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.
Stephen King: Edward gets a job as the caretaker of The Underlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains; it requires him and his wife (Bella) to move into the hotel during the winter months. Out of kindness, their friend Jacob comes along. But the Underlook has a mind of its own. Jacob is destined with a rare pyschic connection by the name of The Shining, enabling him to read minds, communicate with other Shiners and see and hear things that aren’t there. When Edward turns into a violent, misogynistic man, Bella hits him over the head, locks him in the pantry and plans to escape with Jacob. But the hotel won’t let them leave and eventually, Edward ponders his sad existence in the boiler room and overheats and destroys the whole hotel. Bella and Jacob escape and remain friends but both miss Edward before the hotel turned him crazy.
Here’s my version, in the style of Moses.
In the beginning, God created a beautiful forest and amid this forest he created a town called Forks, Washington. To inhabit this town, God created a group of pale people, and among this tribe of pasty faces was a girl named Bella. God saw that Bella was bored and depressed and the Lord said “It is not good for Bella to be alone, I will make a vampire companion for her so that she can have romance and excitement.” He named him Edward. In this forest they will able to live and thrive but were warned about ever seeking out the sun. “If your skin meets the sun” he said to Edward, “You will glitter and be found out for the vampire you are and thus be killed.” Edward and Bella agreed that they would never test the warning. One day as Bella was skipping through the forest, a serpent came to her introducing himself as Jacob, he invited her to warm her pale skin in the sun, assuring her that if she asked Edward to come and bask in the sun with her, nothing would happen. “God just doesn’t want you to have a better tan than His.” he chided. Bella then ran to convince Edward that sunning themselves would be perfect for their lack of vitamin D. He trusting his wife agreed to go with her. As they reached the sun, he indeed began to glitter at that moment, everyone knew he was indeed a vampire. Instead of killing them, Bella and Edward were cast out of the beautiful forest to a horrible place called Bakersfield.
Alice Walker – Bella is sold by her father into marriage to the young Edward Cullen, who ends up being a vampire. Edward frequently beats her until she realizes that her life is pointless and acts like a tree. She learns that he is really in love with Jacob, a hunky werewolf/blues singer. Eventually Bella and Jacob have sex when Edward brings the sick Jacob to his house. Oprah Winfrey is a secondary character who contributes to the feminist nature of the novel. Bella’s long-lost sister, Nettie is found in Italy, having written letters to Bella for years under the auspices of the Volturi, an undeveloped tribe living in Italy and forced to work for the white man. The novel continues to make unnecessary tangents into Nettie’s life, but is largely written in Bella’s characteristically impersonal black folk English.
Ray Bradbury – Much to the Cullens’ dismay, vampire literature has been banned in dreary Washington state. Bella, a radical thinker, falls in love with a mysterious young lady called Edward, and she questions his ability to burn/stake books. Bella’s wife Jacob is obsessed with television and somehow manages to maintain perfect physique while ignoring reality. Bella eventually comes to terms with her love of books and memorizes part of Hogwarts: A History, but her escapades are finalized when she is chased into Arizona by a needle-bearing Volturi robot. But alas, Washington has been destroyed, and with it Jacob’s magnificent abs.
Charles Dickens – Bella is a young lady living in England who rescues her father and her lover, Edward, from the French Revolution. But she is suddenly struck by a disastrous love for werewolf Jacob Black and spends all of her money on him. She becomes an orphan and wanders about Seattle until she pickpockets her long-lost mother of whom we never hear again.
Mark Twain – Edward and Jacob are best friends despite their different monster conditions and wealth, living on the Mississippi River, who run away from home, whitewash their fences using trickery, bring their slave, Bella, to an island in the middle of the river, where they consider the impact of vampirism and racism on society, and catch graverobbers.
