As a reward to myself for finishing Blood Hunt, I finally got around to buying and playing Fallout New Vegas. I forced myself to wait because I knew it wasn’t going to be a six-hour first-person shooter, or even a 25-hour game like Mass Effect 2. No, I knew I was going to drop 70-plus hours into the game. That’s how I am with RPGs, especially open-world RPGs like Bethesda’s become known for.

I haven’t in fact “finished” or “beat” the game because I’ve only seem one sequence of innumerable possible endings, but there are certain stories I’ll never see (siding with Caesar for example), and certain other ones that I’m saving for an inevitable replay sometime down the road, so for the most part I feel finished, and won’t be going back to it for a while. With about 79 hours put into the game, and every single location on the world map visited (including exploring all the caves and buildings, not just getting close to them so that the map marker highlights), I think I’m at least qualified to write my review.

So here’s what’s weird: I’m not sure whether to complain about the game’s highly derivative aspects first, or laud the things it does far better than Fallout 3 first. There are plenty of both, and although I clearly enjoyed the title it’s a bit hard for me to give it a “great” because of all the ways it could have improved on Fallout 3 but didn’t. On the other hand, it succeeds so spectacularly on certain levels that … you know what? Let’s just start with what it got right.

(note: I’m not going to explain the plot here. I hate reviews that do that, not because of spoilers but because it’s a waste of space and time. You can find out the plot from the millions of previews on the web.)

The Good

Fallout: New Vegas had a few people working on it – most notably Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone, who were major contributors to the original two Fallout games. While I felt Fallout 3 did a fine job of nailing the “feel” of the Fallout universe and presenting a compelling story, I think New Vegas does a superior job of following in the footsteps of the originals. The overall storyline is more convoluted with no “right” route or goal clearly highlighted. There’s a “good vs. evil” sideline, but only if you believe the NCR is good, and there is plenty of compelling evidence placed within the game to show that they are not.

There also way more marked side quests (a lack of which bothered me in Fallout 3). Many of the characters are directly related to people you met or worked with in Fallout and Fallout 2, including at least one possible companion. You also get to learn more about some of the well-established pre-war companies like RobCo. In general, it all adds up to feeling just a bit more like Fallout than Fallout 3 did, which works for me as a huge fan of the first two games (Fallout remains on my ten best games of all time list).

The concept of managing your reputation with various factions has been reintroduced, and might actually be stronger than in any of the three previous titles (I don’t really factor in the non-RPG spin-off games when thinking about the history of the franchise — just the RPGs). While there are still some extremely obvious karma choices, there are many interactions which are intertwined, and helping one faction can hinder your reputation with others. It’s actually quite possible to gain “mixed” karma ratings where people are mildly bewildered with your actions. I tend to play a heavily light-side character, and I still had a couple of factions (and not necessarily the evil ones) who were a little sketchy in their opinion of me. The “bad guys” – Ceasar’s Legion – hated my guts, of course.

Another thing that New Vegas does better than Fallout 3 is packing more punch into a tighter area. The game map for New Vegas seems slightly smaller than Fallout 3′s Washington DC metro area (especially when you account for the large amount of inaccessible mountain area), but there are fewer “filler” locations and a total lack of “oh my god where the hell am I?” subway stations (thank you, Obsidian). With the noteable exception of a few parts of New Vegas, everything is open to the outside world. When you do find a filler-esque location (such as a cavern, or a mine), many of them are tied into side quests and have a reason for existing. Those that don’t are kept mercifully short. There are very few multi-map cavern/bunker crawls, unlike in Fallout 3 where often a cave system would often have three or even four separate areas. While this gaves Fallout 3 a bit more breadth than New Vegas, it didn’t really add much depth, and it added a ton of repetition to the game. In fact, the last three Bethesda RPGS — Oblivon, Fallout 3 and New Vegas — have gotten progressively better about this. I’m hoping the trend continues in the upcoming Skyrim.

