A man’s guide to the “Twilight” phenomenon

If you are a man and you have a woman in your life, there’s a decent chance that she’s a fan of a book called “Twilight”. You might be a little curious as to why this book is so popular with the ladies, but chances are that you aren’t curious enough to actually pick it up and read it.

I, however, was that curious, and I recently completed the nearly 500-page journey into the world of teenage vampire romance. I’m not going to recommend that any men out there follow my example, but just so you won’t be completely in the dark about this estrogen-charged phenomenon I’ll give you a brief summary of what happens in the book.

The story opens with our teenage protagonist, Bella, moving to a new city to live with her single father. Bella is a moody, sarcastic teenage girl with a poor self-image, but the single most defining thing about her is that she is extremely clumsy. She can barely walk without falling down and injuring herself, and I had to wonder if she had some sort of undiagnosed neuromuscular disorder. Unfortunately no one in the book thinks of this, so we’ll never know.

At her new school Bella immediately makes a bunch of new friends and inexplicably seems to despise them all, especially the boys. Being a typical girl, she is instead fascinated by the one guy in school who seems to want to have nothing to do with her.

That guy turns out to be Edward, our other protagonist. Edward is apparently the most attractive man ever to walk the earth, a point that is driven home mercilessly throughout the book. We eventually learn that that Edward is also a vampire, and he lives with a sort of adopted family of six other vampires who are all achingly beautiful in their own right. Not to worry though, they are all “good” vampires and only drink animal blood. They jokingly refer to themselves as vegetarians. Cute!

Some of the vampires in this book have psychic powers, and Edward can read people’s minds. He can read everyone’s mind except Bella’s, and of course that causes him to be fascinated by her. Being as fine as he is, it doesn’t take long before Bella develops a little fascination of her own, and for the next 250 pages or so the two of them slowly get to know each other and fall hopelessly in love.

One day Bella joins the Cullen family as they go out to play baseball during a thunderstorm (don’t ask) when out of nowhere three more vampires show up. Unfortunately the new vampires are not vegetarians, and one of them (James) decides he wants to make a meal out of Bella. Edward scares him off, but this new guy is a relentless hunter and he now has Bella squarely in his sights. Edward’s family quickly spirit her out of town for her own protection.

The dastardly James manages to trick Bella into meeting up with him alone using a scam that involves Bella’s mom, an abandoned ballet studio, and a VCR. Once James has her where he wants her, he makes the classic bad-guy blunder of going into a long, boring speech about how great it is going to be to kill her instead of just sucking her blood and calling it a day. That gives Edward and his family time to catch up and save Bella at the last minute.

“Twilight” is not destined to be on my short list of favorite books as it drags way too much in the middle section and could have benefited greatly from the services of a good editor. It’s not awful though, and I may continue on with the next book in the series, which I hear involves werewolves. No doubt these werewolves will be strikingly handsome when in human form. Just because you’re a monster doesn’t mean you can’t be smokin’ hot