1/2/12 5:15 PM UPDATE: io9 has reposted ye olde Twilight snark. Check the comments for more hilarious suggestions, from Dr. Seuss to George R.R. Martin.
As I mentioned in an early post, the main problem with Twilight isn’t its sparkly vampires who lack all traditional weaknesses or its anti-feminist sensibility. When you get right down to it, the trouble is that the writing is terrible, filled with cliche phrases (“smoldering eyes”), repeated words (294 “eyes” in 498 pages) and the reductive characterization of its main characters (Bella is clumsy, and I guess she likes books. Or something).
On a recent car-trip with my husband and the writer Chip Cheek, we mulled over the question: What if great literary writers of the last 200 years had penned Twilight?
Herman Melville
“Call me Bella.” A tome about the length of the original series investigates Bella’s monomanical search for the vampire who stole her virginity. There’s an entire chapter devoted to describing the devastating whiteness of Edward’s skin, and several on the physiognomy of vampires, starting with their skeletal structure outward.
Virginia Woolf
The novel takes place over the course of twenty four hours, during which Bella is painting a portrait of Edward and reflecting on how her femininity circumscribes her role within 20th century society.
Cormac McCarthy
In the opening scene, Edward dashes Bella’s head against a rock and rapes her corpse. Then he and Jacob take off on an unexplained rampage through the West.
Jane Austen
Basically the same as the original, except that Bella is socially apt and incredibly witty. Her distrust of Edward is initially bourne out of a tragic misunderstanding of his character, but after a fling with Jacob during which he sexually assaults her (amusing to no one in this version) she and Edward live happily ever after.
George Saunders
Same as the original, but set in a theme park. Somehow involves gangs of robots, which distract the reader from the essential sappiness of Edward and Bella’s story.
Raymond Carver
Bella stars as the alcoholic barmaid with daddy issues that Edward, a classic abuser, exploits. When Bella’s old friend Jacob comes to visit and is shocked by her bruises, she thinks about leaving him, but instead hits the gin bottle. Hard.
Annie Proulx
Edward and Jacob defy society’s expectations up in the mountains.
Lewis Carroll
Bella takes acid and charts syllogisms.
James Joyce
Edward’s rapacious love for Bella reflects the way globalism has pillaged Ireland. It’s entirely written in Esperanto, with sections in untranslated Greek, except for Chapter 40, which is inexplicably rendered as a script page from the musical The Book of Mormon.
Dorothy Parker
Bella writes a brilliant takedown of the latest school play, dates a string of men, and repeatedly attempts suicide.
Kate Chopin
Stifled by her marriage to Edward, Bella has an affair with Jacob and then drowns herself.
Ernest Hemingway
Edward and Bella exchange terse dialogue alluding to Edward’s anatomical problem. Eventually, Bella leaves him for Jacob, a local bullfighter with a giant…sense of entitlement.
Flannery O’Connor
When Native American werewolf Jacob threatens her with death, Bella reconsiders her hardcore racism, and just for one milisecond, the audience finds her sympathetic.
Ayn Rand
Edward tells Bella that he intends to stop saving her life, unless she starts paying him in gold bullion. Hatefucking ensues, then Jacob spouts objectivist philosophy for the next 100 pages.
12/22/11 Update:
Novelist Urban Waite adds this one:
Tim O’Brien
It’s all about the memories these vampires have carried with them for the past couple hundred years. Just think how much that would have deepened their characters. “Bella looked into Edward’s smoldering eyes and knew all the pain he carried with him, the cross burned into the cleft of his muscular chest, 1 oz., the dash of his hair across his forehead, dangling ever-so, 5.oz, etc… etc… ”
Got more writers and renditions? Put ’em in the comments.
While I’m flattered that people are reblogging this post, I ask that you don’t reproduce it in its entirety on your own blog.
Stephen King: Edward and Bella are voted prom king and queen but Jacob is jealous so he dumps pig blood on Edward who then exacts his revenge by drinking the blood of everyone in the gym…
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch: Edward is initially attracted to Bella due to her imperious, despotic, unknown allure, and once he gets a date with her, spends a ridiculous amount of time and rhetoric convincing her to fulfill his dream of being whipped by a woman in a luxurious fur coat. Bella is at first willing to accommodate his kink, but Edward becomes disenchanted with her when she sometimes wants a relationship of loving equals rather than to stay in the character of a dominatrix all the time. Finally Bella takes up with the rather less high-maintenance and traditionally masculine nobleman (and werewolf) Alexis von Jacob, in whom Edward finally discovers the sharp-toothed, furry abuser of his dreams.
Lucy Maud Montgomery: Bella the orphaned waif is taken in by the father she never knew, and persuades him not to send her back to the orphan asylum with her great wit and talent for storytelling. Bella then meets Edward at the one-room schoolhouse, and breaks school supplies over his head when he mocks her hairstyle. She then spends the next several years as his furious academic rival while denying their intense mutual attraction. Bella and Edward then go off to college, where Edward meets the beautiful, charismatic Victoria and Bella meets the dashing, romantic Jacob, who shares his umbrella with her in a rainstorm. Then despite the obvious greater attractions of Victoria and Jacob, Bella decides she prefers the hometown boy and accepts his marriage proposal. Then we get another book about their courtship, another book about their newlywed days, and about three more books about the adventures of their many plucky children.
Enid Blyton: Bella goes to Malory Towers, where she is initially unpopular because she doesn’t like open-air swimming, has an imagination and likes boys. Slowly she becomes normal and learns to play lacrosse. Edward isn’t in it at all.
HP Lovecraft. Edward cannot reconcile his own horror at becoming a vampire. He rapes and kills Bella but attributes it to the desires of an ancient Deity outside our power to understand. Everyone thinks it’s ok because he calls his devil by a cutesy name.
William Gibson:
Plot: Bella is a failed prototype of Artificial Intelligence living in an Archology in the suburbs of the Neo-Seattle Cyberspace and is a hyper-hyped celebrity-artist wannabe. As her scuptures made of discarded Hitachi Magic Wands don’t pay for her addiction for designer nanoprobes, she is about to consider selling her lines of pink code to a Snuffer-than-snuff Albanian memory implant service. There, she meets the dashing/doomed hacker EdWard_v0.9. At first unimpressed by his online-persona (A vampire, like everybody else), she is strangely attracted by his demure if not vacant attitude (he’s mostly AFK, to be honest). EdWard is running away from a mega-corporation who has unleashed a new breed of software agents called Werewolves on his virtual ass. One of them, called JacobShavenTorso will kidnap her during an epic cyber-heist/exploit whose description will last for five chapters. Once Bella is extracted, they hide in the darkspace, out of the reach of any known search engine and wins her CPU over. Unfortunately, during a slow-mo tedious-core lovemaking description, Jacob hits Bella’s reset button by mistake and EdWard_v0.9 gets another chance at making it work… but he is AFK again, operating his Toyota-Monsanto sandwich maker. Bella falls in love with him again, triggering a final philosophical one line pop-shot from the author about the recursive nature of non-reality, or something.
Style: No sentences are more than four words but 50% of the time contain a cool brand made of the fusion of two existing but unrelated corporation names. The rest have a random allusion to a fiercely emerging third-word country.
In the future, even English grammar is tortured by cyber-implants…
Haruki Murakami:
Bella has sex with Edward, who is half a ghost. Jacob is a talking cat. Most of the prose is given over to descriptions of Bella making pasta.
Awesome, team. Keep ’em coming. I love all these additions, particularly King and Murakami!
L.J. Smith:
Everything almost exactly the same…oh, wait “famous writers”…never mind.
Diana Gabaldon: Bella inexplicably time travels back to 1919, just after Edward is transformed. When she finds herself pregnant, instead of staying with the man she loves in a time she’s adjusted to, she decides to hop back to the 1940’s to live with her previous husband, who she tolerates, and becomes a doctor. Twenty years later she abandons her daughter to jump back in time to Edward. (Though this begs the question of where the 1940’s version of Edward is, as he would still be 17 years old)
Marcella Hazan:
Edward prefers the center of Bella’s right calf for his new braise, Osso Bella, but has trouble finding the Sicilian sea salt essential to its proper preparation.
LJ Smith:
The close proximity of vampires and werewolves, not only upsets the local ecosystem, but the global one. This disturbance begins a course of events that will end in apocalyse without the intervention of Bella, the heroine. Then the story ends abruptly before the finale and readers are left with a ten-year cliff hanger.
Joss Whedon:
Bella carries a wooden stake tipped in silver. She kicks butts of misbehaving vampires and werewolves alike. Neither Edward, nor Jake can reconcile themselves to dating a woman as powerful as themselves. Bella wanders the world as a protector of humanity.
Margaret Atwood: Bella is a strong, independent woman who takes pity on Edward, in keeping with her Canadian hospitality. Jacob runs off into the wilderness, never to be seen again. Bella ponders the symbolism of the wilderness. Fin.
Robert Heinlein: Bella is a polymath genius who meets the equally brilliant Edward after developing a dimensional portal. They get married after fifteen minutes together, and spend the rest of the book running from an ever-changing Jacob. At the end of the book Jacob is revealed to be Lazarus Long, and everybody has sex.
Samuel Beckett prose: Bella roams the earth on a quest for something that she forgot what, picking up stones and sucking on them and lying prostrate in gardens. Edward is searching for Bella but doesn’t remember why. There is only one paragraph break.
Samuel Beckett play: Bella, Edward, and Jacob are all in large urns. A spotlight lights each of their faces and they can only whisper of what they each wish they could do to one another (kill, have sex with, run from, run to, etc), but none of them can move any body parts except their lips and smoldering eyes.
Douglas Adams
Bella is the last of a discontinued series of robots made to emulate the now extinct human race. She whines gears and randomly pouts moronic gibberish while falling over. She is accompanied on her travels across the cosmos by Edward, a sparkly giant space banana and Jacob, a small wooden box of doom.
Twilight ala Isaac Asimov:
Much of the book is devoted to Bella and Edward discussing how to circumvent the Three Laws of Vampirics…
Geoffrey Chaucer: Bella, Edward and Jacob are on a pilgrimage to Candlestick Park along with others. To pass the time they decide to tell stories. Bella tells the story of Troilus, who falls in love with Criseyde without ever speaking to her and spouts 2000 lines of poetry while lying on his bed, weeping. Edward tells the story of three men who meet death on the road, make bargains with him to be rich, famous, and powerful, and end up sparkly feminized vampires. Jacob tells the story of a young woman married to a really old vampire and the young handsome man who moves into their house and woos her. The story ends with a red hot poker and someone peeing out the window. They never get to Candlestick Park.
You know, if you spent as much time writing your own book as you do regaling us with why the Twilight Saga is terrible writing, I might actually be impressed. The truth is that the Twilight books struck a chord and they’re loved by millions. The rest of this is just sour grapes and trying to prove that you are one of the ultimate “cool” people because you don’t like it. Give it up.
I happened to enjoy the story and in MY opinion, the story telling is just fine. I appreciate the Romeo and Juliet motif, the metaphor for alienation of youth, the vampires and werewolves representation of the Capulet and Montague rivalry, and if Romeo and Juliet could go on and on about their angst about their love and how they would rather die than be separated, I don’t have problem with Bella and Edward’s devotion. No one bothers to make comment about how Juliet needs to woman up and get over this Romeo obsession as if that’s the only thing in life. No one makes the snide comment about how the romances of the time were about the glory of battle in Renaissance Italy and R & J were about one child’s obsession with getting laid.
Did Shakespeare write it better? Well, sure, because he’s Shakespeare. But that doesn’t take away from the modern retelling and I appreciate it for what it is. And all of you reviewers wasting the space about how crappy the book was — well, those who can do, those who can’t review.
Dostoyevsky: In the first chapter, we learn that Bella is an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who conspires to kill Edward for the money he has taken from his victims during his life as a vampire. The rest of the novel investigates Bella’s tortured internal argument as she seeks to justify staking Edward because of all the good she plans to do with his money, versus her guilt at killing him, which simultaneously represents her desire to kill her father and the prevailing spirit of atheism that is threatening to kill society.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
Bella meets Eduardo at his own funeral and moves into an abandoned house with him. The town disapproves, not because she is living with the risen dead, but because Eduardo fought on the side of the Conservatives who defeated Colonel Aureliano Buendía.
Eduardo stays faithful to Bella for seventy years, despite her having borne eight children by Jacob, the man-beast who lives in the jungle.
Kazuo Ishiguro:
The story is recounted by Bella, who is prone to long tangents and frequently changing her recollection of past events. It comes out that Bella missed her chance with Edward because she is too British to understand her own emotions. Ultimately, the ending is bittersweet, as Bella stumbles across her childhood friend Jacob in an incredible coincedence, only to learn that he is dying. Edward marries someone else, but has bouts of unhappiness, and Bella convinces herself that the best thing for her is to focus on her career and not look back.
Henry James: Bella is an independent, but complex woman who affronts her destiny while being courted by both Edward and Jacob. Although Jacob’s charisma is attractive and he seems like the man who will offer her the most stable life, she rejects his marriage proposal because she fears marrying him will threaten her freedom. Edward does not possess any charm or attractive qualities, but Bella decides to marry him anyway. She simple becomes a collectible for Edward. The story ends with Bella regretting her decision, but adhering to her duties as a wife despite how unhappy she is.
Neil Gaiman:
Jacob, a woodsman, travels through a dark land, speaking to hermits, talking animals and forest spirits of his quest to slay Edward, the vampire lord who stole his true love Bella, turned her and then grew bored of her. In return, he learns the secrets he needs to find his way to Edward and defeat him. Eventually, it is revealed that Edward has engineered his own demise, as his immortality has robbed him of all emotions except for guilt over the death of his love for Bella. With Edward’s death, his and Bella’s grown-up daughter takes over his kingdom and the story ends on an ambiguously hopeful note.
Tom Robbins:
Bella is a bowl of over-cooked spaghetti and Edward is a stick of chalk. The entire novel consists of an argument that takes place over a Chia Pet named Jacob. Edward insists that she should water him but Bella likes to admire the top of his smooth head.
Robert A. Heinlein: After much talk about sex, the vampires, werewolves and humans get together under the tutelage of a wise old 2200 year old human named Lazarus Long and decide to build a space-time-fantasy ship to look for a cat who walks through walls.
Gustave Flaubert:
Edward is a young and angst-filled boy, new to his school. There, he meets, Bella, a spoiled, but indecisive young woman. He stalks her briefly and then they marry. Edward trains as a doctor. Bella grows tired and disillusioned by Edward’s relentless angst, while happily spending all his money. They have a daughter. She attracts the attention of and flirts with many of the young men in the town. After a few years, a rich and wolfish landowner, Jacob, seduces Bella. However, he creepily runs away with Bella’s young daughter instead. Bella is crushed that she can’t have both men at once, but decided to flirt more and spend more of Edward’s money. Having placed Edward in heavy debt and with her reputation in shreds, Bella commits suicide by bleeding herself very slowly to death. After she is dead, Edward slowly finds he can’t live without Bella and builds a shrine to her and dies of a broken heart.
Laurence Sterne:
Recounted by a consumptive Bella at the end of her life, attempts to tell the story of whether she chose Edward or Jacob, but never makes it past her her mother’s inexplicable love affair with a minor league baseballer.
Faulkner:
The entire saga is a monologue inside Bella’s head as she drives to Phoenix and back with Edward’s corpse in the trunk of her car, in which descriptions of Edward’s topaz eyes are interspersed at random intervals with descriptions of Edward as a horse and a fish. Jacob mysteriously disappears, and after many years his skeleton is found in Bella’s bed beside the indentation in her pillow where she has apparently been sleeping for decades without ever changing the sheets. Her parents are cousins.
Milan Kundera: Across the span of four novels, Bella and Edvard torrid love affair builds into an allegory for the transition of Czechoslovakian communist regime into the Velvet Revolution. Eventually Bella and Edvard emigrate to Paris, where they spend lengthy, passionate nights discussing the transcendent nature of various ephemeral joys and sexual agonies of their past.
Phillip K Dick:
Ed is a B movie actor currently hiding out from his agent in a seedy motel in Santa Monica. Convinced he contracted vampirism from an extra during the filming of a recent feature; he is currently trying to come to grips with the shift in his consciousness as the disease ravages his physical body. Bella, an aspiring visual artist working as a call girl catches a glimpse of Ed as she is leaving the room of her client. She is so moved by the ethereal shimmer of his skin that she begins bringing all her tricks back to the same motel hoping to get a chance to see Ed again. Ed is so disturbed by Bella having sex with different men in the room next to his that he finally confronts her. A short physical altercation ensues between Bella and Ed. Her pimp, the wolfish Jacob, steps in to protect his investment. During the fight Bella experiences a shift in reality. Bella concludes that Ed’s skin is secreting a psychedelic substance, (accounting for his glittery appearance) and decides that Ed is essential to the genesis of her art. She devises a plan to capture him and hold him captive. Jacob discovers her plan and agrees to help her with the provision that he will become her agent. Bella lures Ed into a relationship and they settle into a curious sort of domesticity. Bella becomes a famous painter of reality. The book ends with Ed ruminating on the nature of vampirism while Jacob stands in the doorway making references to Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Bella, Jacob, and Edward meet on the train to wizard school….