New Vegas also gives you optional companions who have a whole lot more depth than the companions in Fallout 3 did. They’ve got lengthy back-stories, each companion has an entire quest-line that allows you to choose between different upgrades to their abilities and change their endings, and they have a lot more to say about the places you visit and the movement of the plot-line. The revamped companion interface wheel is also a million, billion times nicer to use than navigating through dialog trees, and I applaud whomever designed it.

The crafting system has also been greatly expanded for people who love turning raw ingredients into usable stuff. As someone who ignores crafting as much as possible in every RPG he’s ever played, I … ignored it as much as possible. But it was there, and I’m sure I could’ve saved a whole lot of money on ammo and other goods if I’d used it. Also, if you’re insane enough to play the game in hardcore mode, where it tracks your sleep, thirst, and hunger, then you will absolutely need a high survival skill, and all the crafting abilities it bequeaths. Otherwise the crows of the Mojave will be picking your bones clean in short order.

Strong voice acting has always been a hallmark of the Fallout series, and this is still the case with New Vegas. Many of the major characters (and a few minor ones) are played by Hollywood actors, and the rest are fleshed out by talented and experienced voice actors who do a good job of giving life to the supporting dialog.

The Less-Good

I’ve heard mention that many people felt New Vegas seemed like “a glorified mod” and I understand why. A massive amount of art assets are recycled from Fallout 3, from bunkers to burned-out sheds. Even in character creation, I don’t think so much as a single new haircut or beard style was added, which was more of a bummer than it seems because it means all of the characters you meet in the world look identical to residents of post-apocalyptic Washington DC, despite the fact that Nevada is frankly much further ahead in the “restoring the world to order” department than the Northeast is. A lot of new content was made for the game, most noticeably in the various casinos and other areas around the New Vegas strip, but it’s sometimes hard to differentiate the two games.

Another frustration, for me, was that the game makes an extreme effort to prevent you from overpowering your character. Perks have been reduced to once every two levels, so you only get 15 total instead of Fallout 3′s twenty (on the plus side, you do level 30 times, so you can still max several skills if you have a high intelligence). For those of us who want to play a game where our character eventually evolves into a super-powered cyber-genius whose skill in combat is matched only by his stealth and silver tongue (and who think Perks are the single greatest thing about Fallout), it’s frustrating not to get as many of them. Of course, the original game only gave you one every three levels, so I guess every two is still better.

If you do the side quests as they come along, you’ll hit the level cap long before you have visited every point on the map. I did; in fact, I hadn’t even entered New Vegas proper until somewhere around level 26 or 27. When I hit the cap, continuing to do quests just felt pointless to me, so I downloaded a mod that set it to 50 instead of 30. Problem solved. I beat the game at level 38. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have wasted two early perks on the “10% extra experience points” set.

I also preferred Fallout 3′s somewhat more open approach to enemy strength. In New Vegas, there is a definite path the game tries to lead you on (roughly: south along the western border, then east along the southern border, then up towards Vegas). Trying to deviate from this route lands you rapidly in areas stocked with brutally powerful deathclaws, and gigantic wasps that hit like a mortar shell. In many cases it seems you may be able to sneak by on the borders but — SURPRISE! — invisible walls abound in the Mojave desert. There are areas of incline that you absolutely should be able to scale, but can’t, and in some cases you can even hit invisible walls on flat planes. This is a game design tactic that needs to die a quick, merciful death, and I was sorry to see it show up in this title.

The casinos in the game are kind of a let-down. They’re fancy and fun to wander, but many of the areas are remarkably empty — amusingly, one will often hear background noise indicating a huge crowd despite there being only two dealers and one other gambler in the room with you. I understand this is probably due to performance limitations, especially on the consoles, but it was still a bit of a letdown to walk into Gomorrah for the first time and find a gigantic and mostly empty room full of tables. Oh, also, the “choice” between blackjack, roulette and slots at the casinos isn’t really much of a choice. Blackjack’s the only game where the odds don’t overwhelmingly favor the house (and let’s be honest – they still get a sizable edge). A version of poker would’ve been nice, though I understand that would’ve involved a lot of AI coding. Craps would’ve been pretty great too, just because it usually takes at least a little longer to burn through 200 bucks.

