#31 of 2009: Nightlight by The Harvard Lampoon

Sometimes you’ve got to hate something to appreciate the jokes about it.

I was late to the Twilight party. I didn’t get caught up in it until the fourth book was about to be released, picking up a softcover copy of the first book and reading up to Eclipse. I bought Breaking Dawn but there is no way in Hell I’m ever going to read it. By the time I made my way through the first three books, I was so thoroughly irritated by Meyer’s writing style, her horrible handling of both vampire and native lore and her hideous, insulting character development that I doubt I’ll ever read another sentence written by her again.

I have a tendency to get suckered into something out of sheer curiosity, which is the only reason I read beyond the first book in the first place. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. On a related note, anyone who wants my hardback copies better lay claim to them before I render them into booksafes. I’ll get more use out of them that way.

There are a million different reasons to hate the Twilight series, and I’m not going to go into them all. If you want to read some very well thought out, well written responses to Meyer’s work, check out Stoney321’s dissection of the series on Livejournal or Mark Reads Twilight So You Don’t Have To. You’ll save money, save time and retain your sanity while still being able to laugh at Twilight’s unintended hilarity.

For the few people who’ve read and enjoyed the Twilight series and have a sense of humor about it, and for those who’ve read it and hate it, there’s no better rip on the series than The Harvard Lampoon’s new book, Nightlight.

Belle Goose, a girl so clumsy and unable to control her limbs that she can’t walk through a door without self-injury, leaves Phoenix and moves to Switchblade, Oregon to be with her father, the town’s greatest (and possibly only) window-washer. Once there, she realizes that everyone in town adores her, including the mailman, the school secretary and all of her classmates. Only one person, the mysterious computer nerd Edwart Mullen, seems impervious to her blazing charm. There has to be a reason for this. He must be a vampire. Despite having little to no evidence to support her theory, Belle falls head over heels in love with him in record time, even though they’ve had almost no contact with each other outside of a few glances in each other’s direction during classes.

Thus begins the romance of a lifetime.

Nightlight is incredibly stupid, but it’s a calculating, mocking stupid. Every ridiculous line is crafted to mimic Twilight’s unintended hilarity:

He frowned and looked down at the tablecloth. “Actually, you’re the one person I can’t read. I’ve always considered myself good at looking at people’s expressions and making wild guesses as to how they feel, but you - I look at your face and try to guess what you are thinking, and all I hear is ‘BEEEEEEEEEEEEP.’ Just this giant beeping sound - the sound a medical monitor makes when you die and everything goes blank. ‘BEEEEEEEEEEEP.’ Like that.”


“Gosh, Belle. When someone asks you, ‘What’s new?’ the correct answer is, ‘not much.’ Besides, isn’t it a little soon to cut yourself off from the rest of your peers, depending on a boyfriend to satisfy your social needs as opposed to making friends? Imagine what would happen if something forced that boy to leave! I’m imagining pages and pages would happen - with nothing but the names of the month on them.”


One nice thing about my dad is, as an old person, his hearing isn’t too great. So when I closed the door to my room, unpacked, cried uncontrollably, slammed the door, and threw my clothes around my room in a fit of dejected rage, he didn’t notice. it was a relief to let some of my steam out, but I wasn’t ready to let all of it out yet. That would come later, when my dad was asleep and I was lying awake thinking about how ordinary kids my age are. If only one of them were extraordinary, then I’d be rid of this insomnia.

I could not put this book down once I'd started reading, and in the two hours it took me (including breaks for dinner and moments to breathe deeply and control my laughter) I must have burst out into at least twenty separate fits of giggling.

It takes genius to mimic stupidity, and I find it hilarious that a bunch of college kids half-assing it managed to so superbly imitate Meyer and her cast of inane, vapid characters. Nightlight is absolutely fantastic in its mockery, doing in a mere one hundred and fifty-four pages what took Meyer five hundred and forty-four to accomplish, and she was taking the endeavor seriously.

5/5

Sometimes You Can't Say It Better...

So you just repeat what the other guy said.

