New Moon Rising

I love Stephenie Meyer for many reasons. I love that she's Mormon. I love her because she wrote books about not having casual sex and made millions of dollars in the process. I love her because her books are black and white and red all over. I love her because the last line of the last full paragraph on page 197 of Twilight ("It was a colossal tribute to his face that it kept my eyes away from his body") gave my cousin Jazon a new fitness goal: to work out until it's a tribute to his chiseled body that it distracts from his perfect face. Clearly, this is literature that changes lives. And I love Stephenie Meyer for that.

Do her books have shortcomings? Sure. There's a missing comma on page 67 of New Moon, for example. Her dialogue is often coated with a distracting number of adjectives and adverbs. And the way her books progressively romanticize controlling types and stalkers is a little bit alarming. But they can be forgiven all that, because they've inspired something better:




Vampioneers: The Everlasting Covenant is the fifth-best book I've ever read, and I've read a lot of books. It takes all the angst and turmoil of Twilight and moves it from the adolescent to the transcendent. These vampires aren't tortured by forbidden love for a whiny teenage girl; they are tortured by the way their immortality and changed natures are separating them from God. They don't spend their time staring through girls' windows; they rescue strangers from another continent from a midnight mob, embrace a new faith, cross an ocean, and help a prophet build a city as persecution rages.

And now, they'll be in a movie. That's right: at select screenings of New Moon in the intermountain west, they've started playing previews for what will almost certainly be the film of the decade. The Twilight film franchise, as you know, is nearing its eclipse.

So, move over Meyer media machine. The real new moon rising is Vampioneers.