Twilight Offers Teens What They Didn’t Know That They Didn’t Want

By Joel Turner

Published: March 1, 2009

Twilight is that time of day when it gets really hard to drive. The sun has set, but it’s not really that dark. Your headlights are on, but you can’t see them emitting any light. You keep checking to make sure your lights are on. After some time, you realize that you’ve spent more time trying to figure out whether or not your lights are on and less time looking at the pavement before you. Once you sever your attention from the dash, you are suddenly mesmerized by the brilliant colors on the horizon. It’s beautiful, vast, surreal. But then you realize that you’re driving 14 miles under the speed limit and the driver of the Chevy Tahoe behind you is getting really frustrated. This is kinda like the plot of Stephenie Meyer’s book cover Twilight.

Before I continue, I have a few things that I must get off my chest: Modern technology is being threatened by a seemingly innocuous and decidedly archaic form of entertainment: The book. Yes, those dusty concentrations of pulp that seem to occupy your parents’ rogue bookshelf are on the loose, and they threaten to change the world in which we wish to know: A world devoid of technology-less outlets of learning. Just when I thought that Amazon’s Kindle had the future in its grasp (that being a world without books), Stephenie Meyer had to go and eff it all up.

When I take a long and concerted look at the cover of Meyer’s maiden tale, I see nothing more than fear-mongering propaganda at its most sophisticated. What strikes the book cover reader first is the contrast between light and dark: The pale, almost specter-like hands, reaching into the light to offer a delicious red fruit are juxtaposed by a deep, rich, and eerily comforting blackness. Clearly, it doesn’t take a literate scholar to conclude that this is a tale of albinos, organic produce, and the inability to pay one’s electric bill.

But like few other book covers, Meyer’s Twilight attempts to draw the reader deeper into the intricacies of the dust cover. The reader is forced to ask: Is that a Gala Apple? A muted red delicious? Could it be a crimson plum? To assume that the delectable treat is a metaphor for the forbidden fruit is presumptuous at worst and at best, offensive. More likely, these pale hands have just caught the fruit, which was thrown by an anonymous individual.

It is easy to be drawn to the cover’s rich tapestry, but be not deceived: The hand that wishes to feed you probably has little teeth that want to bite you. Meyer is by no means your typical Babysitter’s Club-grade novelist; rather, if Beverly Cleary’s work was a Cézanne, Meyer’s would most definitely be a Jackson Pollock: unrehearsed, lathered on in an intoxicated, angst-filled stupor.

How might the book cover end? Well, as with any horizon that is on fire with the rays of the setting sun, dusk ensues, followed by darkness. You put the pieces together.