Allow us to explain:

This is a shot from a London bookstore yesterday, when copies of Stephanie Meyer‘s new short novel set in the Twilight universe were delivered to the store… by werewolf. Shirtless, barefoot, cosmetically muddied werewolves, carrying a coffin full of books that will be “kept under guard before fans can get their hands on them.” The book goes on sale at midnight EST today.

Obviously, our biggest problem with this is that they are totally the worst pallbearers ever.

QED.

Click to enlarge.

(MIT Science Fiction Society via The Daily What)

It was on May 26th in 1897 that Bram Stoker’s vampire novel Dracula first made its way onto bookstore shelves and into popular lore. When I just recently learned this fact, I raised my fists to the air, thinking loudly, “This is the day that 113 years ago, a course of events was put into motion that ultimately led to Twilight! Curses!”

I had, of course, assumed that as the definitive piece of vampire literature, Dracula was also the first. But you know what they say: When you assume, you make incorrect claims about the ancient origins of irritating popular culture phenomena. Or something to that effect.

After a bit of research, just to confirm my disdain was well founded, I realized it wasn’t. Dracula was actually preceded and inspired by the work Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, which came out in 1872. This novel, the real first vampire novel (though still not the first piece of vampire fiction), tells the story of a lesbian vampire who seduces a young girl and manipulates her family. Wait a minute. Carmilla sounds familiar. Lesbian vampires. I’ve got it!

It turns out, this movie wasn’t the completely random romp I once considered it to be:

Nowhere have the sparkly claws of Twilight failed to secure their grasp, for this week Forbes published their yearly Fictional 15, a compilation of the fifteen richest fictional people in current pop culture. Carlisle Cullen, the nearly 400-year-old patriarch of the Cullen family is the richest fictional person in the world with a net worth of $34.1 billion.

And you thought Twilight being studied at Cambridge was something: This coming fall, another British university, the University of Hertfordshire, will be launching the first-ever Master’s program in the study of Vampire Literature.

Dr. Sam George, the lecturer who’s launching the program, is also hosting an academic conference from April 16th-17th titled “Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture.” The “undead” in the title refers to “[vampires'] less charismatic undead cousins, zombies, [which] have been dug up in droves to represent various fears and crises in contemporary culture.”

A few of the lectures on the docket: (spoiler alert: there is Twilight involved.)

Yesterday, The Daily Beast put up an exclusive interview with Stephen King regarding the making of his first comic book, American Vampire.  Yes, we know all about the Dark Tower comics, but this time, King is actually writing the scripts.  In fact, much to his disappointment, DC Comics told him he couldn’t use thought bubbles anymore.

“I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don’t do that anymore.’ ‘You don’t do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they’re thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’”

King also mentions the Twilight books, as anyone who writes anything about vampires is now forced to do as if no one has ever done vampires before:

After a kinda useless ten-second trailer for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse came out yesterday, the folks at Twilight, Inc. (read: Summit Entertainment) released the full trailer for Twilight: Eclipse this morning.

Twilight has a strange power to inspire nerd-rage because it is not Lord of the Rings, or even Harry Potter, and yet it presumes to come up with its own mythology, involving vampires and werewolves. How dare it! Also, Twilight is for girls, and girls are gross.

In truth, we can’t pretend to be huge Twilight fans, but neither is Twilight the scourge of the earth:

Disney has a long history of taking its princess characters and turning them into merchandising juggernauts the likes of which the world has never seen (since Star Wars, that is.) Their mission continues, with a movie you may not have thought of, and to a sub-culture that you wouldn’t think would be very receptive to overtures from “The Happpiest Place on Earth.”

But, according to The Wall Street Journal, Disney has licensed a line of clothing, accessories, and fragrances based on Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland to Hot Topic, aimed at “young women and teenage girls, particularly those who gravitate to darkly romantic entertainment like the “Twilight” series.”

Translation: goths.

Some Twilight superfan over at Etsy has finally found a way to plug the vampire- or werewolf-shaped hole in your heart: with life-sized pillows, or “manllows,” shaped like Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. More pictures after the jump:

Soon, students at Cambridge University will be getting a new supplement to their educations: books from Stephanie Meyer‘s Twilight series.

According to BBC News, a newly-opened Cambridge center for the study of children’s literature (they call it a “centre,” naturally) will cover, among other things, Twilight, the Harry Potter series, and video games as works of literature.

In an interview, the soon-to-be director of the center/centre dismissed suggestions that Twilight and other contemporary series are “trash,” and even said that academics had something to learn about ethics from the series: