbling at the bottom today. Everyone was expected to have an opinion on Twilight. Even people who hadn’t read it. Children, the elderly, the illiterate. Babies born from 2008-2012 were assigned Team Edward or Jacob upon exiting the cervix.
My own experience with the franchise was limited. I never saw the movies (I didn’t watch movies), but I was a very active reader. I had access to all of the books. They were just there… sitting on my mom’s bookshelf. So, I read Twilight. Then, I was on a roll, so I read New Moon, too.
I remember very little, if any, of the impression the story left on me. I read them at a time before I had learned to critically engage with anything I read or watched, so I didn’t have the language or inclination to either hate or love them. I wasn’t even invested enough to be one of those baby gays that really, really liked Alice.
Moreso, I felt… something creeping and uncomfortable being seen reading the books in public. No one ever said anything unkind, but there was judgement hanging thick in the air, real or imagined— maybe from my peers, maybe from my teachers, maybe from the world.
The Twilight backlash was arguably more powerful than its fandom. With all the buzz, it was naturally going to attract haters. And it did.
Another subset of Twilight readers characterize themselves as “anti-Twilight,” or haters. Generating haters has become unavoidable for any cultural phenomenon nowadays. However, the visibility of Twilight haters is unusually high. Facebook groups such as “Twilight sucks” or “I hate Twilight” have attracted several hundred thousand members each, a degree of unpopularity not achieved even by hyper-mediatized popstars (Lady Gaga, the Kardashians) and unheard of for a book series.
– Twilight Haters: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Internet Popular “Hatedom” by Lucie Bernard
The haters were out in full force, with contributions so vast and passionate they were… basically just fans, really. They kept up with news, they posted about the series constantly, made memes and demotivational posters, riffed and analyzed the work line-by-line (a practice once known as “sporking”).
While many of the people making and propagating anti-Twilight content were merely blindly hating upon something they refused to engage with, there was a significant proportion of people actively consuming what the series had to offer (but, like in an evil way).
So, everyone told me that I would love Twilight. And in the midst of a grad-school storm of procrastination-related crazy, I tried it. I read all four books. Multiple times… Twilight was the worst thing I had ever consumed. Ever.
Most of this hater-made content has aged poorly. Such righteous anger at a book series that dares to be— gasp! —bad. In hindsight, this backlash reads as childish misogyny, a knee-jerk praising of male-dominated horror over a franchise beloved primarily by teenage girls (and their moms).
Whenever I hear this stupid shit regurgitated in modern day (because it is still the dominant narrative, make no mistake), I feel defensive for Twilight's sake— I become a white knight, defending the honor of this poor, maligned book. Which is a problem, because Twilight fucking sucks.
There has been enough reappraisal of the Twilight backlash, and the role misogyny played in it, that there has been a backlash to this reexamination. Not everything bad said about the series was invalid! There were people making good faith criticisms back in the day. And certainly, there are plenty of valid criticisms to be had now. It is, after all, a book with a deeply Christian conservative viewpoint that was and is marketed to an impressionable teen readership. The series is also, like, super racist. [2]
A brief example with some concrete numbers: the paleness of either Bella or Edward’s skin is mentioned roughly 13 times in the first four chapters. This is not coincidental. The book operates under the assumption— never stated, but felt in the air— that whiteness equals attractiveness, desirability.
But the Lord said unto him: “Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
What was that mark? It was a mark of blackness. That mark rested upon Cain and descended upon his posterity from that time until the present. To day there are millions of the descendants of Cain through the lineage of Ham, in the world, and that mark of darkness still rests upon them.
Indigenous characters are exoticized in their descriptions and, through their status as werewolves, portrayed as animalistic and impulsive. This slots neatly both into colonialist narratives of Native American people (as savages in contrast to Good Christian whites) and more modern forms of racist caricature, in which Native Americans are inherently magical and powerful, more “in tune” with nature— portrayals that turn them into symbols and props, rather than people.
In regards to real life, the beliefs of the Quileute tribe (a real group that really exists right now) were outright ignored and replaced with legends of Stephanie Meyer’s own imaginings. Doing such a thing, and for as silly a purpose as furthering the plot in your vampire romance novel, speaks to a deep lack of respect— and a whole lot of fucking gall.
While there is certainly some discussion of these aspects of the series to be found written at the height of the franchise’s popularity, they did not bleed into the larger, Twilight Sucks culture. You will be hard pressed to find an impact font meme mocking Meyer for her tone deaf appropriation of Quileute culture.
But you know what you will find?
I could perhaps forgive this if Twilight was merely poorly written with an uncompelling narrator. By the time I got to the fourth book, Breaking Dawn, I realized these books were an unwitting assault on any ambition a woman may have in this world outside marriage and children.
Another question often looms large in more nuanced Twilight discussions: is Bella a good role model for young, impressionable girls? Is the series feminist? If not, is it the fault of the book itself, or are anti-feminist ideals baked into the groundwork of the entire romance genre? Can you be “woke” and also like Twilight? If there were two women on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock, would that be fucked up or what?
I am not going to give this part of the culture war much time or energy, because it makes me want to bash my head against a wall, but it will be relevant throughout. Feminist media critique is a vast subject with decades of academic research behind it. But, to grossly over-simplify— feminist is a lens you view a piece of media through, not an innate quality a work contains.
Also, why is this damn conversation always framed around “role models”? If I wanted good role models, I’d look in a post office, not a book. Stories are where you go to watch weird women stab cops in the eye. Jesus. Fuck these books. Everyone on every side of this argument is stupid. Who cares? Why am I writing this?
no movie is feminist except, of course, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion
Ultimately, Twilight is a story in which love is a black hole. Love is predestined, and it is in your best interest not to fight, but to succumb to its endless embrace. It falls flat whenever it pokes at something more complex than this. It falls flat when it tries to engage with real complexity, with true monsterhood. The vampires don't even eat people! And so desperate is the series overall to leave no character unloved, it hooks up an adult man with a baby.
