Bedazzled: Stephenie Meyer and the Twilight Phenomenon
I must admit that I was fairly disappointed in Bedazzled, as it
provides no great insight or commentary on the works of Stephenie
Meyer. George Beahm’s explanation for providing no critical insight of
the Twilight books is that Stephenie Meyers intends to publish
the definitive guide to the world of Edward and Bella herself.
However, this really shouldn’t have stopped Beahm from adding his
tuppence worth of opinion. The only commentary he provides merely
proves that Beahm has had a correspondence with the great Ray Bradbury
rather than adding anything of particular relevance to the Twilight saga.
Much of the material of the book consists of interviews, mainly with
Stephenie Meyer and the stars of the movie adaptations. These could
have been edited better, as there is a great deal of repetition (I got
fed up of reading about Meyer’s protestation that she was never a fan
of vampire movies, since this is often referred to in the book). To be
fair to Beahm, he does write that Bedazzled was devised as a
book that you can dip into, rather than reading it from cover to
cover. I suspect that fans of the movies will be most satisfied with Bedazzled,
due to the numerous interviews featuring Rob Pattinson, Kristen
Stewart, and Taylor Lautner et al. Fans wanting to visit locations
featured in Twilight will also be well served by the guidance
this book provides. However, a lot of the book’s material does appear
to have been derived from the Internet, but is still peculiarly
colourless, maybe because Beahm has played it too safe with this book?
The illustrations, aside from the cover, are also nothing to write
home about. However, as noted above, the real problem of this book is a
near complete absence of an author’s voice, which is strange, since
this book is a celebration of one of the world’s most popular writers.