The Twilight Years.

Ah, I find myself once again musing upon the subject of vampires. An admittedly uncommon occurence until recently. I find myself pondering, whatever happened to the image we used to have of these mythical part human, part bat, blood sucking, parasidic creatures? In 1897 Bram Stoker put pen to paper and wrote the novel Dracula. This novel featured Count Dracula, a nobleman living in Transylvania in a castle that also happened to bear the name Dracula. The local Transylvanian villagers are shown to fear and revere Count Dracula, as he is portrayed as an almost schizophrenic character, on one hand a charming old man capable of conducting himself to the highest levels of social etiquette, and on the other hand a ruthless and vindictive parasite that will do anything to achieve his goals.
Twilight however, does not seem to feature vampires in the same manner. The main vampiric character, Edward Cullen, is said to have existed since the year 1901 and yet throughout the book we find Edward acting like a lovestruck teenager, and shown as some kind of disturbing sex symbol for young women. Now I may be no expert on this subject, but I'm almost certain no woman in her right mind has in her head their idea of a perfect man, featuring the ability to bite through their flesh in order to suck their blood. Being treated like an overgrown ice lolly is not something most women would appreciate.
For the most part this book seems to be a generic love story with the supposedly dark and mysterious young man and the young lady but the..Surprise Surprise.. another character enters the mix turning this seemingly generic story into...well...ok, so it remains a generic love story, but at least the style of writing is something we can all appreciate, right?
WRONG! Stephenie Meyer, the author of the aforementioned gleaming sentience of originality writes (and this is probably a kind review) with all the ability and grace of a trained monkey. Whereas Stoker can transport a reader through the ages with his use of superlatives,adjectives, punctuation, metaphors and many other literary techniques, Meyer does not achieve the same effects with her commas and full stops (although if you search thoroughly enough you may find the odd metaphor or two, but we can't be sure whether they were intentional).

All in all, I personally miss the days when vampires were violent sociopaths, living in crypts to awake only during the night to feast on the blood of the innocent. In my opinion these noble vampires of yesteryear would not care for the feelings of a 17 year old girl, they would merely care if the blood in her body was enough to sustain them for longer.

Therefore, if you have purchsed a copy of Twilight, you may wish to burn it now and save yourself, as reading it as i'm sure it will soon be clincally proven to lower your I.Q several points!