J.R.R Tolkien: Bella sits around while Edward is the heir to a long-lost throne, goes on a massive quest, gains his inheritances and comes back to marry her. The main story ends there but there are 4 other books that deal with genealogy, culture, and language of the world in which they live.
Jacob becomes a dwarf who is unconcerned with Bella and thrown in for comic relief.
Brian Jacques:
Bella is a mouse on a quest to save her home. Along the way, she meets the quirky bat Edward, who takes her in for a time and introduces her to his bat-clan, and then accompanies her on her quest. They eventually run into the wolf Jacob, who tries to eat them but then convinces the other wolves to let them be provided they solve a number of riddles. Eventually, they all live in an abbey, Bella’s home saved, and she marries a mouse completely unrelated to either Edward or Jacob, who become fast friends.
Stephenie Meyer: Bella (who is Stephenie Meyer’s self-image) suffers from self-loathing and lack of personality, but that changes when she realises that she can have sex if she falls in love with a corpse… she becomes even more confused when she also falls for an animal, and can’t decide between necrophilia and beastiality for some time, before settling on necrophilia as her preferred vice.
George R. R. Martin
In the war-torn country of what is probably supposed to be the Pacific Northwest, different Houses rule their realms and clash often. Bella of House Swan (which is an insult to the other House Swann in ASOIAF) is actually a brilliant and sharp young woman. She manages to see the reclusive knight Edward of House Cullen ride in a tourney and becomes enamored with him. She notes that he has peculiar habits, but it doesn’t deter her from her intent.
She manages to talk her dullard of a father, Charles the First, into letting her marry Edward to add to their realm of influence. However, Bella is scheming to have Edward murdered shortly after their wedding night so she can rule the lands of House Cullen unopposed. The family realizes this plot and enlists the the beast-men from the outer haunted forests: the Blacks. Bella discovers that the Cullens are essentially blood drinking abominations, Edward included. So basically it turns into a bloody battle of the Cullens vs the Swan family guards and the Blacks swarming the holdfasts and butchering everyone where they stand.
Bella dies for her scheming, and so do Houses Cullen and Swan. The Blacks ascend to the throne and rule with an iron fist.
David Foster Wallace:
Edward suffers from a dizzying array of unfortunate conditions, including one that requires him to drink blood to survive and another that makes his unnaturally pale skin break out into a rash when exposed to sunlight, leading other characters to refer to him as a vampire. Several hundred pages are spent detailing his physical disfigurements and his depression in painstaking detail (the pun is pointed out in a footnote).
Jacob, the only supernatural character in the novel, is a werewolf. He does not interact with the other main characters in any way. Jacob is killed midway through the story by a werewolf hunter, whose specific sexual fetishes we learn entirely too much about.
Bella is a normal high-school student. Chapters told from her perspective are written entirely in chatspeak.
Including its five hundred pages of footnotes, the non-linear novel is over two thousand pages long.
Paulo Coelho:
Basically the same, but when Edward leaves to protect Bella, he stays away for many, many years. Bella marries Jacob even though she never loves him the way she loved Edward. Her broken heart never fully recovers and she is never able to forget him. When Bella is old she meets Edward again and the love between them is still strong. They have a wild, passionate adventure together lasting for a few hours. She dies in his sparkling arms on a hill bathed in the rising sun.
Stieg Larsson: A tale of political conspiracy that reads like a cross between The X Files and Sucker Punch.
Franz Kafka
Edward leaves Bella. She spends the rest of her life looking for him. In the end, she is executed for a crime she didn’t commit.
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Terry Pratchett: Bella is a troll from the mountains who falls in love with Edward, a charming, handsome assassin. They have various adventures in a parallel universe until Jacob, who is Edward in the future, disrupts everything by being heir to the throne. Bella nearly dies but is saved by Edward/Jacob + a comical, mythical ingredient. Instead of 4 books there are 103.
Jesse, I just want to say that you are taking this far too seriously. I like the Twilight Saga, but I also recognize mediocre writing. I let it slide because I see that it’s written simply for the audience it’s intended to reach, teens. That’s not to say teens don’t deserve good writing.
This exercise is one that stimulates your mind and get you thinking about other authors and their styles. I also enjoy making fun of Twilight. You can be on both sides. And I think these examples are great.
Get over yourself and just enjoy these posts and this blog. It’s funny.
Ok, with my defense of this written, I’m contemplating an Edward Gory version.
Bella comes to the Cullen mansion during a storm, the wind tosses her hair as she runs.
She roams the halls in the night in desperation and depression. Edward stalks her, never able to completely voice his love for her. The constant watching drives Bella mad.
Jacob, in wolf form, rushes the mansion and changes to human form. He declares his love for Bella and insists that she come with him. Edward watches as Jacob trips on the Cullen’s fountain and drown.
Jacob’s death affects Bella deeply, but she’s conflicted with the feelings she’s developing for Edward. She never sees more of him than a hand or an eye, but the stalking is wearing her down.
Edward, in a fit of self confidence tries to reach out for Bella as she stands in the hallway crying. The cold touch startles her and she runs away.
Blinded by her tears, she doesn’t see that she approaches the window, and screaming she falls. She is impaled on the spire of the fountain in which Jacob drowned.
Edward spends centuries watching the scene, unable to resolve his preternatural attraction to Bella even in her death.
(I wish I could draw, I can totally see the pictures for this in my head.)
Jacob and Edward are both born shortly after midnight on the first day of American independence. However, due to a mixup, Jacob is raised by vampires and becomes a violent mass murder while Edward lives in a small town in the Northwest and loves organic green chutney.
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Bram Stoker:
While Bella is a confused young village girl of little import as a character, Edward and his family rampage through the countryside killing and maiming everything in their path. Bella, Jacob and the rest of the original cast die, while Edward and his family live happily ever after in coffins of bone. Little to no sexual activity involved.
Kurt Vonnegut:
Edward lived through World War 2 as a poor-mannered American soldier captured for a short time. Trauma leads him to believe he is a vampire and thus drinks blood (actually he drinks altogether too much red wine, as the anonymous narrator intones) and avoids the sun. Bella is pretty much exactly the same and obsesses over Edward.
Reply to “If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight…”
They wouldn’t be famous after their death…or before it even.
I have to admit, I love the Edward Gorey version… the illustrations from the Gorey alphabet are vivid in my brain and make the version so much fun!
Nicely done!
Michael Crichton: Bella is a world-renowned hematologist/geneticist who develops a vaccine that turns humans into vampires. Jacob is an ecologist, Edward is a physicist. The Volturi are rewritten as ruthless land developers. Every 10 pages, there is a paragraph-long discussion on how vampires are scientifically possible. Every 15 pages, there is a discussion on how the study of genetics will advance modern medicine only if humans choose not to abuse this new-found knowledge.
Roald Dahl: Pretty much the same narrative, except the vampires use nonsense-sounding lingo and there are cutesy illustrations by Quentin Blake. The Volturi are rewritten as overweight and heartless parental figures.
For JESE:
Of course they’re making fun of Twilight. But, like JEN, I enjoy the books as well. That in no way means I think they are good literature. The themes are recycles and the character development is predictable. That doesn’t make them unlikeable, nor does it make them guarded from criticism. What makes you think there was absolutely no one who criticized Romeo and Juliet? On the contrary, I believe Shakespeare was heavily criticized.
And about your comment about how the authors of the blog should write their own material: Well, they are….Just because a writer doesn’t write books and get them published doesn’t make them any less of a writer. They are bloggers, and clearly well-respected (by most, anyway).
That being said, let us have our fun! I can love and hate Twilight at the same time, and I’m sure others can too!
I agree that writers who haven’t published books are still writers, but did want to mention that my first book, Leaving Mundania, a narrative nonfiction account of the hobby/subculture/art of larp, comes out this May. Hope y’all check it out.
Ha, just found this, it’s really fun!
Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes is called to investigate a murder on the countryside. Edward is the victim and the folk people believe he was killed by a werewolf. At the end Holmes explains Jacob’s elaborate disguise and that Edward’s wife Bella was helping him all the time
H. G. Wells – The vampires are creatures engineered by the Martians to act as living blood filters to get rid of human germs, leaving the blood clean to be consumed by the Martians. The werewolves were created by Dr. Moreau
Miguel de Cervantes – Edward is not really a vampire, but believed to be one and acts dramatically, much to the despair of his loyal companion Sancho Jacob
Star Trek episode – The Enterprise lands on a planet were a lupine-humanoid population is being conquered by Romulans who are experimenting drugs on them. Ensign Bella is torn between love for a charming Romulan scientist who claims to be not like others of his race; and her desire to help a native who is being turned into a monstrosity : ^D
James Ellroy, told from the perspective of the cop dad.
Restaurant crime scene. Some g****** animal ripped another poor b****** apart. Now my f****** daughter waltzes into my crime scene. I know where she’s been. Out with that pasty f*** Edward.
Suzanne Collins – author of slightly better teenage fiction.
Bella grows up with Jacob hunting wild deer in the woods by their house. When Bella is chosen to compete in a ‘game’ for the entertainment of the Volturi, Jacob says that he hopes she won’t die, but if she does he will watch it on the big screen with everyone else. Edward is also chosen. He has been stalking Bella for years without her noticing, apart from an incident involving a blood bag. At the Volturi capital, Bella is known as “the girl with the facial expression that never changes”. Edward declares love for her for publicity and food. When they are in the arena, Edward pretends to love her while Bella tries to save them both. They kill everyone and in the final scene Bella is killed by Edward and declared victorious. He goes back home and kills Jacob. There is no second book, or third, and the book is able to stand on its own without the last quarter of it being a cliffhanger for the next in the series.
Got a better James Ellroy tribute:
1:50 a.m.
Tox reports on the Dupree case. Bingo. Strychnine.
Great. Daughter screaming in the middle of the night again. Crying over a boy that dumped her. Good riddance.
I know that kid climbed through her window. Good thing he left town. He’s having an “accident” if he shows his face again.
More screaming. Drama queen. Dose of Xanax and a dose of shut-the-f***-up already.
Armistead Maupin
When naive ingenue Bella moves to a new town, she finds an unlikely family in a group of quirky local supernatural beings who broaden her horizons until she learns to find humor and enlightenment in her own idiosyncratic routine.
Thomas Pynchon:
Bella investigates a series of disturbing killings in her town. She learns Edward is behind them, but is more horrified by his fixation with scat play than his vicious murdering. Eventually she discovers vampiricism is a conspiracy started by the East India Trading Company. Edward disintegrates because entropy.
Edgar Allan Poe: On the eve of their wedding, Bella wakes up in sweats and finds Edward staring at her. She thinks his left eye has changed color and is disgusted by it. Bella kills Edward, takes his eye, buries the body under the bed. Jacob comes around looking for Edward. Bella talks and talks and talks about the reason vampires scare her and then admit to killing Edward.
J.K. Rowling: Bella goes to boarding school, and saves the world, than marries Jacob and lives happily ever after.
Mark Z. Danielewski:
The perspective continually shifts between Edward, Bella, Jacob, a middle-aged author named “Stephanie M.” and a commentary by a scholar of historical vampire fiction. One or all of the characters may be “monsters” but due to the unreliable narration, it is never clear which if any of them actually are.
Pages at a time are given over to interlocking panels of footnotes exhaustively detailing the traditional attributes of vampires, werewolves, Native Americans, and high school girls (amongst other things).
The book comes as a manila folder full of 300 handwritten cocktail napkins. They are not numbered, and the reader must compile the book as they go in the order which makes most sense to them.
Orson Scott Card: Edward, a young boy with a genius for war tactics and a nearly psychic ability to infer a hundred times more information than a person intends to communicate in general conversation, gets whisked away space school. There, he meets Bella. Clumsy, boring, and completely useless, he believes he falls deeply in love with her, but is really just projecting his own issues of abandonment and misplaced love for his sister, Alice. Bella remains useless through the entire series, and the focus shifts to Edward’s relationship with Jake, a young genius with a past shrouded in violence and secrecy. This relationship allows Edward and Jake to win what they believe is a simulated battle against supernatural beings that no one understands. At the end, Edward realizes it was not a simulation and he really did wipe out a whole race of beings that weren’t trying to kill anyone and were probably more interesting than anything else that has happened in the book so far. His guilt is the focus of three more pointless books about more supernatural beings with vaguely homoerotic elements thrown in and people dying in a entertaining, but violent fashion whenever things get too dull.
Crap, sorry, John Ajvide Lindquist:
The story is exactly the same, except it has good writing and characters and happens in a remote island settlement off the coast of Sweden.
Phillip Pullman: Bella only pretends to be clumsy and boring in order to manipulate the adults around her. She is attracted to Edward, a wealthy boy she meets at the market, but resists him because he isn’t actually that interesting. Jake, her childhood friend, is also attractive and very interesting, but she doesn’t notice because they have been friends for a long time. Jake gets kidnapped near the start of the story, and Bella asks Edward to help her find him. When they do, Jake is a shell of his old self because her evil mother and pet monkey amputated his arm (that had a tattoo representing his soul) believing tattoos to be the source of all knowledge and evil. Vowing vengence and hoping to find her lost father, they continue to the North Pole, where they cross into another dimension when they both get soul tattoos. Edward defends Bella and a host of other strange, zombie-like children, from a mad priest and wins a super sharp knife, useful for tattooing anything you wish (and therefore opening up other dimensions). They uncover a plot by the Catholic church to banish tattoos and the knowledge of them, thus plunging the world into complacent darkness. They fight this plot, even going through hell to rescue those who have already been sent there for having tattoos, and eventually end up in a metaphorical garden of Eden. There, in the shade of large trees, they come to full knowledge and tattoo each other in very intimate places. Sadly, they discover that Edward’s vigorous tattooing has opened up too many dimensions and he must stay what was formerly children-zombie land, while Bella returns to her home. They make a pact to sit on a bench once a year and pretend the other is with them, giving them another vigorous tattoo.
Note: Orson Scott Card (they call Edward a vampire because he can suck the life out of any being and meant to be a compliment, but causes feelings of guilt and self-loathing). Pullman (Edward is called a vampire because that it his tattoo, the essence of his soul – everyone’s tattoos represent their essence…Jake’s was of a wolf, Bella’s was a black hole).
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Janet Evanovich: Bella is a clumsy bounty hunter who catches her FTA’s by accident. She has an on-and-off relationship with Jacob, a hometown boy who she’s grown up with, but her feelings for Edward, her dark and mysterious bounty hunter mentor make an awkward love triangle. Her car explodes.
Isabel Allende: In a single book that spans 50 years and three generations of the Cullen family, Edward is in love with Bella’s sister, but she dies, leaving him to settle for Bella. Bella spends the entire novel exhibiting clarvoyance and in ignorance of Edward and reality, choosing instead to entertain the world in her head. Bella’s daughter, Nessie, falls in love with Jacob, a strong supporter of the socialist government that replaces the conservative government. A military junta violently replaces the socialist government, as headed by the son of Edward’s illegitimate child, and Nessie’s daughter is captured and raped. Nessie’s daughter writes the whole story based on Bella’s diaries and testimonies of the dying Edward. Enough rape, violence, and symbolism to cover every inch of 20th century Chilean history.
Steven Moffat: Edward meets Bella when she is a child. He promises to come back in five minutes. He actually comes back in 10 years. She’s suddenly hot and has a boyfriend, Jacob. Edward invites her to join his vampire ways of living. She falls in love with him, then realises it’s Jacob she really loves once she sees him do something cool. She can’t decide whether to become a vampire or a werewolf, so she stays human and jumps between the two. Then she gets pregnant. The baby goes through the same process, but at one point chances race.
Aldous Huxley: A great war ended in victory for the alliance of vampires and werwolves. The world is driven by the more efficient consumption and allocation of humans, who willingly perform the ultimate sacrifice as a matter of course for the pleasure of each individual member of society. Everyone is happy. That is, except Jacob, whose strange appearance and whining is queer enough to raise the attention of the ever so pneumatic vampire Bella. The two visit a “savage” reservation where vampires and werwolves find reason to practice restraint in their consumption of humans. The savage vampire Edward, who is brought from the savage reservation to the civilized world as a social experiment, falls in love with Bella. After Bella attempts to force sex onto Edward on several occasions, Edward commits a particularly long-drawn masochistic suicide by ripping himself apart in front of a captivated jeering and cheering audience.