I cannot emphasize how much a baby was fallen in love with.
Despite how batshit it can get, there is not much fun that can be had with a black hole. It can only do one thing. Consume.
But if there’s anything pop music has taught me, it’s that love is whatever the hell you want it to be in any given moment. So, let’s finally see what other writers did with the cottage industry that sprung up around the little vampire book that could.
The Repackagings
Okay, listen, the thing is— you guys, writing books is really hard. And if I (a publisher) want to ape on a new trend, that might mean that I might have to like, buy some new titles, maybe take risks with unproven authors. And no matter how half we ass the editing and marketing, it’s still going to take minimum six months, more likely a year or two, to get that bad boy to print— the publishing machine is slow.
And I (the publisher) like money, and I like easy money. So, before we get out any new hot teen paranormal romance novels, I’m going to unlock the cages I keep the graphic designers in, throw them a bone and a copy of Photoshop CS3 and have them make some new covers for titles already under our thrall in our catalog.
The design and aesthetic of the Twilight Saga, and especially that first book cover, had maybe more of an influence on the publishing industry than the story itself. It’s sparse, Gothic colors. The simplistic photo manipulation, on-the-nose visual symbolism— these were all elements that the imitators latched onto and reproduced with all their might. One can sniff a Twilight imitation from a thrift store bookshelf a mile away.
The Vampire Diaries is a book series written by LJ Smith, starting in the early ‘90s. The series shares superficial similarities to Twilight— a normal human girl in love with a vampire, a love triangle. Written before Twilight (and some other fantasy novels) made YA books into door stoppers, the books were short and snappy, more akin to the pulp of yore than the melodrama to come.
The series was licensed by the CW and, in 2009, very loosely adapted into a long-running television series of the same name. The books, of course, were also republished. In order to replicate the long-winded trend, several books were put into one volume. This was also done with LJ Smith’s other vampire series, Night World.
We used to have culture…. and free glow-in-the-dark stickers…
But what if you needed a book to look shorter? What if you wanted to repackage a book originally aimed at adults?
One day, I found one of the more obviously low-priority cash grabs of this period. It was a compilation of female-led vampire stories, originally published in 1987. It was an old library copy, with the label indicating a local middle school. From the list of authors, I assumed it to have originally been made for adults.
How did they make this into something that could sit on the shelves of a children’s library? This book has Carmilla in it— Carmilla is pretty long for a short story compilation, nearly a hundred pages. How did they do it?
Easy. Make the text small.
What is this, a font for ants?
There are only so many pre-existing works that can be re-tooled in this way, however. Eventually, the publishers were going to have to let loose the slush pile. They were going to have to produce new material— and a “new” genre to go with it.
Paranormal Romance
Through the phone, Luce could hear Roman Holiday playing in the background on Callie’s tiny TV. Luce’s favorite scene had always been the one where Audrey Hepburn woke in Gregory Peck’s room, still convinced the night before had all been a dream. Luce closed her eyes and tried to picture the shot in her mind. Mimicking Audrey’s drowsy whisper, she quoted the line she knew Callie would recognize: “There was a man, he was so mean to me. It was wonderful.”
– Fallen by Lauren Kate, Chapter Five: The Inner Circle (emphasis mine)
Contrary to popular belief, Meyer did not invent the paranormal romance genre. Books about romancing the monster had been around for decades, and had even been experiencing a much smaller wave of popularity shortly before Twilight’s publication. Most existed as a subset of more evergreen genres, like romance or urban fantasy, and were written for, well. Adults.
But the main business of the day is bloodlust, with an emphasis on the lust. Romance authors--and who can blame them?--find it hard to resist the imagery. Women are "impaled," "scream to wake the dead" and constantly experience a rushing of blood.
This would not last long. By the height of the wave, every Barnes and Noble in the United States (and beyond, probably) had retrofitted their burgeoning Young Adult sections with a new category, at once niche and all-encompassing: Paranormal Romance.
Any supernatural creature was up for grabs in those days. There were, of course, more vampires and werewolves. But there were also at least two distinct fallen angel romances— not to mention the witches, telepaths, Cthulhu, cursed tiger princes… anything you could ever want.
What a weird phenomenon! I feel as if it can’t be overstated. Twilight is such an odd, singular novel: it wears its heart on its sleeve, and Meyer is always eager to talk about her influences, in interviews or the book itself.
I lay on my stomach, crossing my ankles in the air, flipping through the different novels in the book, trying to decide which would occupy my mind most thoroughly. My favorites were Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
– Twilight, Chapter 7. Nightmare
[Orson Scott Card]’s sort of my favorite writer [3] who’s alive. My favorite-favorite is probably Jane Austen.
Twilight is filled with so many little idiosyncrasies— these are what personally have softened the story to me. Bella’s cynical, too-adult narration, the clunky and sometimes inaccurate Google research, the story’s bizarre structure. The novel is almost allergic to conflict in a way that is compelling and frustrating: there is tension over the inclusion of tension.
But then, these things got swept up into the genre, stirred in a big melting pot. There is a gloomy (but not emo) white teenage girl, there is a brooding Byronic hero with a dark secret. He is controlling and pushy, but it is only because he loves her so much. She can change him, and the power of love will save them from whatever thinly-plotted antagonist that threatens the world. Reading paranormal romance invokes the sensation of eating a pre-chewed meal.
I read several for this project and, to be quite honest… I don’t really remember much. This is where my limitations as a guide start becoming clear: the whole appeal of these sorts of books is foreign to me. I’m missing the cornerstone on which this scaffolding is built. I have no desire to shit on most of them, even recreationally.
