Bella Swan is a fairly typical teenage girl — bright and a bit lonely, brown hair and brown eyes. Edward Cullen is a beautiful, noble vampire with skin like a marble statue. Although more than 100 years old, he never ages past 17.
They're Romeo and Juliet for today's teens, the star-crossed stars of the biggest literary series — for kids or adults — since Harry Potter retired his wand more than a year ago.
At midnight tonight, bookstores all over metro Atlanta and nationwide will be jammed with fans thirsting for the release of "Breaking Dawn," the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer's vampire romance saga called "Twilight." Nearly all will be female, but they'll range from teens to women in their 40s.
"This is the book you have to read if you're female," says Barbara Friend Ish of Sandy Springs, who's dressing up in Goth prom attire with her 13-year-old daughter, Rachael, to attend a "Breaking Dawn" party at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur.
"They're not great books by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a fun, girlie thing," says Lillian Hughes, a store manager at Criminal Records in Little Five Points who plans on baking cookies that ooze fake blood for a party. "I get together with my girlfriends and talk about it and it's just our goofy thing."
The overall series has sold 10 million copies worldwide so far, and "Breaking Dawn," which has been No. 1 on the Amazon best-seller list for weeks as a pre-order, has a first printing of 3.2 million. That doesn't really approach Harry Potter territory, but then nothing else in publishing history does, either.
If "Twilight" can't match Harry's across-the-board appeal, it certainly brings out fan obsessiveness like few books ever.
Emily Yandel, a rising freshman at Roswell High School, prefers the "Twilight" series to Harry. "I always thought romances were like kissy-kissy goo-goo stuff, but this isn't," she says. "I fell in love with it immediately."
Like many girls, she heard about the series from a friend, and has since passed on her love to other friends.
Garrison Taylor, however, says she's not as into "Twilight" as she was Harry.
When she attended a midnight bookstore party for one of the Harry books, she would start reading it in the car on the way home. With "Breaking Dawn," she says she'll wait until Saturday afternoon. But that's because she and her friends are all dressing up for a bookstore party and then going back to her house for a sleepover. (It's also her 13th birthday, and she may be able to sample one of Lillian Hughes' blood-oozing cookies.)
In addition to vampire-inspired edibles, various parties will include a blood drive, trivia quizzes, fortune tellers, costume contests and lots of dress-up, in red, black and white attire. ("Twilight" is a literary series that comes with a color scheme.)
The Alpharetta Barnes & Noble will have two claims to distinction: live music and an actual, not-ashamed-of-it male fan — Mitch Hansen. The Cumming musician and bookstore manager enjoyed the books and was inspired to write songs about the characters and post them on his MySpace page (www.myspace.com
/mitchhansenband). He e-mailed the link to Meyer's Web master, and eventually Meyer mentioned his songs favorably on her Web site. He said his page views quickly soared from 1,000 to more than 300,000, and he's now selling a "Twilight"-themed CD on iTunes.
Meyer's success story is every bit as unlikely as J.K. Rowling's much-told rags-to-riches tale. A Latter-day Saint and stay-at-home mom of three young children in Glendale, Ariz., with no writing experience, she started the first novel, "Twilight," based on a dream she had, purely to entertain herself. When it was eventually published in 2005, sales started off slowly, as they did for the early "Potter" books, but word of mouth has built huge momentum — all four "Twilight" books are in the Amazon Top 10.
"When I was writing 'Twilight' I didn't really have a target audience," Meyer said last year when she was promoting her only area appearance, in Alpharetta.
"It was a very personal thing. I wasn't letting anyone see it. When it was done, I was kind of shocked."
She didn't even know much about vampires when she started.
"My vampires are very light." she says. "Since I started writing, I've learned more about how other vampires roll, so to speak, and it's a very sensual thing, the blood-drinking, the sex and violence. Mine is more about attraction."
Like the good Gothic romance it is, "Twilight" is filled with passionate longing, but is actually quite chaste.
"It's not about sex," says Carole Bates, librarian at Hull Middle School in Duluth and a fan of the series. "It's clean and nice and perfectly fine for middle school. It's all about the tension, and that's why it appeals to little girls."
"Edward has that bad-boy energy that all the good girls love," says Ish, who owns a small publishing house. "He's a bad boy who doesn't want to be a bad boy."
The lack of overt sex (and the presence of lots of bad-boy desire) may help mothers and daughters bond over "Twilight."
Ish says she and Rachael have discussed the books endlessly. "And all the girls her age have to discuss it," she says. "And we've also had to discuss her friends' reactions.
"But it's just so wonderful," she adds, "to see someone tap into the collective consciousness this way."
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