Although I never committed to reading Midnight Sun, Meyer’s aborted retelling of the events of Twilight from Edward’s perspective, I had vague ideas about reading it to supplement the rubbish characterization in Twilight. Besides, MS possesses certain characteristics that suggested it would be especially ripe for mockery. If you’ll permit me an incredibly obscure analogy, if books are nuclei and stability is snark potential, Midnight Sun was predicted to be double magic. It’s an incomplete first draft told from the perspective of a male character, and if Meyer can’t deliver a believable and sympathetic character of her own gender, the odds that she’ll do justice to a male character aren’t high.
I underestimated how terrible it would be. I made fun of Twilight for being poorly edited, but now I understand that what editing there was pushed that book from godawfulness into being merely terrible. Edward turns out to be a colossal jackass, his mind reading abilities are mostly used to inform the reader that everyone, male and female, is obsessed with Bella, and the prose–oh good heavens, the prose!–is so purple it makes an eggplant look pale. Bella’s contempt for everyone except Edward was mostly implicit, but Edward’s contempt for everyone, his family included, is the subject of every other paragraph. This puts it somewhere near Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness in terms of reading painfulness, and that was the novel that caused me to reconsider my policy of finishing every movie or novel I start.
So I did my level best, but I only got through three chapters before I invoked the Peretti Doctrine. Hopefully New Moon won’t be this bad.