Just a few more, because I have too little time 🙂
Nathaniel Hawthorne – Using beautiful imagery, Hawthorne depicts the struggles of Bella, who is forced by the Volturi to wear a Scarlet Letter, her vampire lover, Edward, who tortures himself because he can’t decide whether he loves Bella enough or not (ahaaaa), and their illegitimate daughter.
Henry David Thoreau – The setting is Walden Pond, and Bella ponders her own lack of facial expressions while struggling with beanstalks and the mysteries of human nature.
I’m going to stop before I’m compelled to do Richard Dawkins 🙂
Enid Blyton
Edward, Bella, Alice, Jasper and Jacob the dog (aka the Famous Five) head off into the forest for another exciting adventure, taking with them two small tents, a sleeping bag for Bella (no one else needs one), a torch, a magnifying glass, sandwiches and lashings and lashings of ginger beer. They set up camp by the lake and creep around the old boathouse to find three men up to no good – they listen to their conversation “Blah blah blah bank job blah blah blah big guns and dynamite blah blah blah Volturi blah blah blah tasty blood in handy packs”. Our five heroes figure out that the men are the nasty Volturi (their rival gang) and planning to rob of the local hospital’s blood bank. Because Jacob is with them, Alice can’t send the local police chief, Charlie, a telepathis warning message so Jacob has to let his friends in the wolf pack know and they morph back into their human forms to alert Charlie, and then race off to the hospital to protect the blood bank. The Volturi are too powerful for Charlie, so the wolves revert back to being wolves and with the help of Dr Cullen rip them apart and save the blood bank. Luckily Charlie fainted so has no idea how the Volturi were defeated so pays the $5,000 reward on the Volturi’s heads to the famous five for uncovering the plot. Bella looks into Edwards eyes and says “just think how much ginger beer we can buy now for more adventures in the woods”, and Jacob bites Edward’s ankles.
Phillip Roth:
Edward is a successful upper middle class vampire, who runs a factory and spends his time with sports and his lovely daughters and his wife.
He is married to his high school sweetheart Bella since ages.
But inside he is torn and bitter, because of the anti-vampirism he encountered all his life and still witnesses (although mostly behind his back and seldom spoken openly). He only wants to be a lucky member of society but still he feels left out because of his being different, despite his success and his status in society.
He tends to spoil his daughters a little bit, because he wants them to be happy, normal children, but the nicer and more generous he becomes, the more his daughters turn away from the seemingly perfect family.
Thats about everything that happens.
This has made my day so much brighter! I’m working on my own contribution, which I will post shortly.
Also: I’m just starting to read “Lolita,” so as of yet I don’t know enough to take a stab at a Nabokov iteration of “Twilight” — anyone wanna try that?
Thanks, all, for sharing your creations. What an awesome little game to play with what is, possibly, the most mutable little narrative in the past 50 years.
Please let me know when somebody ‘does’ John Irving, I’d love to see that version. All I know is it would have to have bears in it, oddly behaving, sickly white family members, early deaths and possibly a farting dog. Romance would not survive.
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Jonathan Swift:
Same as the original word-for-word, but written as a satire on bad writing.
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Stephen Sondheim:
Bella is a willful girl who falls for the urbane, witty, charming, but deeply-conflicted Edward, recently relocated from New York City to Forks with his family, a group so moribund they could very well be the vampires they claim to be. The two sing a duet in a minor key that accentuates their different upbringings and causes the audience to question whether theirs is necessarily a good pairing.
Along comes Jacob, a hirsute young man with an earthy charm and an unnaturally high tenor for a werewolf. Is he there to sweep Bella off her feet? A dissonant and oddly staccato duet causes the audience to question his motives. Perhaps there is something between he and Edward, as the two sing the first truly melodic duet of the musical just before intermission about the joys and travails of being (marginally) alive.
