As if the four-book vampire love series, which became a baffling smash-hit, wasn’t enough, Stephenie Meyer has written another book. Her latest offering, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, as the name tells you, is the concise (mercifully!) tale of the “vampiric” existence of Bree Tanner.
Bree, incidentally, makes a fleeting appearance in Eclipse, the third instalment of the love story of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. For those who’ve either read or watched Eclipse may recollect the girl who is killed by the Volturi in the climax.
She is one of the newborns spawned by Victoria who, Twilight fans may remember, as the mate of the tracker James was killed by the Cullens. For the uninitiated, Victoria vowed to kill Bella, the vampire hero Edward Cullen’s human girlfriend. She feels it’s fair revenge — Edward killed her mate, she’ll kill his.
Victoria sets about creating an army of newborns to fight the Cullens. Again, for those who don’t know, newborns are particularly dangerous as they’re uncontrolled, rash and impulsive, drawn to the scent of blood. They’re also stronger than older vampires. Bree Tanner, one of the newborns who was a teenaged runaway in her “real life”, lives in an underground shelter with others like her, under the leadership of Riley, Victoria’s aide.
Bree’s a loner who keeps a low-profile and hides behind Fred, a “talented” vampire with the unique ability to make people around him feel disgusted if he so chooses (Twilight for dummies: Some vampires have remarkable attributes. They can read people’s minds, see the future, the past, and even make you feel pain without laying a finger on you). Oh no, Fred doesn’t disgust people in a way that makes them wrinkle up their noses or cover them. He just makes them feel that they’re “going to be sick”.
Bree makes friends with Diego, a slightly older vampire, and together they make the discovery that they’re impervious to sunlight though they’ve been told otherwise by Riley, and hence the underground shelter. They also catch Riley talking to Victoria and devise a plan. Subsequently, Bree realises she’s been betrayed (I’ll not spoil the suspense by telling you who, etc) and ends up in the newbies’ fight against the Cullens. But she refuses to fight. The Cullens have mercy on her and are ready to spare her “life” and take her with them. Sadly for Bree, the Volturi, the vampire oligarchy, so to say, aren’t that merciful and she’s eventually decimated.
A piece of advice for Ms Meyer: She may want to refrain from giving out the obvious conclusion in the title of the book the next time she writes one.
That being the flavourless story, it’s difficult to fathom why these vampire books are such a phenomenon, despite the very ordinary writing. Ms Meyer is either very ingenious to have applied a certain dumbness quotient and thus struck a chord with her target audience — teenaged girls — or she just got lucky. It could also be that she’s riding on the popularity wave that horror love stories have always enjoyed.
Right from the macabre setting of Anne Radcliff's Gothic romances to that of Nosferatu, the fictional Count Dracula who was inspired by the real-life Vlad Wallachia of 15th century Transylvannia, more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler or simply Dracula, and subsequently Bram Stoker’s story of the “undead” Count Dracula. The whole vampire/bloodsuckers idea has since caught everyone’s fancy and turned this into a frenzied franchise, with a whole new genre of books, movies and TV serials: Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, Buffy, Angel and, more recently, True Blood. But, then, it’s also not that surprising. The “vampire genre”, if you may so call it, is based on the premise of the forbidden being always attractive. That goes right back to Eve. We, being post-Lapserian humans, are only more susceptible to it.
The forbidden label may be due to different reasons: dangerous, irreligious, wrong, banned, intolerable, rebellious. Each of these only makes it more tempting. There is also the sexual element attached particularly to vampires as they supposedly bite you on your neck. This gives them the predator/hunter quality which is the most basic of the hidden sexual fantasies of their audiences.
So is Ms Meyer a genius, or a bored stay-at-home mum of three with a fantastical dream but no flair for writing? Take your pick.