1/2/12 5:15 PM UPDATE: io9 has reposted ye olde Twilight snark. Check the comments for more hilarious suggestions, from Dr. Seuss to George R.R. Martin.
As I mentioned in an early post, the main problem with Twilight isn’t its sparkly vampires who lack all traditional weaknesses or its anti-feminist sensibility. When you get right down to it, the trouble is that the writing is terrible, filled with cliche phrases (“smoldering eyes”), repeated words (294 “eyes” in 498 pages) and the reductive characterization of its main characters (Bella is clumsy, and I guess she likes books. Or something).
On a recent car-trip with my husband and the writer Chip Cheek, we mulled over the question: What if great literary writers of the last 200 years had penned Twilight?
Herman Melville
“Call me Bella.” A tome about the length of the original series investigates Bella’s monomanical search for the vampire who stole her virginity. There’s an entire chapter devoted to describing the devastating whiteness of Edward’s skin, and several on the physiognomy of vampires, starting with their skeletal structure outward.
Virginia Woolf
The novel takes place over the course of twenty four hours, during which Bella is painting a portrait of Edward and reflecting on how her femininity circumscribes her role within 20th century society.
Cormac McCarthy
In the opening scene, Edward dashes Bella’s head against a rock and rapes her corpse. Then he and Jacob take off on an unexplained rampage through the West.
Jane Austen
Basically the same as the original, except that Bella is socially apt and incredibly witty. Her distrust of Edward is initially bourne out of a tragic misunderstanding of his character, but after a fling with Jacob during which he sexually assaults her (amusing to no one in this version) she and Edward live happily ever after.
George Saunders
Same as the original, but set in a theme park. Somehow involves gangs of robots, which distract the reader from the essential sappiness of Edward and Bella’s story.
Raymond Carver
Bella stars as the alcoholic barmaid with daddy issues that Edward, a classic abuser, exploits. When Bella’s old friend Jacob comes to visit and is shocked by her bruises, she thinks about leaving him, but instead hits the gin bottle. Hard.
Annie Proulx
Edward and Jacob defy society’s expectations up in the mountains.
Lewis Carroll
Bella takes acid and charts syllogisms.
James Joyce
Edward’s rapacious love for Bella reflects the way globalism has pillaged Ireland. It’s entirely written in Esperanto, with sections in untranslated Greek, except for Chapter 40, which is inexplicably rendered as a script page from the musical The Book of Mormon.
Dorothy Parker
Bella writes a brilliant takedown of the latest school play, dates a string of men, and repeatedly attempts suicide.
Kate Chopin
Stifled by her marriage to Edward, Bella has an affair with Jacob and then drowns herself.
Ernest Hemingway
Edward and Bella exchange terse dialogue alluding to Edward’s anatomical problem. Eventually, Bella leaves him for Jacob, a local bullfighter with a giant…sense of entitlement.
Flannery O’Connor
When Native American werewolf Jacob threatens her with death, Bella reconsiders her hardcore racism, and just for one milisecond, the audience finds her sympathetic.
Ayn Rand
Edward tells Bella that he intends to stop saving her life, unless she starts paying him in gold bullion. Hatefucking ensues, then Jacob spouts objectivist philosophy for the next 100 pages.
12/22/11 Update:
Novelist Urban Waite adds this one:
Tim O’Brien
It’s all about the memories these vampires have carried with them for the past couple hundred years. Just think how much that would have deepened their characters. “Bella looked into Edward’s smoldering eyes and knew all the pain he carried with him, the cross burned into the cleft of his muscular chest, 1 oz., the dash of his hair across his forehead, dangling ever-so, 5.oz, etc… etc… ”
Got more writers and renditions? Put ’em in the comments.
While I’m flattered that people are reblogging this post, I ask that you don’t reproduce it in its entirety on your own blog.
Michael Crichton: Bella is a world-renowned hematologist/geneticist who develops a vaccine that turns humans into vampires. Jacob is an ecologist, Edward is a physicist. The Volturi are rewritten as ruthless land developers. Every 10 pages, there is a paragraph-long discussion on how vampires are scientifically possible. Every 15 pages, there is a discussion on how the study of genetics will advance modern medicine only if humans choose not to abuse this new-found knowledge.