In the second act, the torn Bella bounces back and forth between the two, unsure of her affections. In a three octave, ten minute solo, she begins to realize that perhaps her biggest problem is not her choice of man, but the fact that she’s simply the most godawfully annoying and whiny depressive in the whole rain-sotted state. However, despite this brilliant revelation, she is almost immediately swept into an amazing song cycle featuring the three singing different themes that somehow mesh when they simultaneously return to their refrains. Sadly, this draws her away from her moment of sharp and brilliant clarity and back into a frustrating dance where the whole town bemoans her inability to get a fucking life.
A jaunty musical montage sweeps Bella and Edward through an ill-advised marriage, a series of comical near-indiscretions and ironical affairs that features a now ostracized and equally depressed Jacob, and a bitter divorce which leaves the three reflecting on the fact that this whole sad series of events could have been prevented if Bella had just taken some anti-depressives, Edward had gone out in the sun just once, and Jacob had bothered to shave.
In a coda to the exhausting three hours this musical has taken, Edward’s family gathers to celebrate his finally getting the hell out of the whole sad affair, but he fails to show up, and it is noted in almost a throwaway tone that no one has seen Jacob in awhile, either.
Michelle Tea
Having been kicked out of her school in Arizona for skipping classes and smoking behind the gym, Bella moves to Washington to live with her father. Despite her recreational drug habit and chronic distaste for showering, two local pretty boys, Edward and Jacob, fall for Bella. After getting high with the boys in the woods, Bella convinces them to make out with each other while she runs off with a female member of Jacob’s wolf pack. She and Lady Wolf live happily ever after writing stream of consciousness, poorly punctuated novels and drinking themselves silly. Edward and Jacob never speak to each other again.
Hunter S. Thompson:
I was coming off the edge of ether binge when I first met Bella. It wasn’t long after that she became scared from my clumsy advances and ran out the bar and into the woods. I followed for no other reason than the drugs moving my limbs towards another vulnerable human being. Once I crossed the threshold of civilization, however, I heard something. I couldn’t go in, I thought to myself, this is bat country!
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Karl Marx writes a story in which Bella is part of the proletariat and Edward is one of the religious capitalists who not only is a vampire, but a priest who has trouble dealing with the fact that he is bisexual. Edward tries to convert to a true Marxist and stop exploiting the Russians who are secretly werewolves that he brought to work in his factory, and it all works until it ends in a twist in which Bella commits revolution and fakes both of their deaths. Except it goes horribly right and Bella dies before Edwards eyes and scars him for life as he tries to lead the revolution but the Russian werewolves kill him. Jakob survives, only to be killed by the German secret police.
Basically a piece of crap, but it makes more sense.
Henrik Ibsen
Edward treats his Bella like a pretty blood-filled songbird, only to find out she told her father about the vampires in order to let him protect himself against threats. Edward flies into a rage, calling her disobedient. Bella finally realizes that she was never a real person to Edward and leaves him to find her own way in the world.
Sylvia Plath
Intellectually brilliant Bella is a secretary because her mother feels that women should have jobs rather than careers until they marry and stay home. Frustrated and bored, Bella has had bouts in mental institutions and her thoughts dwell morbidly on the recent the executions of two vampires, Julius and Ethel. Her mother pushes her to meet Edward, a local ‘nice’ boy, but though Bella thinks he’s atractive she finds him colourless and distant. Assuming that she’s the problem, her mental state begins to deteriorate. After a violent sexual encounter with Jacob, who leaves abruptly, she realises that she lives in a world where a woman with a brain will never be valued or fulfilled, so she attempts to kill herself yet again. She is admitted to a mental hospital and seems to recover. At the end of the book, there is a flicker of hope, but we know that she’s eventually going to try to top herself.
Tom Clancy:
Full scale war between Vampires and Werewolves breaks out over Jacob and Edward’s affections for Bella. Every few chapters we periodically check on Bella for dramatic effect as the remainder of the book is devoted to the high level machinations of Vampire and Werewolf leadership as they posture for war and elements within each camp attempt to subvert attempts at preventing the war and ideologues and defense contractors further incite the conflict.