And I think this is why you see a lot of girls feeling drawn to the Edward Cullen character, for all his high-handed fuckwittery, because this is someone who is willing to take it slowly. In fact, you can push him as much as you want--you can push it all the way to the edge of how far you're willing to go--and he's still not going to give in. It's liberating for the shy or inexperienced (right up until the point it becomes frustrating as all hell): Edward's the training wheels on your bike.
Jokes about bad faith feminist discourse notwithstanding… these books are harmless. Even in an upcoming section, in which I rip an outwardly innocuous book’s head clean from its stump, it is not from any sense of justice. Harmful ideas propagate in fiction all the time (we live in a society, you see). No individual book is going to convince someone of something they didn’t already, on some level, believe.
Fiction is a space of feelings beyond logic. Fiction can tug on the heartstrings, but it will not change the world on its own. This is for better, and for worse. Writing is not activism, and only politics will affect politics. Looking Backward had all the power and influence a fictional story can have, and the best we got were a scattered number of idealist societies insisting that we should do something about the bad things in the world. It inspired individual people to act. It could not, and never could have, made the society Bellamy so clearly desired.
No, Twilight (nor its imitators) did not and will not “teach” teenage girls to be passive and submissive to the whims of controlling men. Twilight will not make you racist (though it's certainly not going to do the opposite). That’s what real life is for. Because we live in a—
We know the genre is trite, that it’s silly and dated (but not as dated as those teen dystopias, yikes). But there has to be something there, right? Something that keeps it alive in the eyes of pop culture, even as a whipping boy. Something that compels me to waste a literal year of my life writing this damn essay.
The formula is well and ground down. But not every book that rode the Twilight wave was content to follow it exactly. Some brave souls dared venture into territory untreaded, taking only what they desire from their inspiration and leaving the rest as bones in the desert. To… mixed results.
Marked
Okay. Okay. No more niceties. No more white knighting, no more getting defensive and attempting to speak carefully about a book too many people have shat on for the wrong reasons. It’s time to go for blood.
Marked is the first novel in the House of Night series by PC and Kirsten Cast, a mother-daughter duo of writers. It is, from a marketing standpoint, brilliant. It slots itself neatly into two of the biggest YA trends of its time— magical boarding schools (why? who knows) and Twilight (vampires…but sexy).
The protagonist is Zoey, a young woman who, in the first pages of the novel, is “marked” as a vampyre— yes, with a Y— and sent away to boarding school: the eponymous House of Night. It is a simple novel, the first building block in a dizzyingly overwrought series about the most special-est girl in the world. It’s as if every mean-spirited YA parody coalesced into a real book. It’s rancid.
I really tried to approach the books read for this project in good faith. My fascination with the YA genre is in part because I’ve always disliked it, felt separate and distant from a sprawling, massive industry that most people of my generation seem to enjoy to this day.
When reading, I tried to imagine myself as a teenager, the sort of person who would pick up a vampire book at 15 and look for solace in it. And the House of Night, I suppose, gives teenagers what they want. It caters to their worst impulses.
It is bigoted and judgemental beneath a veneer of respectability— of token minority quirky friends and Native American mysticism and a benevolent “matriarchal” society. It is filled with blunt and dated pop culture references, constant slang and quippy one-liners, and a not-even hidden disgust of other, lame vampire stories. These ones are so cool, we spell it with a Y!
Our protagonist is outcast enough to feel separate from the high school elite, but not so odd as to be "one of those freaky Goth kids who didn’t like to bathe much." She is judgemental from the moment go, insulting her supposed friend from the second line of the novel. Utterly charming— the sort of person who denounces swearing while casually dropping the r-word.
She has parents who just don’t understand her (do you reader, also feel misunderstood? Don’t you wish you could just be whisked off to a cool vampire boarding school?). She has a squad of instantly adoring friends and has a cool older guy fall in love with her due to her… [insert character trait here] [4] . Within the first forty pages, she is revealed to be so very special, chosen by the goddess Nyx because of her Cherokee bloodline.
Within you is combined the magic blood of an ancient Wise Woman and Elders.
– Marked, Chapter Five
Admittedly, I think there is maybe something okay to be done, with an element of Zoey attempting to connect with her culture as a means to connect with her grandmother, who she loves dearly. But this is overshadowed by the weird latent ideas that run through this book as a constant undercurrent. What the hell is up with this book and eugenics.
“Wanta hear my theory about how my generation could single-handedly wipe out slugs and loser kids from America?" [The horse] seemed receptive, so I launched into my Don't Procreate with Losers speech.…
–Marked, Chapter Fourteen
The little seed of weakness or wickedness has been carefully nursed by society, generation after generation, until it has blossomed at last in this destructive monster. Civilization has formulated a new variety of the genus homo--and it must inevitably perpetuate its kind.
– Caesar’s Column by Ignatius Donnelly
Let's back up, shall we? In 1859, Charles Darwin published a little book you might’ve heard of: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
The Origin of Species is not unlike Twilight, in regards to its explosive spread and popularity[5]. But this was not fiction. Instead of influencing genre and publishing trends[6], this theory of evolution would go on to radically alter both the scientific and social world. Natural selection was an observable explanation for things that had seemed impossibly incongruous, and had puzzled the scientific world since its inception.
Selective (aka artificial) breeding by way of animals, such as dogs and pigeons, was a well-established industry in Darwin’s time. The theory was that such a phenomenon also occurred at a much slower, subtler rate in nature. Heritable traits that benefit an animal’s niche would be passed down as that animal successfully reproduced, and non-beneficial traits would eventually die out. Through this, over a long enough length of time, new species would be able to branch off from a common ancestor.
