Lily’s New Strange World Today

As a fiction writer who admires the likes of Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and King, gothic romance stuff is not really my style. And as someone who got published AFTER the onslaught of Twilight, and whose writing features vampires as the major antagonists, I can only imagine that I will be accused of trying to capitalize on the genre currently dominated by Stephanie Meyer. My writing is nothing like Meyer’s. I doubt very much that it would appeal to the same audience at all.

Twilight is one of the few books that I really could not read, mostly due to the toxic levels of purple prose, such as seen in this paragraph.

He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

I would like us to ponder for a moment–what would this paragraph have become had Lovecraft ghostwritten Twilight? Perhaps you can do better, but here’s my take.

He lay perfectly still in the grass, gazing up into a vortex of swirling horror as he pondered the blind, insane God which existed outside the known cosmos. His shirt was open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, now branded with the terrible Yellow Sign, reminding him of the hideous oath he had taken to serve Hastur. His scintillating arms were bare, beginning to resemble tentacles more than human appendages. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. He would never sleep again, for fear that he would dream of that fearsome Cyclopean city with its non-Euclidian angles and the stairs and alleys that led nowhere that could be discerned by the naked eye. He was like a perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal, cold to the touch, like the skin of great Cthulhu himself. Great Cthulhu who waited dreaming beneath the waves in the sunken city of R’Lyeh, waiting for the time not long from now when he would rise again to destroy the world. Edward smiled with mad glee, pondering that glorious moment to come.

Now we’re talking! That’s a story that I could really wrap my tentacles around and sink my teeth into!

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