The Toilet Saga

There’s noth­ing we like bet­ter than a well-written book, and there is noth­ing like a well-written book inside the run­away best­selling ode to chastity and the most bor­ing girl­friend in the world known as Twi­light, by some weepy-eyed hack liv­ing out her teenaged girl fan­tasies writ­ing sloppy, one-dimensional dreck.

We have to hand it to Stephanie something-or-other for being smart enough to tap into that deep, nay, bot­tom­less pit of long­ing that lives inside the flat-chested breast of, let’s say, 50% of the Amer­i­can Girl pop­u­la­tion, along with another 20% of the flat-chested gay men who long, also, to be teenaged girls in high school being chased by the two most in-heat bach­e­lors in all of one-dimensional emotionland.

Yes, we’re bit­ter. Bit­terly jeal­ous of this author who’s rak­ing in the mil­lions based on a series of four books that are so poorly writ­ten, so awk­wardly plot­ted and so void of orig­i­nal­ity that they make your aver­age Dick and Jane book look like the Bible.

And per­haps they are, but we won’t go there (just yet).

Luck­ily for you, our intre­pid research depart­ment has man­aged to dig up the fifth unpub­lished man­u­script in the Twi­light series, a tome so wretched in lan­guage and so lack­ing in writerly skills that we thought, just for a moment, that those mil­lion mon­keys had actu­ally pro­duced some­thing. But no, upon fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion it turns out that, yes, what we have in our sweaty, vam­pir­icly glit­ter­ing palms is the unre­leased dénoue­ment of the series, which we will be more than happy to sum­ma­rize for you — with copi­ous excerpts — now.

As you’re no doubt aware, in Twi­light: Break­ing Dawn, Edward and Bella have a half-vampire, half-human baby daugh­ter they name Renes­mee, which in Vam­pire means “she who is a nec­es­sary plot devel­op­ment.” Renes­mee is mis­taken to be an “immor­tal child,” aka Michael Jack­son, by a neigh­bor­ing vam­pire and the court of Vam­pire Law, the Vol­turi call the Cul­lens to the table to accuse them of being “too bor­ing to live.” After they wit­ness the full bore­dom of then now-vampiric Bella, who Edward turned into an undead shrew dur­ing child­birth just to shut her up and make her stop mak­ing that face like she just swal­lowed lint cov­ered in lard and dead flies, they real­ize that the Cul­lens are actu­ally okay, as long as they stay in Forks because what­ever. Free now to live our their non-lives in peace with a weird baby and a hot were­wolf who finally admits that he’s way, way too hot to hang out with such losers, even though he does because (bad writ­ing), the novel ends just as the story had begun, with stu­pid, list­less, awful Bella, glit­tery, poetry-spouting, deathly dull Edward and big, dumb, hot Jacob sit­ting in a hot tub think­ing about sex but not hav­ing any.

The fifth book, Twi­light: Sun­rise begins sev­eral years later. Unsur­pris­ingly, noth­ing at all has changed in the least for the immor­tally dull Cullen clan. Unlike the first four books, which are writ­ten in first-person nar­ra­tive via Bella’s view of the world in which every­one loves her for no rea­son and she can do no wrong and the men are all incred­i­bly hand­some and sexy and want her so much that they can’t even touch her, while she describes her­self in only the vaguest terms and might as well be a turnip for all you know, the pro­tag­o­nist of Sun­rise is the now teenaged Renes­mee, who goes by the name Me, which makes the first-person nar­ra­tive struc­ture sur­pris­ingly easy, if a bit awk­ward because she con­stantly refers to her­self in the third-person, Me, as in “Then Me is going to drive the old truck to the gen­eral store, though why Me still doesn’t own a Volvo is beyond my com­pre­hen­sion to comprehend.”

That’s one of the most coher­ent lines which Me speaks, incidentally.

Any­way, let’s get to the fast-paced, glacial plot, such as it is, and see how the author has matured in her style of writ­ing and grasp of lan­guage, shall we?

Me is now 16 years old and fake-attending high school. For rea­sons beyond under­stand­ing, Bella, Edward and Me still live with the entire Cullen clan, all of whom are unchanged from the last book. Carlisle and Esme are still pre­tend­ing to be Edward’s — and now Bella’s — par­ents and deal black-market Japan­ese hair gel from their split-level house. Ros­alie and Emmett spend most the novel locked in a game room try­ing to under­stand the pur­pose of a pool table with­out any balls. Alice is still wan­der­ing around pre­dict­ing and fore­see­ing amaz­ing things like the intro­duc­tion of a new spread­able cheese made from beaver milk and, in one of the novel’s only sur­pris­ing twists, reveals that Dick Cheney, who is still alive, feeds on the blood of the Vol­turi but no one really cares. Jasper is all but ignored in the book, and there is absolutely no men­tion of were­wolves or Jacob at all, other than a pass­ing men­tion of a wolf rug that is lying in front of the fire­place in the liv­ing room and how Bella always sighs when she sees it.

