The Oates Journal (ISSN: 1098-1446) is a publication of the Wayne E. Oates Institute addressing issues related to spirituality, ethics, and healing from the perspective of pastoral care and counseling.

I first noticed The Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer because I'm a chaplain and all my patients seemed to be reading them. This series includes Things That Go Bump In The Night and Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn. For me numbers count (as do books about vampires) and I am hooked on anything that goes bump in the night.

The first surprise for this reader was that these are very good books. They're hard to set down: the characters remain for the most part interesting, compelling, and attractive. We care what happens to them. Although vampire stories are old, this twist is quite new.

Most vampire lore features sunlight as instant poison for any undead who happen to stay out too early. In Meyer's version, sunlight is fine...but it identifies the vampires clearly as different from humans: their skin sparkles, crystalline. Still, discretion is the better part of valor, so her vampires live in Forks, Washington, a lumber town which can boast the least sun of any place in the continental US. Having been to Forks, I can attest that it's a great choice...it nests in rainforests of towering Douglas firs, ancient cedars. Even a traditional vampire could exist there without experiencing any sunscreen issues whatsoever.

Vampires are usually victimisers of humankind. In this saga, there are families of vampires who choose to fight their instincts and hunt animals instead and live alongside human communities, "passing" as human (reminiscent (to me, anyway) of John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who "passed" as an African American in the American South as recounted in his nonfiction work Black Like Me). In some ways the vampires are the minorities here. Although they possess wealth and uncanny survival skills, they have to tow the line, behave themselves and conform, or they'll be run out of town. But when Bella, a human, becomes a vampire, marries one and has a baby, her father looks exactly like the father in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner. Inconvenient as it is, these vampires also have to move every few years because they never age once they've been transformed (a process which involves enduring several days of excruciating pain) and so their differentness would otherwise be revealed to all and sundry. For survival they must camouflage themselves as humans.

A friend asked me whether I thought the story expressed the dark side of contemporary teen imagination. I don't think it does. I do think the concept has wide appeal to teens as well as adults for several reasons aside from the writer's storytelling skills.

The Twilight books are peopled by three species: humans, vampires, and werewolves. The werewolves grow into it. They are all from a local Indian tribe, the Quileutes, and it seems to be a gene pool thing. There's a lot of alpha dog talk among them in terms of hierarchy and order: Cesar Millan meets Bigfoot. The werewolves are sworn enemies of the vampires, but have a pact with the Cullens (the local good-guy vampire "family"). It's an uneasy treaty. Think Klingons and Borgs sharing the Enterprise with Captain Kirk and his crew because it's the only ship in the Quadrant: they have no choice.

What these werewolves and the vampires have in common is that they are well-intentioned toward humans and befriend and live amongst them peacefully, even falling in love with them in some cases. In most other stories they are the enemy. It's a twist.

In terms of mythos, these books do not follow the usual thread. There is no Harvest King, who is sacrificed to the gods that all may live and prosper. There is no Persephone: Bella, the human heroine, who becomes a vampire after having fallen in love with one, goes happily to this particular Hades. No unwilling abduction here.

There is however hierarchy. There is an alpha pack leader of the werewolves and among the vampires, the power is held from afar by the ancient Volturi clan (*like that other V-word, the Vatican, they are from Italy). The Volturi, like the Vatican, have dogma and canon law. One of the laws is that the vampires must keep a low profile. If they don't, the Volturi will flatten it for them. The Volture (note linguistic resemblance to "vultures") are Enforcers. As ancient vampires, they have unimaginable strength and total power. Like the Vatican they rule from afar (for the most part).

Another commonality between these beings is that we have two species of "superheroes." Both vampires and werewolves have preternatural gifts, are nearly immortal (they can be killed but it's terribly difficult), and they come to the aid of their human friends, but secretly, like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne. Superheroes are the modern Olympiad ... young people in the last half of the twentieth century grew up with Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Wonder Woman and other beings with special powers which they used to benefit mankind and protect the innocent from dark forces and evil counterparts. These comic book characters have become the stuff of the silver screen and are the contemporary Zeus, Apollo, Minerva for modern American youth. It is not surprising that novels featuring creatures with superhuman powers would be wildly popular.

Superheroes are also valued, I think, because they're magic. People generally seek (or have the illusion of) control and power over their circumstances. From ancient times, shamen have tried to influence natural elements to work in their favor. Many people whose theology consists of 'magical thinking' think God will work miracles for them if they believe hard enough or if they bargain: "If you do this for me I'll go to church and behave myself and give up prime rib at Lent, to boot." We who work in hospital settings see families who, when confronted with the unpleasant information that if the ventilator is removed, their loved one will die, cling to the kind of magical thinking which says "God will work a miracle!" instead of the perhaps more realistic "Nearer My God To Thee." They blame the medical staff for "taking away our hope." Superheroes make it possible in our fantasies to change reality, to make magic happen, to save our days. We welcome them. Also of course, these particular superheroes are as immortal as it gets without actually dying. The fantasy of postponing death indefinitely whilst having everything one wants (vampires: cars, clothes, homes, money...werewolves, the run of the woods and the ability to change form at will) has magnetic appeal: all the Twilight series are bestsellers.

What might such quasi-immortality imply in terms of soul? Do werewolf and vampire souls reincarnate, progress, go to Nirvana or to celestial streets paved with gold, at some point? Do they have to stay in Purgatory first? How long? How do their souls differ from human souls, other than having spent more time in the corpus? Some readers might assume vampires and werewolves soulless. But in the classic, Dracula, when the vampire dies, the soul of the former human held captive within is then released. Unlike the vampires in Dracula, Meyer's vampire and werewolf characters have character; they are good, thus, they might be said to possess spirit.

Another message we might extract is that possibly our universe is different than we assume. These novels leave us feeling there well may be (as Ruth Montgomery put it) "strangers among us."

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