Seventeen year-old Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart, left) is involved in a romance with vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in the film Twilight, based on the bestelling series of books by Stephenie Meyer. (Peter Sorel/Summit Entertainment)

This Friday night, for a few blissful hours, a huge swath of teenagers will forget the indignities of adolescence — the zits, the moodiness, the endless anxiety. Because: OMG! Edward! And Bella! On screen!That sonic-boom-like collective shriek rattling the rest of us will be the sound of millions of fans finally getting a look at Twilight, the film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s ridiculously popular horror-romance novel.

Stephenie Meyer’s true genius lies in how she’s adapted the erotic metaphor of the vampire legend for an audience that is at once thrilled by and terrified of sex.

Just how ridiculous? Since 2005, the four-book series has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, and the fandemonium that surrounds the big-screen version of Twilight has reached Beatlemania proportions. Girls in Team Edward T-shirts have descended upon the film’s stars like hungry locusts — at malls, at a recent ComicCon convention and at the film’s premiere in Los Angeles. At one event, Robert Pattinson, the British hottie who plays the dashing vampire Edward Cullen, was reportedly asked by one young woman to bite her neck.

Long before that, readers obsessed about the series’ plot points on fan sites and weighed in with hormonal fury on the movie’s casting. Director Catherine Hardwicke, best known for indie features like Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, recently deadpanned to the New York Times, “There’s all this stuff online. People were making casting suggestions and now they’re doing their own trailer and posters. It’s stimulating, in a way.”

By now, the fairy-tale roots of the story are the stuff of legend. One night, Meyer, a stay-at-home Mormon mom, had a dream she just couldn’t shake about a 17-year-old girl having an intense conversation with her vampire boyfriend. Thus began the star-crossed love affair between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, she the latchkey Juliet to his fanged Romeo. Bella is a bookish transplant from sunny Phoenix to rain-soaked Forks, Wash., while he’s a “devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful” immortal who is able to live, sort of, like a regular teenage boy, protected from the sun by the perpetual gloom of the Pacific Northwest.

Twilight hit bookstores in 2005. When Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the series, was published in 2008, it sold 1.3 million copies on its first day in print. With a post-Harry Potter book industry hungry for the next cash cow, the Twilight series has proven to be a bona fide hit, fuelled by the tween/teen girl juggernaut — the same ardent fan base whose big sisters turned Titanic and the Spice Girls into phenomena a little more than a decade ago.

Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight series of books. (Canadian Press)

The Twilight films — New Moon and Eclipse, books two and three in the series, have been optioned, too — promise to be just as huge. Some screenings of Twilight have already sold out in advance online ticket sales. The soundtrack, which features artists like Muse, Paramore and Linkin Park, debuted earlier this month at number 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.

Because I’m observing all this from a perch at least 20 years older than the target audience, the Twilight frenzy can seem perplexing. At best, Meyer’s prose is mediocre; dialogue lurches rather than zings, secondary characters are underwritten to the point of inertia and no detail of Bella’s life is too ho-hum to be left unchronicled. While other recent vampire offerings like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood approach the genre with a wink, Meyer’s books are as earnest as a 12-year-old girl’s diary.

As it turns out, that’s not always a bad thing. There’s something irresistible about the self-absorbed, adolescent aching in passages like this: “About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him — and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”

Meyer’s true genius lies in how she’s adapted the central erotic metaphor of the vampire legend for an audience that is at once thrilled by and terrified of sex. The scent of Bella’s blood drives Edward crazy, but, like the rest of his genteel family, he has chosen to be a “vegetarian” — they sate their lust for human blood by hunting wild animals instead. Edward can’t risk getting too close to Bella for fear of biting her, and so they end up doing a lot of restrained hugging and lip pecking.

At times, the books read like a gothic primer for the True Love Waits set, but Meyer puts an unexpected spin on the real-life abstinence movement, which tends to treat a young woman’s virginity as a sacred jewel she (and sometimes her father) must protect from handsy boys. In the Twilight series, it’s Bella who is perennially horny for Edward. (Meyer must have turned purple herself writing those panting descriptions of her hero’s granite pecs.) Edward, ever the gentleman, always seems to be putting on the brakes.

As far as romantic heroes go, Edward is a honey, combining the glowering reticence of Mr. Darcy with the crotchless, clean squeak of a Jonas brother. He reminds me of a novelty book that came out last year called Porn for Women. The joke was that it didn’t feature manscaped hunks posed on bearskin rugs, but rather shots of blandly handsome guys vacuuming, doing the dishes and cooing things like, “Ooh, look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we'll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair.”

Actress Kristen Stewart, who plays Bella Swan in the film Twilight, signs autographs at MuchMusic in Toronto on Nov. 15. (Mark Blinch/Reuters)

TheTwilight saga offers the same kind of neutered, your-needs-first fantasy object for tween girls. Edward protects Bella from bad guys, but also from her own naughty urges. She can safely crave losing her virginity and her mortality to Edward because despite being an archetype of male pulchritude and virility — not only is he a masterful pianist, he’s also a mean baseball player and expert villain vanquisher — Edward is, oddly, not that interested in sex. He’d rather — get this — listen attentively while she talks about her feelings.

When Bella does finally convince Edward to go to bed with her, he agrees, on the condition that it only happen once they are married. Meyer is extremely protective of her G-rated plot lines. She insisted that a passionate on-screen kiss between Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, who plays Bella, be toned down.

Grown-ups might feel nostalgic for the clever camp of Buffy or the stylish sizzle of The Hunger, but this isn’t a vampire story for us. As Eric Nuzum, author of the vampire compendium The Dead Travel Fast, recently explained on a U.S. National Public Radio show, “vampires are a perfect reflection of the age which creates them.” Edward Cullen is a dreamboat Nosferatu for Hannah Montana times.

Twilight opens Nov. 21.

Rachel Giese is a writer and editor in Toronto.