Walt Disney: Bella is a beautiful princess cursed by an evil witch to be clumsy and angsty. Edward is a handsome prince cursed to be sparkly and angsty. Jacob is his faithful dog who always protects him. Edward sees/hears Bella singing a sad song about angst in the woods (surrounded by birds, squirrels, chipmunks, a wolverine and two naked mole rats) and falls in love with her. When he attempts to dance with her, Jacob prevents him, fearing that Bella’s clumsiness will lead to a fatal accident. Edward and Bella say, “Bad dog!” and runs away with Edward. The abandoned Jacob develops an unhealthy obsession with Bella’s shoes and pines to death in her closet, after which he is magically turned into a giant china dog which Bella and Edward keep by the fireplace so as to always remember their faithful friend.
José Saramago: It´s new year’s evening and at the inmedeatly second after midnight, some people stop dying, They’ve been called vampires; and they become insatiable blood suckers. The ataraxic girl fall in love with the teen ager – pretend to be underground – vegetarian vampire at school. When they’ve decided to get married the pandemic non-dead situation gets self solved and the vegetarian vampire dies. The ataraxic girl feels fine because it was a burden to be alive in a world of deads and she had to reminds them permanently the human nature and their feelings when at the same time she has lost those too.
Has no-one done Shakespeares version yet?
Homer: Bella, Edward and Jacob are thrown into a love triangle by divine manipulations in an allegory of the destructive power of hubris. Periodically includes a list the name and parentage of all students in Bella’s classroom.
Patricia Cornwall: Bella, abandoned by her father, goes to University of Tennessee and researches forensic anthropology at the Body Farm. One of the bodies fails to decay, rises from the dead, and really screws up her research. Bella examines the evidence, blood and sparkles, under the microscope, runs DNA tests, and calls the FBI for help from their profiler, Jacob, who might actually be a werewolf. Or a serial killer in cahoots with that strangely alluring undead guy who has been following her around. After many subplots and red herrings, Bella escapes from their clutches and realizes she is a lesbian.
Jorge Luis Borges:
Bella meets Edward on a beautiful island and they fall madly in-love and have a half-dozen vampire babies. One day she finds herself working in a library and she realizes she is really married to Jacob and has no children. Or does she? which is her real life? Is she a housewife dreaming she’s married to a vampire or is she married to a vampire and is dreaming she has a simple life and is married to Jacob?
J.K. Rowling
Jacob, Edward and Bella are best friend throughout their schooling years while hormones flair and they defeat evil forces. Bella continuously rages and scolds against Edward for being emotionally inaccessible while Jacob awkwardly tags along as the third wheel even though he’s the main character.
I have three comments, only one an addition, so ….
1. I hope no one minds if I utilize this blog in my Lit Theory course when we discuss “What is an author” and metacommentary.
2. Jesse – not only was R&J ridiculed at the time, but critics often still comment on the ludicrous nature of the characters obsessive reactions. The difference is that Shakespeare created words and Meyer seems to have a limited number she knows, or is willing to use. Also, the fact that she has stated, in interviews, that she did not borrow from any other stories is ludicrous and disingenuous. Can it be lighthearted fun to read? Yes, as long as the person reading it isn’t an impressionable 13 year-old girl likely to think she is going to find “her” Edward someday and willing to let men treat her badly because of that notion.
3. [She may not be famous enough, but what the heck] Laurell K. Hamilton – Bella falls in love with Edward, is saved by him several times, saves him at least as many times, meets Jacob and falls for him as well. Rather than being angst-ridden about choosing who her soulmate is, she enters into a menage-a-trois and they live together happily, mostly, as anyone in love would.
Margaret Mitchell: teenage Bella is in love with Edward, whom never seems to age and conveniantly survives the civil war. Shrewed, dashing Jacob manages to catch Bella in between husbands and she agees to marry him because of their fondness. After a decade of war, struggle, and triumph, Edward’s weakness is unveiled. Bella runs back to jacob, where she admits her wrong doings and her love for him, to which he replies “frankly my dear, IDGAF”
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club): Bella, who is never explicitly named, carries on relationships with both Jacob and Edward who are actually both alter-egos of the guy who almost hit her with his car in the first book. The entire book is written in diary format from the point of view of her spleen.
Dumas
Edward, sailor, is madly in love with the morally irreproachable and dull Bella. Jealous of Edward, Jacob, Edward’s old friend, conspires with Edward’s enemies to throw him in el Chateu de If, the most dreadful prison on the face of the earth. While incarcerated, Edward becomes pale, Vampiric, and hellbent on revenge, and is taught the ways of the world by an imprisoned former priest, Carlisle Cullen. Edward escapes the prison, gains a mysterious fortune, and after several inexplicable chapters of Edward smoking opium and calling himself Sinbad the Sailor, he seeks out Jacob. Jacob has married Bella, who swore to love Edward for eternity but now doesn’t really seem to care all too much that her one true love has returned. Edward kills Jacob and all his conspirators in incredibly vengeful ways yet Bella still seems to have no opinion about the entire matter. She leaves for a nunnery for some unknown reason, and Edward marries a weird but beautiful former Greek princess.
Edgar Allen Poe: Bella meets a strange man an over a period of time falls in love and they marry. But he, Edward is keeping a secret or two. He is a mutation that needs blood and can live a long time. But what the real secret is that he has a sort of twin. Jacob who howls at the moon and gets very hairy. You see, he tells her, when you married me you married him as well. She screams echo from the crumbling mansion. Are they of ecstasy or pain or horror or all three?
Howard Philips Lovecraft: Edward an Jacob are two monsters who have been fighting through the ages and now they fight over a human woman by the name of Bella. She is a weak, delicate thing of fragile beauty and learned antiquarian. But they both know that if they should spring how different they are to her she could die like a moth in a flame. But one day while walking in the forest Bella sees them fighting an screams. Both creatures come to her and try to use their powers to awaken her. But they begin fighting again and in the mean time Bella awakens from the fain as the two creatures fight harder and harder trying to kill the nearly unkillable. She tries to stop them and intervenes.A short scream an ripping sounds. Fade to black.
Mickey Spillane:
I stood beneath the trees while the warm rain dripped down and splashed in the mud at my feet. Jacob, his blood running down his face, was on his knees looking up at me and grinning like the jerk he was. He’d made one wisecrack too many about Bella and I’d slapped him across the eyes with the combat 45 I’d found in Bella’s closet.
“Yeah, Edward,” Jacob slurred out as blood dripped from his chin. “That Bella is one hot little…”
I jammed the barrel of the rod into Jacob’s mouth, splintering his teeth and pushing his tongue back into his throat.
“This is it, smart guy.” I spat out. I pulled the trigger and the dum-dum 45 caliber round punched through the back of Jacob’s head scattering blood and brain matter out to mix with the black mud. A small skull fragment lay on the ground like an arcane ashtray.
Jacob struggled back to a squatting position, making obscene grunting sounds as his shattered bones knitted together and his skin swirled and reformed.
I laughed, a hard laugh that held no humor. “Like that, Jake?”
Jacob sneered, “You’re dumber than you look, Sparkles. Just gimme a min…”
The second round took him in the gut and slammed him back against an ancient tree.
“No, Jake,” I said. “The lead round was just to get your attention. The silver round is for keeps.”
I knelt down in front of him. I wanted the last thing he saw to be the look of pure hatred on my face.
“How,” he gasped, blood bubbling up on his lips. “How could you?”
Just before his eyes closed forever, I took him by the throat, leaned close and whispered in his ear.
“It was easy.”
chuck palahniuk:
Edward exists in Bella’s imagination, as she falls into a destructive downward spiral. If her name is Bella it’s unknown, as the entire narrative is in her deeply sarcastic voice and perspective. Details of herself are slim. In a journey of self discovery that involves violent altercations, she meets Jacob- a zookeeper with a wolf fetish that captivates her imagination. Her behavior is less than law abiding, and culminates when she initiated a gang war between the self proclaimed Vampires. Jacob comes to save her. But she can only be saved if she stops Edward…
Just wanted to applaud all of you for redefining this abusive love story.
Jules Verne: Bella is a scientist who has just discovered the whereabouts of the undead around the world. Edward is a zombie who’s been living 20,000 leagues under the sea. Jacob had once been Edward’s assistant many, many years ago and is searching for his remains around the world. Between the vast ocean and landmass, Bella ends up journeying toward the center of the earth and, you know, lives to tell the tale.
Charlotte Bronte: Bella becomes suddenly poor when her mother, who always hated Bella’s clumsiness and inability to shut up, cuts her off as she comes of age. Made drab and meek by years of abuse at Forks Charitable Institution, Bella tiptoes into her new life as a lady’s maid at Cullen Hall. She finds the family unexpectedly warm, especially her new charge, Alice, who treats her almost as an equal. She begins to ponder the mystery of the family’s changing eye color, long history, &c, but is distracted when the temperamental but oddly alluring Edward returns from a hunting trip. She falls in love with him, and after a weird subplot in which he pretends to love Jessica instead, agrees to marry him. However, when she discovers on the eve of their wedding that the Cullens are vampires, she decides their home is a den of sin and runs away into the woods. Jacob finds her passed out in a copse of trees and takes her back to La Push, where he and his two charming sisters nurse her back to health. It is discovered that Billy and Charlie are long-lost brothers. Jacob proposes to Bella, but Bella does not love him, and decides she would rather be a vampire than live without love. Renesmee’s birth is mentioned once in the final chapter. The last paragraph of the book is about Jacob going on a quest in South America to find the ancient Incan Books of Werewolf or something.
Emily Bronte: Everybody hates everybody. Bella loves Edward, even though they beat each other regularly. Concerned, the upper-class Jacob steps in, and Bella marries him even though he is snobby and ineffectual. Heartbroken, Edward goes away for a long time. When he returns, Bella receives him into Jacob’s house, acting like nothing ever happened. When Edward suggests Bella run away with him, Bella falls ill with indecision, and accuses Edward of her eventual death. Edward spends a mysterious night with her corpse. Jacob dies of hatred. Edward abuses his and Bella’s children. Everyone is sad on the moors.
Anne Bronte: Bella slowly falls in love with Mike while Edward and Jacob are away making names for themselves in the navy.
Robert Jordan: Bella is taken from her home by Edwir, a mysterious figure that claims it is for her own good. They travel the world, collecting underlings and gaining power so that they can eventually be prepared to face the Volturi in the Last Battle. What was supposed to be four books becomes 15. Almost 1/3 of that is spent describing clothing.
William Shakespeare: A ghost tells Edward, Prince of Denver, that Jacob killed his father. Edward spends the next third of the book feigning insanity and debating what action he should take. He rejects Bella’s love, telling her to get to a nunnery. Believing Bella to have drowned herself, Jacob challenges Edward to a duel. Unbeknownst to Edward, Jacob poisons both his sword and Edward’s wine. Bella appears at the duel and drinks a toast to both from the poisoned goblet. Edward is wounded, but during the fight he and Jacob exchange swords. Edward then stabs Jacob with the poisoned blade. All three die, along with most of the supporting cast. Second Soldier announces the arrival of Fortinbras.
Chuck Palahniuk (Sorry, different take on his style)
Edward is an extremely wealthy man who secretly dabbles in the occult and has a family in another country. Bella is a cocktail waitress he meets by chance and falls inexplicably in love with, though he never admits to it. Through a series of freak and no doubt entertaining events, they end up on a cross-country journey with Jacob, an environmentalist by day and a violent sex-addict by night. Bella spends much of the journey flinging sexual advances in both directions, making it a hot, sticky, terse car ride for all.
VC Andrews (dead author, Flowers in the Attic and numerous books written after her death by a ghost writer)
Bella Black and her brother Jacob Black have a very selfish mother. She regrets having children, responsibilities, credit card debt, being left alone, and financially destitute after her husband Charlie Black died from food poisoning. She squandered her dead husband’s money in Vegas playing poker and she is a raging alcoholic.
Mrs. Black decides to go on a cruise with Mr. Emmett Cullen, her new boyfriend, for three months in Europe. She promises her children if they are very good for their grandmother (who will mind the children in her absence) that she will bring them all European chocolate from Belgium and many, many presents.
Bella and Jacob’s younger brother Edward and younger sister Alice are too young to understand why their mother has a new boyfriend so soon after their father died from food poisoning.
Edward and Alice object to being left alone, but Mother smiles and tells pretty lies to convince them go to Grandmother Black’s house. Once they are all at Grandmother Black’s house, it is very clear to all four children that they have horrible relatives.
Mrs. Black leaves the children in the care of her cranky, mean, over-bearing Bible-thumping mother. Grandmother Black locks all four children in a windowless basement full of black widow spiders. She hates her grandchildren and tells them that they are devil’s spawn doomed to go to hell. Their grandmother goes on to tell them that mother and father were sinners and shouldn’t have gotten married, and they should never have been born.
Bella isn’t afraid of Grandmother Black. She tries to protect little Alice from the horrible, controlling old woman. Poor little Edward, the youngest, gets terribly ill after eating some of Grandmother Black’s Famous Cookies. Unbeknownst to the children, the cookies were laced with the deadly poison arsenic. The older children are continually deprived of food. Grandmother Black decides to cut their meal portions down to rodent-sized bits of cheese and moldy bread.
When the old woman isn’t poisoning the children, she lectures Bella and Jacob on propriety and insists that Bella doesn’t undress in front of Sinner Jacob.
Bella is a teenager and quite attractive, and Jacob is strangely attracted to her. They wind up having sex in the bathroom when Edward and Alice are asleep, tucked in separate beds since Grandmother Black won’t allow them to share the same bed.
Edward and Alice become vampires. Bella and Jacob decide they are starving slowly to death. Lack of food means they are desperate to nourish the young bodies of Edward and Alice. The older two feed the younger children their own blood.
After Edward and Alice turn into vampires, they attack Grandmother Black and drink her dry. Horrified by what they have done, the no longer innocent younger children run screaming to Grandfather Black’s room. He is a man they have never met, and he is in fact a werewolf. A huge battle ensues when Bella and Jacob discover that Grandfather Black is about to make a meal out of all of them.
Bella takes a silver spoon from the kitchen (now that Grandmother Black is dead she has run of the house) and impales Grandfather Black with it. He dies and they escape.
Strangely, Mother shows up in the living room with a preacher and she is in a wedding dress. She was going to get married, but her two youngest children, furious and starving, attack her. Unable to control themselves, Edward and Alice drink Mother dry. When they are finished with her, they attack Mr. Cullen and kill him.
All four children bury the dead in the graveyard on the family property and Bella puts the family mansion up for sale. She donates the money to charity, since she and her siblings have inherited everything.
Bella and Jacob move in together, set up house, have lots of sex, and Bella gets pregnant. She goes to the doctor after she has a miscarriage after tripping down a flight of stairs. She realizes that she really can’t marry her brother because they would have a monster baby.
Meanwhile, Edward and Alice wreak havoc in the neighborhood, shrinking its population during their nightly romps. They become known as the Party Twins. The Party Twins recruit an army of vampires to help them take over the world.
The saga continues in four novels, detailing the sexual exploits of young Bella and Jacob. Death, mayhem, and neighborhood demolition feature strongly in the other novels as Edward and Alice realize their growing power.
Of course it all ends badly for the four siblings when all four of them are tragically decapitated in a horrifying Winnebago-semi truck accident on the freeway.
Sherman Alexie: The main focus of the story is Jacob who is funnier and more intelligent and also holds a comic/tension between his Native American roots and the oppression placed on him by white Bella, and super-white Edward. Jacob wants Bella because she’s white and he wants to take ironic revenge on those who brought so much pain to him and colonize Bella, but he also loves her, which makes him feel weird. Edward is so white he’s evil. He represents all of white America’s transgressions. We find out that Jacob is an heir of Crazy Horse and he and Bella end up together but Jacob still can’t reconcile if he’s with her to make a political point or if he loves her.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
It is a musical in two or three acts. Most of the songs are just one especially catchy verse repeating over and over again, and when a change is needed, it will simply change key (probably to E major).
The characters will have little or no development, which actually isn’t that much of a change from Meyer’s version. The first song is a give-away prologue about Edward’s early transformation. Then it switches to 203482 years later without the audience being informed of this fact. Edward leaves Bella at the end of the second-to-last act in a dramatic song that will be a recycled song from earlier in the show (a reprise). They get back together in the final act, and it ends with love ballad between Edward and Bella that will be re-recorded by multiple artists and featured in 50 of the Most Beautiful Love Songs CD collection, available now on this TV order.