In Summary

In the end, New Vegas ends up being a lot like Fallout 2: it uses essentially the same engine, recycles a LOT of art assets, but is a somewhat more complicated game than its predecessor. Also there’s more gambling and whores than in the first game.

While New Vegas is by no means perfect, it’s an impressive title with an intricate story, characters you grow to have feelings about, and an unbelievable amount of stuff to do. I think Obsidian did a great job in a fairly limited time of creating an interesting and enjoyable game world that’s populated with outstanding characters, and fits very well into Fallout canon. I don’t know where the series is going from here, and whether the task of planning it out will be given to Bethesda’s core team or to Obsidian, but either way I’ll be happy, because both have proved that the franchise is in good hands.

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Note 1: New Vegas is currently available on Steam or at various retail outlets for around twenty bucks. If you haven’t played it yet, it’s a steal at that price.

Note 2: With rare exceptions, I don’t do DLC. By all indications the New Vegas DLC is very good, so this game might be an exception once all the stuff is out and packaged together into one purchase. Maybe on the next play-through!

The Passage by Justin Cronin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” is a complex novel that at, over the course of its reading, left me at times enthralled and at other times enraged. I think that’s a good thing, but if you ask me tomorrow, I may have changed my mind again.

What I can say about the book is that it’s a sweeping sci-fi/fantasy epic that fits very nicely into a long and proud tradition of novels in which their author gleefully destroys most of humanity and then sets about telling us what happens in the aftermath. I’ve seen it compared to Stephen King’s The Stand, and the comparisons are warranted. There is a long and utterly engrossing set-up to the end of the world, which eventually happens with remarkable speed. King spent more time dealing with the actual apocalypse part of his post-apocalyptic world than Cronin does, but considering the heft of the book as it is, it’s perhaps for the best that Cronin literally skips over the 90 years or so between “when the bad stuff happens” and when the story picks back up.

The similarities continue throughout. There’s a group of traveling friends, and not one but two old, black ladies who like to talk about God. There’s a pregnancy and a divorce of sorts. There’s a bad guy who is drawing others to him. There’s a big showdown at the end and a pronounced denoument. Throught the book, people die. Most of them die badly. There’s a lot of The Stand in here, yes. But to call the book a copy or even highly derivative would be an outright lie. It stands as its own work, one with is intriguing and exciting, pulse-pounding at times, sad or uplifting at others. There are characters to hate and love, although I never found myself hating and loving them quite so much as I have with some other books.

As a fellow author of “vampire books” (though my vampires are apples to Cronin’s oranges), I love what he’s done with the myth. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book, give or take, are nearly flawless. Cronin paints a portrait of a near-future United States that is hyper realistic, bound up in protocol inspired by fear over continued terrorist attacks, with states mistrusting each other and the federal government operating in many clandestine ways to get what it wants. You can SEE this world, you can feel it, because it’s not so improbable. You become caught up in the story and the characters immediately, and you spend much of the time waiting for The Virals (as they become known) to break lose. You know it’s coming and that it’s going to be bad. Cronin doesn’t disappoint here.

To say that the story shifts gears at this point is an understatement. It’s something more akin to parking the car, getting out, and switching to an entirely different vehicle. Yes, it still takes place in the same world, with the same problems and even a few of the same characters, but in the 90-year shift the story also moves more out of the realm of Science Fiction and into that of Fantasy. I don’t have an inherent problem with this, but I did find the shift jarring. I also found the sudden introduction of more than a dozen new characters a bit overwhelming at first, though in the end you figure out who’s who, and you are properly outraged at the times you’re supposed to be, when the heroes are being held up by people who don’t understand that, damn it, they’re the heroes and they’re right.

The problems I had with the book, the things that threw me out of reading mode and made me frustrated, all happened in the second half and were mostly small issues. For one thing, Cronin is guilty of the extremely modern belief that all human beings immediately lose whoever they were before, at the moment they hear they are having a baby (or in extreme cases, at the moment of the baby’s birth), and instead become dedicated only to the existence of that child. For another, I’m tired of old women who love God. I don’t find any comfort in the idea of predestination or “God’s Will” and I don’t find characters who do to be particularly sympathetic.

