Her fans devour the books in Meyer’s “Twilight” series — U.S. sales climbed to more than 5.3 million this year — about a searing but chaste romance between a devastatingly moral vampire named Edward and a mortal girl, Bella, the object of his tautly reined appetites. A movie version of “Twilight” arrives in theaters next winter.
Meyer’s newest novel, “The Host,” departs from the earlier series in subject. Instead of vampires, it features a disconcertingly appealing alien who takes possession of a stubborn human, giving new meaning to the phrase “being of two minds.” But spiritually, “The Host” is right in step with the “Twilight” books.
There’s enough torrid frisson in “The Host” to start major fires. The characters barely touch, “but there’s more sex in that one paragraph than in all the snogging in Harry Potter,” as Time magazine’s Lew Grossman put it in his recent profile of Meyer.
Yet there’s nothing that last century’s National Legion of Decency could reasonably censure. It’s a book that Meyer’s mother and children could read without blushing.
“I think of the books as very romantic,” said Meyer when she stopped in Denver last month during a book promotion tour for “The Host.” She is impeccably groomed, with luxuriant curves and a thick fall of dark hair. She takes her new celebrity standing more or less in stride and still feels guilty about being unable to personally answer her stacks of fan mail with the “three-page handwritten letter they all deserve.”
Meyer’s special gift is infusing an electricity in holding hands or kissing, similar to film director Alfred Hitchcock’s talent for implying horror far more exquisite than what the camera showed.
So, though the text simmers in “Twilight” and its sequels, “New Moon” and “Eclipse,” high school students Edward and Bella remain as G-rated as the Bobbsey Twins, with perhaps a superior ability to resist temptation. (Edward belongs to a coven of vampires that foreswear human blood, sustaining themselves on wild animals.)
As she was editing “The Host,” Meyer read the text aloud to her eldest son, age 12, as she did with the first “Twilight” books. She’s refrained from reading him more than the first three chapters of “Breaking Dawn,” the upcoming “Twilight” book, due in August.
“I don’t read more than that to him, because I don’t trust him not to sell me out to some cute 12-year-old,” she said during a visit to Denver last month.
She was quite serious about that, and with good reason. Readers are frantic to know what’s next.
Weeks before Meyer’s scheduled appearance in Denver, tickets to her reading were in such demand the Tattered Cover Book Store moved her presentation from its new East Colfax digs to East High School’s auditorium. Most of the readers were devout “Twilight” fans who took it on faith “The Host” would be just as enthralling.
Unlike the “Twilight” books, “The Host” is aimed at adult readers, and it is a little darker and grittier. But, as the Tattered Cover staff can testify, adolescents are reaching past grown-ups to lunge for copies of “The Host.” When Meyer was in Denver, scores of readers brought multiple copies, along with well- thumbed “Twilight” books, to be signed.
“I brought two of my ‘Twilight’ books, and two of ‘The Host,’ because one was for my friend,” said Hava Rosenberg, 13, who owns “an indecent number of copies” of Meyer’s books. The rest were signed at Meyer’s 2007 book signing stop in Denver.
“What I like about her is everything she describes is so real you can relate to it, but there’s this hint of fantasy, with werewolves and vampires. The magic and mystery pull it away from reality a bit. She has a really good voice in her storytelling. She can make anything interesting. I would read math textbooks if Stephenie Meyer wrote them,” Hava said.
The “Twilight” series began, famously, with a dream that awoke Meyer on June 1, 2003. It was so compelling that she immediately logged on to her husband’s PC and began to type.
“What compelled me to write it down was that I have a really bad memory, and it was a story I didn’t want to lose,” she said.
“It was always a story. I was not thinking, when I wrote, ‘This is a dream.’ I did not think of it as a book. The important part of the dream was the conversation.”
It took three months to finish the initial “Twilight” book. The others followed as quickly. Agreeing with the publisher about a book cover, she observed, often takes more time than writing the book itself.
The idea for “The Host” took a more conventional route but arrived as wholly formed. She has outlines for two “Host” sequels and is eager to get back to that storyline.
“The Host,” she said, “was an idea I had on a long road trip. I was halfway into the story, and not really sure about it when I came up with an alien in someone’s body, and both the alien and that human being in love with the same man. I tend to see everything like a movie in my head.”
Fiction
The Host, by Stephenie Meyer, $25.99
