Stephenie Meyer "Reimagines" TWILIGHT for 10th Annniversary

Publishers Lunch

Stephenie Meyer announced on Good Morning America a "surprise" new novel in the Twilight series, LIFE AFTER DEATH: TWILIGHT REIMAGINED, released today as bonus content bundled with the original book's 10th anniversary edition. (The publisher had billed the anniversary edition as offering hundreds of pages of unspecified "bonus content"; this is the bonus.) The new 442-page story is a "reimagining" which flips gender, where Bella is now Beau and Edward is now Edythe.

Meyer said in the novel's foreword that she wrote the story as a response to comments that Bella was a "damsel in distress," saying: "My answer to that has always been that Bella is a 'human in distress,' a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and villains. … I've always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and vampire female -- it's still the same story. So I thought to myself, 'Well, what if I put that theory to the test? That might be fun.'"

Apparently the gender-flipping of character was "really fast and easy," wrote Meyer: "It turns out that there isn't much difference at all between a female human in love with a male vampire and a male human in love with a female vampire."