"There hasn't been this much advance demand for a book since the seventh Harry Potter book was released last summer," says Donna Bates, a merchandise supervisor for the Borders bookstore - and a fan of Meyer's series.
"Ever since the first book came out, it's been steadily building in popularity. I'm 50, and I read it, and I've talked many women my age into reading it. It's very romantic, though there's no sex in it at all. I think this notion of a Byronic hero who has to restrain himself to protect the woman he loves resonated with a lot of female fantasies."
Though the Twilight books have some male fans who enjoy the vampire aspects of the saga, it's not surprising that the series appeals primarily to the X-chromosome set. Elizabeth Eulenberg, who bears the unwieldy title of Director of Global Publicity for Stephenie Meyer, estimates that perhaps 90 percent of the series' fans are female, and that two-thirds are younger than 18.
As popular as the books are, Meyer isn't about to knock J.K. Rowling off her broomstick any time soon. With the 3.2 million advance copies for Breaking Dawn, the total number of sales for Meyers' four books will exceed 13 million. In contrast, sales of the seven Harry Potter books have topped 400 million.
Comparisons between the two series are inevitable. Even Meyer's staunchest fans concede both that the vampire author lacks Rowling's ability to envision a new world down to the smallest physical details, and that the Twilight books lack the depth and scope of the saga about the boy wizard. But, in the Potter books, male-female dynamics get relatively short shrift. In the Twilight series, the romantic triangle is the main course.
"Stephenie Meyer's writing might not be spectacular, but she's an amazing storyteller," says Hannah Briggs, 15, of Baltimore.
"What I like about the world that she has created in Twilight is that there are rules about what vampires can do and what they can't do, and the rules don't change. In the Harry Potter books, sometimes she [Rowling] will put the characters in a predicament and then invent some new magic that they can do to get them out of it."
The Twilight series is a fantasy in more ways than one. Despite the ever-present threat of annihilation by bloodsuckers, Meyer paints a world that is safer than the one in which teens really live, a world that reflects her values as a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Not only is it a world in which the characters abstain from premarital sex, it also is a world without drugs or violence. The characters don't even swear.
