Meyer was always at her best in building the vampire world, from supernatural abilities like Edward’s mind-reading to the complex social dynamics that govern his and other vampire families. In his memory, we travel to other cities, meet other vampire covens and learn new vampire lore. Another sees him recall his painful transition to a vampire. A whole chapter recounts his murder of a pedophile. Frozen at 17, he’s nearly a century old, and in anguish over some of his moral mess-ups of decades past. Midnight Sun is about 150 pages longer than Twilight, and those extra passages give readers new insights into Edward’s personal history. Still, it’s far more fascinating to discover the world of the vampires through the eyes of one of their own. It’s a nod in the right direction, but without resolution. His internal struggle plays out as though Meyer considered how best to address the outdated power dynamics, clarified by the MeToo movement, without changing the fundamentally regressive design of his character. Ever brooding, Edward tortures himself with questions that feel attuned to the past few years’ reckoning with gender and power. Meyer seems to say that he’s too much of a vampire and too little of a human to refrain from doing them (a flawed argument itself). But it does describe Edward’s interior conflict as he makes those bad choices. The blood flows more freely here, even if it never quite spills.
Although it was Bella’s story that launched more than a decade’s worth of young adult sci-fi and dystopian heroines, it turns out the narrative power-and compelling internal drama-was on Edward’s side all along. But it is more complex, more sophisticated and less innocent than Twilight.
I can’t say that Midnight Sun is a good book. And the major flaws of the Twilight series-its depiction of a problematic romance, its turgid prose and its careless treatment of Indigenous characters-remain. The dialogue and plot twists will feel familiar to anyone who has read the original book or seen the movie. And though it’s always dangerous to return to past guilty pleasures, I was not (totally) disappointed.įirst, it should go without saying that 658 pages of excruciatingly detailed vampire thirst makes for a dull and likely unsettling read if you’re not already a Twi-hard, or at least a casual fan. The teen fan inside me was eager to revisit Meyer’s brooding vampire world to see how it all turned out. This month, over a decade later, Meyer published Midnight Sun in full-and set off a debate about how it stacks up against the original. Where Twilight, like Bella, was straightforward and rather naive, Midnight Sun was dynamic and messy. And soon I discovered the early draft of Midnight Sun, the novel told from Edward’s perspective, which leaked online in 2008.
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