Roald Dahl: Pretty much the same narrative, except the vampires use nonsense-sounding lingo and there are cutesy illustrations by Quentin Blake. The Volturi are rewritten as overweight and heartless parental figures.
For JESE:
Of course they’re making fun of Twilight. But, like JEN, I enjoy the books as well. That in no way means I think they are good literature. The themes are recycles and the character development is predictable. That doesn’t make them unlikeable, nor does it make them guarded from criticism. What makes you think there was absolutely no one who criticized Romeo and Juliet? On the contrary, I believe Shakespeare was heavily criticized.
And about your comment about how the authors of the blog should write their own material: Well, they are….Just because a writer doesn’t write books and get them published doesn’t make them any less of a writer. They are bloggers, and clearly well-respected (by most, anyway).
That being said, let us have our fun! I can love and hate Twilight at the same time, and I’m sure others can too!
Ha, just found this, it’s really fun!
Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes is called to investigate a murder on the countryside. Edward is the victim and the folk people believe he was killed by a werewolf. At the end Holmes explains Jacob’s elaborate disguise and that Edward’s wife Bella was helping him all the time
H. G. Wells – The vampires are creatures engineered by the Martians to act as living blood filters to get rid of human germs, leaving the blood clean to be consumed by the Martians. The werewolves were created by Dr. Moreau
Miguel de Cervantes – Edward is not really a vampire, but believed to be one and acts dramatically, much to the despair of his loyal companion Sancho Jacob
Star Trek episode – The Enterprise lands on a planet were a lupine-humanoid population is being conquered by Romulans who are experimenting drugs on them. Ensign Bella is torn between love for a charming Romulan scientist who claims to be not like others of his race; and her desire to help a native who is being turned into a monstrosity : ^D
I agree that writers who haven’t published books are still writers, but did want to mention that my first book, Leaving Mundania, a narrative nonfiction account of the hobby/subculture/art of larp, comes out this May. Hope y’all check it out.
James Ellroy, told from the perspective of the cop dad.
Restaurant crime scene. Some g****** animal ripped another poor b****** apart. Now my f****** daughter waltzes into my crime scene. I know where she’s been. Out with that pasty f*** Edward.
Suzanne Collins – author of slightly better teenage fiction.
Bella grows up with Jacob hunting wild deer in the woods by their house. When Bella is chosen to compete in a ‘game’ for the entertainment of the Volturi, Jacob says that he hopes she won’t die, but if she does he will watch it on the big screen with everyone else. Edward is also chosen. He has been stalking Bella for years without her noticing, apart from an incident involving a blood bag. At the Volturi capital, Bella is known as “the girl with the facial expression that never changes”. Edward declares love for her for publicity and food. When they are in the arena, Edward pretends to love her while Bella tries to save them both. They kill everyone and in the final scene Bella is killed by Edward and declared victorious. He goes back home and kills Jacob. There is no second book, or third, and the book is able to stand on its own without the last quarter of it being a cliffhanger for the next in the series.
Got a better James Ellroy tribute:
1:50 a.m.
Tox reports on the Dupree case. Bingo. Strychnine.
Great. Daughter screaming in the middle of the night again. Crying over a boy that dumped her. Good riddance.
I know that kid climbed through her window. Good thing he left town. He’s having an “accident” if he shows his face again.
More screaming. Drama queen. Dose of Xanax and a dose of shut-the-f***-up already.
Armistead Maupin
When naive ingenue Bella moves to a new town, she finds an unlikely family in a group of quirky local supernatural beings who broaden her horizons until she learns to find humor and enlightenment in her own idiosyncratic routine.
Thomas Pynchon:
Bella investigates a series of disturbing killings in her town. She learns Edward is behind them, but is more horrified by his fixation with scat play than his vicious murdering. Eventually she discovers vampiricism is a conspiracy started by the East India Trading Company. Edward disintegrates because entropy.
