The "Twilight" series is anything but scary... and yet "Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined" has given us something truly bone-chilling: Stephenie Meyer trying to write a book from the perspective of a GUY. 
 Yes, apparently as an effort to dismiss the accusations of sexism in the Twilight books, Meyer decided she would PROVE how not sexist her books were by flipping the genders of the characters... and then rewriting a thousand little passages to maintain and even add to the sexism. As if that wasn't bad enough, this "reimagining" is a dry, dusty retelling of the same story, with none of the same frenetic, stalkerish, creepy lust that made "Twilight" successful. 
 Whiny, self-absorbed Beau Swan moves to the small town of Forks to live with his silent lump of a father. Yes, everyone else in this book is gender-flipped (with many names straight from Utah), but I guess the idea of a flaky, irresponsible man and a sullen female cop is beyond Stephenie Meyer's imagination. And of course, Beau encounters.... Edythe Cullen. Which sounds like the name of a Southern great-grandmother who makes everyone uncomfortable, but allegedly she's a hot vampire girl. 
 Of course, there's buckets of contrived sexual tension, mostly involving petty bickering and talking about things that don't matter -- and eventually he realizes that she's actually a vampire after she saves his life. A sparkling one, naturally. But after Edythe finally introduces Beau to her creepy vampire family, an evil tracker decides she wants to kill Beau. See, it's feminist because the MAN is the one in danger now. See?! 
 If there's one thing the Twilight novels have shown us, it's that Stephenie Meyer understands the male psyche as well as she understands string theory. So an entire book from a male perspective is kind of torturous -- her idea of writing a male perspective is to just toss in some token mentions of watching violent action movies, reading books with monsters, Monty Python and sports. It's kind of like masculinity as seen by aliens. 
 Admittedly she did adjust her writing somewhat, since her flowery, melodramatic style is ridiculous enough for a girl, and would be hilarious coming from a guy. And she adjusted certain scenes, such as turning the attempted gang-rape into a hilariously contrived confrontation with a pair of cartoonish thugs(because obviously guys never get raped! Rape exists as a peril to swooning girls so they can be rescued!). 
 But the attempt at a stripped-down style ("It was probably beautiful or something") just ends up being boring. When Smeyer does sound like herself, she writes lines that no guy would ever actually think or say ("I was well aware that my league and her league were spheres that did not touch"). And it's wildly inconsistent, with some scenes stripped-down awkwardly to make them more masculine, and others are just as flowery, melodramatic and silly as ever. 
 And does gender-flipping the characters somehow diminish Meyer's misogyny? No, of course not. It actually makes it worse. Rather than letting the gender-flipped characters simply do the same things, Meyer painstakingly went through the original text and changed the prose in a thousand little ways. That means the author deliberately changed these things JUST to promote her sexist belief that women are irrational, vicious, childish idiots, and men are rational, calm and sensible. Even the changed ending can only be explained as a gesture based on sexism. 
 As a result, the characters are actually rather different from Edward and Bella -- Beau lacks Bella's vindictive snobbery and martyr complex, which makes him as interesting as a Wheat Thin, and the sneering, domineering creep Edward has been transformed into the inoffensive, smiley Edythe. And since Edythe is a woman and not Stephenie Meyer's fantasy sexual partner, the descriptions of her attractiveness feel bloodless and vague, and she's completely devoid of even the pretense of menace. Even in a book where the powerful, dangerous vampire is female... Meyer can't bring herself to actually have her seem credibly scary. 
 Nobody wanted it, and guess why. "Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined" actually takes the misogynistic vampire romance, and somehow amps up the sexism even more. Only for die-hard completists.