Watch Stephenie Meyer talk about Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse

A gaggle of 50 or so tween-to-teenage girls gather at the public library in Naperville, Illinois. Inside, the tables are sprinkled with rose petals, while ornate plastic goblets brim with a concoction called Bella’s bloody punch. Those in attendance are all clad in vampire garb — with the exception of the accompanying mothers, who busy themselves by painting vampire “bites” on the girls’ necks and adding spray-on sparkle to their daughters’ clothes and hair. It is the Twilight Prom, held last weekend as a precursor to the evening’s main event. At 7.30pm, the girls will troop down to their local cinema and watch what, for them, is the most eagerly anticipated film of this, or indeed any, year. All across America, similar scenes unfold, as devotees of Twilight, a teenage love-story-cum-vampire-tale, flock to cinemas. By the time they close that Friday night, the film will have taken more than $35m, a better first-day haul than that recorded by either of the first two Star Wars prequels, or indeed any of the Lord of the Rings films.

Twilight’s extraordinary success should come as no surprise. The movie rights were optioned before the first novel was even published, and American booksellers have dubbed their author, Stephenie Meyer, “the new J K Rowling”. The four books in her saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn) have helped stem the fall in sales precipitated by the Harry Potter series coming to a close. For their publisher, Little, Brown, the books were a bombshell. “I’ve been in the business for 20 years,” says the imprint’s Megan Tingley, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Another surprise is that Meyer was, until five years ago, just “a humble housewife”, a devout Mormon (she doesn’t drink or smoke) with no pretensions to a career in writing. The idea for her tale came to her, she says, in a dream. Her unlikely personal saga now sees the bubbly, if shy, 34-year-old established as the fastest-selling author in the world. “Honestly, I’ve never had a dream I wanted to write down, either before or since,” she says with a smile. “But one night, about five years ago, I woke up with this image seared into my mind. It sounds cheesy, but I’d had this dream about a boy and a girl. The boy was a vampire, and he was telling the girl he wanted to kill her because she smelled so tasty! But he wasn’t a monster. He yearned to be human.”

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BACKGROUND

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BACKGROUND

• Twilight

Within an hour of waking up — “I had to change a few diapers and get breakfast for my husband and kids going first” — Meyer was sitting in front of the family computer, pecking away at the first few lines. She wrote Twilight in three months straight. She insists she had no intention of publishing the story — she even kept her literary endeavours secret from her husband, Pancho, and her three boys, Gabe (now 11), Seth (8) and Eli (6).

“It seemed silly to say I was writing a story about vampires,” she says. “And I have no idea where the idea came from. I have no interest in horror or being scared. The only connection I can think of is that I’m very pale, especially for someone growing up in Arizona, and in high school I had therapy because there were a lot of people who called me ‘ghost’ and were generally pretty horrible. People used to pretend I was like a mirror where they could see their reflection. So maybe there’s an inner part of me that said, ‘Pale is beautiful, damn it! And you are all going to admit that.’ ”

Meyer’s story quickly took shape, recounting the tale of Bella Swan, a teenage girl from Arizona who moves in with her father in Forks, a logging town in rain-soaked Washington state. There she meets a mysterious boy, Edward Cullen, and, as the story unfolds, learns he is a vampire. “I wasn’t going to show the story to anyone, but I told one of my sisters about it, and she insisted on reading it. I let her have a look when I was done, and she was adamant: I had to get it published.” Meyer relented, sending out her manuscript and receiving 14 rejection letters in reply. Then, finally, Little, Brown offered her a $750,000, three-book deal.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the secret to the books’ success is rooted in Meyer’s upbringing. She insists her characters do not directly reflect her Mormon faith, but her story is, undeniably, shaped by her own experience. Growing up the second of six children, with “traditional, authority-figure” parents, Meyer had what she terms a “long childhood” and says her dating experiences were mundane. “I was never really attracted to bad boys — well, there was one guy who dated all my friends at the same time, but he was still a very sweet boy at heart — and generally everything in my life was so safe. I was very practical and I chose the nice boys, like my husband. I actually met him when we were four years old, although we didn’t get together until I was 20.

