Edward and Bella in Twilight, the film based on the book by Stephenie Meyer

It’s the next best thing after Harry Potter, some are saying. The Twilight series from Stephenie Meyer is here, being launched from a Calcutta nightclub. It cannot be taken lightly — 12,000 copies of the series were sold in Calcutta in seven months during the downturn.

So how is The Twilight series different from Harry Potter, apart from the fact that Potter does not visit nightclubs much? The newer series hinges on the paranormal too, but it’s a bloody romance. A love story between a human and a vampire with cool, or chilling — depending on the way your blood reacts — accounts of kisses, hugs, and even some jealous vampire-versus-vampire and vampire-versus-werewolf encounters over the human love interest. Evolution at its best.

Says Siddharth Pansari of Crossword, “Four books of the series are among the top five best-sellers. It’s selling in thousands and has surpassed the first year Harry Potter sales in the eight months that the books have been brought to the city.” Apparently teenage adults arrived in droves asking for the books (the four books are Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn) even before they hit the stores and Hatchette had to allot more copies for its Calcutta stores to meet the demand.

“I kind of like the chemistry between Edward (the vampire) and Bella (his human love interest). It’s kind of eerie to read about a vampire falling in love with a girl,” says Ishita Sanyal, a teenager at Crossword. Ishita has read all four titles and finds them “engrossing”.

Author Stephenie Meyer finds her inspiration from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. She writes in her blog: “For my vampire (who I was in love with from day one) I decided to use a name that had once been considered romantic, but had fallen out of popularity for decades. Charlotte Bronte’s Mr Rochester and Jane Austen’s Mr Ferrars were the characters that led me to the name Edward.”

For her female lead, she chose the name that she had kept for her unborn daughter, Isabella. And the Forks town setting, where the romance blossoms and flourishes, was the result of a Google search, says Meyer, for the most rainy place in the US (vampires, remember, are not supposed to come out in daylight).

But the young vampire-followers in Calcutta did not come out in droves at night either, at least not to the nightclub launch.

The promo for the series was the first book launch to happen at a nightclub in Calcutta. The first Friday night on June 5 — the promotion is to continue through the months — was a damper, suggesting Calcuttans love their fiction at home, and not at nightclubs, though Tantra had on offer various vampire-themed cocktails, music and snacks, to be had with Calcutta’s party animals!

Meanwhile, having written the last of the series, Breaking Dawn, which has the “riveting” encounter between a vampire and a werewolf, Meyer is now basking in its success, having sold 42 million copies worldwide of which 200,000 units have been sold in India in less than a year.

She has won the British Book award pipping Rowling’s Tales of Beedle, the Bard to the post.

Sarwat Chadda

Is chivalry dead?

Angels and Demons, with Tom Hanks nearby, may be doing quite well all over the world, including at the city theatres, but not all authors of medieval atmospheres are being treated with grace everywhere.

Sarwat Chadda, the author of Devil’s Kiss, about the only girl squire — and a multi-culti one — in the Knights Templar, claims he was recently held at a US airport after racial profiling.

The book, published by Puffin in the UK and Hyperion in the US, was launched recently in the country. Devil’s Kiss was sold to Hyperion in a “big six-figure deal”, Chadda’s agent said.

The author was on his way to Book Expo America, the New York-based trade show, a prestigious place for a first-time author to be. But not before he was detained at Newark airport for “copious questioning”.

Flying in from Heathrow, Chadda, born in the UK of Pakistani parents, was taken away by immigration officials, questioned and not permitted to make a phone call.

“I queued up at passport control and spoke to the lady at the counter. She asked me whether I was here for business or pleasure and I answered ‘business’. She handed an official my passport and the forms and he took me to a waiting area,” says Chadda on email.

Eventually a policewoman called him and asked the same question, why he was there. She asked him if he had travelled around the Middle East or Pakistan, about his parents, where they’d come from, how long they’d been in the UK, if he had siblings, if he had relatives in the US.

After an unnerving hour or so, he was released and sent on his way.

Chadda says his world is different from Dan Brown’s (Brown is the author of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons) as his hero, Billi SanGreal, is a girl who’s been brought up with both Christianity and Islam. “Given the current concerns regarding Islam and Christianity I’ve been investigating the various historical encounters between these cultures,” he says.

They are not yet over.