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The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer
Stephenie Meyer promises a 'monster' in her latest Twilight tale, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, but doesn't deliver, says Imogen Russell Williams.
Photograph: AP Photo / David Stone / Little, Brown and Company
In Stephenie Meyer's introduction to her latest Twilight tale, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, she whets her fans' appetites by suggesting that in this novel she's "stepped into the shoes of … a 'real' vampire – a hunter, a monster". Any readers frustrated by the mundane suburban detail of Meyer's previous Twilight books – vampires who play baseball, drive Volvos and give each other tasteful, thoughtful gifts – might be tempted to perk up. Sadly, it's a folorn hope. One of Meyer's notable weaknesses is that she can't bear any of her narrators to have pasts or morals blacker than dove-grey. We're promised a wild, amoral, bloodthirsty teen protagonist, but what we get is Bree. Despite a few gritty touches, there's never any danger she's going to get into real trouble after running away from an abusive father in her early life. While starving on the streets she carefully avoids becoming a "junkie ho" before getting suckered by the promise of a cheeseburger, and subsequently being turned into a vampire. OK, she exsanguinates a prostitute here and there, but she spends most of the novella offering her new vamp boyfriend, Diego, high fives and double-wrapping the books with which she whiles away the daylight hours, because she "hates water-damaged pages". In fact, Bree is a thinly-disguised, bloodsucking version of Meyer's first Twilight heroine, Bella Swan – geeky, dependent on males to protect her and think for her, and utterly devoid of black-hearted, kick-ass joie-de-vivre.
Bree is one of an army of fledgling vampires created by villainous Victoria, one of Bella's nemeses, to take down the Cullen coven and destroy their pet human. This is a promising set-up, but the combination of prose which is as clunky as ever and some frankly farcical vampire traits make it harder and harder to see the army wielding any kind of menace. Apparently it's common practice among fledgling bloodsuckers to pull each other's limbs off, but these can be swiftly reattached with the aid of vamp saliva – perhaps a design feature of future spin-off action figures. Even the naughtier baby vampires hardly indulge in the sort of wilder pastimes open to preternaturally strong, nocturnal adolescents outside the reach of the law, preferring to imitate Spider-Man by climbing up walls singing his theme tune. These chaps aren't dark, dangerous fragments of the id, they're about as intimidating as an airbrushed, eyeliner-wearing boy-band.
After 120 pages of dull vampire summer-camp action, the novella ties in to the finale of the third Twilight novel, Eclipse, where the Cullens, teamed up with the Quileute werewolves, swiftly put pay to Victoria and the fledgling army. Bree and Bella look searchingly at each other before the Volturi, a kind of Italian vampire royalty, mercifully shorten Bree's second life. As red eyes meet brown, you can almost hear the author bellowing: "Mirror! It's like a weird mirror! For both of them! Notice my literary device!"
Meyer has had the grace to make The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner available to fans as a free e-book from tomorrow until 7 July, which means that all but the most diehard Twihards will be saved from shelling out £11.99 for such a slight hardback offering. Its few promising moments – Bree's pleasure when no humans interrupt a special moment with Diego, because "all the screaming would have ruined the mood", a chillingly thorough massacre of a whole ferry-load of people – are insufficient to redeem it from being woefully, leaden-footedly pedestrian throughout. In fact, the most interesting thing about it is the cover: a glossy black number with an hourglass almost emptied of its blood-red sand. It's very pretty. It should be (double-)wrapping a better book.
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