The book is also littered with diagrams of troop movements and positions that only someone who has actually directed a theatre level conflict would understand. Finally it spends 4 straight chapters developing strategy on both sides till finally Harrison Ford kicks Bella off a cliff and saves the day.
Salman Rushdie – Bella is a film star living in Mumbai, and Jacob is literally a werewolf. He never becomes human, and exists only in her head. This does not stop them from consummating their relationship. Edward is a has-been lord from Florence who ends up in India by mistake. He worries that he is occasionally impotent, despite Bella’s best efforts.
Eagles Song – Bella and Edward come to a random hotel that appears in the middle of a mirage in California. Jacob is a waiter there, who passes them champagne on ice as they make love under mirrors. They constantly do drugs and cannot leave until they get clean, which never happens.
Dianna Wynne-Jones: Bella is the eldest of three sisters and feels condemned to a humdrum life of fail in a world where seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility do exist. One day, the Volturi turn her into an ninety year-old woman and she decides to leave her house where she ends up journeying to a magical moving castle inhibited by Edward, a narcissistic vampire who makes women fall in love with him and his fire-demon, Jacob, who has his heart. In the end, she discovers that she’s not a complete failure and she and Edward annoy the heck out of each other but love each other anyways in a weird sort of happily ever after.
Goethe a la The Sorrows of Young Werther:
Edward is in love with Lady Bella, who is married to the noble man Jacob. Jacob is often out of town with his “wolfpack”, that’s how Edwards secretly calls them, because they are all way to proud of their royal blood. In the meantime Edward accompanies Bella throughout most of the day.
They spend their time reading books and playing with Bella’s daughter Ellesmera, who is a very smart little girl. When Edward is at home, he ponders a lot about the “other” family, how he wishes Ellesmera was his child, how he wants to dive his lips into Bella’s bosom and how he pictures himself as a much better father than the dull Jacob.
Secretly, Bella has feelings for Edward too, but there is no way she could leave the house of Jacob, especially since they have a daughter together. She covers her sorrow with fake laughs but unfortunately it also results in her absence from social events, so that she becomes somewhat of an outsider.
Edward spends more and more time in his little study from where he can look into Bella’s house, particularly the upper window where Bella’s bedroom lies. He fantasizes more and more, writing down every single thought into his diary, every little detail of Bella and their experiences together. He starts to think he is the only one that can how beautuiful she is, what qualities she really possesses, which makes him somewhat of an ubermensch in his own eyes. The loneliness finally drives him crazy and he has flashes of drinking Bella’s blood. He becomes so afraid of hurting her that he kills himself, leaving a poem for Bella which ends in:
“no longer do I request your love,
will look down on your from above
and whisper to your ear,
with every leaf that’s near.”
Edward is obsessed with Bella and wants to hire Jacob to keep tabs on her when he’s not around. Similarly, Jacob is obsessed with Bella and wants to hire Edward to keep tabs on her when he’s not around. In a confusing but ingenious conversation, they hire each other.
Bella, however, is not the Bella of their love, but her identical twin, Izzie. Bella threw herself off a bridge in angst at some point in the first book, arranging for the pages of the book that describe her death and the twin to be destroyed posthumously.
Perhaps not a famous author but he did coin the term ‘steampunk’ an ever growing and popular sci/fi genre:
K.W. Jeter – Edward is the reincarnation of King Arthur. He has been reincarnated several times before but in this era he finds out that he has been reincarnated as a vampire of all things! His goal as always is to save Great Britain from certain destruction. His faithful friend, Merlin, is currently going by the moniker: Jake. He finds out that Merlin/Jake has recently acquired the ability to morph into a werewolf. Merlin/Jake thought it would be funny since Edward/Arthur is a vampire. Merlin/Jake informs Edward/Arthur that the world has already been destroyed by the Morlocks, a terrible thing indeed, but more importantly England is in danger of being destroyed as well. They enlist the help of beautiful but surly Bella, a battle-hardened soldier. Edward/Arthur is aghast at her un-feminine behavior but is thankful that she has saved his life on more than one occasion. Fighting off the desire to feast on the blood of all Londoners, Edward/Arthur and his faithful companions seek Excalibur which, of course, will enable him to slay the Morlocks and find H.G. Wells’ time machine thereby setting the stage for sequels involving a time-traveling vampire.
