"Nightlight: A Parody" by The Harvard Lampoon (**1/2)

November 20, 2009 10:20 a.m. EST

Vintage Books

154 pages 

With any worldwide cultural phenomenon, there always needs to be people willing to take it down a peg. And so, along comes "Nightlight: A Parody."

Teenager Belle Goose is unsure what to expect when she moves from her mother's house in Phoenix to live with her father in the northwestern Oregon town of Switchblade - but don't bother trying to find it on a map, as cartographers don't care enough to include it. Nobody understands the new girl in school - particularly when she lapses into French speech at random or talks with a mouth full of pudding - but she doesn't mind that. What does draw her focus is the mysterious boy in her class named Edwart Mullen, whom she immediately decides can't be an average human when he doesn't eat his baked potato at lunch. Belle just can't place her finger on it, but there's something odd about Edwart, if her daydreaming doodles of him with fangs are any indication. When she finally decides that he must be a vampire, there's just one question: How does she get him to make her one?

There's no lack of direct references to Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series here, especially with members of the high school staff reading books like "Daylight" and "New Moon" rather than doing their jobs. That's one school nurse you don't want to get a shot from. Meyer's prose is almost copied point by point as the authorial team of The Harvard Lampoon mercilessly skewers the characteristics of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. Stating the obvious seems to be a big laugh for the Ivy League student group, with sentences like the following: "'Game Over,' the screen read. Game over, indeed, I thought, using a metaphor." This kind of self-referential humor gets a bit tiresome, but in a book full of in jokes, you have to pick your battles.

You may love "Twilight," you may hate it, but it makes itself such an easy target that it's impossible not to chuckle at declarations such as, "Were we going to have to wait four books and thousands of pages for anything to happen?" The humor is incredibly broad, but following in the footsteps of members of the Lampoon's 1960s lineup - who wrote the J.R.R. Tolkien parody "Bored of the Rings" - it's like a Mad Magazine spoof stretched out to paperback length. Granted, it's hardly original, considering Stephen Jenner's similar "TwiLite: A Parody" was released earlier in the year, but with "Twilight" sequel "New Moon" coming out in theaters and other imitators wanting to clamp onto the vampire sensation that's sweeping the nation, we all need a good laugh.