“So I think, for me, Twilight was dangerous. It was new ground; I was nowhere near as mature as Bella at her age, and I would never have dated Edward. Bella, however . . . she’s like, ‘Oh, I’m in love with a vampire? Fine, I’ll deal with it!’ ”

For all the story’s smouldering passion, however, a clever plot thread in the opening books denies the young lovers the chance of a physical consummation — in Bella’s presence, Edward is torn between a desire to love and a desire to feed, so he can’t surrender to his passions. This, in turn, shapes Twilight, in particular, as a metaphor for carnal restraint. It has certainly bewitched its target readership, allowing them to splash around in the waters of adolescent desire without having to dip their toes into the darker depths of sex.

“That was something I worried about while they were making the movie,” Meyer continues, “that they might want to put in gratuitous sex scenes and things, but I got on so well with Catherine [Hardwicke, the director] and she was always so courteous, asking my opinion on things.” These are no idle platitudes: the director made changes to the first cut of the movie after Meyer had given her feedback. Apparently, in one or two scenes the author thought the young cast were exposing too much flesh. Hardwicke switched to footage from her B camera, editing in close-ups instead. And, says the film-maker, it actually proved beneficial, making the scenes even more intimate.

“Obviously, watching the movie was a little weird,” concedes Meyer. “But so much has been weird for me these past five years. I'm a shy, quiet person, and all this has really forced me to become more confident. I’m glad success has come later in my life, when I’m old enough to be grounded. My husband has given up his job as an accountant to manage my career, while I try to keep the family’s feet on the ground. Most of the time with the kids, it’s quite simple. My middle boy, Seth, has a bit of a speech impediment and the other day he was talking to this little boy who I could see was having trouble understanding what he was saying. So I went over, and what he was trying to ask was, ‘What books does your mommy write?’ Because to him, that’s what mommies do.”

Given her success — and the pleasure it brings both the writer and her legions of fans — it’s what this mother will be doing for some time yet. But the J K Rowling comparisons do seem to make her uncomfortable. “There’s only one J K Rowling. And all that kind of talk puts unnecessary pressure on me; she’s sold millions and millions of books. Far more than me.

"Anyway,” she laughs. “I’m glad I am Stephenie Meyer.” Given last weekend’s box-office figures, so are millions of others — chief among them, no doubt, those who gathered at the Twilight Prom in Naperville, Illinois.

Twilight is released on December 19

Making a killing

* Worldwide sales of the four books Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn now top 25m. The United States accounts for 20m, although Breaking Dawn debuted at the top of bestseller lists in France, Italy, Ireland, Spain and Britain.

* The four books held the top four spots on USA Today’s bestseller list — which, unlike some lists, ranks young adult books alongside adult fiction — in the two weeks leading up to the film’s release.

* The Twilight saga has been published in 37 languages, including Vietnamese, Chinese, Croatian and Latvian.

* The fourth novel, Breaking Dawn, sold 1.3m copies in the United States on its first day on sale.

* The film recouped its shooting costs ($36m) and marketing budget ($30m) with its first weekend’s takings of $69.6m.

* The film’s November 21 release date in America is the day traditionally used for Potter films (the final movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, has moved to July 2009).

* Twilight’s opening-day US box-office figures eclipsed both Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ($29m) and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ($32m).

* The lead vampire is played by the British actor Robert Pattinson, 22, who starred as Cedric in two Harry Potter films. He had never heard about the books when he took the part. Fans were “100% negative” about his being cast at first, he has revealed.

* The publisher Little, Brown has announced that The Twilight Saga: The Official Guide will go on sale early in the new year, with new material, genealogical charts, maps, kitchen sink and so on.

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