Stephenie Meyer has decided to celebrate Twilight’s 10th anniversary in a unique way – gender-swapping the lead couple and rewriting the novel.
The original book followed Bella Swan, a teenage girl who had moved to the small rainy town of Forks to live with her father, and saw her fall in love with the mysterious Edward Cullen (who’s a vampire, by the way). Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined features Beaufort Swan, a boy in very familiar circumstances, who falls for enigmatic vampire Edythe.
Meyer has said in the foreword that the gender-bending idea came to fruition in an attempt to dispel the talk that Bella is “a damsel-in-distress”. She says the character is in fact “a human-in-distress” and describes him/her as “a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillains”. Meyer also says Beau will be “more OCD” than his female counterpart and that he’ll be “totally missing the chip Bella carries around on her shoulder the whole time”.
She said that writing the novel was “fun, but really fast and easy” and that it has been a way for her to correct things that she was previously unhappy with. Some mythology has also been altered for consistency purposes.
Do you think it’s a cunning ploy to squeeze more money from the Twilight franchise? Or are you genuinely interested to see this new take on the original story? One thing’s for certain: Life and Death is sure to sell well when it’s released on Tuesday.