Some people then took this theory as an excuse to be immeasurably evil.
Pay no mind, person scrolling really quickly… I am a normal essay…
Eugenics is a belief system that operates on a misunderstanding of natural selection. It posits that humanity would be improved by artificial breeding— by removing so-called unsavory traits from the breeding pool. The flip side being, as Caesar's Column above explains to us, that letting people (code: the poor) breed and marry indiscriminately will somehow damage the fabric of humanity itself.
And what does society deem unworthy? Racialized traits, queerness, disability, among others. What is considered undesirable is decided by the arbiter— whoever may so happen to be in power at any given time. And in order to further deepen this power, it is convenient for proponents of eugenics to connect any and all traits to biology. Have you committed a crime? Are you outspoken against the powers that be? Well, of course it had nothing to do with your own decisions or any human rights violations we may have foisted upon you or your loved ones. It’s all in your bloodline— which, according to this theory, it would be a moral good to eliminate.
In the 19th-century, these ideas really, really took root in Europe and America. Like, more than you or I will ever really be able to comprehend. This is not ancient history, and it is far from gone from the public consciousness. It was public policy across the US for decades, and under the guise of Progressive ideas and public health, racist laws restricted or banned immigration, the “mentally deficient” or “degenerate” were denied marriage, and thousands were forcibly sterilized.
Like most evils, eugenicist thought manifests in outwardly benign ways. There are brutal, negative measures that can be taken—euthanasia, genocide, forced sterilization— but there are also positive measures, too. These encourage the pre-chosen “ideal” to reproduce. Again, there comes the misunderstanding of natural selection. If the systems we live under put pressure on the poor, the disabled, any one out of the norm, and pushes them to an early death, or sequestered miserable lives— it’s not due to human hands, it’s nature working as intended.
Marked takes an ideology inextricable from white supremacy and puts a cute little coat of diverse paint over it. Not only does the novel operate on the logic that Zoey’s bloodline is what caused her to be “chosen” (and therefore the main character), it runs throughout the entire worldbuilding this story is loosely scaffolded onto. In the House of Night, vampirism is presented as a great equalizer, a system in which only the “best” and “worthy” emerge.
“She was what all vampyres are, more than human— stronger, smarter, more talented”.
– Marked, Chapter Six
There are no fat vampires. There are no lazy vampires. There are no ugly vampires. Those who do not measure up merely die. And those left alive do not have to suffer any guilt. It’s simply the natural order.
As he spoke I felt better about Elizabeth's death. Suddenly it didn't seem so scary, so horrible. It seemed more like a part of the natural world, a world that we all had a place in.
– Marked, Chapter Fifteen
Our main antagonists of this story are a group of evil sluts (the book's words, not mine), led by the beautiful blonde Aphrodite. They are evil partially because Zoey hates women so much, but also because they have the gall to say the quiet part out loud. They are callous, and maybe even actively approving, of letting humans and lesser vampyres die. But not Zoey. Sure, she’ll refer to our token homophobic fat character as a slug, and go on and on about how it would be better if he didn’t breed— but it’s not like she’d want him to die or anything!
“If we were humans we'd call it survival of the fittest. Thank the Goddess we're not humans, so let's just call it Fate, and be happy tonight that it didn't kick any of our asses.”
I was totally grossed out to hear sounds of general agreement. I hadn't really known Elizabeth, but she'd been nice to me. Okay, I admit that I hadn't liked Elliott—no one had. The kid was annoying and unattractive … but I was not glad he died.
Euthanasia saw marginal support in the U.S., motivating people to turn to forced segregation and sterilization programs as a means for keeping the "unfit" from reproducing.
There’s probably an entire essay in and of itself to unpack this aspect of the novel— which presumably continues on into the rest of the books? I wouldn’t know. And I will admit, once you know how eugenicist ideas populate in fiction, you will find them everywhere. I just didn’t expect to find them here. This was supposed to be a silly essay about dumb vampires! What the fuck!
Let’s move on to lighter-ish topics. Did I mention how much Zoey hates women?
Pictured: a woman
While Twilight is implicitly sex-negative, what with its clunky abstinence metaphors and Mormon attitude, it’s got nothing on the House of Night. It’s constant. It’s so overblown. It’s hypocritical as all hell, considering the obvious purpose of these books is to present a fantasy of being constantly pursued by a levy of hot boys. But if you have any interest in sex at all, you’re a slut.
Kinda like those girls who have sex with everyone and think that they’re not going to get pregnant or a really nasty STD that eats your brain and stuff. Well, we’ll see in ten years, won’t we?
– Marked, Chapter Five
"Do these people ever marry?" I inquired.
"Marry!" he exclaimed, with a laugh; "why, they could not afford to pay the fee required by law. And why should they marry? There is no virtue among them. No," he said, "they had almost gotten down to the condition of the Australian savages, who, if not prevented by the police, would consummate their animal-like nuptials in the public streets."
– Oh hey Caesar's Column, what are you doing here again?
Pictured: women
Our main mean girl is introduced to us by giving a blowjob in the hallway. We are supposed to hate her for this. And, like, the book does establish a legitimate reason to hate her in this scene— in how she pressures and assaults our male love interest. But never is this aspect remarked upon. It’s all about the sex. And also, later, smoking weed.
Of course there are girls who think it’s “cool” to give guys head. Uh, they’re wrong. Those of us with functioning brains know that it is not cool to be used like that.
– Marked, Chapter Seven
Even weirder, the story later spends time on having the love interest make amends for daring to be assaulted, insisting to Zoey that he’s “not like that” in a bizarre gender-invert rape apologia spiral. It’s rotten all the way down.
