• Twilight Official Guide to Arrive at Last–Next Year

    ByElizabeth
    4 Comments

    After promising publication for over a year and a half now, Little Brown has at last given a firm release date, April 12 next year, for the now-illustrated official guide to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga. Meyer has promised that the new guide will include backstory information on characters, as well as genealogies and maps to fill in more background on the world of the Cullens. It will be interesting to see how much really “new” information is included, or if most of it will be the same material Meyer has already posted on her website or revealed in correspondence and interviews.  One piece that was originally intended for this guide grew until it took on a life of its own as The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Perhaps the collection will include shorter pieces that fill in the actions of characters whose stories Bella couldn’t tell.

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  • How to Film the ‘Breaking Dawn’ Birth Sequence

    ByJohn
    3 Comments

    The marriage of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen is the Alchemical Wedding of Red King and White Queen. The child they conceive, the so-called ‘Philosophical Orphan,’ is supposed to cause their deaths, at least according to the rubrics of literary alchemy. The orphan is a character stand-in for the Philosopher’s Stone and is meant to be an incarnation of the contraries needing resolution in the story’s setting. Renesme not only has a name that screams “resolution” (at least as much as “melange” does), she is also the human-vampire androgyn and alchemical Rebus that unites vampires, shape-shifting werewolves, and hapless humans. Really, in the allegorical story of Latter-day Saint divinization embedded in the last three Twilight novels via the hermetic symbolism of alchemy, the marriage and apotheosis-in-sacrificial-childbirth scenes are essential — and wild. (All of which is explained in detail in Spotlight: An Up-Close Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga.)

    But how do you film Bella’s bone-breaking and bloody-beyond-belief birthing? And keep a PG-13 rating?  The discussion is on in earnest at this mommy weblog; I hope you’ll share your ideas in the comment boxes here. Usually, I don’t care for movie versions of book scenes for which I have pretty vivid images in my head already. In this case, though, I think I may see the film only to displace the ones I have from the printed page and my imagination. (Hat Tip to Arabella!)

  • 9/11/1857: The Mountain Meadows Massacre

    ByJohn
    1 Comment

    It’s mid September, so our thoughts return to the events of 9/11 — and, if we’re serious Twilight readers, to the first 9/11 massacre, the unprovoked attack of Latter-day Saints on an Arkansas wagon train passing through Southern Utah in 1857 on that date, the so-called Mountain Meadows Massacre. If you wondered why Carlisle Cullen has a picture of a mountain meadow in his office and why every Twilight novel features a scene of revelation or conflict in a mountain meadow, the answer in large part comes back to this historical event and books about it published the year Mrs. Meyer had her vampire-with girlfriend-in-circular-meadow dream.

    One of the more bizarre events in my Walter Mitty existence as an author happened this February in Oklahoma City. I was speaking at the C. S. Lewis conference there and spent the night in the home of a friend’s parents. The father was wonderfully hospitable, and, being a serious reader, our conversation on the drive to his house turned to talk about books and my work as a critic. I shared a copy of Spotlight: A Close-Up Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga with him and explained its two parts. I mentioned to him what I said above: that a large part of Twilight’s inspiration, Mrs. Meyer’s dream, is in the LDS community’s response to three histories of the Mountain Meadows Massacre that were published in the year she had her dream.

    He held up his hand and said, kindly but firmly, as we pulled into his driveway, “Stop right there. Don’t say anything more about that.” Read More “9/11/1857: The Mountain Meadows Massacre”

  • Mockingjay Discussion 19: Shadows of Twilight

    ByJohn
    29 Comments

    I don’t think Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer have that much in common besides being the authors of best-selling YA series. Mrs. Meyer is a stay-at-home mom, a Latter-day Saint, and didn’t study creative writing in school or work as a writer before taking the world by surprise with Twilight. Ms. Collins’ faith and political posture are unknown (if I had to guess, I’d say “Catholic” and ‘DLA’), but she has an MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University and she had a successful career as a television writer and novelist before Hunger Games made her a household name. If Collins has the equivalent of a PhD in creative writing, though, it still seems she has learned a lot from the soccer-Mormon-mom in Arizona. The Hunger Games novels and especially Mockingjay are loaded with Twilight echoes. Read More “Mockingjay Discussion 19: Shadows of Twilight”