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Nov 4, 2009 09:30 AM
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The humorists at the Harvard Lampoon are taking aim at klutzy girls and sparkly vampires with their novel-length Twilight parody Nightlight. Expect a vain, vampire-obsessed narrator, unnecessary adjectives, and a computer geek who simply can't be bothered with girls.
Nightlight, which has just been released, is the Harvard Lampoon's first foray into parody novel-writing since its 1969 spoof Bored of the Rings. But this volume appears to be an obsessive, scene-for-scene parody of Meyer's books, lampooning not only Meyer's writing and characters, but also the vampire craze itself. Belle Goose is the new girl in the dreary town of Switchblade (some of the jokes appear to have been written via Mad Libs), where she spies her handsome classmate Edwart Mullen. She immediately decides that Edwart is both her soulmate and a vampire (thanks in part to his aversion to tater tots and his rescuing her from a snowball), and that she must convince him to make her his undead wife. But there are plenty of parodies of Meyer's writing style, such as when Belle describes being "unconditionally, irrevocably, impenetrably, heterogeneously, gynecologically, and disreputably" kissed by Edwart, and the scene when we first meet the supposed vampire boy:
It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn't noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.
A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room - maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman's idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.
A preview of the entire first chapter is available at Entertainment Weekly.
Send an email to Lauren Davis, the author of this post, at lauren@io9.com.
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