Due to a lack of self respect and an annoying sense of curiosity, I’ve been “reading” the series via audio book because I knew I wouldn’t have the patience or will to assault my eyes with such horrendous text. I doubt you were intending to read the rest of the series (and I highly discourage it since it’s almost guaranteed to give you an aneurysm) but I feel I should warn you that it only gets worse.

Here are some of my biggest (and re-occurring) gripes:

- Stephenie Meyer has absolutely no concept of how to compose a story. The first half to three-quarters of the book is all exposition and setting up the characters. Okay, fine. HOWEVER, at about the three-quarter point she decides to finally throw in a plot point, which is a bit jarring as a reader. Most notably with “Twilight,” by the time I got to about chapter 17 or so, I thought I was reading a different book.

- There are some things that have generally been agreed upon as “vampire canon”. I feel like Meyer tries to break some of that canon. (SPARKLY VAMPIRES? For real?) It’s like she started to write a love story and decided to make one of the characters a vampire as an after thought. Because of this, she had to go back and work around some of the established vampire canon or cherry picks what she likes to get her Mary Sue way.

- The characters are erratic, fickle, flat and unrealistic. I don’t connect to them or find them endearing. Bella’s an obsessive lunatic, and Edward’s mood swings border on manic-depressive.

- The characters’ dialogue feels inconsistent, uncharacteristic and contrived. The characters are either articulate or mouth breathers. The descriptions are repetitive. It’s also embarrassing to read when she forces in the books title unnaturally into dialogue.

- I detest Meyer for making Bella Swan a shallow, obsessed drone. Bella had the potential to be a strong, maybe even admirable, female lead. But she becomes irrationally blinded by her emotions and embarrassingly immature. Then, the men are either doofy (oblivious to what’s going on or generally dopey), domineering (controlling Bella in some way or another) or neutered (a slave to their emotions for Bella, which are unrequited).

TL;DR: Stephenie Meyer is an insult to the craft of writing. These stories read like second or third drafts instead of highly polished narratives. More than anything, I’m completely disgusted with the editor(s) and publisher(s) that worked with Meyer to produce such an atoricity. I feel that we can merely hope that Twilight is a fad that will disappear soon.

Here’s mine. And for the record, I still find The Da Vinci Code far more offensive to my literary sensibilities, if only because of its pretensions of tackling the big questions. It never occurs to Meyer to do that in a novel.