It also remains the case, as many critics have by now argued, that the backlash against Twilight was much more vitriolic than the backlash against other trashy bestsellers of the era like Ready Player One that were marketed to boys rather than to girls. It has the same insistence that stalking and emotional abuse is romantic, the same casual racism toward Indigenous people, and every other fault that made the franchise a general pop culture punching bag when it was at the height of its cultural saturation 10 years ago. It has all the same clunky, leaden sentences you remember from the first time Twilight came out in 2005, and the same bizarre pacing, where nothing really happens until maybe 50 pages from the ending. Is Midnight Sun a good book? Of course it’s not, it’s a Twilight book. It’s been lightly revised from that leaked first draft, and when you hold it in your hands, it feels like 2009 is back all over again. Thirteen years after it was first leaked to the internet, Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun, which retells the first volume of the Twilight saga from Edward’s point of view, is finally out in print. Into this Year of the Plague, like the half-forgotten relic of a simpler, lower-stakes culture war, has sparkled the most famous Spanish flu survivor in American popular culture: Twilight’s Edward Cullen is back.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |