A niggling sensation of shame
Apr. 30th, 2008 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Why do I like writers who are Mormons, sometimes? This chagrins me. Anne Perry, the Mormon murderess, then Shannon Hale, who is quite a good young adult fiction author (Enya Burning, The Goose Girl, and The Princess Academy), and now Stephenie Meyer, the author of a new vampire teen romance series, current darling of the masses. She is so much a darling of the masses that a) her book was in the Scholastic Book Club catalog, which is how I came to own it, along with a dozen other books for the classroom (well, and honestly, for me); b) she was featured in Time magazine AND Entertainment Weekly as "the new J. K. Rowling" (who at least isn't a Mormon, however insanely wealthy she's become); and c) she's featured in, of all things, the CostCo magazine.
At least I've never read (and never intend to read) Orson Scott Card.
This Stephanie Meyer... it's because vampires are hott. I mean, I think (and have thought since fairly young) that vampires, with their melding of blood and death and sex and desire, are hott. I hasten to say that I have no leaning towards goth, at all, in my personal sense of style or music (okay, except for the Cure, and the Smiths, if those counted, way back when), or in any tendency to personal melodrama or moodiness. But vampires are still hott.
Apparently pop culture agrees with me, because they've been mighty popular, especially in the world of romance lit, for several decades now. I mean, I guess (after Bram Stoker) that Anne Rice started it, but I didn't find HER overwrought, pretentious, solemn vampires at all hot, not even Tom Cruise (ew) or whoever else was in her movies. There are a lot of chick lit books that feature supernatural romantic heroes including vampires*. And then there are the two actually good entrants in this genre: Octavia Butler's The Fledgling, and Robin McKinley's Sunshine. Both of those are complex, and have to do with either the struggle to find one's identity as a new vampire and set limits for oneself, or the classic impossible romance between human female and male vampire, nobly resisting his dark impulses. But their books are complicated, and thoughtful, especially Butler's. Butler's death, just after The Fledgling, which was clearly intended to be the first of multiple books on the subject, was even sadder, since we'll never get to see how she'd intended the story to continue.**
Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, the novel that is being so loudly acclaimed by hordes of teenaged girls, is in some ways reminiscent -- I'll almost say derivative -- of both of the latter books, by Butler and McKinley. McKinley will, I hope, write a sequel to Sunshine, where Butler won't. I hope that she will, at any rate, because her story of a world where vampires and other magic bearers are something like persecuted illegal aliens, criminals, or terrorists with State Task Forces and elite military squads devoted to them... it's very good. Also very romantic, with that trademark love of someone for how unusual he or she is, an ugly duckling of sorts. Like Butler's brand new vampire (a 'fledgling' vampire) and like McKinley's vampire who seeks in her female protagonist exactly what is dangerous for him -- her affinity for sunshine, Meyers' vampire debunks some of the mythos -- he can live in sunshine just fine, but would be visually revealed by it to ordinary humans. Like Butler's vampires, Meyers' Edward lives in a clan which is trying not to hunt humans -- they're a sort of vampire version of animalitarian/vegetarian. Like neither of them, however, Meyers' vampire and teenaged human girlfriend stop short of making out -- kissing and holding hands are the farthest outpost of their desire. And Meyers manages to fill those two acts with a great deal of described, and sublimated, desire. She is proud of that in her interviews: she's brought back that sense of wonder and intensity one feels in high school when merely holding hands is "just -- wow."
Oh, crappy lit, what is thy attraction?
*There is ONE series of that sort of supernatural chick lit that I feel moved to plug: Tate Halloway's romance series featuring a Wiccan bookshop clerk in Madison, Wisconsin. There are so many snarky in-jokes in that series; it's lovely. This sort of thing (I mean, Wicca does tend to go better with vampires... also there's a hilarious subplot about vampires who have goth groupies who are DYING to give blood for the cause; the vampires in question who stoop to this are treated like addicts and losers) DOES make me wonder how a kind of Christian can do vampires convincingly -- she doesn't feel any contradiction between her bible stuff and the pagan underworld?