Lafcadio Hearn:
Bella is a spurned and vengeful woman who decides to kill her vengeful (pre)vampire husband and her wolf youkai lover
Poppy Z. Brite:
Edward and Jacob murder and eat Bella, then have sex. The murder, cannibalism and homosexual sex are all described in gruesome/loving detail.
Evelyn Waugh: Bella somehow always gets in the way of Edward’s friendship with Jacob.
Crikey. I’ve got some reading to do.
Mark Kurlansky:
A witty and erudite history of vampires and werewolves encompassing fields as disparate as religion, pop music, virology, mechanics, twitching, hematology, small goods (specifically, black pudding) and epidemiology. Kurlansky’s engaging and well-researched book is veined with witty anecdotes and amusing side tracks. Bella gets a few paragraphs in the section on human/were/vamp relationships and Jacob and Edward feature heavily in the index because – well – they’ve been around a bloody long time. Kurlansky has created a tasty, full blooded blend in a socio-political-historical educational entertainment which is (due to the extreme age of its subjects) six volumes long.
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Edgar Rice Burroughs:
Bella is raised by apes. Instead of dying as an infant from exposure, starvation, predators or tropical diseases, as would happen in real life, she grows up to be this super athlete jungle woman. Edgar and Jacob are *extremely* horny male apes who compete to mate with her. Or…
Sometime after the end of the American Civil War Bella is gazing up at the night sky, sees Mars and cries “I wish that I was on the planet Mars!!” and is instantly transported there. She quickly adopts the Martian dress-code–Martian women go topless–and proceeds to “save” Mars by repairing it’s atmosphere-production-machines. Or…
Bella is a telepath who travels to the planet Venus. There she meets Edward and Jacob and has various & sundry adventures.
I read sixty-nine of ERB’s novels in the ’70s, truly great fun…fond memories…
Goethe: The whole book is written in letters.
Jacob, a poetic young men who loves nature (and is by the way completely perfect because of the huge ego of the author who just described himself and his life), fells deeply in love with Bella who is also the most perfect women in the world. Sadly, she is already engaged with Edward, a responsible guy with much money. After a big drama and a lot of tears Jacob commits suicide.
(I’m german, so I’m sorry for possible mistakes.)
Howard Zinn: Tired of the revisionist history of vampires and werewolves Zinn sets out to tell the story of Edward and Bella from the point of view of the oppressed. It starts with a lengthy discussion of how Jacobs people were screwed by the US policy toward Native Americans and how they have already move as far Northwest as they could without ending up in Canada. Several hundred thousand were killed along the way. We also find that Thomas Jefferson was actually Thomas Cullen (Jefferson) and his support of the Indian Relocation project was only to make it easier for vampires to rape and pillage the country.
Chinua Achebe:
They eat yams. Edward feels that his role as a man is defined by things outside his control. They eat yams. Everyone gets to say “ikemafuna” a lot. They eat yams. The kill jacob and his twin in the woods as infants. Then, for a change of pace, they eat more yams.
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Camus:
In Edward’s dream, Jacob is endlessly pursuing Bella along a beach of dazzling, glittering sand. Edward awakes to the sound of screaming. He has torn Bella’s throat apart in his sleep. Jacob stands over them, his eyes smoldering (sic) with rage. Edward declines to justify his action or apologise. He is tried by the Volturi and found guilty of murder. Their leader offers him redemption if he will apologise and suggests he may yet save his soul. Edward denies having one. He spends his time lying on his prison bumk watching a small spider trying to catch a large fly and waiting for his execution.
Sartre:
Edward, Bella and Jacob are shut in a room for eternity. Their eyelids are atrophied open.
All three are chained to different corners of a triangular room in such a way that they can never quite reach each other.
Edward’s eyes have been put out. Jacob changes from adolescent to wolf perpetually and Bella is deprived of makeup, tissues and sharp objects.
Beckett:
Edward et Jacob se rencontrent au carrefour poussiéreux d’un sentier de campagne. Ils attendent l’arrivée de leur copine. Ils discutent de l’amour, de la faim et de la mort. Ils boivent d’une bouteille. Enfin l’on comprend que la bouteille contient le sang de leur copine.
Ian McDonald:
Bella is the heiress to a tech empire based in a rapidly modernising Third World country. She meets data mogul Edward, who promises her software upgrades she doesn’t understand, but which he persuades her are for the best. Jacob heads a rival company that’s been stirring up trouble in the country in an attempt to destabilise Bella’s company’s leading position in the market. It all culminates in a virtual battle between the advanced AIs of the three corporations, who end up collectively ascending to become a creature of pure data that exists beyond human understanding.
Thank you for this absolutely delightful thread. I only wish that I had my own contribution to this. It has lightened my heart today.
J.D. Salinger:
Bella, an apathetic failure of a student runs across the lousy but not completely ugly Edward, but is bored to death after hearing all about his lousy vampire family, who probably aren’t really vampires anyway, but just a bunch of phonies. She finds the incredibly hairy gigolo, Jacob, but just sits and stares at him. Ultimately, she decides to dump all those lousy phonies and become a shut-in.
William S. Burroughs:
Edward suffers from a blood disorder that interferes with his job as a Hyper-Dimensional Fuck Doll on a colonial planet that may be earth of the future or possibly a 1950s alternate dimension. He spends interminable chapters repeatedly musing on his own inability to shit. He finally quits his job and tours the globe posing as a journalist researching rare diseases sampling any drug he can often as elaborate cocktails as he tries to cure himself. The drug cocktails affect his skin which now appears to sparkle… he takes this as a sign and moves to Marrakesh where he starts drinking the blood of virgin boys. Meanwhile left alone for several years, Bella, his long suffering wife, has had an affair with Jacob who she thinks is Edwards psychiatrist but is in fact a junkie friend of Edwards who believes he was given shape shifting powers by alien infiltrators. Edward returns seemingly cured and gives Bella and Jacob his blessing and they all move in together. During the Road trip epilogue Edward accidentally shoots Bella in the forehead and she dies. Edward returns to Marrakesh where the story breaks down entirely and we repeat 8 chapters of scatological musing.
Bill Peet:
It would be basically the same, but all of the smiling, smouldering eyes, and 90% of the rest of the book would just be replaced by cute, slightly comical pencil drawings. The plot would be basically the same, but anything too graphic would only be implied. The moral of the story would have to do about choosing your relationships wisely, unlike the main character.
Clive Barker: Bella is an aerialist in a travelling carnival, the daughter of the bearded woman and the lizard man who, like the rest of the freaks, reject her for being beautiful. Edward is the ringmaster, who glows not only when the spotlight is on him, but whenever he is elated, a sign of the Nightbreed blood in his veins. His lover/assistant is the bulging-muscled Edward, a mendicant with a lot of canine characteristics. The plot is very complicated, having something to do with a pair of glowing balls and a large rod that can pierce through dimensions and a wizard who can control anything made of dairy, paper or muslin.
Dan Brown version:
Bella is a famous scientist who specializes in folklore. She is contacted by Edward, an old and well respected friend who is an expert in history, indicating that someone has been murdered in Forks. When there he is greeted by Jacob who acts as her guide to the new town. They have an intimate relation as they track the mysterious “cold ones”. With Edwards help they are led on a wild goose chase only to realize that he was responsible for the murder in the first place.
Agatha Christie:
Edward and Bella are a happy young couple engaged to be married, though his family finds Bella to be too “common”. While staying at the Cullen family estate, Edward is nearly poisoned by a cup of tea that was intended for Bella, and several minor characters are murdered. Edward plots to catch the murderer with his old school-mate, Jacob, while Bella, terrified, enlists the help of Poirot, a funny little man with an egg-shaped head who happens to be in the neighborhood. Poirot finds Bella distastefully modern, but his friend Hastings thinks she is rather charming, really.
In the second-to-last chapter, Poirot calls together the entire household and reveals that Bella and Jacob are actually husband and wife crooks who were after the Cullen fortune. Edward is heartbroken for a few paragraphs, until he suddenly realizes that his father’s secretary, the sweet Miss Agnes, is really the love of his life.
(pardon my English) Dante Aligieri:
The word “eyes” appears only 40 times, once every 200 pages.
Bella is looking for the answer about the human existence and the philosophical purpose of the Universe. One night of deep meditation she meets Edward, a mysterious man who offers to show her the other world hidden for ordinary mortals. She accepts and together with Edward she travels the (under)world seeing with her own eyes the deepest secrets of human souls. She is deeply moved with what she sees and describes everything with rhetorical skills that ancient Greeks (whom she also have met) envy her. During the journey she fells in love with Edward, but he leaves her unexpectedly. While she mourns the departure of her guide, Jacob appears, her old friend and lover, who, even though he might be dead, shows her the other aspects of human existence and further purpose of the Universe. She accepts his proposal and contues journey for another 300 pages sharing with the reader the whole spectrum of her moods.
Sadly in the end of the journey Jacob, who apparently has been a ghost all the time, leaves her. Though devastated she knows her destiny is to overcome vanity of heart desire.
She wants to continue the journey for the higher purpose. When she makes that decition she meets Aro, in whom she recognizes both Edward and Jacob. Aro tells her she has always been his desire and spent about 28549 years preparing for meeting her. Together they turn form this life and rule the (under)world determinating the purpose of the Universe.
Louisa May Alcott: Bella is a tomboyish, short tempered girl who loves making up stories and plays which she acts out with her three sisters.Then a new boy moves in next door named Jacob he falls in love with her eventually and asks her to marry him but she refuses. He leaves to go to Europe and she goes to the New York to start her life as a writer. There she meets an enigmatic German immigrant named Edward who she falls in love with. But one of her younger sisters is dying of cancer so she has to return home. Everyone gathers for the funeral and Jacob comes back from Europe married to her youngest sister Renesmee. Bella is shocked and realizes she is alone. Three weeks later a package from Edward arrives and in it is her manuscript Twilight which is going to be published. She asked who delivered it and her maid tells he a beautiful man who shines in the sunlight. Bella runs down the road after him and they reconcile and get married and live happily ever after!
lol that would actually make a pretty awesome book! Also im just realizing that twilight has a few things in common with little women
Jim Butcher:
Bella is a (sexy) wizard on the outs from the magic council who decides to “go public” and advertise her services as a wizard who investigates paranormal cases.
She takes a throw-away case just to get away from the Big Bad Things ™ in the city. She investigates the mysterious disappearance of massive amounts of wildlife from the rain forests of the pacific northwest.
Bella tracks down a family of vampires who are like no other she’s ever encountered. They sparkle in the sun instead of bursting into flames. She also encounters a Native American tribe of werewolves.
One thing leads to another, and she discovers that, between the two groups, they’re devastating the ecology of the entire region.
One of the (sexy) vampires (Edward) and one of the (sexy) werewolves (Jacob) take a liking to her and try to woo her over to their way of thinking.
She incinerates them both with a blast of magical fire, then hunts down and destroys the rest of the vampire family and the werewolf tribe.
Which is as it SHOULD be.
George Orwell (novels): A lengthy metaphor of totalitarianism, where Bella is a proletariat who is in love with both party inner circle member Edward and soldier Jacob. In the end Bella and Jacob are tortured until they cannnot love any more.
George Orwell (essays): Analysis of the use of gothic horror figures like vampires and werewolves and how they reflect on the class struggle, and what they revela of the writer and his political views.
Shakespearean comedy:
Bella loves Edward, who is in love with Jacob (who is dressed in drag to hide from his evil uncle who wishes to kill him for his inheritance), who is in love with Bella. Eventually Bella and Edward get married, and Jacob’s uncle is punished for his schemes. There are lots of sex jokes in the meanwhile.
Lord Byron
‘She Walks In Twilight’
She trips in beauty, like the twilight
Of rainy days and cloudy skies
A bit of blood and a bit of fright
Meet in her in biology, bad surprise
Thus I feel sick, I so want to bite
A teenage boy, is my disguise
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Anne Rice:
Edward is a vampire of high class and with picky tendencies. He seeks to find a companion who will remain with him for all eternity.
Enter Bella, who is not his type. He attacks her eventually, because she is annoying and feeds off her.
Jacob and Edward become lovers.
Peter Watts:
Bella is a researcher who conducts experiments in an esoteric, semi-fictional sub-discipline of cognitive science for an obscure government agency. Due to childhood sexual abuse, she is unable to form normal emotional attachments, and devotes herself obsessively to her work. The closest thing she has to a friend is Edward, her supervisor, whose intense, semi-autistic demeanour somehow fails to trigger her customary revulsion for human contact. The bulk of the book’s early chapters are taken up by a bleak exploration of Bella’s strange everyday life, interspersed with frequent scholarly asides and various slow-burning and seemingly disconnected sub-plots presented by an anonymous narrator.
Halfway through the novel, Bella stumbles upon a terrible secret that causes her to be marked for death, and goes on the lam accompanied by Jacob, an escaped research subject who has developed a bestial split personality as a result of a botched surgical procedure. They are alternately aided and hindered in their flight by Edward, who appears and vanishes without warning and knows far more than he should. A deeply dysfunctional relationship develops develops between the three, culminating in a graphic three-way sex scene between Bella, Edward, and Jacob’s animalistic alter-ago that drew heavy censure from critics for its “extreme sexual sadism”.
Eventually, Bella discovers that she herself has been experimented on: the childhood trauma that has rendered her emotionally crippled throughout the story is really a series of false memories, implanted only a few weeks before the story began; classified documents reveal this to be part of an experiment aimed at creating a perfectly loyal employee. Meanwhile, Jacob is separated from the group and regresses permanently into a bestial mindset (represented by his portions of the text being narrated from a clinically detached viewpoint that describes his actions in terms of stimulus and response); he recovers some shred of his humanity just in time to discover a terrible secret, but is killed in a spectacularly pyrotechnic accident before he can warn Bella, leaving everyone but the reader ignorant of what he found.
In the end, it is revealed that Bella’s agency has been subverted by some unknown force, implied – but not confirmed – to be extraterrestrial in origin. Edward turns out to be an artificial being with a completely alien mindset, who had simply pretended to have human emotions in order to manipulate those around him. He destroys all evidence of the conspiracy, but inexplicably spares Bella’s life and departs. Bella finds a sort of nihilistic empowerment in her ordeal, and becomes an anarchistic vigilante. The novel ends with a short monologue on the inevitability of human extinction by the same anonymous narrator from the beginning, his (or her) identity hinted at, but never fully revealed.
(Five years later, a second book is published; though nominally a sequel, Bella makes only a token appearance, the bulk of the text being concerned with the adventures of a group of hyper-intelligent squid.)
Marquise DeSade
Edward and the rest of the vampires lock Bella and anyone who has come into contact with said vampires in the basement of the vampire house, raping, torturing and administering molten lead enemas to the victims for the time of an entire school year. And then they’re not being violated six ways from Sunday, they are invited to dinner parties with their captors, instilling a horrible case of Stockholm Syndrome.
John Grisham: Bella, fresh out of Forks Law School, takes a position at the prestigious law firm of Cullen & Cullen. While there, she gets swept off her feet by the porcelain skinned Edward. Their brief love affair is cut short when Bella is assigned to the biggest case in Forks history. The opposition, determined to defend the rights of shirtless men everywhere, is led by Jacob Black whose short temper is the stuff of courtroom legend. Together with his pack of well-muscled attorneys, Jacob pushes Bella and the Cullens to the brink of a billion dollar settlement. The case is all but over until, the night before the final hearing, Bella is approached by none other than Jacob Black himself. Jacob reveals that the Cullens have been secretly blackmailing the (Vol)jury in order to secure a verdict. The next morning, Jacob is “accidentally” killed by a drunk driver on his way to the hearing. Without the dynamic figure of Jacob in the courtroom, the (Vol)jury rule in favor of the Cullens. Bella confronts Edward after and demands to know if what she was told about the Cullens is true. Edward gives Bella the cold shoulder, confirming her suspicious. Wearied by the corruption of the big city, Bella moves to Idaho to be a corn farmer.
Irvine Welsh:
Edward, an american 45 year old wealthy man who spends his time indulging in all excess known to mankind meets Bella, a 16 year old girl just casted in the new generation of the Mickey Mouse club. Bella’s manager Jacob is a 43 year old scottish man who is also a retired boxer secretely in loved with her. Edward and Bella fall for each other and 3 chapters of the book are spent between their sexual escapades and drug abuse, and Jacob’s monologues on how he is going to kill Edward with his own hands. Edward and Jacob have a fight in a mall, which results in both going to prison. There they get entangled in a love/hate relation, filled more drug abuse and sexual excapades. In the final chapter Edward and Jacob are released and Bella´s mother reveals that Edward is her father, who abandoned her mother when he found out she was pregnant. Bella doesn’t care and marries Edward. Jacob Kills them both and ends up in a mental institution where he spends the rest of his days writing kid’s, rivaled in sales only by those written by Madonna.
ehem… Jacob spends the rest of his days writing kid’s books. sorry for that mistake.
