“It’s a crazy time right now, and I wasn’t sure if it was the right time to put this book out, but some of you have been waiting for just so, so long, it didn’t seem fair to make you wait anymore,” author Stephenie Meyer said on May 4 when announcing the release of Midnight Sun, a brand new addition to the Twilight series of books. Fans of the beloved vampire romance series knew something was coming for days, after Stephenie, 46, teased the surprise announcement with a countdown clock on her website’s homepage. Many fans suspected that Midnight Sun was coming, and now, their decade-long wait will soon be over, with the book set for an Aug. 4, 2020 release date. The last book, Breaking Dawn, came in 2008, so it’s been a while since fans last saw Edward, Bella, and the rest of the brooding gang on the page. Before venturing back to Forks, Washington, here’s what you need to know.
1. Midnight Sun tells the Twilight story from a different point of view. For anyone who’s ever read one of the books or caught one of the movies, the Twilight saga is told from the perspective of Bella Swan. Midnight Sun flips the script and retells the original Twilight love story from the point of view of vampire Edward Cullen. “While I was procrastinating some real editing work (I’m always at my most creative when procrastinating), I started to wonder how the first chapter of Twilight would read if it were written from Edward’s perspective,” Stephenie wrote on her website. “There is so much more to his side of the story than there is to Bella’s in that first chapter.”
2. Midnight Sun was supposed to shine over a decade ago. The reason that some fans theorized that the May 4 announcement was going to be about Midnight Sun is that it was initially set to publish in 2008. Stephenie published a partial rough draft of the work on her website, but it never saw the light of day after that. At the time, she called it “an exercise in character development that got wildly out of hand,” but it seems like it was just a story not ready to be told yet.
JUST IN: 15 years after the first novel in the “Twilight” saga was released, author Stephenie Meyer is bringing readers back to Forks, Washington, with her new book, “Midnight Sun.” Find the details here: https://t.co/IHD4UfAkkI pic.twitter.com/ZY3ZqnBahG
— Good Morning America (@GMA) May 4, 2020
3. It’s going to be a mammoth book. “This unforgettable tail, as told through Edward’s eyes, takes on a new and decidedly dark twist. Meeting beautiful, mysterious Bella is both the most intriguing and unnerving event [Edward] has experienced in his long life as a vampire.” Readers will feel just as old after finishing the book, because initial listings for the tome have it at 672 pages. So, it’s a “summer reading” in that you start it at the end of summer and finish it sometime around Halloween.
MIDNIGHT SUN IS 672 PAGES LONG?! pic.twitter.com/o3g3u3Hbel
— Kayleigh Donaldson (@Ceilidhann) May 4, 2020
4. Certain fans already know how the story ends. Web security in 2008 wasn’t what is like now. Over ten years ago, twelve chapters of the unfinished Midnight Sun manuscript leaked to the internet and when that happened, it put a stake in the heart of the whole project. “If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James [a vampire tracking Bella] would probably win, and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn’t dovetail too well with the original story,” she said at the time, per The Guardian. Before the leak, the only people who had read the chapters were Stephenie, Catherine Hardwicke (the director of Twilight), and the man who brought Edward to life on the screen, Robert Pattinson.
5. Midnight Sun was also another chapter in Meyer’s feud with EL James. Around the time of the 2008 leak, Stephenie learned that her literary rival EL James had beat her to the punch. EL had taken her novel Fifty Shades of Grey — a book that was originally written as Twilight fan-fiction – and gender-flipped it into Grey, a telling of the 50 Shades story from the Christian Grey perspective. Discovering this was, as Stephenie later said, a “flip-the-table moment for me.”