Charlaine Harris
Edward is a Louisiana barmaid who happens to be telepathic..and a vampire.When Bella walks in and he is unable to read her mind he is enthralled by her womanly wiles.She however cannot pick between him and Jacob a local Were.
Gary Shteyngart:
The story is generally the same, except this time it’s well written and full of sardonic humor and references to Soviet culture. Instead of teenage angst, as interpreted by a puritanically bored, middle-aged housewife through the voice of a two-dimensional Bella, the story is told from the perspectives of Eddie and Yakov (a version of Jacob as a slightly overweight Russian Jew), both pinning for her affection. Both men see themselves as tragic Onegins and drink too much throughout the novel. Though fun is had (sporadic car chases and transitional revolutions in obscure, imaginary Eastern European countries abound), nothing substantive is ever actually resolved. No sequels are necessary.
Sherman Alexie – Edward, a native american, looks back on his life as an old man, his eccentric family, and his affair with a white woman named Bella. The two end up living on a trailer in the reservation until a man named Jacob from another tribe comes and steals Bella away sending Edward on a quest which ends in failure and alcoholism.
Tanith Lee:
Bella is a mid-ranking daughter in a late-medieval family with a small land holding. Edward is a pampered noble in a much larger and imperial clan. They take over Bella’s family’s land, kill off the rest of her relatives, but Edward insists on keeping Bella as his personal toy. Sexual tension and clothing descriptions mount for months, culminating in a brutal rape, which causes political turmoil for Edward and he’s forced to take her as a socially maladjusted, sequestered queen.
Bella finds Jacob during her nocturnal, slightly insane wanderings, he shows her a pagan cult operating under the radar in Jacob’s kingdom. Strange rituals and another rape commences, Bella get preggers with a rapidly developing baby of unclear parentage, who goes crazy on birth, kills Edward and Jacob, and burns the estate down. Close with Bella watching with detached interest as refugees flee.
Vladimir Nabokov:
Edward is an aristocratic European university professor with a penchant for trilingual puns. Bella is eleven years old. The story is told in a 999 line poem ostensibly written by Edward, but with copious footnotes by the clearly unhinged Jacob, a middling American filmmaker with his own grotesque fondness for le fruit vert.
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Pat Califia:
Confused leatherdyke Bella is seduced by femme top Alice. Between bouts of steamy lesbian D/s sex, Bella hangs out with local bear Jacob and his houseboi, Gothic Lolita fetishist Edward.
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Brett Easton Ellis:
Written from Edward’s perspective, Bella is just one of several mortals Eddie has on the hook. Each paragraph is generously studded with pop culture references to other vampires, as Edward desperately tries to achieve status in the eyes of his fellow undead. Also, lots of drugs.
Orwell: Bella and Edward’s story is an exquisitely-crafted allegory for Western society’s dependence on, and worship of, the political ruling class. A ruling class that is ancient and consolidates power over the underclass (Bella) by periodically sucking their blood and promising, but never delivering, the love and happiness that the underclass so desperately needs. Jacob is a metaphor for a human state of nature that is flirted with, but ultimately rejected for the false sense of security offered by the ‘vampire’.
Neitzche:
Bella feels the crushing loneliness of her banal existence, and falls in love with Edward, who offers her a hollow respite from living amidst the shattered debris of her childlike yearnings for a powerful godman.
Jacob overcame his need for meaning and has since moved on to an unshackled existence elsewhere, where health clubs and wax are in great supply
Charles Bukowski:
Edward Chinaski drinks heavily and often. He enjoys the warmth of Bella’s fat ass. When she leaves town three weeks later, he goes to the racetrack.
