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The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer | Books | guardian.co.uk

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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.

Love You to Death

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

I REVIEWED Eclipse, the third book in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series in September last year. The book was preceded by Twilight and New Moon. To cut three big, fat books short: Teenager Bella Swan and sexy 150-year-old vampire who looks 17 fall in love and grope for pages on end). You would think that Meyer couldn't possibly have written close to 2000 pages on just human-vampire lust, but to hear the fangirls talk you'd think she had. You wouldn't be entirely wrong either to think that that's what most of Meyer's teenage fans love about the series.

At a book discussion group I facilitate, the 13-year-old girls were swooning over Edward. One of them told me that a friend of hers had whited out the name Bella in Eclipse and replaced it with her own so she could fully indulge in a fantasy relationship with the romantic, dreamily good-looking undead hero. It's came as no surprise that the girls were unimpressed by Bella's other love interest, Jacob Black, a native American shapeshifter - most Malaysian teenage girls I know prefer white boys. I'm not sure if, in this case, their partiality had anything to do with the fact that Jacob's shapeshifts into a giant wolf. I mean, it's all very well having a boyfriend who hunts deer for nourishment (Edward and his family drink the blood of animals not humans - they're funny that way), but do you really want one who sits by the fireside gnawing on a bone?

Sink Your Teeth In

A human girl and a luscious male vampire decide to go steady. A werewolf offers the girl an alternative (hot-blooded) romance. Obviously, some females attract all the right monsters.

Fan art of Bella and Edward, the human-vampire lovers in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series.

Dead and Alive

I'm currently biting my nails over Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, which is part-detective, part-horror fiction, about a group of scholars investigating the truth behind the legend of Vlad the Impaler, the cruel medieval ruler whose crimes formed the basis of the myth of Dracula.

Reading this book, prompted me to re-read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Coincidentally, two new versions of the classic tale arrived on my desk about a month ago: an illustrated edition, and a graphic novel.

Horror of Horrors! It's the Undead and They're Wearing Ungaro!

Raced through Vampire Beach: Blood Lust (Simon Pulse, 196 pages) by Alex Duvall last night.

It's set in the exclusive world of designer-clad teens a la The Clique, The A-List and Gossip Girl. The only difference is the popular kids here are vampires, which means they are even more terrifyingly perfect than the teens in the other series. Yes, this is the first book in a series.

Check out the tacky cover. It's so ... Miami Vice, or is it The OC? (Malibu Beach is the setting for the story.)

So, how about a series about teenage pontianaks in Sentul Convent? Or hip-hop werewolves in Brickfields? What about zombie mat-rempits in Kajang? I should be cashing in - what the hell's wrong with me?!