Twilight, 9

In which your blogger ponders the dangers of pop-culture…

Plot: Bella and Edward drive home. Edward likes to drive really fast. This, your blogger supposes, is SM's version of character building. Big E, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, is a vampire. He doesn't sleep, is unaffected by sunlight, and survives on the blood of animals. Your blogger wonders how PETA hasn't thrown a fit about that last bit. Ah well, still time… Bella handles all of these things with roughly the same amount of excitement your blogger evinces when presented with a particularly compelling grocery list by his mother. Edward tells Bella that she realy needs to stay away from him, despite the fact that he's been FOLLOWING HER ALL NIGHT. I don't even have a joke for this. It is deeply disturbing and I refuse to dignify it with humor. Anyways… our leads declaim about how much they can't concentrate while apart or something. Bella eventually gets back to her room, and decides that she is "completely irrevocably in love" with the creepy vampire dude who likes to talk about how he's still seventeen despite really being much older and therefore kind of a pedophile, since the age of consent in WA is still 18, as of the last time your blogger looked (roughly 30 seconds ago).

Rant: I publicly committed to reading this entire series (albeit not under my real name) and I'm going to do it because I don't like to break promises. But we should be clear about something: I despise this book. It has no redeeming qualities, no cultural or literary value. The world is a worse place because it exists. I strongly recommend that you go read something else, and I'll be delighted to provide recommendations to make that process easier.

Now then… This chapter is utter crap on every level. It is terribly written, with the inordinate amount of dialogue only serving to highlight SM's annoying use of adverbs, dialogue verbs, and every other crutch terrible writers have been using since Rome. But honestly, I could forgive those faults if they were presented in service of characters or a story I wanted to read.

They are not. Edward is an awful, profoundly fucked-up abomination of a character. Think about the way he is acting here. He follows Bella without permission, invades her privacy and the most intimate thoughts of her friends, informs her that he will probably do physical violence to her at some point in the future, and that's supposed to be HIS DECLARATION OF LOVE. Oh, and he's an old man saying these things to a vulnerable teenage girl. I don't care how well preserved you are, asshole. Having a good skin-care regime does not make you young.

I wish the shit stopped flowing with Edward, but it doesn't. Why? BECAUSE BELLA TAKES IT. She hears all of this, all of the same things that have me grinding my teeth as I type, and declares her irrevocable love. Stephenie Meyer, listen up: Relationships are about compromise, the meeting and joining of two personalities, each with dreams and desires and opinions and lives of their own. What you've presented here, Stephenie Meyer, is not the start of a relationship. I don't know what it is, other than profoundly and utterly wrong.

If I saw my little sister reading this book, I would take it from her hands and burn it to ash. Good night.