George Lucas
Bella is a strong independent princess who is captured trying to save her planet from the evil mouth-breathing Volturi. Edward is a young Jedi who falls for her as he is trying to learn to control his emotions without looking constipated. He hires the dashing Jacob, who enjoys hanging with furry creatures, to fly him and his family to the planet Volterra where they discover Aro is actually Edward and Bella’s father.
John Gardner:
Bella is a misunderstood, erudite genius who is hopelessly in love with Edward, who never had much interest in her and constantly spurns his advances. The townsfolk look down on Bella as a freak because of his intellectualism and romantic view of life, which is incomprehensible to them (but regard the real plagues on the town of vampire and werewolf attacks and corrupt politicians as totally normal). Bella resents Edward for the constant pain of rejection he has brought to her life, and her conflicting emotions lead her to self-destructive manic depressive tendencies.
Jacob will happily sleep with Bella, but Bella doesn’t like Jacob because after sex she always realizes how incredibly boring he is, and so sex with him is meaningless. The townsfolk is full of pompous windbags who represent that which they condemn. In the ultimate perversion of justice, Bella is executed at the end.
Moderators: sorry, in the other post I got my pronouns mixed up. Please approve this one instead.
John Gardner:
Bella is a misunderstood, erudite genius who is hopelessly in love with Edward, who never had much interest in her and constantly spurns her advances. The townsfolk look down on Bella as a freak because of her intellectualism and romantic view of life, which is incomprehensible to them (but regard the real plagues on the town of vampire and werewolf attacks and corrupt politicians as totally normal). Bella resents Edward for the constant pain of rejection he has brought to her life, and her conflicting emotions lead her to self-destructive manic depressive tendencies.
Jacob will happily sleep with Bella, but Bella doesn’t like Jacob because after sex she always is forced to confront how boring he is, and so sex with him must be meaningless. The townsfolk is full of pompous windbags who represent that which they condemn. In the ultimate perversion of justice, Bella is executed at the end.
Don DeLillo: The plight of Edward and Bella is an allegory for the end of the American Empire, the Kennedy Assassination and 9-11. In this version, Jacob is the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Palahniuk:
Bella is an anorexic coke-fiend who, to escape the constant raping of her father, allows herself to be sexually accosted (read: raped) by Edward Jacob, a highly-delusional vampiric murderous psychopath with a split personality who is a bisexual LARPing furry.
Instead of giving birth to his son, she’s given a huge dose of LSD and Edward Jacob disembowels her while she’s tripping.
Voltaire
Edward and Bella, two starry-eyed young lovers, set forth into the world with the hopes of converting all vampires into the Best Of All Possible Vegans. Their tutelage from crazy old Dr. Cullen led them to believe the best in others. Edward seeks to convert the Volturi, only to be hunted down and enslaved by them. Bella is led astray by Jacob, and ends up being continually raped by werewolves. Both escape their terrors and finally find each other again, and spend the rest of their lives humbly hiding on a farm and eating their own livestock.
Steven Brust: Bella makes her living working for the vampires and werewolves as a killer, meets Edward and Jacob in the middle of planning a hit, they fight, become friends, she finds out she is the reincarnation of their sister, briefly meets a little girl in one scene that is never explained, and has many a good meal
Not sure if he’s THAT famous, but…
John Green: Edward leads relatively a normal, single life, right up until meeting a manic pixie dream girl named Bella. His best friend, Jacob, is mostly in the background until he mentions his parents’ collection of black Santas (queue an entire group of people in the real world collecting them too). Bella asks him for a random favor of helping her screw with the Volturi. She then runs away before Edward can graduate, which leads him to chase after her to a made-up place.
Quentin Tarantino
Bella, while engaged in a kick-boxing death-match with a former rival, accidentally blows off Edward’s head when she slips on a knick knack that has fallen to the floor. Her clean-up guy, Jacob, is called away from his bookie’s sado-masochistic preferred customer lounge to orchestrate her escape from a town in which she is no longer welcome.
Fred Gipson:
Young Bella lives on a farm with her family and faithful dog, Jacob. They have many adventures together. One day, a lone vampire attacks Bella. Jacob comes to her rescue, fiercely driving the creature away. Unfortunately in the process the loyal dog is bitten by the vampire. The novel ends with a poignant scene where Bella takes Jacob into the woods to stake him.
James Fenimore Cooper — Jacob, one of the last two of a dying native american werewolf clan, his daughter Bella and his “white son” vampire Edward are caught up in the middle of the French and Indian war. During a journey to rescue a group of British from another tribe, Bella is killed, leaving Jacob as the last of his tribe.
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Kurt Vonnegut- Bella meets Jacob in a field outside her house when the two of them witness doubles of themselves apear in ancient Roman attire along with Edward. The next moment the two are abducted by aliens called Trenlins. The two go back in time to the fall of Rome and fight barbarians for 14.6 hours and then are abruptly transported back to the forest outside a clearing a few moments before Bella and Jacob witness themselves appear by a discenting Trenlin. The two witness the abduction take place with a pop, and Edward approaches them asking what happened. The three are then transported back to ancient Rome the instant they previously left. After a few more hours of hiding and fighting everything freezes and a Trenlin approaches them and tells them they need to prevent the fall of Rome so that the civilization can live on and one day give rise to an intergalactic federation that in turn saves the Trenlin’s home-world from famine. The three agree to try but eventually fail where they are transported back to the present where they find themselves standing moments before the initial abduction. After hearing the pop from the woods a Trenlin approaches them and with a wave of his hand they forget everything. They all wake up in their respective homes the first day of school for Bella in Forks, Washington.
Chinua Achebe: A long and in depth portrait of Jacobs life in which his hyper-masculine mentality is highlighted by his incessant need to take his shirt off and transform into a wolf is shown. Bella comes to town and begins to throw everything he knows into chaos. Jacob falls in love with Bella but Edward, a white man, has gained her love. The tension between Jacob and Edward builds quickly and climaxes in a brief interaction that ends with Jacob severing Edwards head in two strokes with a machete. Unable to cope with this new world Jacob hangs himself.
This turned out much longer than I expected, but here goes…
Terry Pratchett
Recent violent skirmishes between the vampires and werewolves in Überwald have led to an influx of refugees of both species into Ankh-Morpork, which is happy to house them if they stay out of each other’s way and don’t cause any (much) trouble.
Edward is a vampire who finds work as an assistant to Otto Chriek and sees an Igor on a regular basis due to a strange malady he suffers from; his skin turns into diamonds in the presence of human girls, and a small gnome called Manfred who lives on Kicklebury Street.
One day Edward meets a young girl who mysteriously does not cause his diamond skin to appear. At first he tries to get her help to discover a cure but even when this proves futile he still spends time with her and they fall in love.
Bella goes with Edward on a night with a full moon to cover a werewolf story for the Ankh-Morpork Times where she saves a sort of oversized poodle from being run over by a cart which Bella herself accidentally sent hurtling down the street. Through hijinks she discovers that the poodle is in fact a werewolf names Jacob whose “kissing-cousin” parents caused his unfortunate werewolf form. Jacob has lived in the city for many years and generally tries to keep a low profile and away from others of his kind. Bella agrees to keep his secret and lets him stay with her on full moon nights. Jacob comes to have strong feelings for Bella, but is unsure if they’re not solely due to the fact that she gives the most divine stomach scratches and likes to play ball with him.
When Edward finds out about Jacob he is enraged and their feud ignites the already tense vampire vs. werewolf sensibilities. Soon the whole city is swept up in the conflict and the Watch is arresting vampires and werewolves left, right and centre.
A series of clues and oddities eventually lead the two men to discover that Bella is not in fact a human but the last member of the fierce, shape-shifting Selkie race who has sworn revenge on all vampires and werewolves for the persecution and ultimate extinction of her species 200 years ago in Überwald. She is also revealed to be the main instigator responsible for the outbreak of violence there. The men find the Selkie skin and use it to turn Bella back into her mindless animal form. She is sold to a small zoo run by Mr C.M.O.T. Dibbler.
Edward and Jacob settle their differences and go back home to Überwald as emissaries of peace to help their respective peoples do the same. Months later Ankh-Morpork’s first zoo is tragically destroyed in an unrelated incident involving a Klatchian migratory bog truffle, a small pot of cream and an inexplicable letter most definitely not signed by the Patrician.
Pedro Almodovar:
Similar to the original, Edward and Bella get married and Jacob is a heartbroken werewolf. During an argument Edward lets his lust lead him to Bella’s neck and so kills her, Jacob finds out, kidnaps Edward and through a series of operations turns Edward into a Bella look alike transsexual who he falls in love with.
Charles de Lint: Bella is a homeless pixie girl with hidden wings and an incredible painting ability. Eddy is the sparkly king of a legendary mole people whose realm is only accessible by looking sideways at the base of a random light pole. Jacob is a Native American dream spirit that in habits the random tree that Bella is living in. Bella is just chilling with her hippie, nature friends who all play reed flutes or violins when she becomes embroiled in an ancient war between the mole people and the dream spirits. She must choose between becoming the queen of the mole realm or of the dream spirit realm by choosing between Eddy or Jacob. If she doesn’t, the ancient Volturi Being of Myth, who is behind the war, will consume both realms. She instead spends all her time saving abused orphaned street children and the other homeless denizens of the poor parts of the city. There is also random, obscure references to Irish, Welsh, and Native American mythology.
Bret Easton Ellis:
Bella and Edward are bored with their lives and wind up doing a lot of coke and having sex with each other and all the other characters they can find. They attend fabulous parties with other beautiful people and have fabulous drinks and are generally fabulous, cold, callous dicks. Jacob tries to find meaning in torturing and mutilating girls. Bella eventually moves to LA, realizes she’s still bored there, does a lot more coke, and moves back to Forks. In the end, nothing really happens, the characters’ lives are just as shallow, and the reader is left to wonder if any of this actually occured.
Margaret Atwood: 40 years down the road, Edward and Bella are married but openly carrying on affairs with other people while growing increasingly bitter towards each other. Meanwhile, the still-mortal Bella is beginning to feel the pinch of middle age, which she obsesses over in lovely, candid prose while reflecting back on her entire life, particularly the hormone-fueled events that have led her to this somewhat regrettable impasse. Jacob attempts to protest his “temporary” status in Bella’s life by committing suicide, and is unpleasantly surprised when he succeeds.
Lois McMaster Bujold: Jacob is a traumatized ex-soldier looking for peace, but ends up uncovering scandal and corruption within the Volturi (surprise!) while attempting to live out a quiet life as Bella’s tutor. He eventually overthrows them with great difficulty and the help of a spiritual epiphany, while Bella, an impetuous, strong-willed woman, goes on to become Volturi head after her creepy suitor Edward is magically assassinated.
Morag Joss: Twilight is set in Scotland. Everyone is misunderstood, but no one really cares. Edward, Jacob, and Bella all become massively more irritating, which is probably a product of the prose switching repeatedly from first person to third person and back again. Bella attempts to look more grown-up to Edward by acting like she doesn’t care about anybody, and impresses no one.
George Lucas
Bella is an intergalatic princess kidnapped and facing death at the hands of a ruthless and evil enemy with bizarre powers. Following an SOS message she is rescued by an angst ridden Edward coming to terms with the death of his known relatives and the new knowldege that has a special destiny. Edward is accompanied by the alluring Jacob, the rogish captain of a smuggling ship, in which they escape. Following a big fight, the great weapon of the enemy is destroyed by Edward. Subsequently Bella finds it difficult to decide between Edward and Jacob, who are becoming increasingly jealous of each other’s relationship with her. This is ultimately solved by the discovery that Bella is Edward’s sister, and everyone lives happily ever after.
20 years later some prequals are written which just annoy everyone.
Schiller:
Bella is a simple young girl in love with the wealthy Edward, son of the overambitious official Carlisle. She doesn’t hope for a future with Eddie because of their different origins, but he does not care about society and obligations and is determined to marry her. His father does not approve. He compels Jakob (the comedic character), who is responsible for spreading the aristocratic gossip, to play Bellas secret lover. Edward is easily convinced that Bella is cheating on him. He poisons her. Then he learns of her innocence. He is in total despair and tries to kill himself, but then remembers that he is actually a vampire and therefor doomed to live forever in agony and guilt.
Edgar Allan Poe:
In a poem entitled “Bella Marie,” Poe narrates from the point of view of a man, Edward, who has lost the woman he loves. The narrator repeats the refrain “I and my Bella Marie” and “city by the sea” to create a repetition of rhyme throughout the poem. The narrator recounts (several times) how he and Isabella Marie were deeply in love but that Jacob (a “demon”) killed Isabella Marie about of jealousy of their happiness. He feels his soul cannot be separated from hers, and spends his days sleeping beside her corpse.
CJ Cherryh (sci-fi author of the Foreigner series):
In the future, Earth is shared between two races: the humans and vampires. They have a truce that they adhere to, in order to avoid open warfare which has historically decimated both sides (but mostly the human side). Bella is a human who has been studying vampire culture and language. When the one human interpreter who is allowed by the truce to live among vampires retires, she’s promoted to his position. Her competency at vampire language and manners quickly place her in volatile diplomatic situations, during which she increasingly learns to mediate. Edward is assigned to her as one of her security detail against the vampire assassin’s guild, the Volturi, and conservative vampire factions who do not like humans. He finds her strangely attractive and they fall into a sexual and awkwardly romantic relationship. Jacob, Bella’s old boyfriend, makes several attempts to pull Bella back into a “normal” relationship with him, but ultimately fails as she becomes embroiled in global politics and becomes increasingly estranged from human relationships. The books of the series contain a growing glossary of the vampire language.
Ian McEwan: Jacob falsely accuses Edward of sexual assault, therefore Edward and Bella are forced to be apart. Bella is furious and breaks all contact with Jacob. She and Edward manage to meet only once but never consummate their love. They both die young in different circumstances. Jacob lives all his life with the guilt that he separated Bella and Edward. Before he dies, he writes a book about it.
Dada : Bella Edward meet There and
Bella school fall only problem There and
school in only also separate
Edward and only problem is werewolf separate
Edward high that is Bella
school and a There also loves to
My friends have all come up with their own versions inspired by this great post. I still have yet to come up with one. (I’m slow.)
Here’s my husband Alex Bosworth’s Edgar Allan Poe version.
Recounted by Bella, from within the walls of a mental institution, the story involves the young woman’s uneasy cohabitation with the century and a half old Edward, who’s constant glittering drives her to insanity. In a fit of blind rage. she bludgeons her shimmering roommate to death and stuffs his body beneath the floor. When Jacob arrives to investigate, Bella tries to remain nonchalant, but slowly becomes unhinged under the delusion that she can still sense Edward glittering. The story ends as Bella tears open the floor boards hysterically screaming out a confession.
Alan Moore: Set in an apocalyptic world where everyone fears the attack of the Russians on the United States. Everyone hates the President, the whole country has gone down the drain and everyone lives in fear. Bella, aka Swan Spectre, is the daughter of an aging, dying whore in California. She later finds out that Charlie, aka The Policeman, is her father because he raped her mother when they were both crime fighters together back-in-the-day. Edward wears a mask because he’s so ashamed of his life, he calls himself Rorschach and is a pyschopath. Jacob, aka Dr Brooklyn, is a super-human, no-clothes-wearing physics geek who fights with Bella, breaks up with her and then he goes to live on Mars. He knows all about the past and future. Together the three of them, with others, make up the Watchmen. Lots of fighting ensues, lots of scheming happens and eventually it’s found out that the person everyone least expected, Alice, is the coordinator of all the violence and everything she held dear is destroyed in the end. The Russians don’t attack, Edward dies (but his apathetic diary remains and somehow arrives on the desk of the editor of the local newspaper) and Bella lives with her new boyfriend Mike happily ever after.
Stephen King: Edward gets a job as the caretaker of The Underlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains; it requires him and his wife (Bella) to move into the hotel during the winter months. Out of kindness, their friend Jacob comes along. But the Underlook has a mind of its own. Jacob is destined with a rare pyschic connection by the name of The Shining, enabling him to read minds, communicate with other Shiners and see and hear things that aren’t there. When Edward turns into a violent, misogynistic man, Bella hits him over the head, locks him in the pantry and plans to escape with Jacob. But the hotel won’t let them leave and eventually, Edward ponders his sad existence in the boiler room and overheats and destroys the whole hotel. Bella and Jacob escape and remain friends but both miss Edward before the hotel turned him crazy.