Okay, but we’re DIFFERENT
It may be relevant to note that Twilight hatedom is composed of unusually high numbers of people thinking of themselves as authors.
– Twilight Haters: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Internet Popular “Hatedom” by Lucie Bernard
Here is the part where I feel the need to mention that I wrote what, in some ways, could be construed as an “anti-Twilight” novel. I’m not Ophelia is the whole reason this essay exists, as I try my best to engage with particularly relevant or influential parts of any genre I happen to write in. InO is part-retelling of a classic vampire story and part-deconstruction of paranormal romance… and thus, I had to learn how the sausage was made.
I will not be analyzing InO in this section, since— just as it has been since time immemorial— authors don’t know shit about their own books.
She had just clicked on something. As I approached, it finished loading. It was a black webpage with red and white text. The Hidden Truth About Vampires.
“Are you a Twihard for real now?” I put my hands on my hips.
“No!” Diana gasped and covered her face.
I sighed. “That was a joke, Di.”
– I’m not Ophelia by Oscar Engel, Chapter Five: Broken Mirror
I feel I must state this, not only to put my own cards on the table, but also to make this next bit even more clear: I could not find any anti-Twilight novels. I was shocked and bewildered that I could not track down any contemporaneous hater-penned novel. Where were my predecessors, my contemporaries, my people?
The hatedom has always been keen on propping up other works as examples of "better" or "correct" vampire stories. But the vast majority of these predate Twilight’s publication and therefore don't belong in this retrospective [5] . Things like 30 Days of Night (bad) or Buffy (haven’t seen it, you can’t make me) were cited as obviously superior vampire representation, often with little commentary on either works.
I was anticipating something that may exist— a book that the hatedom would be able to cherish and claim as a product of one of their own, or at least use to piss off the Twihards in an edgelord gory way. But no such luck.
There was a general vampire boom in Twilight's wake, unrelated (or at least broader) than the paranormal romance wave. Some books within this space could be argued to occupy an anti-Twilight position— the gory, the masculine, in contrast to Twilight's feminine mystique. Examples of this ilk include The Strain, a long-term passion project from director Guillermo del Toro that was first published as a book explicitly because of the demand for vampire novels, and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which was also aping off the concurrent trend of mashups in the Pride, Prejudice and Zombies-style.
There were also parodies, such as Nightlight and Vampires Suck. But there’s not terribly much to say about low-rent parodies. Their existence is a result of the bizarre labyrinth that is American copyright law, which is extremely unyielding to all but direct mockery. [6]
I will make you all watch this, anyways
It would’ve been in poor taste for major publishers to market a book by bad-mouthing another. There were some things within the indie press and self-pub spheres (and fanfiction, of course, though that is well beyond the scope of this essay), but— just as Pa-No-Ro-Mo is such an easy target, I am even less keen to punch down on a decade-old novel that made zero to little impact on larger culture.
More fundamentally, the Twilight hatedom was a reactionary movement. That’s why recommendations always came in the form of older media: things the members already liked. They’re not going to read, like, new books. New books are bad!
On TVTropes (a site I spent way too much time on as a wee highschooler), there exists a trope, a phrase, an ideology: Our Vampires are Different. As I have gone on far too long about, the vampire genre is inclined to evolution and, as is especially prevalent in horror in general, often bends itself to the whims of the wider culture at the time. Vampires are disease when your biggest worry is disease, vampires are immigrants and invaders in a xenophobic age, vampires are rich, because, well… you read the opening [7] . In clearly delineating the abilities and nature of your vampires, you tell the reader, implicitly, what your monster is here to do, or to represent.
Twilight is the defining vampire story of its era, but it is not horror. The function of the vampire in Twilight is that of a romantic object, one whose indiscretions, whose monstrous nature serves as a tantalizing (but never indulged) temptation. It is the specific purity fantasy of one Mormon housewife.
A rare, pre-movie piece of art
A tension exists in Twilight: a thirst for blood that is never satisfied. The story twists itself into knots to conspire to get Edward to do the thing he doesn’t want to do: go apeshit. And yet… he never does. Even in the climax of the novel, Edward’s slip into his vampire nature while feeding on Bella’s blood does not lead to any lasting consequences— nothing so meaningful as to overturn the status quo in a way that cannot be reversed. It hesitates at the critical moment. Bella should have become a vampire in the first novel: it is the natural conclusion to the both of their arcs.
Okay, but we’re different: Meyer is unaware of the appeal of her work. I (the faceless mass of Twilight haters who considers themselves writers) am not like that. I’m different. I’m better, and so is my hypothetical book.
I do not think the Casts, in writing the House of Night, meant to blindly regurgitate racist and sexist ideas— fiction has a nasty way of revealing preconceptions that run so deep, you as the author will never be able to see it if not for the tapestry you have woven. Prejudice is a sticky web, and (especially in genre fiction spaces) is often woven into storytelling itself.
Here’s the thing: in the act of voicing your story, you are creating a monster. It does not matter whether you know the monster exists or not. In an optimal situation, the author is savvy enough to recognize the implications of their story and world, and is able to shape it accordingly.
Stories that cater to romantic and sexual fantasies, especially those of heterosexual women, are moralized endlessly. Over and over, it is said that these sorts of brooding, domineering men will lead to a world of defenseless women, cowed into submission through their reading habits in teenage years. Well, brave haters, what are you going to do about it?
If what people write on the internet is to be believed, this is serious. This is war. The fate of swathes of theoretical teenagers hangs in the balance! A Twilight hater in 2010 puts themself to sleep with thoughts of hordes of soldiers destroying the faggot vampires before they dare snatch up their sweet innocent Anglo-Saxon women.
Ladies and Gentlemen of Anti-Twilight-Only; I love war.
