Forks Shadows

If you are not living with a pre-teen daughter this summer, or if there's a tween girl in your home, but your home is either located in the center of the earth or on a space station out in the Crab Nebula somewhere, it is possible that you have avoided the Twilight Series altogether. Or, as I have come to call it, "Forks Shadows".

You may not know that the fourth book in the series, Breaking Dawn was released to much excitement and a lot of high-pitched squealing at midnight on August 1st in book stores across the country (and, probably, across the galaxy).

However, if you've been blissfully unaware of this massive tremor in teen culture, I'll get you up to speed. The Twilight Series (written by Stephenie Meyer) is a Horror-Modern Gothic-Teen Romance between two high school juniors – Bella, daughter of the local police chief, and her 110 year old boyfriend, Edward, also a high school junior - set in Forks, Washington. If Edward's advanced age and lack of educational progress were not enough to make him poor dating material, he's also a vampire.

And everyone else in his family are vampires, too. And they're all in high school, except for the vampire foster parents and a couple of older vampire foster sibs. They all dress beautifully, and drive rare, custom, imported sports cars or fully loaded off-road vehicles. While they are all extremely attractive and extremely pale, they aren't very popular. They are haughty. The other kids at Forks High think they're kinda weird. Go figure.

There are also some werewolves who live in La Push and provide a counter-balance to the story as well as a romantic rival for Bella's affections. I've been saying that if Bella could just meet a nice Zombie from, say, Sequim, she'll have the trifecta of boyfriends. Then Bella's junior year of high school dating a vampire, a werewolf and a zombie will not be a whole lot different from MY junior year of high school. But that's a different book.

As the mother of a tween daughter, the series has entered my life on several levels. There's just my basic response as a reader and evaluating whether these books have any literary merit (to me, anyway). There's my “mom” response where I dissect the author's subtle insidious attempts at perpetuating feminine cultural stereotypes and try and determine their negative impact (if any) on my daughter's developing world view and self-esteem. Then, there's the entertainment I get out of just being a pop-culture participant. Let's start with my good time.

Local bookstores were hosting midnight parties for the release of “Breaking Dawn” and I offered myself up as event coordinator to the other parents. There are other, much worse, parenting gigs than sitting for three hours in a nice bookstore with an adjacent coffee shop while your pod of 11-year-olds runs to and fro on a store-wide scavenger hunt. Other parents were grateful to turn the task over to me, and I was content to ferry everyone to the bookstore at 10:00, facilitate their purchases at midnight, bring them back to my place at 1:00 and finally shut them down at 3:00 a.m. when I started getting crabby.

There are rewards for this sort of sacrifice. Upon finally holding her much awaited copy of Breaking Dawn in her hand, one girl said, "My spine is tingling." I know that feeling. I get it all the time in bookstores.

My other adventure came on my visit to Forks. I just happened to be camping on the Olympic peninsula this summer without my daughter, and promised to make a trip through Forks to get as many Forksian souvenirs as I could find. Forks is a pretty tiny place and isn't accustomed to international recognition, but the locals are getting into the spirit of becoming a tourist destination, much in the same way the good citizens of Rosalyn got used to being in Northern Exposure.

I bought t-shirts, keychains, stickers and a tote bag. I took photos. I signed the book at the pharmacy for visitors who wanted to leave a message for Bella and Edward. I wrote, "Bella, study and get into a good university! You have years and years to meet a self-absorbed boy with a deathly pallor. Don't rush it."

But, my good time with Forks Shadows came to an abrupt end last weekend when I read Breaking Dawn cover to cover and decided that calling it trash really gives trash a bad rap.

To back up a little, being a chronic reader, books are a big deal for me - just one step below oxygen in my hierarchy of needs. So, when my offspring gets hooked into a book or a series, I fairly beam with approval. I try to refrain from commenting on the merit of Rose's choices, however, to avoid raining on her literary parade. But the Twilight Series has given me an irresistible opportunity for critique.

I read the first book and the last book and passed on the two in the middle. It was all I could stand, but at the beginning, I understood the appeal. What readers like about Edward is what girls and women loved about Barnabus Collins in Dark Shadows, the stud vampire of my day – he was an elegant bad boy with great hair, a lot of style and a mysterious home life. Edward Cullen is a projection of a man who doesn't exist outside of fiction. A distant, erotic archetype, if you will, whose dangerous, suave charm is timeless. A superior super-human creature who still has an eye for the ladies.

As a reader, I'll give Meyer points for creativity in reworking the vampire archetype for the younger set. In terms of style, the series' plot line is innovative, but there is some character confusion for the reader. Sophisticated adults (some of the vampire-teens are in their hundreds) are trying to pass as high school students, and since the characters aren't especially likeable or communicative, it's hard for the reader to accept the contradiction. The dialogue is average and although the characters are diverse, they are sort of one-note shallow. They are obsessed with their vampirism – if there is such a word. They don't seem to do much but mope about it, with the exception of Dr. Carlisle Cullen, Chief of Medicine at Forks Hospital, the only vampire with a steady job. (Although, in Twilight, all the younger vampires end up at Senior Prom, leaving me to wonder how one chaperones vampire teenagers, in the event that I'm ever called upon to do so).

I like the back story on the individual vampires. The action is spotty, but when it's good, it borders on interesting. Meyer does a very credible job at setting the scenes – I can see the houses, I can imagine the island, I can picture the forest in my mind. Meyer throws in so many plot lines and auxiliary characters, however (we've got your Italian Vampire Coven, and your Arctic Vampire Coven, and your Rain Forest Vampire Coven, and your Romanian and Egyptian Vampire Coven and a couple of packs of werewolves and their families), that the reader loses track of all the players. Not to mention, their various powers and alliances and psychological motivations.