John Steinbeck:
Bella is a bored farmer’s wife, and possibly closeted lesbian, in post depression California. When a sexy peddler comes into her garden and refuses her veiled offer of an afternoon delight while her husband is away, Bella is left heartbroken by the peddler to a life of a darling, yet painfully empty wife.
T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of E. Anthony Cullen
Let us go then, Swan and I,
When the twilight is spread out against the sky
Like a werewolf staked upon a table;
Let us go, through uncertain half-terrified streets,
The histrionic retreats
Of new moon nights in one-night cheap high schools
And FDA cafeterias with fortified-blood:
Streets that follow like a tedious Eclipse
Of vampiric intent
To lead you to an overwhelming desire….
Oh, do not drink, “Sweet she is!”
Let us go it’s Breaking Dawn.
In the room the telepaths come and go
Talking of Renesmee, you know.
Tolstoy – Set in the beginning of 20th century, Bella is duly married to Edward, has an affair with Jacob, begs Edward to kill her out of her guilt over the extramarital affair (and he does), while Jacob spends 5 full chapters on describing in excruciating detail about his country life and how to skin a deer with nothing but his claws.
Roberto Belano:
Bella is a tired factory worker in a Mexican border town. One of her coworkers is brutally murdered and left by the side of the road. Later in the novel, we learn of Edward, a creepy European who may or may not be a centuries-old serial killer.
Elmore Leonard:
Edward’s a retired cop who now runs errands for the Mob. He teams up with an old buddy, Jacob, a former Hell’s Angel, who was once a body guard for the Stones back at Altamant. They meet up in Miami for one last bender, but are side tracked when they meet the beautiful Bella who convinces the two men to steal money to fund her rockstar delusions.
Raymond Chandler:
Bella, a debt-ridden private eye, witnesses the death of celebrity bad-boy, Edward, as he is thrown from a moving car in front of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. As he bleeds on the pavement, Edward mumbles the name of a notorious pornographer. Bella hires Jacob who is beat to an inch of his life while exploring an abandoned construction site. Later Bella too is beat up and held overnight by the local police. The police let her go but tell Bella to keep her nose clean. Later she drinks a vodka gimlet and thinks about Edward . . .
If Franz Kafka had written TWILIGHT:
One morning Bella wakes up to discover she has changed into a giant insect. She examines her room, clumsily knocking furniture over. Edward appears in her room, is appalled, sparkles, and vanishes. Her father is appalled and throws apples at her; one lodges in her back and cripples her. Bella does no soul searching, mourns the loss of Edward’s perfect face and body, and dies. Edward runs off with Jacob and they live happily ever after.
If Divine Inspiration from God (Old Testament Version) had written Twilight:
Edward smashes Bella’s skull against a rock when she sees her casting lustful gazes toward Jacob. Jacob meanwhile is sent off to die in a meaningless war. Edward is remembered as the greatest king of the vampires.
Rich Shapero:
Bella is schizophrenic, and Edward only appears to her when she’s alone. Because they must remain hidden, supernatural beings deny things that Bella sees them do. Entire series is deliberately ambiguous as to whether anything was real.
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Charles Stross:
Jacob is an agent of a covert government agency dedicated to preventing the end of the world, even though they clearly don’t have the budget for it. While attending a seminar on filling out forms for ISO-9000 conformance, he meets Bella, who has been recruited by the CIA because she plays electric violin. While running from counter-agents of SMERSH, who have unaccountably popped in from a James Bond novel, they meet Ed Wood, a vampiric Hollywood director, who clearly doesn’t have the budget for even a B movie. Robots from a post-climate-apocalypse future appear, and horror ensues, with occasional wackiness.