I love how the hot metal rains down on the sleeping towns. I love it as we trample the sparkly trash beneath our boots. I love how we shoot down the enemy Swans as we travel to the fork in the road. I love walking passed [sic] the town that was bombed during the time of Twilight. I love releasing our wolves upon the harmless puppies of the enemy.
Gentlemen, let us wage war, and we shall be around for the next war, and the war beyond that war, and the next war, and the next.
And yet, they never did wage that war, let the monster free— not as any novel I could find, at least.
What’s the next thing you (a hater) can do, then?
One would think that analyzing fiction would be a passive act, compared to writing fiction. That one would be able to sit content in their ivory tower, recline in an armchair and quilted smoking gown next to a roaring fire and send off their missives from on high. Well, one would be WRONG. Fiction is violence. Stories exist to tear through the skin, to burrow into your emotional marrow, and the act of analysis will always, always leave some part of you on the vivisection table. If writing is to birth a monster, a squirming creature with your face and soul, and publishing is to let that thing be taken out of your power, then engaging with the monster will always feed it. Whether you choose to cast stones or to embrace the monster, some part of your nature will be revealed in the act.
No, This should've looked like this: "My light brown hair drifts through the wind as I drive away. It usually does that, as its always messy and never tame. I look at myself in the small mirror in my car; I see a person with blue eyes and full red lips. That person had a little acne, but just enough to drive her crazy sometimes. Shes quiet to the people that she just met, but her friends know that shes the most fun loving person. Her hair was a mess, like always. The person was smiling slightly back at me. She was familliar. Like the face I saw everyday in the mirror." Now you atleast have an image. Or you dont. Y U NO use your imagination? And please, make me look pretty.
By now, paranormal romance is old news. There are no more dedicated displays set up at Barnes & Noble, no more big shiny movie deals or CW series. In the immediate wake of the trend, the big splash that paranormal romance made was overblown by the next big thing teenagers were into: science fiction dystopias. Our poor maligned vampires never really recovered. Books published were down to a trickle by 2013, and unheard of even two years after that.
bella was lucky she didn’t have a cell phone of any kind because you know ya boi edward would be blowing up that phone 24-7 going “saw a snail today…. effervescent” or some shit equivalent
But these things never truly die, do they? Passionate readers of paranormal romance will always find their niche, especially with the modern explosion of self-publishing. And now, the time is ripe for nostalgia: the 20 Year Rule has come for the 2000s. Online, a movement known as the Twilight Renaissance is booming. People who read Twilight as a child or teen are returning to the series with a critical eye— a light-hearted acknowledgment of the series’ flaws, and a desire to not only clown on, but improve upon it.
A not-insignificant amount of the Twilight Renaissance crew are people who grew up with the series and who came back to it gayer than ever. Queer readings, reexaminations, and fanfiction of Twilight are resurging in popularity. And why shouldn’t they? Vampires are inherently queer, and have been since they were established in the literary canon.
In the world of traditional publishing, trends have changed a lot in fifteen years. We’re long past the days when a Young Adult novel can get away with being quite so fuckin weird about minorities like Twilight and Marked were (or, at least, not so overtly). Collective trends have pushed more and more demand for representation and diversity, both in regards to the contents of the books and those writing them. The Young Adult market has particularly evolved to cater to this demand.
I recall being very concerned about representation in media as a teenager. I am not the only one— it’s a natural reaction. You reach the age where you start to notice the cracks in the scaffolding around you, and you want to do something about it. Unfortunately, you are also a dumb kid (though you probably don’t know that yet) who is mostly concerned with drawing anime fanart and reading TVTropes pages. Narrowing in on representation trends is a balm— it is a good thing to care about, and a good means of examining biases. It makes you feel important.
The publishing industry has noticed this, of course. That first-gen of Tumblr “Representation Matters!” SJW’s have grown into authors and artists in their own right, and a new generation with similar desires are eager to buy books that are made with them in mind. And publishing loves it when you buy books. You should totally buy more books— that’ll end racism.
The Lost Girls
The Lost Girls: A Vampire Revenge Story is a novel by Sonia Hartl, published in 2021. It’s about Holly Liddell, a girl who fell in love with a sexy vampire, was turned by said sexy vampire… and then, a couple decades later, got dumped. The story revolves around Holly discovering that her ex is, in fact, a serial predator. He’d turned two girls before her, and now he’s looking to turn another. In the process of trying to stop him, Holly catches feelings for this newest victim— Parker.
More than any other book in this essay, Lost Girls exists in obvious conversation with paranormal romance tropes. Its very premise— and what a premise it is!— is based in subverting the conventions of the stories that came before it. What happens when it turns out that your vampire boyfriend is a shitbag? What happens when our normal girl protagonist becomes the monster in love?
There are a lot of interesting ideas inherent in the story, and I’m sad to say that Lost Girls doesn’t explore any of them in a satisfying way. I’m sorry! I really wanted to like it. It was going to be this whole thing, a neat little queer bow to wrap up my essay in…
First, some positives. The story isn’t cowardly when it comes to the main characters being vampires. They kill people, often without regret. Holly specifically kills sex pests, which is a nice little way to keep the protagonist a sympathetic killer, and ties in with the conceit that she’ll be killing her evil ex— an immortal serial womanizer. I liked the gore. The book is also, uh. Short. Occasionally, the jokes will land. The romance was compelling, at first.
But Lost Girls lost me right off the bat. When reading the plot summary, an interesting question arises: how does Holly meet these ex-girlfriends? Why hadn’t she heard of them before? There are many different ways to deal with this plot beat, many potential exciting possibilities for this meeting to happen— and the book goes with the cheapest one. On page five, they walk up to Holly and introduce themselves. In words. Very casually.
I gasped and took a step back. “Who are you?”