Edgar Allan Poe: On the eve of their wedding, Bella wakes up in sweats and finds Edward staring at her. She thinks his left eye has changed color and is disgusted by it. Bella kills Edward, takes his eye, buries the body under the bed. Jacob comes around looking for Edward. Bella talks and talks and talks about the reason vampires scare her and then admit to killing Edward.
J.K. Rowling: Bella goes to boarding school, and saves the world, than marries Jacob and lives happily ever after.
Mark Z. Danielewski:
The perspective continually shifts between Edward, Bella, Jacob, a middle-aged author named “Stephanie M.” and a commentary by a scholar of historical vampire fiction. One or all of the characters may be “monsters” but due to the unreliable narration, it is never clear which if any of them actually are.
Pages at a time are given over to interlocking panels of footnotes exhaustively detailing the traditional attributes of vampires, werewolves, Native Americans, and high school girls (amongst other things).
The book comes as a manila folder full of 300 handwritten cocktail napkins. They are not numbered, and the reader must compile the book as they go in the order which makes most sense to them.
Orson Scott Card: Edward, a young boy with a genius for war tactics and a nearly psychic ability to infer a hundred times more information than a person intends to communicate in general conversation, gets whisked away space school. There, he meets Bella. Clumsy, boring, and completely useless, he believes he falls deeply in love with her, but is really just projecting his own issues of abandonment and misplaced love for his sister, Alice. Bella remains useless through the entire series, and the focus shifts to Edward’s relationship with Jake, a young genius with a past shrouded in violence and secrecy. This relationship allows Edward and Jake to win what they believe is a simulated battle against supernatural beings that no one understands. At the end, Edward realizes it was not a simulation and he really did wipe out a whole race of beings that weren’t trying to kill anyone and were probably more interesting than anything else that has happened in the book so far. His guilt is the focus of three more pointless books about more supernatural beings with vaguely homoerotic elements thrown in and people dying in a entertaining, but violent fashion whenever things get too dull.
Crap, sorry, John Ajvide Lindquist:
The story is exactly the same, except it has good writing and characters and happens in a remote island settlement off the coast of Sweden.
Phillip Pullman: Bella only pretends to be clumsy and boring in order to manipulate the adults around her. She is attracted to Edward, a wealthy boy she meets at the market, but resists him because he isn’t actually that interesting. Jake, her childhood friend, is also attractive and very interesting, but she doesn’t notice because they have been friends for a long time. Jake gets kidnapped near the start of the story, and Bella asks Edward to help her find him. When they do, Jake is a shell of his old self because her evil mother and pet monkey amputated his arm (that had a tattoo representing his soul) believing tattoos to be the source of all knowledge and evil. Vowing vengence and hoping to find her lost father, they continue to the North Pole, where they cross into another dimension when they both get soul tattoos. Edward defends Bella and a host of other strange, zombie-like children, from a mad priest and wins a super sharp knife, useful for tattooing anything you wish (and therefore opening up other dimensions). They uncover a plot by the Catholic church to banish tattoos and the knowledge of them, thus plunging the world into complacent darkness. They fight this plot, even going through hell to rescue those who have already been sent there for having tattoos, and eventually end up in a metaphorical garden of Eden. There, in the shade of large trees, they come to full knowledge and tattoo each other in very intimate places. Sadly, they discover that Edward’s vigorous tattooing has opened up too many dimensions and he must stay what was formerly children-zombie land, while Bella returns to her home. They make a pact to sit on a bench once a year and pretend the other is with them, giving them another vigorous tattoo.
Note: Orson Scott Card (they call Edward a vampire because he can suck the life out of any being and meant to be a compliment, but causes feelings of guilt and self-loathing). Pullman (Edward is called a vampire because that it his tattoo, the essence of his soul – everyone’s tattoos represent their essence…Jake’s was of a wolf, Bella’s was a black hole).
Pingback: Bella Likes a Different Fella « John M Cusick
Janet Evanovich: Bella is a clumsy bounty hunter who catches her FTA’s by accident. She has an on-and-off relationship with Jacob, a hometown boy who she’s grown up with, but her feelings for Edward, her dark and mysterious bounty hunter mentor make an awkward love triangle. Her car explodes.