China Mieville:
Bella and her family live in a pastoral society, which is genocided by the forces of New Crobuzon. Remade by a Crobuzonner judge to have cows’ legs for legs and arms, she is forced into the service of Edward, vampire patron of Revenant, a literary club whose members are all undead authors, cruelly reanimated and surgically altered to resemble characters in their own books. Edward and the Revenant violently abuse Bella, who finds succour in the embrace of Jacob, a Remade in the form of a giant maggot.
Astrid Lindgren:
Bella is a young girl who lives alone in a house named Villa Villekulla while her father is away at sea. Bella has a suitcase full of gold coins and can throw bullies or burglars effortlessly into trees if they bother her. Her pet monkey Mr. Edward wears blue pants, a yellow jacket, and a white straw hat, and can follow simple directions to climb a tree. Her intelligent horse Jacob lives on the porch because he doesn’t like the parlor. Bella intends to be a pirate when she grows up.
Edward Gorey was the best 🙂
Diana Wynne Jones:
Bella is the de facto head of her family because her parents and stepfather are all incompetent, preoccupied by their own concerns and/or never grew up, but in this version they play a much bigger role in the story and are larger-than-life and funny. When Edward first appears in Bella’s life, she thinks he’s marvellous. But as she grows as a person and comes into her own magic powers, she learns to see his many flaws and goes off him. At the end of the book Bella is looking forward to a fulfilling future involving lots of interesting magic, but it doesn’t include Edward.
Eric Kripke (Supernatural)
As small children, Edward and Bella witnessed their mother dying in a house fire which was started by a demon. 22 years later, they are demon/werewolf/vampire/rougarou killers that travel around the US in a 67 Chevy Impala.
One day they decided to pose as federal agents to investigate a werewolf killing. They show up at Jacob’s apartment, play rock paper scissors, and Bella wins so she gets to stay with Jacob to make sure he doesn’t get attacked. Edward kills the werewolf who turned Jacob and they all stay up all night during the full moon. Jacob and Bella fall in love within 24 hours and have a passionate sex scene, then Bella is force to cry a lot and kill Jacob with a silver bullet after he turns again.
Years later, Edward and Bella discover that the only reason they were created were so two angels, Lucifer and Michael could take over their bodies and have one last battle on Earth. They both die about 50 times and are now in their seventh season on the CW.
Warren Ellis
Edward Gumshoe is a washed-up private eye and a beat-up journalist who’s just been paid a staggering amount of money by a seedy Senator and a shadowy committee to go off on a wild goose chase, for something that seemed terribly important at the start of the book, somewhere, but we’ve all forgotten what it was by chapter three.
He hooks up with Bella, an unpublished (and unpublishable) novelist, who persuades him to pursue the whatever-goose by infiltrating cliques of batshit-crazy fetishists with links to Something Sinister.
They get their breakthrough by injecting one another with bilge until they both display disturbingly distended genitalia and gross deformities of the cranium, their earlobes, one buttock, and their kneecaps.
Tastefully-dressed to show themselves to best advantage, they gain entrance to a party of like-minded body-modifiers with a Dark Secret: underneath the playfully-injected swollen subcutanea, the participants are willfully infecting one another with unspeakable diseases, so that they can later exchange pornographic images of each others’ lingering demise with colourfully-suppurating pustules and antibiotic-resistant gangrene.
Amidst this horrible milieu, they discover that the party organiser, Jacob, is repelled by this degenerate and destructive hedonism; and, deep inside, he wishes to return to his suburban life, when he was a nice, safe, predatory vampire with some structure in his life.
The plot of Crooked Vein By Twilight lurches on, and squelches from one horrifying depravity into the next; ever deeper into the inhuman cesspit of a mind trapped in an immoral obligation to produce a graphic novel every year unto the greater glory of DC Comics Inc. Amen.
Deeper it goes, but no man knows how deep, for no-one ever reads it to the end – or, perhaps, no-one who has ever done so will admit to it; and there are people in this city walking with their clothes adjusted to conceal an awful secret, and a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder clinic catering exclusively for gentleman’s tailors.