In the rush to get these books to print, the editing is sloppy. Transitions are confusing and story lines end abruptly. In Breaking Dawn, Meyer has thrown all of her leftover paragraphs at the story, and it's just a blood-soaked stew of increasingly weird motifs. Even the protagonist vampires for whom you had some sympathy in book one, start grossing you out completely by book four (adorable toddlers just shouldn't be drinking human blood from sippy cups).

But every book ever written does not have to be finely wrought to be entertaining or worthwhile. Meyer found a niche, and readers love her. (Or some do, anyway. Rose got through the first two-hundred pages of Breaking Dawn, slammed it shut and declared it too disgusting to continue on.)

As to its darker violent themes, I know parents are bound to have concerns over this series in much the same way that some critics disproved of Harry Potter's wizard world. It's just a diversion for a grown up reader, but we wonder what our children take away with them and if its message, to the extent it has any, is appropriate.

I have neighbors who are especially concerned about the evil that is transmitted through books and fear that I am allowing a satanic influence to creep into my book shelves. When Rose was following a fleeting interest in astrology and carrying around a book on the subject, the neighbor told her that astrology was like black magic and her mother (meaning me) shouldn't allow her to read anything about it.

My Libran horoscope for the day says, "You thrive on serendipity, following your fanciful whims and allowing room for delicious distraction. Make ‘tolerance' your motto." While I don't find that to be hugely helpful or informative, I think you'd have a hard time parsing out any downright wickedness there.

I don't know how to respond to this. Certainly, there are evil deeds and thoughts in the world, and some of those deeds and thoughts are written down in books. An Anthology of White Supremist Short Stories or 365 Days of Spam Recipes or Clowns in History: A Retrospective” come to mind. There are books whose evil lies in just being very badly written, and books that are brilliantly written about evil things (Nabokov's Lolita is a good example).

Books push you to new places - even places that are not especially sunny and warm. But here's the thing, vampires and ghouls and super-heroes are sort of the dark ooze from our psyche. Fiction is art, and there is no denying the power of the vampire's image. Vampires invoke eroticism and surrender. They are figures of “anti-life” – not necessarily evil, but lost souls feeding on the life force of others.

If I were going to have the discussion with my neighbor, I would say that we do not believe in vampires or werewolves any more than we believe in The Cat in the Hat. Vampires are symbolic and psychologically powerful literary vehicles, but they, like the demons she fears, are pretend.

Still, I appreciate that a certain maturity is required to separate fact from fiction. There are books that shouldn't be read too early in life, maybe, because the material is disturbing and the reader is just not ready. If we waited to read only books, however, that we are psychologically prepared to understand, precious little reading would ever get done and The Diary of Anne Frank would disappear from the earth.

Nay, my objection to the books does not lie in either the quality of writing or its dabbling in the demonic realm, but in the overall message. I take issue with the author that she, unapologetically, wrote four books celebrating the rewards of turning over personal power to a boyfriend in the name of romantic love. Meyer has Bella abandoning her future to become the teenage bride of an unearthly man/boy who offers her wealth, creepy cool, cute clothes, fabulous transportation and immortality.

Eventually, Bella finds herself half unconscious on morphine, and having her vampire husband nibble their hybrid baby out of her womb. Yet, her eternal love for Edward makes it all worth while! I imagine Betty Friedan is cringing somewhere in feminist heaven

Like the girlfriends of other super heroes, Bella's relationship with Edward puts her at a tremendous disadvantage both physically and emotionally. And, like Batman, Spiderman and Superman, Edward is responsible for exposing his beloved to grave danger, but is also simultaneously set up as the hero who swoops in to her rescue. Bella is helpless to save herself.

Even though she's smart and plucky, Bella is not in charge of her own survival. She's mostly misguided, driven and distracted by emotion and her immature passion. Her focus is on Edward and all that a vampire life-style encompasses – his feeding issues and his aversion to sunlight, his supernatural energy and his persistent fear of discovery. Bella doesn't have much to bring to the table. She's a cute and capable girl, but she can't compete with Edward's education or experience or exotic persona. Before she meets Edward, Bella could stand alone. But after falling for her melanin-challenged classmate, she is confused and disempowered by love.

Like a rock-n-roll groupie, all Bella can do is turn herself over to Edward's star-power. Her interests and vitality are subsumed to his macho capability. Bella stops thinking about what she wants for her own life – like a college education, meaningful work, hobbies and interests – and spends all of her waking moments either focusing on Edward and his problems, or completely fixated on a secondary relationship with Jacob the Werewolf.

By book four, Bella has blown off her acceptance to Dartmouth and – spoiler alert - she's married and pregnant at 18 from an undead man who is nearly a century her senior. Eventually, Bella does find her inner strength, but this only achieved after Edward transforms her. Even her aliveness is sacrificed for romantic love.

I didn't even think of prohibiting these books, of course. Even if I didn't believe in the free marketplace of ideas, I already know that if you don't want your kid to read a particular type of book, you shouldn't teach them to read in the first place. No, I'm glad that they are all taking pleasure in reading. I'm glad, even, that these books have crossed the line from engaging to so thoroughly repellent that they caused the tween critic at my house to roll her eyes mockingly. Had these books been better written, their premise of "a perfect piece of our forever" may have been too persuasive. More plausible books may have prevented our discussion about treasuring your own life enough not to give it away.

Good books push you. And in a very unintended way, I can say that the Twilight Series have turned out to be good books.

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Ingrid is currently living and respectably employed in Austin, Texas with a firm specializing in environmental law. She hopes to get back home to the San Juan Islands next spring to stay.
While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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