In which there is not a fight scene. Yes kids, its Twilight time…
Plot: Bella dreams. She is in pain. She hears the voice of an angel, crying out to her in decidedly un-angelic snarls. Your blogger sings to his girlfriend in iridescently angelic tones. She informs him that the abuse of tobacco will not be tolerated in their apartment. Carlisle shows up. He mutters "infodump exposition infodump." Or, possibly, something about Bella having broken her leg and several ribs, just in case any readers weren't paying attention when these things happened three pages ago. Also, the tracker bit her and venom is spreading. Carlisle instructs Edward to suck the venom from the wound, on the grounds that our friendly-neighborhood superhuman doctor is incapable of stitching a headwound fast enough to perform said venom-sucking himself. Edward sucks. Venom, that is. Bella smella gasoline, and proceeds into unconsciousness. Finis.
Rant: Just in case anyone was laughing too hard at my witticism to notice, I'd like to point out once again that this chapter is completely free of fight scenes. Meaning none. Zero. Why, you might ask, did I want/expect a fight, given the near-certainty that Stephenie Meyer would find a hilariously idiotic way to bungle delivery of same? You ask, and I answer, in one word: Catharsis. The tracker, while incomparably shitty in conception and execution, is the villain of this little skid-mark on the underthings of world literature. His death should, in theory, be a fairly major event. Significant. Perhaps something the audience might be interested in seeing, just maybe. Catharsis can be boiled down thusly: Bad guy does bad things, good guy terminates bad guy, audience dances on bad guy's grave. It is one of the major plot-devices in all genres of literature, dating back to the theatre in ancient Greece. And it only works if the author has the balls to not kill her villain OFF-FUCKING-SCREEN. I feel ill.
So, apparently, does Bella. This chapter is clearly meant as a formal experiment, a twisting of normal literary technique to strengthen the effect of placing the reader inside Bella Swan's echo-chamber of a skull. Which would be great, if SM had the skill to pull it off. She doesn't. Not even close. If anyone is interested in seeing this done properly, read Joyce's Dubliners. Marvel as words on a page somehow create the sensation of rain crawling across bare skin, of flame dancing in your eyes. Then come back, read Twilight and feel…. absolutely nothing, really.
The real problem with the chapter, and the book as a whole, is that there are no stakes. Bella is a little banged (up), and her vampires are mildly peeved. Thats it. Six weeks in a cast for her, a fresh mountain lion or whatever for them, and we're all back in the same mudpit as when the tracker first straggled into our hearts and minds. Edward is still angelic (Hey! More fetishization, awesome! (but not really (actually the exact opposite))), Bella still worships him, and nobody important has more than a few scratches. So, nothing changes, nobody learns anything, and nobody suffers as a result of their numerous fuckups. What exactly is the point of this book?
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