Time to see what Bella Swan is up to this week in It's Always Surly in Forksadelphia.
As you may recall, Chapter 6 ended with a werewolf telling Bella that her hot frenemy is a vampire. She's having a hard time processing this information, naturally, and has a nightmare where Jacob turns into a wolf and attacks her and Edward comes to her rescue. Society can refine itself all it wants, but - and doubly so in the horror genre - sex will always equal death.
It also bears mentioning that there's a ridiculous sequence preceding Bella's dream where she tries to lose herself in music. Meyer doesn't tell us who the artist is, though, and doesn't even make one up, leading to sentences that are excruciating in their awkwardness.
The next day, Bella does some research on vampires, using the always reliable source The Internet. Frustrated by what she finds, she decides to go for a walk in the woods and... whatever.
I'm sorry, I don't feel like summarizing the rest of the chapter. It sucks. It really, really does.
Even people with no experience in creative writing has heard that it's better to show and not tell. Alas, Meyer is writing for a young audience using a first-person narrator, so all the reader gets is tell, tell, tell. The fact that Bella does all the telling makes it worse. Telling instead of showing isn't just the work of an unskilled author, it's also painfully boring. To make things worse, there are unbearable stretches where all of the sentences have "I" as the subject.
In summary, when Chapter 7 comes to a merciful end Bella is confused, sullen, and a pain in the ass. Same as it ever was.
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