If you have even the most fleeting acquaintance with a prepubescent girl, chances are you've heard about the film of New Moon, the second in Stephenie Meyer's bestselling quartet of vampire novels.
At a "stars meet the fans" event in London's Battersea Park last week, the hysteria that has greeted each publication day quickened into a bacchanalian frenzy. It came complete with nubile tweens with "Bite me" scrawled across their foreheads, thanks largely to the pallid charms of Robert Pattinson, the young British actor who graduated from a bit part in a Harry Potter film to playing the glitteringly beautiful 107-year-old vampire, Edward Cullen.
Edward, for those who haven't been exposed to a hot blast of tween fervour, is not your average bloodsucker. For a start, he's renounced the part about suckling virgins' necks. Instead, he's part of a posse of "vegetarian" vampires, who have foresworn the hard stuff - your actual humans - in favour of hunting game in the woods.
Second, he's attending high school (Edward is stuck forever in the simulacrum of a devastatingly attractive 17-year-old boy) in Forks, a small town in Washington State, where he's unwillingly fallen in love with Bella Swan, Meyer's human heroine.
This thrusts him into the quandary that drives the entire series - if he goes beyond first base with Bella, he will end up destroying her with his unleashed vampiric lust. Bella's best friend, incidentally, happens to be a werewolf, and for much of the quartet she's caught in a big old supernatural tug of love between the two.
Stephenie Meyer is big business these days, heir apparent to J K Rowling's crown. Though her novels throb with all the emotion and eroticism that the vampire genre demands, penetration - of either sort - is endlessly delayed, making them ideal for an audience who have outgrown the charms of the bespectacled wizard, without necessarily having reached the age of consent.
Since the publication of her first novel, Twilight, in 2004, Meyer has sold more than 70 million books and is credited with single-handedly shoring up young adult publishing, plugging the gap in bookshops after sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows began to die down.
This year, Meyer was ranked by Forbes as the 26th most powerful celebrity in the world. The origin story of Twilight is almost as fantastic as its contents. Stephenie Meyer is famously a Mormon, living in Arizona with her husband, Christian, known as Pancho, a former accountant who is now a full-time father to their three sons.
Though she majored in English literature at the Mormon Brigham Young University in Utah, becoming a novelist was not something she intended, and the only job she had previously held was as a receptionist. The story, which has gained the patina of myth without losing its gawky confessional quality, also possesses a supernatural element.
As Meyer explains: "I wasn't planning on a career in writing, I wasn't thinking about stories I wanted to write down. But I had a dream." Literature inspired by dreams is not uncommon, particularly among horror writers. Mary Shelley first encountered Frankenstein and his terrible creation in a waking nightmare, and Robert Louis Stevenson dreamt two scenes of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
On June 2, 2003 ("I know when I started writing, because ... that was the day I started my summer diet"), Meyer had a dream about a girl and a sparkling young vampire who were talking in a meadow.
In between changing nappies and providing breakfasts for three children under five, she managed to sketch out a plot in her head and over the next few months typed Twilight one-handed with her baby on her lap.
After her sister suggested publication, she researched agents on the internet, received a stack of rejection letters and was eventually accepted by an intern who'd dug her manuscript out of the slush pile. Within a matter of months, she'd signed a three-book deal with Little, Brown Book Group for $750,000, quickly followed by film rights.
The fairy-tale quality of Meyer's ascent recalls J K Rowling, who conjured up her boy wizard from a cafe in Edinburgh while struggling with single parenthood and depression. Both Meyer and Rowling have created worlds so thoroughly imagined, so intricately assembled and lovingly decorated, that a reader can simply set up house within them.
Meyer has put a good deal of effort into engaging with her impassioned readers. Until recently, she went on endless, gruelling book tours and her official website links to hundreds of fan sites with names such as "Glittery Boyfriend" and "Bloody Craving". Many are filled with obsessive stories based on the Twilight characters, something she has mixed feelings about: "I don't like them wasting their time on something they can never claim as their own."
This concern for her readers' morals is a recurrent preoccupation. When, in 2008, a partial draft of her unfinished new novel, Midnight Sun, was leaked online, her response was to abandon the book and put the draft - "messy and flawed and full of mistakes" - up on her own website, so that her fans "don't have to feel they have to make a sacrifice to stay honest".
You wouldn't catch Bram Stoker fretting over his readers like that. But then Meyer is not your typical queen of the night. She hates horror, is a teetotaller, has never seen an R-rated film and confesses to not even having read Dracula.
While Anne Rice, the bestselling author of Interview With the Vampire, once staged her own funeral in New Orleans and liked to arrive at readings carried in a coffin, the closest Meyer comes to gothic is a faintly barbaric necklace and a temporary black rinse.
This desire to keep things pretty perhaps explains why her first novel for adults, The Host, a blended sci-fi romance, did not match Twilight's sales. She's drained the blood from the vampire genre and replaced it with sugared water. It's no wonder teenage girls flock around her like hummingbirds.
Critics, on the other hand, are inclined to accuse her of peddling an agenda of abstinence by dressing it up as a more romantic choice than sex, while her celebration of female passivity has incensed feminists, who see the vulnerable and hapless Bella as a dangerous role model for an impressionable audience.
The quality of her prose has also been attacked. Her novels are melting marshmallows - to say they are poorly written is to miss the addictive, febrile sweetness on which they run.
There are signs Meyer is now withdrawing from the circus she's created. She's called a halt to the book tours and returned home to her marble desk and her kids, claiming: "I'm a little burned out on vampires now. I need to clean my palate."
A film of The Host is in production, and she's begun work on a new fantasy series, set in a realm that she has already intricately mapped out. Her publishers must be rubbing their hands in glee. Her books might be escapist, but Stephenie Meyer has the knack of building worlds in which everyone wants to hide.
LOWDOWN
WHO: Stephenie Meyer (pictured above), best selling author of vampire novels
What: New Moon, the movie, in cinemas now.
- OBSERVER
The Mormon queen of the damned
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