“We’re like you,” the other girl said. She looked maybe a year older than me, eighteen at most. Her dark hair hung just past her shoulders, styled with finger waves. She had a sharp chin and deep-brown eyes a century older than her physical age suggested. She also had fangs. “I’m Ida Radley. This is Rose Mackay.” She nodded to the petite girl beside her. “We were also made by Elton.”
– The Lost Girls, Chapter One
Straight up, this scene feels like a first draft that never got returned to. It is so abrupt, so early in the novel. It’s super boring— the setting is boring, the dialogue is boring. Any tension that may exist is blown over so quickly as to not matter. If there’s no discovery or mystery surrounding these girls existing, why not start the novel with them already having met?
The pacing in the book is all over the place. Characters speedrun their arcs, hitting plot beats but without any emotional weight behind it. Their relationships are dictated by the narration, not the other way around. Holly says she feels this way, so it must be true. Holly says that her evil ex still “had such an impossible hold over [her]” — but these feelings never alter her decisions, or deter her from her goal of killing him. Holly says that she has a found family with the other vampire girls (by page sixty-five), even if nothing has happened in the story so far to earn it.
The sun began to set behind the horizon, bringing the temperature down with it. Despite the difficulties we had ahead, we had this moment of calm. The three of us shouldn’t have been friends. We shouldn’t have even existed in the same time. But in these girls, I found something I hadn’t had in a really long time. Something that felt a lot like family.
– The Lost Girls, Chapter Seven
Any interesting conflict is clearly stated to us, rather than portrayed through the events in the story. Characters always say exactly how they feel— just like real life!
I flashed my fangs as I smiled, and she shuddered. The first sign of fear she’d shown around me. “I like you, Parker.”
“You do? Why?” She groaned and stared up at the ceiling. “I swear, I’m not begging for compliments. Could I possibly sound more pathetic?”
“You’re not pathetic.” I smiled to myself, once again struck by how much she reminded me of me. “I like that you’re self-aware, but you’re not an asshole about it. You seem kind, and not the fake kind where you’re trying to get recognition.”
– Normal Conversation To Have With Someone You Just Met (Chapter Nine)
Again, I tried to put myself in the mind of my teenage self when reading. And, quite frankly, I think I would’ve hated this more than Marked. It’s condescending. The over explanation goes far beyond just the dialogue and character motivations— there’s an absolutely painful scene right in the middle where all our characters sit in a circle and tell each other their sexualities, and the others reassure how cool and valid they all are. It made me feel like I’d walked into the Twilight Zone.
“Not me.” Ida waved her raised hand like class was in session and she really wanted an A in Not Sleeping with Mortals 101. “I’m still figuring myself out. And since I have all the time in the world, I’m in no rush. I don’t think I’m sexually attracted to anyone, but I’m romantically attracted to the idea of someone I haven’t met yet.”
And
“Who you’re into isn’t ever a factor.” Rose squeezed my hand. “There isn’t a litmus test or a certain number of boxes you have to tick. How you feel and who you are is yours. It’s not for anyone else to decide or question.”
– Wow, I feel so valid and represented right now 🥰 (Chapter Thirteen)
In the sex scene, this ham-fisted approach means that the narration has to keep on stopping and emphasizing that the characters consented before every little thing— this story’s about consent, you see, reader!
She led me over to the bed, kissing me as we both crawled onto the mattress. Sitting up on our knees, we touched and explored and got to know each other’s likes. Every few minutes, we’d stop to check in. I’d never felt safer.
– Chapter Twenty
pictured: gay sex
It feels, at best, that the book is speaking down to its readers. That it does not trust that the reader couldn’t figure out any meaningful distinction between Holly and Parker’s relationship and the abusive ex’s without spoon feeding us. At worst, it’s defensive. That the author needs to reassure us that yes, she knows that queer people are so, so uber valid and that consent is sooo super important you guys! Please don’t think I don’t know these things!
The dialogue is trying to be snappy, but it fails to convince me that any of these characters are human— or vampires, for that matter. Any possibly funny joke is hammered in one, two, three times until the punch is gone.
“That girl has serious issues.” Ida pulled a brain out of the refrigerator and plopped it down on some newspaper she’d spread out on the dining-room table.
How long the joke goes on for:
“That girl has serious issues.” Ida pulled a brain out of the refrigerator and plopped it down on some newspaper she’d spread out on the dining-room table. “There’s something not right in her head to make her act that way.” She took out a steak knife and began carving into the brain, setting aside the sections she’d cut away. “Are you sure something didn’t break in her when you did the transformation?”
“It’s not like she’s the only one with issues.” I eyed the pale and squirmy brain on the table. Even when I was furious with Stacey, I still felt the need to defend her.
“To whom are you referring?” Ida plunged her knife into a section of brain, held it up, and grinned as fluid ran down the blade and curled around her wrist.
– Chapter Twelve
And— I haven’t mentioned this because it wasn’t really relevant, but what is it with every single book that I’ve read for this project having some kind of disdain for goths? Who do you think reads these things? This one’s probably the worst in this regard, with the edgy goth teenagers being brutally killed and played for comedy. Which I maybe wouldn’t have cared about if the rest of the book had endeared me in any way!
In the arms of an angel~
The final thing that stuck in my mind is both the biggest, and maybe the pettiest: the implications of the ending. Spoilers, I guess? If you are interested in this book, you should give it a try. Don’t listen to me, I’m a dumb hater.
But, anyways, the end. The stakes of the story are set fairly early— in order to kill the girls’ ex, the process involved would end with all of them losing their memories of their human lives. Each of the girls have to deal with the implications of this, what they’d be leaving behind. Holly worries that losing her humanity would make her like her evil ex and his cronies— devoid of empathy.