Me is attend­ing school and every­one just adores her. Oddly, but keep­ing in line with the pre­vi­ous four books, no men­tion at all is made of what Me looks like, sounds like, wears, eats, or speaks. She is described as being “beau­ti­ful on the inside,” and some of her friends, includ­ing the gos­sipy Mered­ith and the frumpy Gladys, often pour forth with the most over­bear­ing praise for every­thing she does with phrases like, “You’re the most beau­ti­ful girl in school!” and “I’d do you!” so we can either assume that Me is very lovely or that her friends all have very bad taste.

Lit­tle hap­pens at all for the first four chap­ters. Me explains what it’s like to live with the most hand­some father and the most bor­ing mother in the world. She is quite close to Aun­tie Alice and there is one entire chap­ter where Alice is allowed to do noth­ing but dote on how lovely Me is and that the world is going to end in three months unless the moon is brought down to Earth via lariat.

Sud­denly, in Chap­ter 5, a new char­ac­ter is intro­duced. His name is Stephane, though he insists that Me call him Stephen, and for no appar­ent rea­son his falls hope­lessly and entirely in love with Me. Even Me finds it dif­fi­cult to understand:

I’m not sure why Stephen pro­fesses his undy­ing love for me. He is so beau­ti­ful, but there is some­thing… odd about him. All my friends agree, even Gladys who is frumpy and disheveled and smells kind of like Lysol but I love her any­way because I guess I’m just gen­er­ous and under­stand­ing like that. I saw Stephen today in the cafe­te­ria at school and he wasn’t eat­ing. He was just star­ing at me, so I turned to one of my good friends, of which I have many, and said, “Do you know any­thing about that beau­ti­ful boy over there?” And my friend, whose name is not impor­tant, said, “I don’t know, but he’s star­ing at you! My God, you’re so beau­ti­ful!” I thought that was nice of her or him to say, and then I turned my atten­tion back toward where Stephen was sit­ting and dis­cov­ered he had dis­ap­peared, so I said, “Where did he go?” and my friend, whose name I for­get, said, “Can I touch you?”

After a cou­ple more chap­ters of that kind of action, it is revealed in a sur­pris­ing turn of events that Stephane is not human, nor is he a vam­pire or even a were­wolf! Stephane is an Egypt­ian king recently res­ur­rected from the dead — a walk­ing corpse who also hap­pens to be extremely attrac­tive. “My gosh!” Me cries in Chap­ter Seven, “he’s in love with me and I don’t even know why!” To which her friend, ‘unnamed but less attrac­tive than Me girl,’ responds, “We all love you, Me!”

There are count­less para­graphs of long­ing and pas­sion­less star­ing in var­i­ous locales through­out Forks until Me is wan­der­ing alone in the for­est and is attacked by Char­lie Swan, her own grand­fa­ther and Bella’s father, who was so ignored in the later books that he became despon­dent and took up as a her­mit, eat­ing berries, lichen and small ani­mals “such as mice,” as Me describes him. There is no attempt what­so­ever to dis­guise the fact that the her­mit is Char­lie, and after the attack he dis­ap­pears again and is not mentioned.

Any­way, as the “attack,” which con­sists of Char­lie pok­ing Me with a blunt stick and breath­ing on her with “mouse-scented breath,” pro­gresses Stephane appears atop a ridge out­lined by sun­light wear­ing a small Speedo made com­pletely out of gold and jew­els. His upper body is bare and reveals that he is build like a brick shit­house and makes Jacob and Emmett look like “lit­tle girls who spent the bet­ter part of their lives eat­ing sticks of but­ter and play­ing with their own toes.” Whether or not he even has a penis is not men­tioned. Stephane “bounds down from above like a hound in heat, his mus­cles tensed and bulging like bread inside a really hot oven” and falls upon her­mit Char­lie “push­ing him away from Me and sur­round­ing Me with his strong, pow­er­ful arms, mak­ing Me feel safe, like a girl in some guy’s strong, pow­er­ful arms.”

