MATTHEW STEFANSON
Opinions Writer

Pre-teens have terrible taste in literature. This fact is the reason that the Sweet Valley High series and the Hardy Boys lasted so long, and also the reason that we don’t let them vote or drink. They make awful decisions as a full-time job.

No one would dispute the fact that Nancy Drew is pedantic and ridiculous and if you came across a university student who said their favourite book was The Secret of Red Gate Farm you would immediately start looking for mittens on a string or a helmet.

Those books were trash, but at least they were recognized as literary training wheels. They did their job by encouraging kids to read and enjoy reading, which is fantastic. I’m all for literacy and anything that gets the horrible population of children into books is a good thing, but you have to grow out of tripe sooner or later.

Sadly, thanks to Stephenie Meyer, the world of grade school literature is experiencing a Renaissance. The Twilight series — the worst example of trash literature in recent memory — is an abomination that takes over 2,500 pages to fucking end and give the world some peace. It is like a cancer.

The problem isn’t that the stories are bad literature. I wouldn’t expect a book about teenage vampires to be anything but kitschy and incredibly stupid. Which they are.

The problem isn’t even that they’re so poorly written; I applaud Stephenie Meyer for managing to drain the funds of semi-literate sheep.

The problem isn’t that the book’s main plotline details a 100-year-old vampire plowing a 17-year-old girl because that’s a pretty vampire-like thing to do.

The problem is that people — grown-ass people — think these books are something other than bullshit words bound into a hardcover and endorsed by mass marketing.

Meyer has managed to write complete garbage about a sad teenage girl and her sparkling vampire boyfriend that people who are adults, at least technically, are willing to read. The author of these horrid rags has convinced legions of college-aged or older people to read books filled with sappy, teen romance and ridiculously stupid ideas.

And the greatest trick of all: fans of Twilight don’t seem to notice how crazy stupid everything in the series is.

Sparkling? Seriously? Your vampires fucking sparkle in the sunlight? What happened to bursting into flames or turning into statues of ash that blow away on the wind? What happened to all of that cool shit? Why throw all of that away in favour of sparkling?

And why don’t they just go out during the daytime? Because people will know? When they see them sparkle in the sun they’ll know that they’re vampires? No, they won’t. You know why? Because that’s so fucking stupid.

You see a dude sparkling and just walk away. You don’t think that he’s a hellish creature that thrives on human blood, you know why? Because that is idiotic. That is the dumbest possible thing you could think of.

But despite the hours of wasted time that people spend reading about vampire high school and thunderstorm baseball games and every other ridiculous thing in the series, no one has quite caught on to the perfect scam that Meyer is working. She has created — or more appropriately adapted, since I refuse to give her credit for originality — a familiar piece of lore, which has grossed her more than $125 million. She has written several terrible books that have unleashed a horde of offshoot merchandise: board games, toys, jewellery and probably a line of ketchup chips called Cullen Crunch.

And she earned this success by writing lines like this: “Take care of my heart, I left it with you.”

I want to puke so hard that it kills me.

– –
photo: Katie Freeland