by Jesse Steele

Anyone who reads or who has pre-teen kids in the US is likely quite familiar with Stephenie Meyer by now. I read her Twilight series earlier this year on the recommendation of my friend’s twelve-year-old daughter, so when The Host came out, my friend asked me to read it before her daughter did to gauge it's appropriateness since it's Meyer’s first book for adults.

I was excited to read The Host out of plain old curiosity. Could a writer so well known for her very specific, pre-teen friendly urban fantasy style really pull off a grown-up book? Science Fiction, no less? Could she drop the adolescent angst and romantic dramatics that made her Twilight series so successful and write multi-faceted adult characters?

The short answer, I’m pleasantly surprised to say, is yes.

By the bottom of the very first page, Meyer has already established that her focal character (of the moment), the healer Fords Deep Waters, is called a “soul,” that he is in a situation that is causing him a great deal of anxiety which is very unusual for him, that he lives inside a human body, that he has an audience of students, that he is performing something called an “insertion” (I don’t know about you, but it sounds ominous to me) and that none of the characters involved so far are human, except the unconscious adult human woman who is the object of the procedure—but they are all living in human bodies.

Right away, Meyer delivers tension, conflict, the beginnings of a premise, and the potential for some serious creepiness. She also starts the story from the sympathetic viewpoint of the “other”, making it harder for the reader to immediately side with the humans. We don’t start to get the human viewpoint until page thirty-one, and by then we’re hooked in to the depth of feeling and confusion happening in Wanderer, the “soul” who has just been inserted into the body of Melanie, the human woman on the table. From about page forty on, the story develops around the intensely confusing, conflicted dynamic between Melanie and Wanderer, both of whom believe they have the right to inhabit Melanie’s body.

There are certainly some overtones of Orwell and L’Engle in what Meyer is doing here—the “souls” invading Earth and inhabiting the bodies of humans believe they are doing the right thing, that humans have forfeited their right to themselves by killing each other off so wantonly over so many generations. The souls see themselves as giving the humans a gift. The humans, of course, want nothing to do with the uniformly peaceful, eerily cooperative world the souls create. In the course of even the first few pages of the dual occupation of Melanie’s body, we see Wanderer and Melanie fight with each other about free will, the right to make your own mistakes, love, peace, and a roster of other things that to the reader may seem clear but to these two protagonists seem gray and unsolvable in their current situation.

I think Meyer’s first fifty pages are really good stuff, honestly. Better, certainly, than the openings of her Twilight books. There is immediate engagement here, clear tension right away, events that are out-of-the-ordinary for the lives involved, unique character conflict, and solid sympathy for both sides—all established before page fifty-one. I’m supposed to be able to tell you what Meyer didn’t do right in her opening, what doesn’t work—and the only thing I can say is that the remnants of her YA writing show in one way I can clearly see—there’s a certain lack of grit here, a lack of details about the ugliness and violence that would surely accompany an occupation of Earth and of the people themselves on this scale. There is mention of it, certainly, but no actual action to show us how desperate this situation really is. On the other hand, in a certain way I was relieved, for once, to be reading a story like this and not cringing at the gory details but instead feeling the captivity, the hopelessness, the anger and desperation in a much more personal way through the internalized conflict of Melanie and Wanderer.

Now, do I think the book is appropriate for my friend’s twelve-year-old daughter? It depends. It is in the sense (and this is what her mom was worried about) that there’s no blatant sex (in fact, there's a lot more sex in the Twilight books than you'll find in this one), no outright bloody violence, no real swearing (or at least very, very little)—instead, there are moral questions, unclear rules, muddy areas, mixed feelings and changing loyalties for both characters and readers; things I’m guessing might go right over a twelve-year-old’s head. That’s why I think Meyer has made a successful foray into writing fiction for adults. She hasn’t just taken a simple plot line and dirtied it up to get an R rating, so to speak. Instead she has written a story complex enough that it makes the reader think, with conflicted, complicated adult characters with enough depth of feeling to be realistic—good people who make bad decisions and vice-versa—and she has written a first fifty pages that establish all of these things, effectively hooking her audience to keep the pages turning.