MormonYoYoMan
Villager
actually, per somebody else I heard, a college professor made his students read it for some religion course. The story is a parallel to the Book of Mormon. With Vampires. That sparkle.
Speaking as one who hasn't read the books nor seen the movies...as a matter of fact, one of my sons-in-law started a Facebook page called "Husbands Against Twilight"...I can still state that the books are not a parallel to the Book of Mormon. Nor do I have any notion of how Janx came up with that idea.
However, I did - some years ago - do some research into Stoker's novel, and was startled to find that many (most?) of the concepts we have about vampires were NOT part of lore and myth, but that he made up. This is why his vampire, Dracula, was significantly different from previous fictional vampires such as Polidori's or Varney the Vampire.
Meyer has stated that her premise came from a nightmare of sorts that she had, and she extrapolated from that. Her vampires are no more (nor less) non-Stoker than the Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer varieties.
But count (no pun intended) me as one who still prefers the Stoker version (which isn't the Lugosi version either) and considers THAT to be the Classic Vampire type.