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If you survived the great Stephenie Meyer Website Crash of 2020, then you know the news by now: Twilight Mania has returned. Team Edward reigns supreme. Midnight Sun is coming.
After relapsed Twilight fans collectively lost their minds trying to decode a countdown timer that appeared last week on the author’s website, the timer hit zero this morning—only to have the server crash at the last second. Twilight fans urged one another via Twitter to get off said broken server so someone could get in and report back with the news, but no such volunteers appeared. Thankfully, Meyer took to Good Morning America a few moments later to announce what everyone already suspected: After 12 years, Midnight Sun is finally dropping in August.
“I am very excited to finally, finally announce the release of Midnight Sun on August 4,” Meyer shared with GMA. “It’s a crazy time right now and I wasn’t sure if this 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. Sorry about the bad timing. Hopefully this book can be a distraction from the real world. I’m so excited to finally be able to share it with you.”
The book, with a cover featuring a rather unsettling crushed pomegranate, is set to arrive on August 4.
It speaks to the power of Twilight fever that the book has retained so much interest, given its long journey to the shelves. A prequel to the Twilight series, Midnight Sun is a reimagined version of the first book, but told from Edward Cullen’s perspective rather than Bella Swan’s. In 2008, Meyer released a partial draft of the story’s first chapter, but after a copy of the manuscript was leaked online, she was so disappointed that she cancelled publication plans. She then posted a partial rough draft, but made no promises to finish the project.
“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. There is so much more to his side of the story than there is to Bella’s in that first chapter,” she wrote on her website.
But after releasing both The Host and The Chemist, still no Midnight Sun appeared. Fans were beginning to lose hope.
Yet 2020 seemed to herald exactly the chaotic energy a Twilight reboot needed, and so here we are, credit cards in hand, ready to pre-order another sparkly vampire love story—in fact, the same sparkly vampire story we’ve already read. Just from a different perspective! Is Meyer insane? Or is she brilliant? Considering her series has sold more than 100 million copies, it would appear we’re the suckers.