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Even though I didn’t like I Am Legend with its vampires I read Stephanie Meyer’s vampire triology next. My first exposure to the triology came this summer past. My sister, who is fifteen years younger than I, came to stay at my house for a week while she visited the university and applied to school there. One evening we visited a book store and she pounced on Eclipse (2008) which had not been out long at all. We returned home and after visiting with me about fifteen or twenty minutes she retired to her bedroom for good. Ian came home from work around 4 a.m. and told me later that morning that her light was still on. She stayed up to read the whole book through.

I cannot blame her, for Meyer’s writing is simple and seductive and so easy to sink into. Her storytelling is fabulous and no doubt, that is the greatest appeal of her books. Her characters are complex, too. But, it is high school, after all. So high school. Isabella Swan is the protagonist. She moves to Washington to live with her father, the sheriff, of a small, gloomy but green, town. Her mother remarried a baseball player who travels frequently and Isabella felt as though her living with her mother placed a hardship upon her since she couldn’t tag along on new hubby’s travels.

Basically the first book, Twilight, is about Isabella getting used to her new town, school, and friends. Her father is mostly absent, but she cooks dinner for them each evening. She makes new friends easily and eventually befriends a passel of vampires who belong to the same family. She falls in love with Edward, and he feels the same for her. But it’s tough dating a vampire. He’s so cold. And has to control his blood lust around her. And some of the vampires have special powers. Like Alice, Edward’s sister, can see the future. The excitement comes near the end of the first novel when they encounter three other vampires. Almost forgot: These vampires are vegetarians, of sorts. They don’t prey upon humans. They only drink blood from large animals like bears, cougars, etc. The three other vampires the family and Isabella encounter do drink human blood. And they all want Isabella. Throughout the entire trilogy (and there’s a fourth book coming out this summer, so what does that make it?) Isabella struggles with her desire to become a vampire. Sometimes she is conflicted, but for the most part, she is sure that a vampire’s life is for her.

In the next book, New Moon, Edward decides that Isabella cannot live a normal life with him in it. And so he leaves. His whole family leaves Washington for greener pastures. Isabella falls into a deep depression and only goes through the motions of life. Finally, there’s a break in her depression and she spends more and more time with Jacob. They’ve known one another for years. He’s a few years younger than she, and an American Indian who lives on the local rez. She has him repair two motorcycles that she bought with the hope of living on the edge. Mostly, she’s suicidal at this point because she cannot live without Edward. So high school. But then Jacob starts acting weird and won’t take her calls. He avoids her. Readers can put two and two together quite easily if they remember the story Jacob told Isabella in the first book about werewolves and vampires. Eventually Isabella guesses that he’s a werewolf. The problem, of course, is that werewolves and vampires are mortal enemies. So how will Isabella juggle her friendship with Jacob and her feelings for Edward? Oh, Edward returns to her life. The story takes a dramatic turn when Edward thinks that Isabella is dead and he goes to Italy to have the uber vampires kill him, put him out of his misery, for he cannot live without Isabella.

Somehow, I’ve forgotten the third book entirely. Eclipse is filled with Isabella’s woes about finishing high school and moving on to college. She disdains normal human experiences and aches to join Edward and the Cullen family as her own vampire self. One of her major problems is that she’s aging. She turns 18 in this book and doesn’t want to get older than Edward. Edward wants her to go to college and have all those experiences that he missed out on when he was human. Then there are tons of murders happening in Seattle that have Isabella’s father and the Cullen’s out of sorts. The Cullens suspect it’s a pack of newborn vampires going through the city’s population. They prepare for an attack, for they are certain, given Alice’s special powers, that the pack will soon descend upon their town. There’s a bit of negotiating between Isabella and Edward regarding her becoming a vampire. She wants it done soon. He wants to wait. Then he extracts a promise from her that they will marry before she becomes a bloodsucker. Naturally there is a huge fight between vampires when the newborn pack reaches Forks, but surprisingly, the werewolves agree to fight alongside the vegetarian vampires. They fight. Some die, some don’t.

Now I await for the release of the fourth book this summer to see how things turn out. I feel that Isabella won’t become a vampire. Frankly, Jacob, the werewolf seems a better match for Isabella, and one of the struggles she faces in the third book is the realization that she loves Jacob more than in a “just friends” way. The vampires are glamorous and lovely and drive sports cars, but otherwise, they’re boring. Go werewolf, go!