Isabel Allende: In a single book that spans 50 years and three generations of the Cullen family, Edward is in love with Bella’s sister, but she dies, leaving him to settle for Bella. Bella spends the entire novel exhibiting clarvoyance and in ignorance of Edward and reality, choosing instead to entertain the world in her head. Bella’s daughter, Nessie, falls in love with Jacob, a strong supporter of the socialist government that replaces the conservative government. A military junta violently replaces the socialist government, as headed by the son of Edward’s illegitimate child, and Nessie’s daughter is captured and raped. Nessie’s daughter writes the whole story based on Bella’s diaries and testimonies of the dying Edward. Enough rape, violence, and symbolism to cover every inch of 20th century Chilean history.
Steven Moffat: Edward meets Bella when she is a child. He promises to come back in five minutes. He actually comes back in 10 years. She’s suddenly hot and has a boyfriend, Jacob. Edward invites her to join his vampire ways of living. She falls in love with him, then realises it’s Jacob she really loves once she sees him do something cool. She can’t decide whether to become a vampire or a werewolf, so she stays human and jumps between the two. Then she gets pregnant. The baby goes through the same process, but at one point chances race.
Aldous Huxley: A great war ended in victory for the alliance of vampires and werwolves. The world is driven by the more efficient consumption and allocation of humans, who willingly perform the ultimate sacrifice as a matter of course for the pleasure of each individual member of society. Everyone is happy. That is, except Jacob, whose strange appearance and whining is queer enough to raise the attention of the ever so pneumatic vampire Bella. The two visit a “savage” reservation where vampires and werwolves find reason to practice restraint in their consumption of humans. The savage vampire Edward, who is brought from the savage reservation to the civilized world as a social experiment, falls in love with Bella. After Bella attempts to force sex onto Edward on several occasions, Edward commits a particularly long-drawn masochistic suicide by ripping himself apart in front of a captivated jeering and cheering audience.
Walt Disney: Bella is a beautiful princess cursed by an evil witch to be clumsy and angsty. Edward is a handsome prince cursed to be sparkly and angsty. Jacob is his faithful dog who always protects him. Edward sees/hears Bella singing a sad song about angst in the woods (surrounded by birds, squirrels, chipmunks, a wolverine and two naked mole rats) and falls in love with her. When he attempts to dance with her, Jacob prevents him, fearing that Bella’s clumsiness will lead to a fatal accident. Edward and Bella say, “Bad dog!” and runs away with Edward. The abandoned Jacob develops an unhealthy obsession with Bella’s shoes and pines to death in her closet, after which he is magically turned into a giant china dog which Bella and Edward keep by the fireplace so as to always remember their faithful friend.
José Saramago: It´s new year’s evening and at the inmedeatly second after midnight, some people stop dying, They’ve been called vampires; and they become insatiable blood suckers. The ataraxic girl fall in love with the teen ager – pretend to be underground – vegetarian vampire at school. When they’ve decided to get married the pandemic non-dead situation gets self solved and the vegetarian vampire dies. The ataraxic girl feels fine because it was a burden to be alive in a world of deads and she had to reminds them permanently the human nature and their feelings when at the same time she has lost those too.
Has no-one done Shakespeares version yet?
Homer: Bella, Edward and Jacob are thrown into a love triangle by divine manipulations in an allegory of the destructive power of hubris. Periodically includes a list the name and parentage of all students in Bella’s classroom.
Patricia Cornwall: Bella, abandoned by her father, goes to University of Tennessee and researches forensic anthropology at the Body Farm. One of the bodies fails to decay, rises from the dead, and really screws up her research. Bella examines the evidence, blood and sparkles, under the microscope, runs DNA tests, and calls the FBI for help from their profiler, Jacob, who might actually be a werewolf. Or a serial killer in cahoots with that strangely alluring undead guy who has been following her around. After many subplots and red herrings, Bella escapes from their clutches and realizes she is a lesbian.
Jorge Luis Borges:
Bella meets Edward on a beautiful island and they fall madly in-love and have a half-dozen vampire babies. One day she finds herself working in a library and she realizes she is really married to Jacob and has no children. Or does she? which is her real life? Is she a housewife dreaming she’s married to a vampire or is she married to a vampire and is dreaming she has a simple life and is married to Jacob?
