Twilight by William Gay
So I started (not Stephenie Meyer’s) Twilight. The book is set in the 1950’s, and it starts good enough. A brother and sister have a suspicion that the local undertaker is doing perverse things with the bodies of the townsfolk. They decide to dig some up and find their suspicions were correct. The imagery was strong and morbid and interesting, for the most part. But after the prelude came the scariest part of the book: Mr. Gay chose not to include quotation marks in his dialog! Any author who is presumptuous enough to ignore a major grammatical tool better have some talent to back up his hubris (oh joy, I love using the word “hubris”). But instead I found myself in that mild vortex of reading a page and only at the end realizing I had not really grasped anything I just read. So in short, I did not find Twilight scary, just a tad boring. That kind of boring where you just can’t think of anything you want to do so instead just nap for a while and then when you wake up you’re all groggy and wish you hadn’t have slept. To be fair (which I haven’t really been up to this point) I didn’t finish it, nay, couldn’t finish it. It’s like what famed librarian and reader’s advisor Nancy Pearl says, if you aren’t finding yourself engaged by page 50, it’s not worth finishing. So maybe it gets better. I don’t know, but I don’t care to find out. I wish I had liked it, because then anybody who accidently stumbled upon this blog after thinking it was about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight would have another book to read. But fear not, accidental reader, for I have scores of other titles on this blog for you to enjoy. Why don’t you click on many of my generous genre topics. You’ll be sure to find something of great interest.
