Stephenie Meyer: A New J.K. Rowling?

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Her 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 a sentence when she can use a whole paragraph. Her books are big (500-plus pages) but not dense--they have a pillowy quality distinctly reminiscent of Internet fan fiction. (Which she'll readily grant: "I don't think I'm a writer; I think I'm a storyteller," Meyer says. "The words aren't always perfect.")

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, maintaining tension and controlling the flow of information, is simply virtuosic. She creates a compulsion in the reader that is not unvampiric.

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 that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there.

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!"

Beyond Twilight

You 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 (who goes by Wanda) meet up with the host's old lover--now a resistance fighter in hiding--the alien falls for him too and joins the humans. It's a love triangle with two sides, a ménage à deux. Like Twilight, The Host is a kinky setup--two girls in one body!--played absolutely clean.

And like Meyer's other books, The Host is about love and choice and demi-human creatures. ("I rarely write about just humans," Meyer says. "You can get humans anywhere.") The Host is also set on the same slow burn as Meyer's other work: while there's hot kissing, it's a strict PG. But The Host is a grittier read--much of the book is set in a hardscrabble resistance hideout. Nobody has nice clothes. There's romance, but much of The Host is about Wanda's attempts to fit in with her new human bedfellows, about feeling alone and different and unlovable--literally alienated.

If there's a formula to Meyer's work, it holds true here: she rewrites stock horror plots as love stories, and in doing so, she makes them new again. She writes vampire novels without the biting and science fiction without the lasers. Instead, she slows down the action, tapping it for the pent-up emotional drama that's always been present in it but had been all but invisible until she came along. "That's what I like about science fiction," Meyer says. "It's the same thing I like about Shakespeare. You take people, put them in a situation that can't possibly happen, and they act the way you would act. It's about being human." And sometimes there's nobody quite as human as somebody who isn't.

The Evolution of Vampires. A field guide to bloodsucking fiends through the ages

[This article contains a table. Please see hardcopy of magazine.]

Bram Stoker's The bar was set in 1897 with the gothic novel Dracula Anne Rice's Lestat's exploits kept readers biting from 1976 to 2003 Joss Whedon's In 1997 Buffy the Vampire Slayer became a cult fave Stephenie Meyer's Her three Twilight novels are hits; the first will soon be a movie POWERS Mysterious. They include strength, form-changing and mist-summoning They're strong and fast; some have gifts like flying and mind-reading Buffy's vampires are extra-strong, extra-tough and extra-surly Many: the usual strength and speed, plus acute hearing, no need for sleep WEAKNESSES An aversion to stakes, crosses, garlic, holy water and beheading Immune to garlic and stakes. But they do burn in sunlight They turn to dust when staked in the heart. Sunlight and holy water hurt too Not many. Your best bet is to cut one up and burn the pieces IF YOU MEET ONE... Run. Dracula is evil, persistent and hungry. And he likes the ladies Who knows? Rice's bloodsuckers are frequently perverse and amoral Again: run. Vamps are demonic, so they're not into moral reflection If it's one of the Cullens, you may want to ogle. If not, you're toast