J.K. Rowling
Jacob, Edward and Bella are best friend throughout their schooling years while hormones flair and they defeat evil forces. Bella continuously rages and scolds against Edward for being emotionally inaccessible while Jacob awkwardly tags along as the third wheel even though he’s the main character.
I have three comments, only one an addition, so ….
1. I hope no one minds if I utilize this blog in my Lit Theory course when we discuss “What is an author” and metacommentary.
2. Jesse – not only was R&J ridiculed at the time, but critics often still comment on the ludicrous nature of the characters obsessive reactions. The difference is that Shakespeare created words and Meyer seems to have a limited number she knows, or is willing to use. Also, the fact that she has stated, in interviews, that she did not borrow from any other stories is ludicrous and disingenuous. Can it be lighthearted fun to read? Yes, as long as the person reading it isn’t an impressionable 13 year-old girl likely to think she is going to find “her” Edward someday and willing to let men treat her badly because of that notion.
3. [She may not be famous enough, but what the heck] Laurell K. Hamilton – Bella falls in love with Edward, is saved by him several times, saves him at least as many times, meets Jacob and falls for him as well. Rather than being angst-ridden about choosing who her soulmate is, she enters into a menage-a-trois and they live together happily, mostly, as anyone in love would.
Margaret Mitchell: teenage Bella is in love with Edward, whom never seems to age and conveniantly survives the civil war. Shrewed, dashing Jacob manages to catch Bella in between husbands and she agees to marry him because of their fondness. After a decade of war, struggle, and triumph, Edward’s weakness is unveiled. Bella runs back to jacob, where she admits her wrong doings and her love for him, to which he replies “frankly my dear, IDGAF”
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club): Bella, who is never explicitly named, carries on relationships with both Jacob and Edward who are actually both alter-egos of the guy who almost hit her with his car in the first book. The entire book is written in diary format from the point of view of her spleen.
Dumas
Edward, sailor, is madly in love with the morally irreproachable and dull Bella. Jealous of Edward, Jacob, Edward’s old friend, conspires with Edward’s enemies to throw him in el Chateu de If, the most dreadful prison on the face of the earth. While incarcerated, Edward becomes pale, Vampiric, and hellbent on revenge, and is taught the ways of the world by an imprisoned former priest, Carlisle Cullen. Edward escapes the prison, gains a mysterious fortune, and after several inexplicable chapters of Edward smoking opium and calling himself Sinbad the Sailor, he seeks out Jacob. Jacob has married Bella, who swore to love Edward for eternity but now doesn’t really seem to care all too much that her one true love has returned. Edward kills Jacob and all his conspirators in incredibly vengeful ways yet Bella still seems to have no opinion about the entire matter. She leaves for a nunnery for some unknown reason, and Edward marries a weird but beautiful former Greek princess.
Edgar Allen Poe: Bella meets a strange man an over a period of time falls in love and they marry. But he, Edward is keeping a secret or two. He is a mutation that needs blood and can live a long time. But what the real secret is that he has a sort of twin. Jacob who howls at the moon and gets very hairy. You see, he tells her, when you married me you married him as well. She screams echo from the crumbling mansion. Are they of ecstasy or pain or horror or all three?
Howard Philips Lovecraft: Edward an Jacob are two monsters who have been fighting through the ages and now they fight over a human woman by the name of Bella. She is a weak, delicate thing of fragile beauty and learned antiquarian. But they both know that if they should spring how different they are to her she could die like a moth in a flame. But one day while walking in the forest Bella sees them fighting an screams. Both creatures come to her and try to use their powers to awaken her. But they begin fighting again and in the mean time Bella awakens from the fain as the two creatures fight harder and harder trying to kill the nearly unkillable. She tries to stop them and intervenes.A short scream an ripping sounds. Fade to black.
Mickey Spillane:
I stood beneath the trees while the warm rain dripped down and splashed in the mud at my feet. Jacob, his blood running down his face, was on his knees looking up at me and grinning like the jerk he was. He’d made one wisecrack too many about Bella and I’d slapped him across the eyes with the combat 45 I’d found in Bella’s closet.