I also had extreme issue with one decision a primary character makes, late in the novel, not even so much because I didn’t like the decision, but because it’s given barely an ounce of explanation and is a pretty clear setup for a later event. It felt like the character was only doing it because the story needed her to. If you’re going to have the cavalry show up, you need a reason for why it wasn’t there in the first place, and this reason seemed flimsy. The character in question supposedly has her reasons, but they’re never given (or barely so), so the decision she makes seems amazingly arbitrary.

There are a few other moments like this — Cronin kills off a character whose name might as well have been “Obvious Choice” at one point — but I may be stressing the negative too strongly. In the end, the important thing was that whenever I put the book down, I always wanted to pick it up again, and preferably soon. This is the first in a trilogy, and I’m looking forward to the second and third books. They’ll probably frustrate me too, but I bet they’ll be a lot of fun to read while they’re doing it.

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My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a remarkable writer Cormac McCarthy is. This is the second of his books that I’ve read, and while it was more difficult to follow than The Road, it was also a significantly better book (and I really liked The Road!). An unflinching look at the American and Mexcian old west in the pre-Civil-War era, Blood Meridian follows the exploits of a young man who finds himself embroiled in the exploits of the Glanton Gang, a real-life group of scalp-hunters turned outlaws. McCarthy describes scenes of brutal violence and quiet solitude with the same slow, deliberate, biblical prose, and it’s up to the reader to make judgements upon the people who he describes. There are bad guys aplenty in the book, but no real good guys, and I appreciated that fact. There are few good guys in real life, and there were even fewer to be found in the desperate places on the edge of the country (and beyond it).

The lack of quotes and general eschewing of punctuation didn’t really bother me, but I did have some trouble with the extreme run-on sentences, frequently joined together with “and” over and over … sometimes by the time I got to the end, I had to go back to the beginning to remember where the sentence started. Still, the book was fascinating and deeply engrossing. McCarthy is a master.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is no Orciny … is there?

The City & The City is a somewhat difficult book to start, and it evolves into a difficult book to put down. Somewhere between the two states you come to realize that you understand the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Quoma, despite the fact that Miéville has gone to great lengths to avoid explaining them in clear language.

I appreciated this. A lot. It would be a difficult feat to describe how two cities can occupy the same physical space even if one was simply aiming for abject description. Miéville instead uses the framework of a crime novel to let you come to understand the two cities, not to mention the semi-sinister entity known only as Breach, in an organic manner. In a way, I think this allows the reader to learn at a more measured pace, rather than trying to digest huge lumps of expository information.

The key to enjoying the book is to worry about the murder mystery first, and the cities second. The information you’re looking for will come, by and large, though Miéville chooses to leave great gaps in the reader’s knowledge at times (the narrator is not omniscient, and there are many things that he, and thus the reader, will never truly know). Once I stopped worrying about understanding everything, and instead focused on enjoying the story, my overall appreciation for the book grew.

The story’s climax is suspenseful, and the book ends in pretty much the only way it really could. Many questions are answered, many more are left open, and Inspector Borlu comes to understand the truth about the cities, and about the shadows claimed by each, by both and by neither.

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• Platform: Xbox 360
• One Word: Streamlined
• Two Words: Shepard Lives!
• Worth It: Yes
• Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great

This review contains spoilers from the first 15 minutes of the game, where something major happens. If you haven’t already heard about it, you might be upset at me for mentioning it. Proceed with caution.

When a game is already great, it’s often a tough act to follow. Many sequels to great games have been extremely good games in their own right, but did not quite live up to the original (see: my recent review of BioShock 2). Other sequels to great games are just plain not as good. It’s a rare thing indeed to find a sequel to a great game which is better than the original in virtually all ways. Mass Effect 2 is one of these sequels.

