Did Twilight inspire Forlorn?
The answer is yes. Sort of.
It all started when I watched the Twilight movie with my daughter. I thought it was silly. Really silly. Vegetarian vampires? Please. I had a hard time with the idea of a vampire as the story’s hero. Vampires are supposed to be the bad guys. Killing people by sucking out their blood seems fairly evil. I understand that there were sexual undertones in the original Dracula, but that is what they were: undertones. The idea of vampires being good—actually better than humans—seemed ludicrous.
But I also saw that teenagers, in particular, are very attracted to the dark side, the bad boys with damaged souls, and what soul could be more damaged than a vampire? Since Twilight, there has been a whole slew of vampire love stories, some of them quite steamy. Fifty Shades of Gray famously began as Twilight fan fiction.
It’s the job of good novelists to turn tropes on their heads, which is what Twilight did, turning a traditionally evil character into a hero and making the reader fall in love with him. That’s a neat trick. To that end, Twilight is about Edward and, to an extent, Jacob. Let’s face it; no one cared that much about Bella. She’s a bore. She’s relatable at first when she’s the new kid in school, awkward around others, and terrible at volleyball. Yet she’s so beautiful that every guy in school—human and inhuman—wants her. When she falls for Edward, she becomes whiny, obsessive, and morose. She turns to Jacob when Edward leaves her, then dumps him as soon as Edward returns. She’s awful to her dad. She’s a terrible person. Her relationship with Edward is toxic and co-dependent. She shows little growth in her character until she becomes a vampire when she magically transforms into the most perfect vampire ever if such a thing were imaginable.
But I digress. What’s missing from Twilight and all those other supernatural stories is God. God invented the supernatural, yet He has been written out of the story. Books about vampires, ghosts, werewolves, devils, angels, and demons ignore God altogether or mention Him in passing as having lost all relevance and power long ago. In writing Forlorn, I wanted to create a supernatural story with God at the core, where He belongs. A story centered around a damaged, supernatural antihero, born bad, trying to be good, and the girl who falls in love with him against all the rules of the world. I admit this was calculated to attract a teenage audience that might not normally be interested in biblically-based books. But here’s the difference: instead of the girl desiring the darkness, the boy craves the light.
A Nephilim character was the logical choice for this anti-hero. It’s my opinion that the Nephilim are redeemable. Genesis 6 calls them “mighty men, men of renown” (there is no mention of female Nephilim). This implies that perhaps they are not inherently evil, that there might have been a way for the Nephilim to be saved. I’m just speculating, but then again, that’s why this is called speculative fiction.
In Forlorn, with Grace’s help, Jared seeks to break the curse he was born with, to become a “real boy,” so to speak. It’s a mirror of what we all experience, in a way. We’re born with the curse of sin and spend our lives in a quest to conquer the sin that seeks to overtake and destroy us. Only Jesus can do that for us.
That is another difference between Forlorn and books like Twilight. The characters of Forlorn cannot save themselves. That doesn’t mean they don’t have agency or the will to overcome their trials and temptations, but they live in a world where only Jesus saves.
I owe a debt to Twilight for sparking the idea for Forlorn in the first place. We are spiritual beings, and our souls long for things we cannot see with our eyes or grasp with our hands. I just hope that those searching for the spiritual don’t look in all the wrong places. Vampires don’t exist. God is real. Jesus saves.
Gina Detwiler is the author of the Forlorn series, the sixth installment of which, Penny’s Journal: Fortune Lost, releases January 31, 2023. She also wrote The Ultimate Bible Character Guide, and The Ultimate Bible Character Devotional, and co-authored The Prince Warriors series with Priscilla Shirer.