The story ends with this happening, but on the note of the freedom within it— of no longer being held down with the baggage of the past, and being able to move forward. The book, as with everything else, tells us so.
“Regrets?”
“None.” She gave me one of her brilliant, brighter-than-the-sun smiles. “I guess that’s the one good thing about giving up my memories. I have nothing left to regret.”
That was how I chose to view it. Thirty-four years was long enough to pay for whatever mistakes I’d made. Without memories, without Elton, we all were blank slates. We could finally write our own stories and test who we’d be without him.
– Chapter Twenty-Eight
I’ll be frank— for a book so keen to impart good messages to its readers, I think this ending had dire implications. The book is trying to say that you should let go of the past. That you shouldn’t let old, bad relationships get you down, and that new ones are always on the horizon.
I had things worth fighting for now, and maybe it was time to let my past go, before it let me go.
– Chapter Seventeen
But taking into account the actual events, what the book really says is that, in order to live without the baggage of trauma, you need to totally excise it from yourself. In order to be their own people, the girls must forget everything about their abuser— become “blank slates”. Burn yourself in the fire, phoenix-like, and come out pure. Which, if you know anything about real-life, is impossible.
I think the idea that trauma is best dealt with by being forgotten is wrong on its face. The metaphor here is confused. In most circumstances, I wouldn’t care what this book is trying to “teach” its teenage readers— see the earlier ‘is Twilight feminist?’ rant— but this book has been very clear in its intention to illustrate the importance of leaving abusive relationships, of consent and how valid the reader’s feelings are (at the cost of telling a good story). So, why on earth would you end on a magical solution that, when charted onto real-life, is more analogous to suicide than a break-up?
Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
The book promises catharsis— the subtitle is ‘A Vampire Revenge Story’ for heaven’s sake! — but it doesn’t deliver. It dedicates itself to “every girl who has ever been punished for wanting to be loved”, but it fails to capture… what it feels like to want to be loved, to be lonely. The book insists, constantly, that Holly is conflicted by her decision to kill Elton— but she never acts like it. She doesn’t relapse, she doesn’t make mistakes or go soft on him, she doesn’t fantasize about him. Even the flashbacks to when she loved him are brief and undercut by how betrayed she feels in the present. There is no push and pull, no danger in her lingering emotional connection to him, no question about how this is going to end.
So, when Holly stands over Elton’s dying body and says point-blank, “Ending you has put my life back in my hands. I regret nothing.” — good for her I guess?
Conclusion
I touched his face. "Look," I said. "I love you more than everything else in the world combined. Isn't that enough?"
"Yes, it is enough," he answered, smiling. "Enough for forever."
And he leaned down to press his cold lips once more to my throat.
– Twilight, Epilogue: An Occasion
For someone who does not like young adult fiction, it sure does incite an awful lot of feeling within me. Most of it is anger, to be sure. It is a subject that I often feel the need to dance around, a narrow needle to thread. There are swathes and swathes of bad faith criticism surrounding the genre, and I am not keen to add onto the dogpile.
But I also have no desire to contribute to the pap, toxic positivity stance many avowed fans of the young adult, paranormal romance genres subscribe to: that is not only super valid to not think about art, but in fact it is the preferable stance.
In an attempt to explore some lighthearted nostalgia, I kept on circling around these ideas— about the nature of fiction, what it reveals, what it hides, and what it may say when no one is looking. The space that Twilight left in its wake was a hole that money was thrown into. These were books for girls, teenage girls nonetheless, and so there was no expectation for them to be analyzed: only to be read and swiftly forgotten (until it was time to read the twelve sequels). The books were never intended to be read deeply. This is not an inherent flaw, just part and parcel with their function. But that’s where my interest lay: to fit a square peg into a round hole, to stuff my stupid little brain into places it was never supposed to go. I hope it was fun. I hope we all had fun here.
I think readers, and especially young readers, deserve better. Something beyond the pandering mean-spiritedness of Marked or the cloying PSA-speak of Lost Girls. These books hold the hand of the young readership and positively beg them to not look deeper.
I was left behind by the young adult industry. Upon graduating to that age-demographic, I found myself trying to get through swathes of books that attempted to “relate” to me with portrayals of their “authentic” teen experiences— or to otherwise cater to raging hormones that I did not have. I went from a voracious, starry-eyed reader to someone who could barely get through the assigned high school reading. The only writing I latched onto were things that were very emphatically not meant for me— kind of like Twilight.
I didn’t write Twilight thinking, ”Oh, I will appeal to 16 year olds with this.” I don’t believe that you need to write down to teenagers.
A common trait that has survived through folklore and pop culture is the idea that a vampire does not appear in mirrors. It is shorthand to show the creature’s inhumanity— that they may wear a human face, they may be able to act the act and talk the right talk, but nothing of a human soul lies beneath. Isn’t that the scariest thing of all? To exist but never see yourself, to be reflected in nothing and no one.
To engage with a story may be a terror, but it has nothing on the alternative.
1. Besides the 400,000 American copies sold at its peak, Looking Backward was also translated into Chinese and Bulgarian— with contents significantly altered to fit their respective societies. ↩
2.For clarity’s sake: I have only personally read the first Twilight book, and watched the first movie for this project. With the exception of this section, when I speak of Twilight, I am talking about Book One, not the Saga as a whole. ↩
4. The set-up with the love interest is so flimsy I was convinced it would be revealed that he had no romantic feelings and was getting close to Zoey in order to enact a cruel betrayal… but nope lol. ↩
5. There were also these… wizard books the kids were into back then? They kept coming up, dunno why. ↩
6. In order to honor you, reader, for getting through my other bizarre tangents, I’ll keep my mouth shut about copyright law. This time. ↩
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