At the end of the first Mass Effect,

• Platform: Xbox 360
• One Word: Depth
• Two Words: Swarming Splicers
• Worth It: Yes
• Scale: terrible | poor | fair | good | great

The Long Version

I’m pretty torn about giving BioShock 2 only a “good” and not a “great” rating. I mean, here is a game far more ambitious in its storyline and symbolism than 90% of the dreck out there, but at the same time, whenever you start to really get into exploring these new parts of Rapture, it decides to throw an army of splicers at you and bog you down in pointless, repetitive combat. The game delivers excellent dialog, creates compelling characters for you to interact with, and features a few interesting moral choices … but it also tries too hard to shoehorn the new villain into the existing Rapture storyline, so much so that one is left wondering how it would be possible to have seen no sign of her influence during the first game. On the one hand, I played the game for hours basically every day after I bought it until I’d beaten it. On the other hand, I spent a decent chunk of those hours bitching to my wife (thanks, hon!) about how little fun I was having during yet another massive firefight.

I think what it comes down to is that the net result of the changes to the game play from the first game made this one more hardcore, and it has been a long time since I was a hardcore gamer. I no longer play games, even first-person shooters, for the combat. I don’t care that I can fight with plasmids and weapons at the same time, because I never found having to switch to be particularly cumbersome in the first place, since you were rarely facing more than a couple of enemies at a time. I don’t care that the weapons and plasmids are generally beefed up from the first game, because I never thought the ones in the first game needed much improvement. I didn’t come back to Rapture because I loved fighting legions of the same four splicers in the first game and wanted to fight many more.

I came back to Rapture because its decayed, art-deco beauty and tragic history make it without question one of the most compelling video game environments ever conceived. Nearly every part of Rapture is a work of art, and to explore it means contemplating what it might be like to exist there, to live in an underwater city, never seeing the sunlight, but with constant access to the beauty and mystery of the ocean depths. The original BioShock was so damn compelling because it was so gorgeous, and had gone so horribly wrong.

Fortunately, in this aspect, the game delivers. The Rapture of BioShock 2 is even more decayed than that of the first game (though, oddly, it didn’t seem as wet), but there are still glimpses of stunning beauty all around. While I was disappointed that we didn’t revisit any of the original areas, the new parts of Rapture shown in BioShock 2 fit right in and make sense as parts of the city. We’re given information on how Rapture was built, and how people originally got around it (a sort of undersea subway system) before the invention of personal bathyspheres.

All that said, I currently have three albums that I’m basically listening to, one after another, over and over, which is probably driving my lovely wife insane. Here’s a list. I linked the album names to amazon.com mp3 downloads, but it should be noted that I don’t really care where you buy them from since I don’t have any affiliate programs or any of that crap set up. :)

Swoon by Silversun Pickups

I have to admit, I first heard of these guys through a Bill Simmons chat on ESPN, but I really enjoyed their EP and their first album. They’ve matured very well, and Swoon is definitely the best thing they’ve put out so far. Just about every song is great, and their music is growing more complex in its musical and rhythmic structure. If you forced me to choose between these three albums, and never listen to the other two again, I would probably choose this one … even though I don’t think it’s the best of the three. Just happens to be my favorite in terms of style and sound. These guys are still a pretty young band, but they’re really coming into their own. I’m excited to wear this album into the ground, and I hope to catch them on tour (I saw them after Carnavas came out, and it was a pretty fun show).

Burn Burn by Our Lady Peace

These guys just haven’t been the same since their original guitarist left. Since then they’ve gravitated more and more toward safe, mainstream rock, sacrificing a lot of the quirkiness that I really enjoyed about the band. Their last album, Healthy in Paranoid Times, was terrible. It has exactly three songs that are worth listening to, and exactly one song that has any business being on a “Best Of” compilation. Thankfully, Burn Burn is something of a return to form. I think it’s probably their best album so far with the new guitarist.

The lyrics aren’t going to blow you away with their poetry or anything, but the songs are catchy and only a little pretentious (I like a little pretension in my music!). I’ve listened to the entire album several times through and have yet to find any songs that I don’t like. That’s a good sign, especially since it normally takes me more than a dozen listens to really open up to an album. I’ve seen this band live more than any other band – mostly due to circumstance and not because I was trying to – but this is the first time in a couple of albums where I’m actually looking forward to seeing them again.