Here’s my version, in the style of Moses.
In the beginning, God created a beautiful forest and amid this forest he created a town called Forks, Washington. To inhabit this town, God created a group of pale people, and among this tribe of pasty faces was a girl named Bella. God saw that Bella was bored and depressed and the Lord said “It is not good for Bella to be alone, I will make a vampire companion for her so that she can have romance and excitement.” He named him Edward. In this forest they will able to live and thrive but were warned about ever seeking out the sun. “If your skin meets the sun” he said to Edward, “You will glitter and be found out for the vampire you are and thus be killed.” Edward and Bella agreed that they would never test the warning. One day as Bella was skipping through the forest, a serpent came to her introducing himself as Jacob, he invited her to warm her pale skin in the sun, assuring her that if she asked Edward to come and bask in the sun with her, nothing would happen. “God just doesn’t want you to have a better tan than His.” he chided. Bella then ran to convince Edward that sunning themselves would be perfect for their lack of vitamin D. He trusting his wife agreed to go with her. As they reached the sun, he indeed began to glitter at that moment, everyone knew he was indeed a vampire. Instead of killing them, Bella and Edward were cast out of the beautiful forest to a horrible place called Bakersfield.
Alice Walker – Bella is sold by her father into marriage to the young Edward Cullen, who ends up being a vampire. Edward frequently beats her until she realizes that her life is pointless and acts like a tree. She learns that he is really in love with Jacob, a hunky werewolf/blues singer. Eventually Bella and Jacob have sex when Edward brings the sick Jacob to his house. Oprah Winfrey is a secondary character who contributes to the feminist nature of the novel. Bella’s long-lost sister, Nettie is found in Italy, having written letters to Bella for years under the auspices of the Volturi, an undeveloped tribe living in Italy and forced to work for the white man. The novel continues to make unnecessary tangents into Nettie’s life, but is largely written in Bella’s characteristically impersonal black folk English.
Ray Bradbury – Much to the Cullens’ dismay, vampire literature has been banned in dreary Washington state. Bella, a radical thinker, falls in love with a mysterious young lady called Edward, and she questions his ability to burn/stake books. Bella’s wife Jacob is obsessed with television and somehow manages to maintain perfect physique while ignoring reality. Bella eventually comes to terms with her love of books and memorizes part of Hogwarts: A History, but her escapades are finalized when she is chased into Arizona by a needle-bearing Volturi robot. But alas, Washington has been destroyed, and with it Jacob’s magnificent abs.
Charles Dickens – Bella is a young lady living in England who rescues her father and her lover, Edward, from the French Revolution. But she is suddenly struck by a disastrous love for werewolf Jacob Black and spends all of her money on him. She becomes an orphan and wanders about Seattle until she pickpockets her long-lost mother of whom we never hear again.
Mark Twain – Edward and Jacob are best friends despite their different monster conditions and wealth, living on the Mississippi River, who run away from home, whitewash their fences using trickery, bring their slave, Bella, to an island in the middle of the river, where they consider the impact of vampirism and racism on society, and catch graverobbers.
Just a few more, because I have too little time 🙂
Nathaniel Hawthorne – Using beautiful imagery, Hawthorne depicts the struggles of Bella, who is forced by the Volturi to wear a Scarlet Letter, her vampire lover, Edward, who tortures himself because he can’t decide whether he loves Bella enough or not (ahaaaa), and their illegitimate daughter.
Henry David Thoreau – The setting is Walden Pond, and Bella ponders her own lack of facial expressions while struggling with beanstalks and the mysteries of human nature.
I’m going to stop before I’m compelled to do Richard Dawkins 🙂
Enid Blyton
Edward, Bella, Alice, Jasper and Jacob the dog (aka the Famous Five) head off into the forest for another exciting adventure, taking with them two small tents, a sleeping bag for Bella (no one else needs one), a torch, a magnifying glass, sandwiches and lashings and lashings of ginger beer. They set up camp by the lake and creep around the old boathouse to find three men up to no good – they listen to their conversation “Blah blah blah bank job blah blah blah big guns and dynamite blah blah blah Volturi blah blah blah tasty blood in handy packs”. Our five heroes figure out that the men are the nasty Volturi (their rival gang) and planning to rob of the local hospital’s blood bank. Because Jacob is with them, Alice can’t send the local police chief, Charlie, a telepathis warning message so Jacob has to let his friends in the wolf pack know and they morph back into their human forms to alert Charlie, and then race off to the hospital to protect the blood bank. The Volturi are too powerful for Charlie, so the wolves revert back to being wolves and with the help of Dr Cullen rip them apart and save the blood bank. Luckily Charlie fainted so has no idea how the Volturi were defeated so pays the $5,000 reward on the Volturi’s heads to the famous five for uncovering the plot. Bella looks into Edwards eyes and says “just think how much ginger beer we can buy now for more adventures in the woods”, and Jacob bites Edward’s ankles.
Phillip Roth:
Edward is a successful upper middle class vampire, who runs a factory and spends his time with sports and his lovely daughters and his wife.
He is married to his high school sweetheart Bella since ages.
But inside he is torn and bitter, because of the anti-vampirism he encountered all his life and still witnesses (although mostly behind his back and seldom spoken openly). He only wants to be a lucky member of society but still he feels left out because of his being different, despite his success and his status in society.
He tends to spoil his daughters a little bit, because he wants them to be happy, normal children, but the nicer and more generous he becomes, the more his daughters turn away from the seemingly perfect family.
Thats about everything that happens.
This has made my day so much brighter! I’m working on my own contribution, which I will post shortly.
Also: I’m just starting to read “Lolita,” so as of yet I don’t know enough to take a stab at a Nabokov iteration of “Twilight” — anyone wanna try that?
Thanks, all, for sharing your creations. What an awesome little game to play with what is, possibly, the most mutable little narrative in the past 50 years.
Please let me know when somebody ‘does’ John Irving, I’d love to see that version. All I know is it would have to have bears in it, oddly behaving, sickly white family members, early deaths and possibly a farting dog. Romance would not survive.
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Jonathan Swift:
Same as the original word-for-word, but written as a satire on bad writing.
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Stephen Sondheim:
Bella is a willful girl who falls for the urbane, witty, charming, but deeply-conflicted Edward, recently relocated from New York City to Forks with his family, a group so moribund they could very well be the vampires they claim to be. The two sing a duet in a minor key that accentuates their different upbringings and causes the audience to question whether theirs is necessarily a good pairing.
Along comes Jacob, a hirsute young man with an earthy charm and an unnaturally high tenor for a werewolf. Is he there to sweep Bella off her feet? A dissonant and oddly staccato duet causes the audience to question his motives. Perhaps there is something between he and Edward, as the two sing the first truly melodic duet of the musical just before intermission about the joys and travails of being (marginally) alive.
In the second act, the torn Bella bounces back and forth between the two, unsure of her affections. In a three octave, ten minute solo, she begins to realize that perhaps her biggest problem is not her choice of man, but the fact that she’s simply the most godawfully annoying and whiny depressive in the whole rain-sotted state. However, despite this brilliant revelation, she is almost immediately swept into an amazing song cycle featuring the three singing different themes that somehow mesh when they simultaneously return to their refrains. Sadly, this draws her away from her moment of sharp and brilliant clarity and back into a frustrating dance where the whole town bemoans her inability to get a fucking life.
A jaunty musical montage sweeps Bella and Edward through an ill-advised marriage, a series of comical near-indiscretions and ironical affairs that features a now ostracized and equally depressed Jacob, and a bitter divorce which leaves the three reflecting on the fact that this whole sad series of events could have been prevented if Bella had just taken some anti-depressives, Edward had gone out in the sun just once, and Jacob had bothered to shave.
In a coda to the exhausting three hours this musical has taken, Edward’s family gathers to celebrate his finally getting the hell out of the whole sad affair, but he fails to show up, and it is noted in almost a throwaway tone that no one has seen Jacob in awhile, either.
Michelle Tea
Having been kicked out of her school in Arizona for skipping classes and smoking behind the gym, Bella moves to Washington to live with her father. Despite her recreational drug habit and chronic distaste for showering, two local pretty boys, Edward and Jacob, fall for Bella. After getting high with the boys in the woods, Bella convinces them to make out with each other while she runs off with a female member of Jacob’s wolf pack. She and Lady Wolf live happily ever after writing stream of consciousness, poorly punctuated novels and drinking themselves silly. Edward and Jacob never speak to each other again.
Hunter S. Thompson:
I was coming off the edge of ether binge when I first met Bella. It wasn’t long after that she became scared from my clumsy advances and ran out the bar and into the woods. I followed for no other reason than the drugs moving my limbs towards another vulnerable human being. Once I crossed the threshold of civilization, however, I heard something. I couldn’t go in, I thought to myself, this is bat country!
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Karl Marx writes a story in which Bella is part of the proletariat and Edward is one of the religious capitalists who not only is a vampire, but a priest who has trouble dealing with the fact that he is bisexual. Edward tries to convert to a true Marxist and stop exploiting the Russians who are secretly werewolves that he brought to work in his factory, and it all works until it ends in a twist in which Bella commits revolution and fakes both of their deaths. Except it goes horribly right and Bella dies before Edwards eyes and scars him for life as he tries to lead the revolution but the Russian werewolves kill him. Jakob survives, only to be killed by the German secret police.
Basically a piece of crap, but it makes more sense.
Henrik Ibsen
Edward treats his Bella like a pretty blood-filled songbird, only to find out she told her father about the vampires in order to let him protect himself against threats. Edward flies into a rage, calling her disobedient. Bella finally realizes that she was never a real person to Edward and leaves him to find her own way in the world.
Sylvia Plath
Intellectually brilliant Bella is a secretary because her mother feels that women should have jobs rather than careers until they marry and stay home. Frustrated and bored, Bella has had bouts in mental institutions and her thoughts dwell morbidly on the recent the executions of two vampires, Julius and Ethel. Her mother pushes her to meet Edward, a local ‘nice’ boy, but though Bella thinks he’s atractive she finds him colourless and distant. Assuming that she’s the problem, her mental state begins to deteriorate. After a violent sexual encounter with Jacob, who leaves abruptly, she realises that she lives in a world where a woman with a brain will never be valued or fulfilled, so she attempts to kill herself yet again. She is admitted to a mental hospital and seems to recover. At the end of the book, there is a flicker of hope, but we know that she’s eventually going to try to top herself.
Tom Clancy:
Full scale war between Vampires and Werewolves breaks out over Jacob and Edward’s affections for Bella. Every few chapters we periodically check on Bella for dramatic effect as the remainder of the book is devoted to the high level machinations of Vampire and Werewolf leadership as they posture for war and elements within each camp attempt to subvert attempts at preventing the war and ideologues and defense contractors further incite the conflict.
The book is also littered with diagrams of troop movements and positions that only someone who has actually directed a theatre level conflict would understand. Finally it spends 4 straight chapters developing strategy on both sides till finally Harrison Ford kicks Bella off a cliff and saves the day.
Salman Rushdie – Bella is a film star living in Mumbai, and Jacob is literally a werewolf. He never becomes human, and exists only in her head. This does not stop them from consummating their relationship. Edward is a has-been lord from Florence who ends up in India by mistake. He worries that he is occasionally impotent, despite Bella’s best efforts.
Eagles Song – Bella and Edward come to a random hotel that appears in the middle of a mirage in California. Jacob is a waiter there, who passes them champagne on ice as they make love under mirrors. They constantly do drugs and cannot leave until they get clean, which never happens.
Dianna Wynne-Jones: Bella is the eldest of three sisters and feels condemned to a humdrum life of fail in a world where seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility do exist. One day, the Volturi turn her into an ninety year-old woman and she decides to leave her house where she ends up journeying to a magical moving castle inhibited by Edward, a narcissistic vampire who makes women fall in love with him and his fire-demon, Jacob, who has his heart. In the end, she discovers that she’s not a complete failure and she and Edward annoy the heck out of each other but love each other anyways in a weird sort of happily ever after.
Goethe a la The Sorrows of Young Werther:
Edward is in love with Lady Bella, who is married to the noble man Jacob. Jacob is often out of town with his “wolfpack”, that’s how Edwards secretly calls them, because they are all way to proud of their royal blood. In the meantime Edward accompanies Bella throughout most of the day.
They spend their time reading books and playing with Bella’s daughter Ellesmera, who is a very smart little girl. When Edward is at home, he ponders a lot about the “other” family, how he wishes Ellesmera was his child, how he wants to dive his lips into Bella’s bosom and how he pictures himself as a much better father than the dull Jacob.
Secretly, Bella has feelings for Edward too, but there is no way she could leave the house of Jacob, especially since they have a daughter together. She covers her sorrow with fake laughs but unfortunately it also results in her absence from social events, so that she becomes somewhat of an outsider.
Edward spends more and more time in his little study from where he can look into Bella’s house, particularly the upper window where Bella’s bedroom lies. He fantasizes more and more, writing down every single thought into his diary, every little detail of Bella and their experiences together. He starts to think he is the only one that can how beautuiful she is, what qualities she really possesses, which makes him somewhat of an ubermensch in his own eyes. The loneliness finally drives him crazy and he has flashes of drinking Bella’s blood. He becomes so afraid of hurting her that he kills himself, leaving a poem for Bella which ends in:
“no longer do I request your love,
will look down on your from above
and whisper to your ear,
with every leaf that’s near.”
Edward is obsessed with Bella and wants to hire Jacob to keep tabs on her when he’s not around. Similarly, Jacob is obsessed with Bella and wants to hire Edward to keep tabs on her when he’s not around. In a confusing but ingenious conversation, they hire each other.
Bella, however, is not the Bella of their love, but her identical twin, Izzie. Bella threw herself off a bridge in angst at some point in the first book, arranging for the pages of the book that describe her death and the twin to be destroyed posthumously.
Perhaps not a famous author but he did coin the term ‘steampunk’ an ever growing and popular sci/fi genre:
K.W. Jeter – Edward is the reincarnation of King Arthur. He has been reincarnated several times before but in this era he finds out that he has been reincarnated as a vampire of all things! His goal as always is to save Great Britain from certain destruction. His faithful friend, Merlin, is currently going by the moniker: Jake. He finds out that Merlin/Jake has recently acquired the ability to morph into a werewolf. Merlin/Jake thought it would be funny since Edward/Arthur is a vampire. Merlin/Jake informs Edward/Arthur that the world has already been destroyed by the Morlocks, a terrible thing indeed, but more importantly England is in danger of being destroyed as well. They enlist the help of beautiful but surly Bella, a battle-hardened soldier. Edward/Arthur is aghast at her un-feminine behavior but is thankful that she has saved his life on more than one occasion. Fighting off the desire to feast on the blood of all Londoners, Edward/Arthur and his faithful companions seek Excalibur which, of course, will enable him to slay the Morlocks and find H.G. Wells’ time machine thereby setting the stage for sequels involving a time-traveling vampire.
Charlaine Harris
Edward is a Louisiana barmaid who happens to be telepathic..and a vampire.When Bella walks in and he is unable to read her mind he is enthralled by her womanly wiles.She however cannot pick between him and Jacob a local Were.
Gary Shteyngart:
The story is generally the same, except this time it’s well written and full of sardonic humor and references to Soviet culture. Instead of teenage angst, as interpreted by a puritanically bored, middle-aged housewife through the voice of a two-dimensional Bella, the story is told from the perspectives of Eddie and Yakov (a version of Jacob as a slightly overweight Russian Jew), both pinning for her affection. Both men see themselves as tragic Onegins and drink too much throughout the novel. Though fun is had (sporadic car chases and transitional revolutions in obscure, imaginary Eastern European countries abound), nothing substantive is ever actually resolved. No sequels are necessary.
Sherman Alexie – Edward, a native american, looks back on his life as an old man, his eccentric family, and his affair with a white woman named Bella. The two end up living on a trailer in the reservation until a man named Jacob from another tribe comes and steals Bella away sending Edward on a quest which ends in failure and alcoholism.
Tanith Lee:
Bella is a mid-ranking daughter in a late-medieval family with a small land holding. Edward is a pampered noble in a much larger and imperial clan. They take over Bella’s family’s land, kill off the rest of her relatives, but Edward insists on keeping Bella as his personal toy. Sexual tension and clothing descriptions mount for months, culminating in a brutal rape, which causes political turmoil for Edward and he’s forced to take her as a socially maladjusted, sequestered queen.
