** spoiler alert ** 
 Stephanie Meyer writes vampire fiction as many teenage girls do -- overblown writing, sexy cold vampires, and a vacuously attractive heroine who serves as the readers' stand-in. WARNING: spoilers. 
 But as fluffy and shameless as Meyer's past work has been, she dips far below her past nadirs in the ghastly, sluggish "Breaking Dawn." There's a grotesque twist toward the book's spluttering end, and it becomes painfully obvious that Meyer was determined to give everyone an utterly happy ending. And she'll sacrifice whatever plot or characterization it takes to get that happy ending. 
 Resident "Mary Sue" Bella is getting the royal treatment from her fiance Edward in the days before they marry. The wedding goes off with only one hitch -- her ex-love-interest Jacob's anger at her impending transformation into a vampire. But newlywed bliss doesn't make for a terribly interesting grand finale, so we get the expected twist -- Bella's pregnant with a half-vampire baby. 
 Jacob becomes even more upset when he witnesses the violent birth of Bella's magical super-special baby Renesmee (nickname: Nessie) -- only to have something unexpected (and very icky) occur between himself and the newborn. But turning into a vampire won't solve Bella's problems, because it turns out that other vampires are gathering in preparation to attack... and it's due to the birth of Renesmee. 
 Authors often create all sorts of endings for popular series -- sad ones, happy ones, bittersweet ones, and occasionally ones that make absolutely no sense in relation to the series. Unfortunately in "Breaking Dawn," Meyer has opted for the last type of ending -- and that finale starts the moment Bella gets pregnant, and becomes more absurd and inane as the story drags on. It ends up being rather difficult to care what happens to any of the characters, because the readers are being assaulted by a string of absurd plot twists. 
 Not that there's much of a plot to twist -- Meyer desperately pads out the flimsy storyline with a lot of florid prose and endless melodrama. The first part of the book is pretty much consumed by wedding drivel and subsequent soft-focus sex, but after Bella becomes pregnant everything spirals down the drain. All this drama culminates in a ghastly birth scene that may turn some readers off ever having kids. Vampire teeth are involved. 
 Having exhausted what little plot can be wrung from a Edward-Bella marriage and subsequent pregnancy, Meyer struggles to somehow fix this by introducing a Big Bad Threat to the new family's happiness. Unfortunately, it has all the climactic impact of a soggy firecracker. As the final indignity, Meyer crashes down a vaguely pedophilic plot twist for Jacob, so he won't be too lonely. You can almost hear the thin plot cracking in a thousand places, as Meyers strains to give a Happily-Ever-After for everybody. 
 Bella remains one of the most vacuous heroines in modern literature -- she has the passion and intellect of a wet mop, but once she becomes a vampire she is also shockingly graceful, beautiful, powerful and self-controlled. In case you haven't noticed, she's just amazing in every way -- and it's difficult to control one's gag reflex when reading about a glaring self-insert made so utterly perfect. 
 Not that the supporting characters help much -- Edward has yet to develop an actual personality beyond adoring Bella, and poor Jacob is treated like a maniac. And the Ultra-Super-Special Vampire Baby is almost as nauseating -- and even more featureless a personality -- as the mother who spawned her. 
 "Breaking Dawn" would better have been called "Breaking Down." Stephanie Meyer had a good thing going with the vacuous vampire soap opera, but here she rips it apart and turns it inside out. Intensely bad.