What’s that you say? A blatantly-cliched, Designated Romance has achieved undeserved popularity through canny advertising and a near-religious fandom of desperate, everyday Americans who don’t know Romance from their own house cats? And you’re actually surprised by this? Am I the only one who’s wondered how large a structure one could build from all the VHS copies of Titanic everyone bought in 1998, watched once…and never bothered with again? The only one who’s noticed that to read Twilight is to read your girlfriend’s old high school diary with all the proper names replaced by “Edward” and all the sex expunged?

Turgid, repetitive, and ill-paced, the Twilight saga is a series of books designed to be picked up and put down between the soul-deadening chores of “normal” everyday American life…which fits, considering that’s exactly how it was written. (You try crafting a piece of literature with a house full of teenage boys.) Author Stephanie Meyer insists she’d never read a vampire story or seen a horror film before beginning her magnum opus, and you know what? I believe her. Twilight is exactly what someone who’s never allowed themselves to experience a vampire story would dream up, given half a chance and a boring life in the suburbs of Phoenix…surely the most forsaken place on Planet America…outside of Southwest Missouri. {More}