“Yeah, Edward,” Jacob slurred out as blood dripped from his chin. “That Bella is one hot little…”
I jammed the barrel of the rod into Jacob’s mouth, splintering his teeth and pushing his tongue back into his throat.
“This is it, smart guy.” I spat out. I pulled the trigger and the dum-dum 45 caliber round punched through the back of Jacob’s head scattering blood and brain matter out to mix with the black mud. A small skull fragment lay on the ground like an arcane ashtray.
Jacob struggled back to a squatting position, making obscene grunting sounds as his shattered bones knitted together and his skin swirled and reformed.
I laughed, a hard laugh that held no humor. “Like that, Jake?”
Jacob sneered, “You’re dumber than you look, Sparkles. Just gimme a min…”
The second round took him in the gut and slammed him back against an ancient tree.
“No, Jake,” I said. “The lead round was just to get your attention. The silver round is for keeps.”
I knelt down in front of him. I wanted the last thing he saw to be the look of pure hatred on my face.
“How,” he gasped, blood bubbling up on his lips. “How could you?”
Just before his eyes closed forever, I took him by the throat, leaned close and whispered in his ear.
“It was easy.”
chuck palahniuk:
Edward exists in Bella’s imagination, as she falls into a destructive downward spiral. If her name is Bella it’s unknown, as the entire narrative is in her deeply sarcastic voice and perspective. Details of herself are slim. In a journey of self discovery that involves violent altercations, she meets Jacob- a zookeeper with a wolf fetish that captivates her imagination. Her behavior is less than law abiding, and culminates when she initiated a gang war between the self proclaimed Vampires. Jacob comes to save her. But she can only be saved if she stops Edward…
Just wanted to applaud all of you for redefining this abusive love story.
Jules Verne: Bella is a scientist who has just discovered the whereabouts of the undead around the world. Edward is a zombie who’s been living 20,000 leagues under the sea. Jacob had once been Edward’s assistant many, many years ago and is searching for his remains around the world. Between the vast ocean and landmass, Bella ends up journeying toward the center of the earth and, you know, lives to tell the tale.
Charlotte Bronte: Bella becomes suddenly poor when her mother, who always hated Bella’s clumsiness and inability to shut up, cuts her off as she comes of age. Made drab and meek by years of abuse at Forks Charitable Institution, Bella tiptoes into her new life as a lady’s maid at Cullen Hall. She finds the family unexpectedly warm, especially her new charge, Alice, who treats her almost as an equal. She begins to ponder the mystery of the family’s changing eye color, long history, &c, but is distracted when the temperamental but oddly alluring Edward returns from a hunting trip. She falls in love with him, and after a weird subplot in which he pretends to love Jessica instead, agrees to marry him. However, when she discovers on the eve of their wedding that the Cullens are vampires, she decides their home is a den of sin and runs away into the woods. Jacob finds her passed out in a copse of trees and takes her back to La Push, where he and his two charming sisters nurse her back to health. It is discovered that Billy and Charlie are long-lost brothers. Jacob proposes to Bella, but Bella does not love him, and decides she would rather be a vampire than live without love. Renesmee’s birth is mentioned once in the final chapter. The last paragraph of the book is about Jacob going on a quest in South America to find the ancient Incan Books of Werewolf or something.
Emily Bronte: Everybody hates everybody. Bella loves Edward, even though they beat each other regularly. Concerned, the upper-class Jacob steps in, and Bella marries him even though he is snobby and ineffectual. Heartbroken, Edward goes away for a long time. When he returns, Bella receives him into Jacob’s house, acting like nothing ever happened. When Edward suggests Bella run away with him, Bella falls ill with indecision, and accuses Edward of her eventual death. Edward spends a mysterious night with her corpse. Jacob dies of hatred. Edward abuses his and Bella’s children. Everyone is sad on the moors.
Anne Bronte: Bella slowly falls in love with Mike while Edward and Jacob are away making names for themselves in the navy.