Bella finds Jacob during her nocturnal, slightly insane wanderings, he shows her a pagan cult operating under the radar in Jacob’s kingdom. Strange rituals and another rape commences, Bella get preggers with a rapidly developing baby of unclear parentage, who goes crazy on birth, kills Edward and Jacob, and burns the estate down. Close with Bella watching with detached interest as refugees flee.
Vladimir Nabokov:
Edward is an aristocratic European university professor with a penchant for trilingual puns. Bella is eleven years old. The story is told in a 999 line poem ostensibly written by Edward, but with copious footnotes by the clearly unhinged Jacob, a middling American filmmaker with his own grotesque fondness for le fruit vert.
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Pat Califia:
Confused leatherdyke Bella is seduced by femme top Alice. Between bouts of steamy lesbian D/s sex, Bella hangs out with local bear Jacob and his houseboi, Gothic Lolita fetishist Edward.
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Brett Easton Ellis:
Written from Edward’s perspective, Bella is just one of several mortals Eddie has on the hook. Each paragraph is generously studded with pop culture references to other vampires, as Edward desperately tries to achieve status in the eyes of his fellow undead. Also, lots of drugs.
Orwell: Bella and Edward’s story is an exquisitely-crafted allegory for Western society’s dependence on, and worship of, the political ruling class. A ruling class that is ancient and consolidates power over the underclass (Bella) by periodically sucking their blood and promising, but never delivering, the love and happiness that the underclass so desperately needs. Jacob is a metaphor for a human state of nature that is flirted with, but ultimately rejected for the false sense of security offered by the ‘vampire’.
Neitzche:
Bella feels the crushing loneliness of her banal existence, and falls in love with Edward, who offers her a hollow respite from living amidst the shattered debris of her childlike yearnings for a powerful godman.
Jacob overcame his need for meaning and has since moved on to an unshackled existence elsewhere, where health clubs and wax are in great supply
Charles Bukowski:
Edward Chinaski drinks heavily and often. He enjoys the warmth of Bella’s fat ass. When she leaves town three weeks later, he goes to the racetrack.
John Steinbeck:
Bella is a bored farmer’s wife, and possibly closeted lesbian, in post depression California. When a sexy peddler comes into her garden and refuses her veiled offer of an afternoon delight while her husband is away, Bella is left heartbroken by the peddler to a life of a darling, yet painfully empty wife.
T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of E. Anthony Cullen
Let us go then, Swan and I,
When the twilight is spread out against the sky
Like a werewolf staked upon a table;
Let us go, through uncertain half-terrified streets,
The histrionic retreats
Of new moon nights in one-night cheap high schools
And FDA cafeterias with fortified-blood:
Streets that follow like a tedious Eclipse
Of vampiric intent
To lead you to an overwhelming desire….
Oh, do not drink, “Sweet she is!”
Let us go it’s Breaking Dawn.
In the room the telepaths come and go
Talking of Renesmee, you know.
Tolstoy – Set in the beginning of 20th century, Bella is duly married to Edward, has an affair with Jacob, begs Edward to kill her out of her guilt over the extramarital affair (and he does), while Jacob spends 5 full chapters on describing in excruciating detail about his country life and how to skin a deer with nothing but his claws.
Roberto Belano:
Bella is a tired factory worker in a Mexican border town. One of her coworkers is brutally murdered and left by the side of the road. Later in the novel, we learn of Edward, a creepy European who may or may not be a centuries-old serial killer.
Elmore Leonard:
Edward’s a retired cop who now runs errands for the Mob. He teams up with an old buddy, Jacob, a former Hell’s Angel, who was once a body guard for the Stones back at Altamant. They meet up in Miami for one last bender, but are side tracked when they meet the beautiful Bella who convinces the two men to steal money to fund her rockstar delusions.
Raymond Chandler:
Bella, a debt-ridden private eye, witnesses the death of celebrity bad-boy, Edward, as he is thrown from a moving car in front of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. As he bleeds on the pavement, Edward mumbles the name of a notorious pornographer. Bella hires Jacob who is beat to an inch of his life while exploring an abandoned construction site. Later Bella too is beat up and held overnight by the local police. The police let her go but tell Bella to keep her nose clean. Later she drinks a vodka gimlet and thinks about Edward . . .
If Franz Kafka had written TWILIGHT:
One morning Bella wakes up to discover she has changed into a giant insect. She examines her room, clumsily knocking furniture over. Edward appears in her room, is appalled, sparkles, and vanishes. Her father is appalled and throws apples at her; one lodges in her back and cripples her. Bella does no soul searching, mourns the loss of Edward’s perfect face and body, and dies. Edward runs off with Jacob and they live happily ever after.
If Divine Inspiration from God (Old Testament Version) had written Twilight:
Edward smashes Bella’s skull against a rock when she sees her casting lustful gazes toward Jacob. Jacob meanwhile is sent off to die in a meaningless war. Edward is remembered as the greatest king of the vampires.
Rich Shapero:
Bella is schizophrenic, and Edward only appears to her when she’s alone. Because they must remain hidden, supernatural beings deny things that Bella sees them do. Entire series is deliberately ambiguous as to whether anything was real.
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Charles Stross:
Jacob is an agent of a covert government agency dedicated to preventing the end of the world, even though they clearly don’t have the budget for it. While attending a seminar on filling out forms for ISO-9000 conformance, he meets Bella, who has been recruited by the CIA because she plays electric violin. While running from counter-agents of SMERSH, who have unaccountably popped in from a James Bond novel, they meet Ed Wood, a vampiric Hollywood director, who clearly doesn’t have the budget for even a B movie. Robots from a post-climate-apocalypse future appear, and horror ensues, with occasional wackiness.
China Mieville:
Bella and her family live in a pastoral society, which is genocided by the forces of New Crobuzon. Remade by a Crobuzonner judge to have cows’ legs for legs and arms, she is forced into the service of Edward, vampire patron of Revenant, a literary club whose members are all undead authors, cruelly reanimated and surgically altered to resemble characters in their own books. Edward and the Revenant violently abuse Bella, who finds succour in the embrace of Jacob, a Remade in the form of a giant maggot.
Astrid Lindgren:
Bella is a young girl who lives alone in a house named Villa Villekulla while her father is away at sea. Bella has a suitcase full of gold coins and can throw bullies or burglars effortlessly into trees if they bother her. Her pet monkey Mr. Edward wears blue pants, a yellow jacket, and a white straw hat, and can follow simple directions to climb a tree. Her intelligent horse Jacob lives on the porch because he doesn’t like the parlor. Bella intends to be a pirate when she grows up.
Edward Gorey was the best 🙂
Diana Wynne Jones:
Bella is the de facto head of her family because her parents and stepfather are all incompetent, preoccupied by their own concerns and/or never grew up, but in this version they play a much bigger role in the story and are larger-than-life and funny. When Edward first appears in Bella’s life, she thinks he’s marvellous. But as she grows as a person and comes into her own magic powers, she learns to see his many flaws and goes off him. At the end of the book Bella is looking forward to a fulfilling future involving lots of interesting magic, but it doesn’t include Edward.
Eric Kripke (Supernatural)
As small children, Edward and Bella witnessed their mother dying in a house fire which was started by a demon. 22 years later, they are demon/werewolf/vampire/rougarou killers that travel around the US in a 67 Chevy Impala.
One day they decided to pose as federal agents to investigate a werewolf killing. They show up at Jacob’s apartment, play rock paper scissors, and Bella wins so she gets to stay with Jacob to make sure he doesn’t get attacked. Edward kills the werewolf who turned Jacob and they all stay up all night during the full moon. Jacob and Bella fall in love within 24 hours and have a passionate sex scene, then Bella is force to cry a lot and kill Jacob with a silver bullet after he turns again.
Years later, Edward and Bella discover that the only reason they were created were so two angels, Lucifer and Michael could take over their bodies and have one last battle on Earth. They both die about 50 times and are now in their seventh season on the CW.
Warren Ellis
Edward Gumshoe is a washed-up private eye and a beat-up journalist who’s just been paid a staggering amount of money by a seedy Senator and a shadowy committee to go off on a wild goose chase, for something that seemed terribly important at the start of the book, somewhere, but we’ve all forgotten what it was by chapter three.
He hooks up with Bella, an unpublished (and unpublishable) novelist, who persuades him to pursue the whatever-goose by infiltrating cliques of batshit-crazy fetishists with links to Something Sinister.
They get their breakthrough by injecting one another with bilge until they both display disturbingly distended genitalia and gross deformities of the cranium, their earlobes, one buttock, and their kneecaps.
Tastefully-dressed to show themselves to best advantage, they gain entrance to a party of like-minded body-modifiers with a Dark Secret: underneath the playfully-injected swollen subcutanea, the participants are willfully infecting one another with unspeakable diseases, so that they can later exchange pornographic images of each others’ lingering demise with colourfully-suppurating pustules and antibiotic-resistant gangrene.
Amidst this horrible milieu, they discover that the party organiser, Jacob, is repelled by this degenerate and destructive hedonism; and, deep inside, he wishes to return to his suburban life, when he was a nice, safe, predatory vampire with some structure in his life.
The plot of Crooked Vein By Twilight lurches on, and squelches from one horrifying depravity into the next; ever deeper into the inhuman cesspit of a mind trapped in an immoral obligation to produce a graphic novel every year unto the greater glory of DC Comics Inc. Amen.
Deeper it goes, but no man knows how deep, for no-one ever reads it to the end – or, perhaps, no-one who has ever done so will admit to it; and there are people in this city walking with their clothes adjusted to conceal an awful secret, and a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder clinic catering exclusively for gentleman’s tailors.
Judy Blume: same story, younger kids.
William Faulkner: Edward and Jacob are brothers from a different father that hate each other. They have to take their dead staked vampie mom’s remains back to her homeland. Carlisle is the lazy, inept dad who pretends to not be beholden to anyone, but actual rips everyone off. To get across the ocean, he steals from Jacob and his other half brother Emmett. Bella is not the love interest, but the vengeful middle sister who is trying to abort her child fathered by a lowly elf. While pretending to favor Edward, she betrays him and helps Jacob gets his revenge by turning over Edward to the Volturi. Edward shockingly laughs at this betrayal by his family. Jasper is the youngest son who is confused on his mother’s death and says, “My mother is a pirate.”
Orhan Pamuk:
While courting Bella, Edward finds himself attracted to and repelled by Jacob. After a while, he finds hair growing on parts of his usually hairless anatomy. Bella notices this … but finds it a turn-on. Jacob, meanwhile, is beginning to drool at the sight of Bella’s jugular vein, pulsing ominously. He scratches his chin, and his dimple takes an entire chapter to describe its reaction to the situation. Bella, for her part, has decided to defy her family’s prejudices and become a painter at the sultan’s court… and whose body IS that in the well? (It never tells us, though otherwise it won’t shut up.)
e e Cummings:
Bella)))*!
?—————-(edwardEdward)
BellaedwardEDWARD Bella
Bella
Bella
Bella
jacob
Bella(Edward)Jacob
J@COBEDW@RD**&^&*
BellaEdward***
Laurell K. Hamilton:
Edward and the other vampires sparkle, but not becasue of the sun…they’re nightclub owners and workers, strippers, comdedians, etc… Bella is a witty but angry necromancer and Jacob is still a warewolf but he hates what he is and tries to keep from changing. Bella is drawn to both men for different reasons, but after making a mystical tie to both men she must have sex with them constantly, inbetween slaying rogue vampires and assisting the PD with the preternatural arm of the PD, to stay alive.
D.H. Lawrence
Lady Bella is young and sexually stymied, possessing a proper woman’s arse and a pale, whiny husband with artistic pretensions – Edward – who refuses to put out. Their is a tragic age. They live in a snobbish, insular community in the Midlands with parasitic artsy types who throng around Edward, and hardy miners outside their estate. One day she meets the brawny, yet sensitive, Jacob, who introduces her to anal penetration and they engage in much tender-hearted fucking around the woods, decorate John Thomas and Lady Jane with flowers, and they agree that of course Celia shits (who doesn’t?).
Kerouac- Edward meets and becomes obsessed with the hyper-active yet charming Jacob and they both decide to travel to Mexico and meet up with all sorts of representations of famous vampires and werewolves from history. When they finally get to Mexico they go to a brothel only to find they are attracted to the same prostitute, Bella. This ends in a fight in which Edward is knocked unconscious and is left for dead by Jacob. This brings Bella and Edward together and in the span of 2-3 pages they marry and return to New York (or where ever Twilight is set…). Edward spends the rest of the novel reconciling Jacob’s nature in his mind. Oh, and it’s all pretty much true, except the names are all changed.
P.G. Wodehouse: Bella doesn’t want to marry anyone, and enlists the help of her wise-but-restrained father Charlie to get out of any romantic obligations that crop up. Much of the action takes place over a weekend at the Cullen manse, with Charlie posing as a gardener and Bella donning different etiquette-mandated clothing between each conversation scene. At several points, due to increasingly convoluted rationale, Jacob and Edward trade places. The climax takes place in the parlor and involves at least ten minor characters, including Bella’s high school teachers, a local priest, and one or two previously-unmentioned aunts.
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Bukowski version is spot on, hahaha!
Jerome K. Jerome: Bella, Jacob, and Edward would go on a canoe trip and bicker the whole time, only Bella is a boy, Edward is just not a morning person, and Jacob stays in wolf form.
William Faulkner: Bella was fascinated by Edward, though she knew he was overtly ambiguous, even as she anticipated his ambiguity, though he was silent about its implications, and even as she knew that his antebellum roots had destroyed all his feeling for the longing, longing, Southern experience and because she knew this, she clung to the hope that he would eventually return to her, love her, and bring her back to the strange but defining lust for life…and on and on.
JM Coetzee: An allegory for post-colonial Forks, the narrative focuses upon Bella’s obsession with her imminent death, and is printed on one half of each page. The complementary halves contain essays by Edward about his refusal to drink human blood. Jacob spends his days hauling the stiffened carcasses of the deer upon which the vampires feed to the incinerator.
Carson Mcullers: Bella is a 12 year old aspiring pianist who falls in love with a deaf/mute edward cullen. Dr. Jacob Black attempts to inspire the Werewolf race to rise against their vampire oppressors.
Richard Brautigan:
There is a vampire
in Washington.
Jon Krakauer: Bella and Edward are lovers, but Edward starts to question the meaning of his superficial life as an extremely rich son of a man who owns a bio company dealing with blood, and goes on a quest by foot to Italy. We follow him on his adventures through people’s interviews and clues he leaves behind. He winds up dead after trying to cross he sea in a raft he found on the beach, and Bella has since married a guy named Jacob.
Last known picture of him is glittering in the sunlight.
F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Bella and Edward are a wealthy young couple living the high life in the Gilded Age. Bella is increasingly discontent with their life, however, and is constantly chasing other men and other excitement. She leaves Edward for a time for Jacob, and they travel Europe together. But when she finds out Edward has died and become a vampire, she is racked with guilt over her decision to leave and throws herself into the Seine. Jacob then disowns the high life and becomes an expat trying to write stories to pass down the lessons of how the American Dream can destroy people.
DH Lawrence
Bella married Edward but because his bottom half was ripped off in a fight with his brother, he cannot have children, and so keeps Bella human, and feeds off her blood as they share her life together.
This slow draining of Bella’s blood is killing her so she hires a
Nurse from the village for Edward to feed off. But now more than ever Bella finds no meaning or pleasure in her life, no longer physically tied to Edward in any way, bored by his whinging that he loves her, and his inability to sufficiently accompany her on her stumbling walks in the woods that surround their home.
One day she meets Jacob the gamekeeper, who rapes her in a chicken coop, but she doesn’t care because she’s bored. Having recently decided that she needs a baby to make her happy, she is delighted when she find out she is pregnant. Jacob, being a real man, doesn’t care; he already has a child by another woman, neither of whom he had any relationship with.
Edward is unfussed by Bella’s pregnancy, so long as she remains his possession. Bella wants to live with Jacob and the baby. Jacob, deciding that the only reason to live with anyone is for regular intercourse, agrees to this plan. But because of the archaic and controlling societal traditions, Jacob has to live on a farm for a bit while Bella deals with chizzy Edward, who degenerates, goes mad, and sucks the nurse dry.
Ends with a letter from Jacob, out hero, to happy mother Bella, about how keen he is to get on with the intercourse.
Alan Moore (much earlier in his career): Jacob “WW” (for Werewolf) Dobbs and Edward Ernest Cullen, generally just known by his last name, are best buds and juvenile delinquents whose escapades include grand theft auto, atomic weapons, littering, and planetary destruction. Bella is a friend of theirs who initially does not know about all the trouble they get into, but once she finds out, reinvents herself as even more of a violent sociopath than the boys, in order to fit in and keep hanging out with them.