**I HATE it when authors die in the middle of a body of work. So inconvenient. No, I mean, but really, it is sad, and I'm terrible with the lack of resolution... authors whose early, unexpected deaths have interrupted my reading pleasure: Kate Ross, a mystery author whose historical setting of just AFTER the Regency period, but with a protagonist who was a musical aficionado, in London, and traveling in Europe; and Frances Temple, a YAF author whose historical novels were wonderful.
At least I've never read (and never intend to read) Orson Scott Card.
This Stephanie Meyer... it's because vampires are hott. I mean, I think (and have thought since fairly young) that vampires, with their melding of blood and death and sex and desire, are hott. I hasten to say that I have no leaning towards goth, at all, in my personal sense of style or music (okay, except for the Cure, and the Smiths, if those counted, way back when), or in any tendency to personal melodrama or moodiness. But vampires are still hott.
Apparently pop culture agrees with me, because they've been mighty popular, especially in the world of romance lit, for several decades now. I mean, I guess (after Bram Stoker) that Anne Rice started it, but I didn't find HER overwrought, pretentious, solemn vampires at all hot, not even Tom Cruise (ew) or whoever else was in her movies. There are a lot of chick lit books that feature supernatural romantic heroes including vampires*. And then there are the two actually good entrants in this genre: Octavia Butler's The Fledgling, and Robin McKinley's Sunshine. Both of those are complex, and have to do with either the struggle to find one's identity as a new vampire and set limits for oneself, or the classic impossible romance between human female and male vampire, nobly resisting his dark impulses. But their books are complicated, and thoughtful, especially Butler's. Butler's death, just after The Fledgling, which was clearly intended to be the first of multiple books on the subject, was even sadder, since we'll never get to see how she'd intended the story to continue.**
Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, the novel that is being so loudly acclaimed by hordes of teenaged girls, is in some ways reminiscent -- I'll almost say derivative -- of both of the latter books, by Butler and McKinley. McKinley will, I hope, write a sequel to Sunshine, where Butler won't. I hope that she will, at any rate, because her story of a world where vampires and other magic bearers are something like persecuted illegal aliens, criminals, or terrorists with State Task Forces and elite military squads devoted to them... it's very good. Also very romantic, with that trademark love of someone for how unusual he or she is, an ugly duckling of sorts. Like Butler's brand new vampire (a 'fledgling' vampire) and like McKinley's vampire who seeks in her female protagonist exactly what is dangerous for him -- her affinity for sunshine, Meyers' vampire debunks some of the mythos -- he can live in sunshine just fine, but would be visually revealed by it to ordinary humans. Like Butler's vampires, Meyers' Edward lives in a clan which is trying not to hunt humans -- they're a sort of vampire version of animalitarian/vegetarian. Like neither of them, however, Meyers' vampire and teenaged human girlfriend stop short of making out -- kissing and holding hands are the farthest outpost of their desire. And Meyers manages to fill those two acts with a great deal of described, and sublimated, desire. She is proud of that in her interviews: she's brought back that sense of wonder and intensity one feels in high school when merely holding hands is "just -- wow."
Oh, crappy lit, what is thy attraction?
*There is ONE series of that sort of supernatural chick lit that I feel moved to plug: Tate Halloway's romance series featuring a Wiccan bookshop clerk in Madison, Wisconsin. There are so many snarky in-jokes in that series; it's lovely. This sort of thing (I mean, Wicca does tend to go better with vampires... also there's a hilarious subplot about vampires who have goth groupies who are DYING to give blood for the cause; the vampires in question who stoop to this are treated like addicts and losers) DOES make me wonder how a kind of Christian can do vampires convincingly -- she doesn't feel any contradiction between her bible stuff and the pagan underworld?
**I HATE it when authors die in the middle of a body of work. So inconvenient. No, I mean, but really, it is sad, and I'm terrible with the lack of resolution... authors whose early, unexpected deaths have interrupted my reading pleasure: Kate Ross, a mystery author whose historical setting of just AFTER the Regency period, but with a protagonist who was a musical aficionado, in London, and traveling in Europe; and Frances Temple, a YAF author whose historical novels were wonderful.