Now that the two of them are together, Stephane/Stephen and Me spend the next chap­ters get­ting to know one another, most of which is end­less, gru­el­ing para­graphs of Stephen telling Me how attrac­tive, smart, funny, and alto­gether amaz­ing she is, and Me telling him that she under­stands. Stephane’s dia­log through­out con­sists of the most egre­gious and hor­ri­ble attempts at romance ever set to page. A few examples:

“Oh, if only I could bring myself to but touch your beauty with the tips of my fin­ger­tips! You are the most beau­ti­ful girl I have ever seen, and I should men­tion that I’m really quite old and have seen a lot of girls, though curi­ously I have never had sex with any of them.”

Then he looked at Me, and his full, moist, kiss­able lips parted, and he said, with pas­sion, “Yes, I do like ketchup. You know me so well!”

“Me, no one has ever affected me like… or is it ‘effected?’ Affected or effected? Are you hav­ing an effect on me? Yes! You are!”

“I don’t care if you are half vam­pire! I love you! I love you more than life! My life! Not your life! I would never take your life, you know, even though I am tech­ni­cally dead and thrive on the organs of oth­ers, and did I men­tion that I only eat ani­mal organs? And then only sick ani­mals? Sick ani­mals with miss­ing limbs. Some­times they are also deaf, and often I only eat a lit­tle bit of their organs. Oh, how I love you!”

And so on. Chap­ters and chap­ters of that, with the plot mov­ing for­ward with the kind of glacial pac­ing usu­ally reserved for Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment doc­u­men­ta­tion. Finally, Me brings Stephane home to meet the clan, and he is warmly wel­comed and com­pletely rejected by them. Me describes the scene as her boyfriend meets Bella and Edward for the first time:

My mother, who has a kind of beauty that is hard to describe because I don’t know how to describe it in words, and in that sense she’s kind of like me, being Me, or me, because what am I, a writer? And my father, who has an oth­er­worldly beauty and is at this moment stand­ing in direct sun­light with his shirt off and his skin sparkles because I think that sounds cool and lends him an air of beauty that’s so intense that you won­der why the hell he’s with my mother, even though she is beau­ti­ful and all that except I can’t describe her to you which is kind of weird, huh? And then there is Stephane wear­ing his golden royal Egypt­ian under­wear stand­ing next to me, hold­ing my hand in his, which is cold, mean­ing his hand and not mine, which isn’t, and he opened his mouth and he makes words with it, and his words say “I love your daugh­ter!” with such pas­sion that I think my heart will cry out like birds might do on a warm morn­ing in Forks except for that smell which is always lin­ger­ing and I think it comes from the mill or maybe it’s that diner where my unnamed friends are always eat­ing even though one would think they have homes to go home to, right? So then my father, Edward, smiles, and my mother Bella, does some­thing with her face that is hard to describe and they open their arms to us both and I say, “Oh, you all love me!” and then they all nod and smile or something.

It doesn’t get much bet­ter than that.

We’d like to tell you that this next novel is leagues bet­ter than the oth­ers and that the author has man­aged to learn how to actu­ally write plots and char­ac­ters and dia­logue, but in fact it would seem that the oppo­site is true. Like her for­mer books, she is actu­ally get­ting worse with prac­tice. And by Sun­rise, she can no longer even hold the thread of the story to a cohe­sive con­clu­sion, and by the end of the book it is dif­fi­cult to tell who is speak­ing, where they are or even what time period they are in, since every one of the char­ac­ters wants noth­ing more than to heap praise on Me and tell her how beau­ti­ful, per­fect and amaz­ing she is.

Obvi­ously, we can­not share the full text of the book with you or we’d get our asses sued — or get a movie deal with Fox and have to move to Los Ange­les, which you know would just kill us, so what we’ll offer instead is the last para­graph of Twi­light: Sun­rise to sing you off to beddy-bye with visions of per­fect, hand­some, chaste men who only want to love you and never touch you until after marriage:

Stephane looked at Me and smiled. His smile was per­fect, and then he had this body that was amaz­ing and his voice was like music is only with­out the up and down parts, and his eyes, which he had two of, looked at Me and they held unlim­ited buck­ets of love for Me and he said, “I love you more than I can pos­si­bly tell you.” And then I asked him, “Why? Why do you love me?” And he was look­ing at Me and I was look­ing at him and I could feel his strong arms around me and some of my friends were there and I could feel their strong arms around me and my mother and my father and there were vam­pires and a sun­set and the sound of laugh­ter and the smell of fresh-baked bread and flow­ers and the clouds looked like pup­pies and my feet didn’t smell bad any­more and that lit­tle dress which I had been try­ing to fit into except for the hips thing but now it fit and every­one loved me and wanted me and the end.

Tags: asinine, bad writing, Bella, Edward, Jacob, kill me now, Team Me, Twilight, vampires, werewolves