Meyer and Harris Give Vampires a New Stake

Young fans of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series (Little, Brown Young Readers) will be unsurprised to hear that the first movie based on one of Meyer’s books is expected to be an unqualified hit with its target audience. From Newsday:

The love-after-death movie “Twilight” is going to be so huge it would take a stake through the heart to stop it. And the reasons seem so obvious they make you say, "D'oh!": A heavily computer-generated, blood-flecked, teenage soap opera set in the hormonal chaos of high school. A ready-made fan base of rabid Gothic/chick-lit readers cultivated by Stephanie Meyer's four-book series. And a not-so-secret weapon named Kristen Stewart.

Back in August, Meyer’s fans celebrated the publication of Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the Twilight series, with the kind of enthusiasm that hasn’t been seen since Harry.

Despite the extreme success of the series, Meyer recently told Entertainment Weekly that her next project might not be in the world of Twilight at all:

I have two projects I want to work on. But the movie has been so time-consuming — all the publicity and the merchandise to approve. But I want to get in and write something totally different, a whole new world, and lose myself in that. I think that will be the most healing thing for me. So that's my goal.

By the time the movie opens on November 21st, media interest should have reached a frenzy. Shoot a silver bullet in any direction and you’ll hit a story about Twilight, Stephanie Meyer or one of the much ballyhooed cast of the film. Business Week brings a different angle, however, sharing the Cinderella story that led to the making -- and well-timed release -- of the film.

All of this comes on the heels of the success of Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Series, recently reimagined as the hit HBO series, True Blood. Writing for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, back in October, Oline Cogdill wrote:

In her novels, vampires have come out, so to speak, thanks to a synthetic blood manufactured in Japan. But not everyone is so accepting of vampires who have been know to, well, be vampires. Sookie Stackhouse, however, is sympathetic. She’s a waitress in a small town and, because of her ability to read minds, she knows what it’s like to be different.

Harris’ novels re-imagined as a series has become a perfect fit for HBO, with Sookie Stackhouse played by Oscar-winner Anna Paquin and the executive producer Alan Ball, who created the hit Six Feet Under and won an Oscar for the screenplay of the 1999 film American Beauty.

True Blood airs Sunday nights on HBO with numerous encores.