Hazards of Love by The Decemberists

We caught these guys on Colbert, and my wife was intrigued enough to add them to her playlist. I thought they were very talented, but not necessarily my style, and wasn’t totally sold on the album until we saw them live a few weeks ago. I went along to the show mostly because Charlotte loves live music and enjoys having me there with her, and was blown away.

I’m not a huge live music person, but I’ve been to plenty of shows, and I’m serious when I say this was one of the top three shows I’ve ever been to (amusingly, Our Lady Peace also has a show on that list). They rocked the hell out of it, playing their entire new album straight through without a stop, transitioning between the songs on the fly, then taking a short intermission, then coming back on and playing a whole second set. They were personable when talking and totally tight and in synch when playing. I’ve since gone back to the album and found a lot to like in it. If I had to recommend one of these three albums to someone without knowing their tastes, this is the one I’d choose.

Oh, and Shara Worden, a guest vocalist on the album from the band My Brightest Diamond, has an absolutely amazing set of pipes. She reminds me of Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane — that kind of intensity where she could be singing about her breakfast and you’re like “holy shit, this is the most important thing on earth.” The other guest singer, Becky Stark, is pretty damn good too. Both of them were at the live show, and the band’s cover of

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling really begins to embrace the darker tone that she first begins to explore in the Prisoner of Azkaban, and the result is a book that I found more engrossing than any of the first three. I like a little darkness, and I like that Rowling is unafraid to show that Harry exists in a dangerous world where people, both good and bad, are in possession of powers that can be extremely physically punishing to those at the receiving end.

Rowling continues to expand her compelling cast of characters, introducing new students both from within Hogwarts and from two other schools of wizarding, as well as several members of the Ministry of Magic. Two other new characters of note include the highly enjoyable “Mad-eye” Mooney, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, and the highly obnoxious Rita Skeeter, an invasive journalist who’s not above making up large chunks of her stories.

We also get to hear from many old favorites, not the least of which being Potters’ inseparable friends Ron and Hermione, although the former proves at least semi-separable for a while as he battles with jealousy over Harry’s constant position in the limelight.

All of this is nice, but kind of expected by now. What’s impressive though is the deft way in which Rowling wraps many of these characters’ stories together and ties them into the central Goblet of Fire storyline. In this storyline, we learn that (as is par for the course), someone is trying to kill Harry. The assumption of course is that his premature entry into the extremely dangerous Tri-Wizard competition was orchestrated to accomplish this goal, and in a way it was … but not how Harry or anyone around him expects.

The book culminates with a confrontation that results in the first “on-screen” death of a character in Rowling’s universe and sets up some extremely important threads that will carry through the rest of the titles. It’s also the first book in the series to end with no indication of who won the house cup (or if it was even given out given the tragic circumstances of the Tri-Wizard competition), and no indication of who won the quiddich cup. I thought it was nice and realistic that these issues – so seemingly important in the earlier books – have taken a back seat to the life and death concerns that Rowling is introducing into the books.

I think this is the best of the Harry Potter books that I’ve read so far, and I’m looking forward to Order of the Phoenix.

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My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really didn’t expect that it’d be so easy to find a book that’s even more depressing, startling, and at times outright uncomfortable than Requiem for a Dream, but all one really has to do is look to Selby’s earlier work, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Selby’s novel – itself more a series of novellas featuring related characters – is populated with drug-addled drag queens, prostitutes, thugs, and a particular union organizer who is an awful man in nearly every respect. That you end up feeling sympathy for nearly all of these characters, even said union organizer, is a testament to Selby’s remarkable ability to invest his characters with realism and humanity. These are deeply flawed people, all, but they’re still people, each with their own set of wants, needs, and dreams.

