Vampires, Shmampires

Dear Ms. Meyers,

I have given in to the hype and begun to read "Twilight", your sales-record-shattering novel that has millions of 14-year-old girls in knee-wobbling ecstatics. After all, there are several Young Adult series that I have enjoyed, namely: Harry Potter, Inkheart, Eragon. Therefore there is a likely probability that I will enjoy this series as well, right?

Stephenee (or however the weird you spell your first name), I must begin by giving you props for the story. You've chosen a nice setting for the hi jinks.... a gloomy, rainy town in the Pacific Northwest. I'm still working on how you chose the name, but suspect that you had just finished a pasta lunch when you started writing. You seem to have a nice story line working. The plot is pretty engrossing.

But, Stefanny, I have to inquire: Have you ever heard of ghostwriting? That's where you tell your story to someone who is actually capable of putting intelligible sentences together. It's created for people who really cannot write, such as movie stars, athletes, and fashion models. You may have picked up a book with the tell-tale "As Told by" notation... that's ghostwriting.

I bring this up, Stayfenny, because your writing "style" makes me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a cotton swab. I call it a "style" because it's nicer than saying that I cannot believe that you are a published author. I would love to meet your editor because I suspect that she has a deskful of empty red ink pens, after having bled over the Lockerbee crash that had to have been your original manuscript. If this is the final product, I can't imagine what you began with. 

Not only are the sentences ridiculously abrupt. But. You have also provided us with. The most paper-thin one-dimensional characters to ever grace a cheap trade paperback page. The only character study I could possibly wring from your protagonist is that she hates being referred to by her full name. And she is too stupid to recognize the vampire until more than halfway through the vampire book. Otherwise, she is so boring that I fervently wish she HAD been killed by that renegade van in the parking lot.

I am also convinced that you called upon Roget to find a synonym for nearly every word in that book. You say "sneered" when you clearly mean "whispered", "pleaded" instead of "questioned", and "The next day...." when we wish you would say "The end."

As I read this best seller, I try not to despair of the future of our youth. I think of the fantastically written books of my adolescence... A Separate Peace, A Wrinkle in Time... and cannot believe that America's teens are buying the sequel and the threequel of this sludge with abandon. Are they just so attuned to the abbreviated text messaging speak that any prose with all vowels intact is suddenly Faulkner?

Will I manage to finish this book of partially hydrogenated palm oil? Or will the shitty prose eventually distract me enough that I toss the book into the garbage disposal and scream "Die, Edward Cullen. Die!" as it is shredded into tiny shitty prose pieces?

Only the undead know. Whooooooooooooooooo. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Barf.

Love,

Minckle Mouse