Twilight time

It landed on the porch with a thud, 520-some pages of it, complete with a shimmery "soon to be a major motion picture" sticker on the cover.

Yes, friends, it's "Twilight" time.

Since we're out of the teen demo -- OK, way out -- we admit to being a little puzzled by all the hubbub over the Stephenie Meyer best-selling vamp series. It's labeled "young adult," so why are so many full-grown chicks slavishly devoted to the books and licking their chops about the upcoming movie? Remember what happened at Comic-Con?

To try to get to the bottom of it, we chatted up a pal. We'll call her Christi because, well, that's her name. She also falls outside the target, but has fallen under the spell, devouring more than 2,400 pages in less than two weeks. That's all four books, including "Breaking Dawn, the most recent in the series that caused some "Harry Potter"-like mania (and a lot of heated debate among readers) when it went on sale last month.

After having purposely stayed away from news, mad crazy blogging, leaks and other ephemera about the series until she'd read it, Christi is now a bit of a "Twilight" hound (doesn't go so far as to call herself a Twilighter, though, because apparently those people are off the hook). Reshoots on the movie? She's on top of it. Book 5 derailed after a rough draft found its way onto the Interwebs? She's mourning that development.

It begs the question: What would cause an otherwise sane non-vampire fan to be so rapt?

"It's a good love story," she said. "Maybe I'm a hopeless romantic."

Fair enough.

Trying to make converts out of us, Christi was the one responsible for the Amazon delivery to our door. So, we read, and we'll admit it has a certain darkish charm. We'll probably take a look at "New Moon," whose first chapter is smartly included at the end of "Twilight."

But it's not because we're romantics. Nope, not copping to that. Even though those kids sure are into each other, and Bella's willing to give up everything for Edward, and he resists his vamp nature to be with her. Heavy sigh.

We're psyched for, um, we'll probably see the movie, which got the plum "Harry Potter" spot on Nov. 21. It's just because we're big Catherine Hardwicke fans. Yeah, that's it. Big fangs, we mean, big fans!

See Meyer in a rare interview today on "The Ellen Degeneres Show," where the Emmy-hoarding host promises to squeeze some Book 5 info out of the elusive author. (Full text likely to show up seconds later on any one of these fan-obsessed sites, just in case you miss it). 

Comments

[whitney]

wow... thanks for all the info and links, i spent a lot of time going through them all. i cant wait for the movie

i even planned my wardrobe:
http://twilightshirts.com/shirt/i-3-forks