Word: meyers
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Whereas Rowling's works maintain a certain English reserve, Meyer's books are full of gusting emotions. Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping. (Bella's histrionics don't feel at all unrealistic. When you're writing about adolescents, melodrama and realism are the same thing.) Rowling labors over her intricate plots, but Meyer's stories never bend or twist or branch. They have one gear, and she guns it straight ahead till the last page. The way she manages the reader's curiosity...
...story reminds one a little of J.K. Rowling's--Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as an unemployed single mom while her baby daughter slept--and Meyer is quick to point out that her success is a direct result of the way Rowling changed the book industry: children are now willing to read 500-page novels, and adults are now willing to read books written for children. But as artists, they couldn't be more different. Rowling pieces her books together meticulously, detail by detail. Meyer floods the page like a severed artery. She never uses...
...Meyer and Rowling do share two important traits. Both writers embed their fantasy in the modern world--Meyer's vampires are as deracinated and contemporary as Rowling's wizards. And people do not want to just read Meyer's books; they want to climb inside them and live there. James Patterson may sell more books, but not a lot of people dress up like Alex Cross. There's no literary term for the quality Twilight and Harry Potter (and The Lord of the Rings) share, but you know it when you see it: their worlds have a freestanding internal integrity...
...Meyer first realized something was afoot when she gave a reading in Seattle and somebody drove 4 hours and took a boat to get there. At twilightmoms.com a website for fans over 25, there are more than 200,000 posts. Last year there was an Eclipse prom in Tempe, Ariz. "It's not like Harry Potter, where you can wear a wizard's robe," Meyer says. "But they do what they can. One girl even had colored contacts...
...wouldn't want to live in Meyer's next book. Her fourth Twilight novel, Breaking Dawn, will be out in August--it's already No. 8 on Amazon.com--but on May 6 she will publish The Host (Little, Brown; 619 pages), a science-fiction novel being marketed to adults. It's set in the near future on an Earth that has been conquered by parasitic aliens who take over the bodies of humans, annihilating their hosts' personalities. One human host resists; she lives on as a voice in the head she shares with the alien. When host and parasite...