Uh-oh! Some unfamous author of teenage vampire fiction has accused Stephenie Meyer of stealing her ideas for last year’s Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in the Twilight series. In a cease-and-desist letter, a lawyer for 21-year-old Los Angeles writer Jordan Scott claims that Meyer plagiarized concepts and passages from Scott’s 2006 book The Nocturne, which was supposedly excerpted in 2003 on Scott’s website. TMZ has the letter in PDF format, along with Scott’s fourteen-page “detailed analysis of all copyrighted infringement,” and it’s pretty damning stuff if you’re very easily convinced of such things.
The slam-dunk case against Meyer? Both books feature the following (spoiler alert!):
• A wedding.
• A post-wedding sex scene taking place on a beach.
• A post-post-wedding-sex sex scene also taking place on a beach.
• A character who has a nightmare.
• A main character who becomes pregnant with, and dies while giving birth to, an evil baby.
• A scene in which a new vampire laments the loss of memories from human life.
• Main characters who refer to one another as “love.”
Pardon our vampire ignorance, but we were under the impression that pretty much all books about teenage bloodsuckers had those things. In fact, if we bought a novel with a shirtless, brooding vampire on the cover and the author failed to include a single one of the above, we’d almost certainly demand our money back. Wake us up when somebody can prove Meyer stole the idea to make vampires sparkle.