Robert Jordan: Bella is taken from her home by Edwir, a mysterious figure that claims it is for her own good. They travel the world, collecting underlings and gaining power so that they can eventually be prepared to face the Volturi in the Last Battle. What was supposed to be four books becomes 15. Almost 1/3 of that is spent describing clothing.
William Shakespeare: A ghost tells Edward, Prince of Denver, that Jacob killed his father. Edward spends the next third of the book feigning insanity and debating what action he should take. He rejects Bella’s love, telling her to get to a nunnery. Believing Bella to have drowned herself, Jacob challenges Edward to a duel. Unbeknownst to Edward, Jacob poisons both his sword and Edward’s wine. Bella appears at the duel and drinks a toast to both from the poisoned goblet. Edward is wounded, but during the fight he and Jacob exchange swords. Edward then stabs Jacob with the poisoned blade. All three die, along with most of the supporting cast. Second Soldier announces the arrival of Fortinbras.
Chuck Palahniuk (Sorry, different take on his style)
Edward is an extremely wealthy man who secretly dabbles in the occult and has a family in another country. Bella is a cocktail waitress he meets by chance and falls inexplicably in love with, though he never admits to it. Through a series of freak and no doubt entertaining events, they end up on a cross-country journey with Jacob, an environmentalist by day and a violent sex-addict by night. Bella spends much of the journey flinging sexual advances in both directions, making it a hot, sticky, terse car ride for all.
VC Andrews (dead author, Flowers in the Attic and numerous books written after her death by a ghost writer)
Bella Black and her brother Jacob Black have a very selfish mother. She regrets having children, responsibilities, credit card debt, being left alone, and financially destitute after her husband Charlie Black died from food poisoning. She squandered her dead husband’s money in Vegas playing poker and she is a raging alcoholic.
Mrs. Black decides to go on a cruise with Mr. Emmett Cullen, her new boyfriend, for three months in Europe. She promises her children if they are very good for their grandmother (who will mind the children in her absence) that she will bring them all European chocolate from Belgium and many, many presents.
Bella and Jacob’s younger brother Edward and younger sister Alice are too young to understand why their mother has a new boyfriend so soon after their father died from food poisoning.
Edward and Alice object to being left alone, but Mother smiles and tells pretty lies to convince them go to Grandmother Black’s house. Once they are all at Grandmother Black’s house, it is very clear to all four children that they have horrible relatives.
Mrs. Black leaves the children in the care of her cranky, mean, over-bearing Bible-thumping mother. Grandmother Black locks all four children in a windowless basement full of black widow spiders. She hates her grandchildren and tells them that they are devil’s spawn doomed to go to hell. Their grandmother goes on to tell them that mother and father were sinners and shouldn’t have gotten married, and they should never have been born.
Bella isn’t afraid of Grandmother Black. She tries to protect little Alice from the horrible, controlling old woman. Poor little Edward, the youngest, gets terribly ill after eating some of Grandmother Black’s Famous Cookies. Unbeknownst to the children, the cookies were laced with the deadly poison arsenic. The older children are continually deprived of food. Grandmother Black decides to cut their meal portions down to rodent-sized bits of cheese and moldy bread.
When the old woman isn’t poisoning the children, she lectures Bella and Jacob on propriety and insists that Bella doesn’t undress in front of Sinner Jacob.
Bella is a teenager and quite attractive, and Jacob is strangely attracted to her. They wind up having sex in the bathroom when Edward and Alice are asleep, tucked in separate beds since Grandmother Black won’t allow them to share the same bed.
Edward and Alice become vampires. Bella and Jacob decide they are starving slowly to death. Lack of food means they are desperate to nourish the young bodies of Edward and Alice. The older two feed the younger children their own blood.
After Edward and Alice turn into vampires, they attack Grandmother Black and drink her dry. Horrified by what they have done, the no longer innocent younger children run screaming to Grandfather Black’s room. He is a man they have never met, and he is in fact a werewolf. A huge battle ensues when Bella and Jacob discover that Grandfather Black is about to make a meal out of all of them.
Bella takes a silver spoon from the kitchen (now that Grandmother Black is dead she has run of the house) and impales Grandfather Black with it. He dies and they escape.
Strangely, Mother shows up in the living room with a preacher and she is in a wedding dress. She was going to get married, but her two youngest children, furious and starving, attack her. Unable to control themselves, Edward and Alice drink Mother dry. When they are finished with her, they attack Mr. Cullen and kill him.
All four children bury the dead in the graveyard on the family property and Bella puts the family mansion up for sale. She donates the money to charity, since she and her siblings have inherited everything.
Bella and Jacob move in together, set up house, have lots of sex, and Bella gets pregnant. She goes to the doctor after she has a miscarriage after tripping down a flight of stairs. She realizes that she really can’t marry her brother because they would have a monster baby.
Meanwhile, Edward and Alice wreak havoc in the neighborhood, shrinking its population during their nightly romps. They become known as the Party Twins. The Party Twins recruit an army of vampires to help them take over the world.
The saga continues in four novels, detailing the sexual exploits of young Bella and Jacob. Death, mayhem, and neighborhood demolition feature strongly in the other novels as Edward and Alice realize their growing power.
Of course it all ends badly for the four siblings when all four of them are tragically decapitated in a horrifying Winnebago-semi truck accident on the freeway.
Sherman Alexie: The main focus of the story is Jacob who is funnier and more intelligent and also holds a comic/tension between his Native American roots and the oppression placed on him by white Bella, and super-white Edward. Jacob wants Bella because she’s white and he wants to take ironic revenge on those who brought so much pain to him and colonize Bella, but he also loves her, which makes him feel weird. Edward is so white he’s evil. He represents all of white America’s transgressions. We find out that Jacob is an heir of Crazy Horse and he and Bella end up together but Jacob still can’t reconcile if he’s with her to make a political point or if he loves her.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
It is a musical in two or three acts. Most of the songs are just one especially catchy verse repeating over and over again, and when a change is needed, it will simply change key (probably to E major).
The characters will have little or no development, which actually isn’t that much of a change from Meyer’s version. The first song is a give-away prologue about Edward’s early transformation. Then it switches to 203482 years later without the audience being informed of this fact. Edward leaves Bella at the end of the second-to-last act in a dramatic song that will be a recycled song from earlier in the show (a reprise). They get back together in the final act, and it ends with love ballad between Edward and Bella that will be re-recorded by multiple artists and featured in 50 of the Most Beautiful Love Songs CD collection, available now on this TV order.
Lafcadio Hearn:
Bella is a spurned and vengeful woman who decides to kill her vengeful (pre)vampire husband and her wolf youkai lover
Poppy Z. Brite:
Edward and Jacob murder and eat Bella, then have sex. The murder, cannibalism and homosexual sex are all described in gruesome/loving detail.
Evelyn Waugh: Bella somehow always gets in the way of Edward’s friendship with Jacob.
Crikey. I’ve got some reading to do.
Mark Kurlansky:
A witty and erudite history of vampires and werewolves encompassing fields as disparate as religion, pop music, virology, mechanics, twitching, hematology, small goods (specifically, black pudding) and epidemiology. Kurlansky’s engaging and well-researched book is veined with witty anecdotes and amusing side tracks. Bella gets a few paragraphs in the section on human/were/vamp relationships and Jacob and Edward feature heavily in the index because – well – they’ve been around a bloody long time. Kurlansky has created a tasty, full blooded blend in a socio-political-historical educational entertainment which is (due to the extreme age of its subjects) six volumes long.
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Edgar Rice Burroughs:
Bella is raised by apes. Instead of dying as an infant from exposure, starvation, predators or tropical diseases, as would happen in real life, she grows up to be this super athlete jungle woman. Edgar and Jacob are *extremely* horny male apes who compete to mate with her. Or…
Sometime after the end of the American Civil War Bella is gazing up at the night sky, sees Mars and cries “I wish that I was on the planet Mars!!” and is instantly transported there. She quickly adopts the Martian dress-code–Martian women go topless–and proceeds to “save” Mars by repairing it’s atmosphere-production-machines. Or…
Bella is a telepath who travels to the planet Venus. There she meets Edward and Jacob and has various & sundry adventures.
I read sixty-nine of ERB’s novels in the ’70s, truly great fun…fond memories…