FORKS — When Phoenix-based novelist Stephenie Meyer had to pick a location to set her undead teenage romance, Twilight, she wanted some place “ridiculously rainy.”
A place where a beautiful family of vampires could start fresh, and a teenage girl from the city could get reacquainted with her father, the small-town police chief.
A place like Forks.
“I knew I needed a rainy place,” said Meyer, a 31-year old stay-at-home mother, in a telephone interview Friday from San Francisco, where she is on tour promoting the novel.
This is her first book — and her research started with Google Images on the Internet.
“And the rainiest place, according to them, is the Olympic Peninsula,” she said.
“Then I came across Forks, and it was hard to resist.”
Bella, the main character, is a teenage girl who leaves her mother’s house in Phoenix to move in with her top cop father in misty, mysterious Forks.
There, she meets an extraordinarily attractive boy vampire and his handsome vampire family who are doing their best to live as upstanding citizens, refraining from the usual nocturnal stalking of humans.
“They are not your average vampires,” Meyer said.
“They are trying to be good, and Forks is a good hiding place for them.”