I’m probably the (at least) ten-thousandth blogger to toss their two cents in about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. I’ll keep my opinion as short and sweet as possible, then. It’s a series of books. They’re very popular with both the YA crowd and the adult women crowd. They serve a purpose not unlike Harry Potter in that they bring young people, people who could be spending their time texting, playing video games or talking on the phone into libraries and bookstores. Unlike Harry Potter, there isn’t anything grand or epic about these books and, if you hold them up to older, acclaimed works, they fall woefully short.

They’re still coercing people into reading, and hopefully picking up other titles, so I can’t complain too much.

However, and this is a big however (imagine it in seventy-two point font if you will), the characters are horrible. Bella is a Mary Sue under a very thin veneer of narrative viewpoint and her two would-be suitors are a prudish, bullying stalker and a whiny teenaged narcissist.

I think one of the reasons I dislike Jacob so much isn’t even his own fault. Any time he, or any tribal members, show up they are immediately described as being “russet-colored.” Meyer uses the word “russet” the way Anne Rice used the word “preternatural,” which is to say too damn much and too damn often.

I’m not sure if Meyer is a bit racially insensitive, is unimaginative or just really likes potatoes, but if I never have to see her use the word “russet” again I will die a happy woman.

TrebleClef over at LibraryThing said everything I wanted to say and more in a review of Twilight that I would like to repost here today. I couldn’t have said any of this better.



Essentially what happens when you walk into Hot Topic, pick out the first twelve year old you see, and then have her write an Anne Rice novel. Twilight is a shallow blunder, and it sure is proud of it. The book reads like fan-fiction from a horny teenager (though that phrase may be redundant) with a mental problem, instead of providing any form of good writing we get every vampire cliché known to man until you're guaranteed every scene-fag that reads it will adore it. It is truly astounding how Meyer is able to say so, SO little in the course of 500 pages.

More than half of Twilight is just characters giving wry smiles, chuckling, hissing, glaring, flaring nostrils and raising eyebrows during some vapid, angsty conversation. The whole thing is narrated by some chick named Bella Swan, someone so lacking in human characteristics that it is more than easy to forget this is your main character. Reading this book makes it no surprise the only people who like this are around thirteen years old, both the main characters are covered in disgusting gloss and teenage perfection. Bella Swan and Edward Cullen are two of the dullest characters I've ever become acquainted with.

Bella is just another "average, ordinary, everyday girl" typical of romance novels. She is the "new girl in school" cliché and instantly becomes popular by doing nothing. She is made essentially perfect in every manner, but in an attempt to hide this the author decides to make her clumsy. The problem is that anyone familiar with these stereotypes knows that when it comes to these characters this is actually a "plus". It also doesn't help she spends a large amount of time I could have spent hammering a nail into my foot whining about how she always falls down. That is, of course, when she isn't using insane amounts of adjectives to describe the "dreamy" vamp of her life, Edward Cullen.

Oh, Edward Cullen. How I loathe thee. This talking mannequin is spoken about for pages upon pages with what looks like a late-night session on fanfiction.net with a teenager and a thesaurus. Like Boring Bella, Ennuyeux Edward is without depth and without flaw. Know what else Bella and Edward are without? CHEMISTRY. This is pretty much the book version of Neo and Trinity from the Matrix, except even worse. A third of the book is spent with these two Barbie dolls enjoying fake, unrealistic sexual tension akin to an episode of InuYasha until an awful plot forms. The important thing is that it ends with Cullen and Bella at the prom... AWWWWWWWWW, NO ONE SAW THIS COMING. AWWWW.

There is a lot more to say about this offense against literature, but this is just a quick little review from me. Despite all of this bullshit, the most infuriating thing about this 4-part story is that it isn't rotting on LiveJournal where it belongs. It is out there making millions with people who wouldn't know quality if it punted them in the vagina. It offers nothing to the reader. Just some clever marketing, some clever abuse of the masses. It is a superficial story that leaves readers with the image of a girl who discovers her own worth and gets all she ever wanted, by giving up her identity and throwing away nearly everything in life that matters. For this reason, Twilight's fame is far more understandable. For this sacrifice of self for the shallow and meaningless truly captures the spirit of the generation it's written for, or at least, the lack thereof.



This deserves a bit of applause, I think. Thank you for braving the anger of a legion of lovestruck young girls to point out Meyer's shortcomings. Hopefully the bulk of them will move on to something more substantial now that the series is (mostly) over.