Choderlos de Laclos: Eduard, marquis de Merteuil, is an aging rake; Iago, vicomte de Valmont, is his protege and ex-lover. The entire story is told in a series of letters between those two, Bella the orphaned ingenue who has been sent to live with Eduard, and one of Bella’s friends from her old school. Eduard advises Iago on seducing Bella in between the two of them trying to one-up each other from bored depravity; eventually Bella’s reputation is ruined and no one has found anything like true happiness.
Tolkien: Edward embarks on an epic quest to seize back land from the Werewolves. A huge battle commences. Edward’s relationship with Bella is relegated to the appendix.
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Sylvia Plath: Bella doesn’t know what she is doing in Forks. She meets Jacob on the way to a party, but he is more interested in her friend. She continually ruminates on Edward, whom she has known for years and has thought about marrying, but has decided finally that he is a hypocrite. Bella returns home and spirals into depression, ruminating on her role as an intelligent woman in 1950s New England. She later attempts suicide and enters a mental health facility. Edward visits her there and he proposes. She laughs in his face.
Thoreau:
Because Edward is fed up with the routine of everyday life, he lives in the woods and isolates himself from human society. There, he contemplates the thoughtlessness of romance as a symbol for everyday life through a character by the name of Bella (who may or may not be a myth). In the woods, he meets a wolf whom he personifies as a symbol of thoughtless male sexuality and names him Jacob. He wrestles with his inner Jacob and ultimately rejects it in favor of deliberate romance. When Edward leaves the woods, he decides to never marry.
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Charlotte Brontë:
Bella is introduced to Jacob by her dad, Charlie, who secretly likes Jacob more than he does his own child. Jacob and Bella become best friends and fall deeply in love, but she is distracted by the appearence of Edward, a pretty, well-mannered but deeply boring individual who the reader has no interest in at all. Jacob and Edward meet on several occasions and every time Edward patronises Jacob until Jacob flies into a rage. Bella spends whole chapters whining about how she loves both of them but Jacob isn’t good enough for her. Everyone spends a lot of time wandering the forests near to Forks (which represents the confusing and wild nature of the feelings of everyone involved) lamenting their woes. Eventually Jacob kidnaps Bella and Edward’s daughter, Renesme and holds her hostage, and Edward feels unable to do anything because he feels guilty for how lonely Jacob feels.
Oh no wait, that’s what actually happened…
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If Greg Keyes wrote Twilight…
Edward isn’t quite trusted by the incredibly clever and adept Bella who ends up having shallow sex with Jacob then CRAZY SHIT HAPPENS and the former two decide to take it slow after an epic, tear-filled climax in the middle of Oblivion.
Author of Gilgamesh:
Edward is a king who enjoys taking women’s viginity on the night of their honeymoon. People decide this isn’t for the best and sends the beast-man Jacob to beat Edward. Bella teaches Jacob to be civilized by having lots of sex with him. Edward and Jacob become best friends and go around killing monsters. When Edward refuses to have sex with Bella, she plots to have him killed by her bull. But Edward and Jacob kill it. In revenge Bella kills Jacob, and Edward grieves at his body until he starts rotting, at which point he searches for immortality, loses it, and becomes a good king, ignoring Bella completely.
Gaston Leroux (author of The Phantom of the Opera): Due to his unnatural sparkling, Edward is a social outcast who lives in hiding in the basement of the high school and wears a mask to hide the sparkles. He falls in love with Bella and stalks her as she goes about her school day. Finally, he kidnaps her, and tells her that she has to marry him, or he will blow up the school building and kill everyone inside. She takes pity on him and agrees to marry him, sparkles and all. Edward is so touched that he lets her go so she can be happy.
Bella’s childhood sweetheart, Jacob, tried to rescue her, but proved pretty useless.
Lemony Snicket:
Snicket recounts the tragic, true story of the life of three orphans whose parent were killed when their house is burned down by an evil cabal of vampires and werewolves called the VFD. Bella, the eldest, is a girl who loves to write. Jacob, the middle child, is a gifted boy with a knack for inventing(usually devices to hide his lycanthropy.). Edward, the baby, has extremely sharp teeth, and a taste for human blood. His siblings call him Sunny because of his unusually sparkly skin. Instead of four books, there are thirteen, in which the intrepid trio continually outwit their nasty uncle, Count Cullen, as he repeatedly tries to get their fortune. The books are extremely depressing, because the author repeatedly goes on about how the reader could be reading something better than this drivel. The series ends with all three stuck on deserted island, which happens to include an apple tree with apples that taste like horseradish. No one knows if they ever leave the island or not.
(Hey, I know he’s not as famous as those above, but I think the result would be hilarious!)
Christopher Paolini:
Edward is a sparkly young farmboy who finds a dragon’s egg while out hunting one day. He names the dragon Saphira, and hides her from his family. (He also never mentions his vampirism). Fast forward like fifteen chapters, and we find Edward rescuing a lovely elf named Bella, from the clutches of an evil shade name Jacob, who can become a wolf. The rest of the book is mostly Edward Saphira, and Bella running around trying to stop evil king Cullen.
Machado de Assis.
Told fom the point of view of Edward who keeps looking for proof that Bella slept with Jacob, never to find out.
Thomas Hardy: Firstly, Bella’s clumsiness is a plot device, as she accidentally burns down her house, and so is exiled to Forks. It is clear from the constant rain that her life here will be ill-fated. In Forks she meets Jacob, who pretends to be related to her, in order to seduce and then rape her. She later falls in love with the supposedly wonderful Edward Cullen. However when he discovers Bella’s past he cannot be reconciled to it, even though he’s a vampire, and so runs off to Italy to live with the Volturi. Bella is left at the mercy of the werewolves, including the lascivious Jacob. Alice foresees Bella’s death and tries to warn Edward, but the message is delayed by the Volturi. Edward returns to Forks too late- Jacob pretended to imprint on Bella and then turned her into a werewolf. When Bella sees Edward again she is so distraught that she kills Jacob with a silver bullet. After a brief moment of happiness, Bella accepts her punishment and is torn to shreds by the pack, while Edward stands by and watches.
Ezra Pound
Bella. Edward. Jacob.
Death is the gift of life.
Milorad Pavic:
Bella goes daily to a coffee shop, as she likes to see strangers eat. Then, she starts having a dream that doesn’t belong to her: a cherry tree in the middle of a rye field, where a boy is crying red honey.
Sixteen days later, on October, Bella meets Edward in the coffee shop, and he tells her she’s been dreaming his dream, because she’s death. Bella then realizes she can’t really be death, as in her masculine-time, she’s been reading a book about a werewolf named Jacob who’s hunting down Edward to kill him.
Jacob wakes up in a room where the ceiling is a cloudy sky and is raining inside, and writes in the blog of Lizzie Stark about the dream he just had about a girl named Bella.
RR Martin:
– Bella falls in love with Jacob who has Edward gets beheaded at the end of the first book and keeps her captive.
Anne Rice:
– Edward’s sire tells him to stop whining, then an end of the world first vampire meta-plot turns up and the humans become irrelevant.
Matthew Reilly:
Edward is an enigmatic Marine sent to investigate a mysterious alien spaceship buried hundreds of metres below the Antarctic ice cap. Bella is the hot soldier who is secretly in love with Edward but is scared of being hurt by a man due to a previous bad relationship, and actually doesn’t have a lot of dialogue or personality. Jacob is actually another female soldier who is 6 foot tall and butch. The Volturi attack Edward’s team in order to capture the alien spaceship first. Lots of stuff gets blown up, people get shot, stuff gets blown up, technical diagrams and maps of the area intersperse the action-packed pages, stuff gets blown up. Edward conducts a variety of battles in a hovercraft, diving bell, platforms, etc in which he is always outnumbered and outgunned, but due to his reflexes and ingenuity manages to turn the tables on the Volturi and other attackers. Jacob’s leg gets bitten off by a killer whale. Bella doesn’t do much, gets wounded, Edward rescues her and a random little girl, discovers the spaceship is actual an American plane from the Cold War powered by leaky nuclear technology. They escape in the plane, land on the Fork’s Police Aircraft Carrier, whereby Charlie tries to kill them, but Edward outwits them but destroying the coveted plane and forcing Fork’s High School to witness that he is alive, despite Charlie issuing a death certificate. Jacob gets found several weeks later on an iceberg, gets a metal leg, and never quite gets killed in subsequent books. Edward never takes off his reflective anti-flash sunglasses.
Joe Orton: Bella and Jacob rob a bank and try hidding the money in Charlie’s coffin. There is not enough room in the coffin for both so Charlie is taken out of the coffin and his cloths are removed and he is rolled in a sheet. Edward has had 11 rich wives who have died unnatural deaths and is trying to convince Bella to marry him. Billy thinks they are all lying and investigates them. Billy agrees to let Bella, Jacob, and Edward go if they give him money. Bella and Edward get married and wont let Jacob live with them because they need to keep up appearences. Billy arrests Mike for no reason.
Charlotte Perkins: Bella marries Edward, has Renesme and then they go to a cottage. Bella locks herself in her room and thinks that there is a person in the wall paper. Little does she know it is just Edward using his vampire powers to make her look insane and send her at an asylm
F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Jacob amasses a fortune in order to win the love of Bella, but is unable to truly break into aristocratic vampire society. Bella’s characterization is essentially unchanged.
Anton Chekhov:
Edward and Bella are an unhappy bourgeois couple trapped in affluenza and bored of their existences. Bella has a brief but passionate affair with Jacob, a travelling artist, but they are unwilling to express their feelings and she returns to her dreary life with her husband while he becomes a landowner in the provincial town of K—.
William Golding:
Trapped on a jungle island, the tenuous social structure Edward and Jacob establish quickly degenerates as Jacob is overcome by his lust for Bella. He hunts down a boar, rapes Bella, and attempts to murder Edward. At the end they’re rescued by a passing boat, who reveal to them only a week has passed.
Louis L’Amour
Edward Cullen was just passing through the town of Forks, but he gets caught up in a land war between the cattle owners, led by Jacob Black, and the farmers led by Charlie Swan. Jacob offers him a job working for him, but after one look at Charlie’s beautiful daughter, Bella, Edward decides to use his almost supernatural gunfighting skills to help the farmers. But Jacob has also had his eye on Bella and it’s not long before the beast inside him lashes out.
Another Stieg Larsson:
Bella is socially maladapted and a bit ‘awkward’. She does however posses amazing hacker skills, which lead Edward – al well-known vampire- to asks her for her help with a mission he is on. Although he is almost 90 years older than her, they sleep together a couple of times. When the mission is completed, Edward leaves Bella for another woman. Bella, heartbroken, flees to Grenada, where she has a fling with Jacob, a werewolf boy almost ten times her junior.. When she returns to Sweden, she instantly forgets all about him. In Sweden she is falsely accuted of committing a murder, but Edward helps her prove her innocence. They realize that they are to different and not made for each other after all, but become good friend instead. Edward marries a vampire girl his own age, and Bella falls in love with a girl in her kickbox ing class.
Leo Tolstoy
Bella initially rejects Edward for Jacob. Edward is fulfilled and rejuvenated by farming with oppressed peasants for 300 pages, before finally impregnating Bella and destroying her reputation. Right before Bella is about to throw herself under a train, the reader does instead.
Iain M Banks – Biella is a Culture agent, on a mission to stop yet another degenerate civilisation from oppressing it’s citizens. She travels on the warship ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’, whose avatar is sparkly and named Edweerd. Edweerd has sex with Biella on the long journey to the Empire of Forks. When they arrive Special Circumstances agent Biella must persuade Jac dem Oblack into acting in such a way that the manipulations of ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’, (which is the most intelligent being in this unCultured sector of the galaxy) to bring down the empire cannot be traced back to the Culture.
SimonB: I consider my options carefully and decide to write something substantial instead.
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Anias Nin:
Bella is a timid girl who has yet to realize her full sexuality. She meets Edward, and it “ignites her inner core..her molten sex creeping from her like a slow volcanic river”. Edward’s “turgid member, pulsing with the blood of hundreds of years” presses tightly to her.
They eventually have Victorian-worded sex, then she with Jacob..then all together…then they go to an opium den and get totally trashed.
oh..btw..this thread is full of WIN!!! So many creative contributors…every time I think I have an author..I search and see someone did it already perfectly!!
Joe Haldeman: Highly educated with a Master’s degree in engineering, Edward has been drafted into the United Nations Expeditionary Force and sent to Sedna for low-gravity and hostile environment training. Personal resolve and high adaptability have allowed him to survive the 34.2% mortality rate, but the next leg of his journey will send him to the Alpha Centauri B system, where contact was made with hostile extraterrestrials, simply known as the “Lupines,” due to their similar to the Earth-based wolves. Traveling at 80% of the speed of light will cause immense time dilation, and by the time he returns to Earth, he will have been gone a generation. But another wayward soul, Bella, has also been drafted into his squad, where a chance encounter turns into a truly long-distance relationship, separated by space and time, amidst the horrors of interstellar warfare…
Anthony Bourdain
Edward Cullen is an inspired young chef in New York City, accompanied by his soux chef and partner in crime, Jacob Black. Together, they drink, fuck and cook their way through the ranks of new york’s seedy underground. In the final chapter, they impress a particularly dangerous italian mob boss with a rare dish, a swan basted with lemon and garlic butter, which they affectionately name “Bella Swan”.
Helen Fielding –
Bella is slightly overweight and spend too much time drinking and smoking with her mates. Enter Edward who is all class but she can’t be sure if he really likes her or not. Instead she distracts herself with Hugh Gra….. Jacob who is a cad but very charming nevertheless.
Flash forward to Bella being embarrassed by her underwear and Edward and Jacob slapping each other in the street while Bella and her mates piss up and smoke egging them on.
Bella ends up with Edward but resents his perfect family and voices her opinion due to having some guts and being a real woman.
Iris Murdoch –
The book opens with 300 pages of unsent letters to Bella from Edward, who is ‘happily ensconced’ in a remote log cabin. He uses ebullient prose and dazzling intertextuality to show his intellectual, as well as physical, mastery of her; and, ironically, the extreme frustration that results from several decades devoid of death and sex. In the second half, Bella and Jacob, on a casual hike, inadvertently stumble upon his hermit cabin. Chaos ensues. Edward, in a first-person narrative function with an indeterminable time lapse between event and recording, constructs his perception of Bella and Jacob, in which they are the epitome of Good and Evil. The interplay between the trio prompts a Platonic examination of the moral viewpoint of the soulless undead.
David Foster Wallace:
Edward’s tennis career and his relationship with Bella fall apart as he dissolves into a marijuana-induced depression. Jacob imprints on a mysterious VHS tape.
Amy Tan:
An old woman named Bella, disturbed by her daughter’s relationship problems, tells stories of her strange youth in the Pacific Northwest and the tragic endings to her troubled relationships with two men named Edward and Jacob . . .
Charles Dickens:
In Seattle, Bella Swan, the beautiful and delicate orphaned daughter of a prominent Portland, Oregon sherrif, meets the aristocratic, blandly nice Edward Nichol, who somehow seems to always be on trial because the Washingtonians are suspicious of his Oregonian roots. His sole interesting characteristic is a mysterious past. Despite not doing much and fainting with alarming frequency, Bella attracts the attention of Edward’s lawyer Jacob Black, a scruffy, unambitious man who is secretly a kickass werewolf and a brilliant attorney and manages to get Edward acquitted.
A sketchy undertaker tells Bella that her father is still alive and running a shoe store in Portland, and the two are reunited when Bella and Edward travel to Portland. But it turns out that Edward’s real name is Cullen, and he comes from a family of vampires. As Portland is currently in the throes of a great rebellion against the vampire population, Edward is imprisoned for being a vampire even though he doesn’t participate in vampiric activities and is disgusted by the actions of the whole species. Jacob travels to Portland to help free Edward with his lawyering and werewolfing.
Mr. and Mrs. Volturi, the sinister couple orchestrating the persecution of the vampires, plan to kill Bella as well, but Jacob overhears them discussing this and switches places with the condemned Edward the night before his execution so that the couple can flee back to Seattle together and be married. Jacob is executed the next morning, but it’s a noble gesture because he’s in love with Bella (God knows why) and feels he has led a worthless life.
Once he escapes, however, Edward finds himself mixed up with a gang of pickpockets and never makes to Bella, who is waiting for him so they can return to the safety of Seattle. Thinking she has been jilted, Bella spends the rest of her life wasting away in the wedding dress she never got to wear down the aisle. She adopts a daughter named Renesmee and teaches her to be a demon to all men because the male population seems to consist entirely of monsters.