As in Requiem for a Dream, Selby’s writing style is light on punctuation and grammar, near stream-of-consciousness, and at times extremely difficult to read (the scenes near the end of one drag queen’s night out with “the girls” are borderline incoherent … an intentional effect). This makes it a bit tough to get into the book at first, but once your brain adapts, reading becomes pretty easy.

It’s easy to understand why this book caused so much controversy when it was released in the sixties. It contains enough sex, drugs, and profanity to ruffle many feathers today. That said, it never felt to me like Selby was trying to be exploitative. Rather, he was trying to paint an accurate picture of the kind of underworld that forms in cities, and was particularly prevalent in New York through much of the second half of the twentieth century. He brings you into these peoples lives and, without sentiment or sensationalism, shows you the world that they live in.

In all, I found the book engrossing and at times moving. These are not people you want to spend time with, and often not people you can identify with, but they are nonetheless human, each with their own tragedies, big and small. Like no other author I’ve ever read, Selby is able to express this without ever stating it outright, and for that his work demands respect and attention, no matter how vile its subject matter sometimes becomes.

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My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m going to go ahead and guess that my review of Twilight is going to sway neither the book’s legion of fans, nor its serious detractors. In all honesty, I’m kind of torn about reviewing the book at all. Its first-person protagonist is a seventeen year-old girl, and the book is very clearly angled at girls in their early-to-mid teens. I am a thirty-two year-old man, and thus am not exactly what one would call the target demographic.

I read the book because my wife advised me to, because I am author who is trying to get his vampire novel published, and she rightly figured that it couldn’t hurt to check out the book, and see what it does well. There ARE things that it does well, despite what some negative reviews might say. There are also many things that didn’t work for me, but may be right for the target audience. Then there are a few things that I think it does legitimately poorly … we’ll get to those.

So. What I liked:

I think — and again, I was never a girl, so I can’t be sure — that it does a good job of expressing the all-consuming strength of a young woman’s first love. Bella’s absolute obsession with Edward is driven home over and over (to the point of tedium for me). Less well-explained is why Edward feels so strongly for her, other than that she smells good, but you still at least get a strong sense of his desire both to love her and to chomp down on her neck, which creates some fun dramatic tension.

I also liked that each vampire had a special little power of their own, something they brought with them from their human lives. I thought the book got stronger as it went along, with the last sixty pages or so of the book, not counting the epilogue, being legitimately exciting and fun to read.

What I didn’t like:

The first 350 pages of the book are nearly a straight teen romance novel, and the first 100 pages or so are brutal even accepting that fact. There’s absolutely nothing happening, action-wise. Bella comes off as bitchy and unlikable. The writing is stilted and hasn’t yet found any sort of voice other than said bitchiness (few sentences have anything resembling stylistic flair). Again, this improves as the book goes on, almost as if Meyer is becoming more comfortable with her characters and the world she’s creating.

I also felt that Edward was too perfect. I realize the novel is more a romance than it is anything else, and this is a common approach to romance novels, but it makes him a less-likable character because basically his only flaw is that he can’t accept that he’s in love and just deal with it. I don’t mind him being gorgeous, or powerful, or intelligent, or charming, or witty, or sensual, or telepathic, or even some combination of these things, but all of them together create a character so flawless he’s hard to relate to.

The epilogue is hard to believe. I find it midly improbable that Bella’s dad would be easily forgiving of either She or Edward after what he had to go through. Also, Bella returns right back to being oblivious and kind of bitchy, as if she’s learned essentially nothing from her experience. I was hoping for a bit of character growth for both of the leads, but there’s little to be seen.

Overall, I think the book does a decent if unspectacular job of conveying a fairly typical first love story with a rather important twist. The last sixty pages or so, where the real meat of the action is, are better than the rest of the book. I have no plans to read the other three in the series, so I went ahead and read their synopses on the internet, and doing so basically reconfirmed that I’m not interested enough to read more. It seems, though, like Meyer understands her audience and has put together a series which they clearly enjoy.

If you’re old enough to drink — and not an aspiring author of vampire novels who likes to keep abreast of what’s happening in that genre — Twilight’s not terrible … but it’s probably not the right book for you.

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