Stephenie Meyer Is Finally Publishing Her Long-Lost 'Twilight' Book

'Midnight Sun' is basically a retelling of the first novel, but from Edward Cullen's perspective.

midnight sun
There he is. | Summit Entertainment
There he is. | Summit Entertainment

Hold on tight, spider-monkeys: Stephenie Meyer announced today that she is finally releasing Midnight Sun, the long-awaited (and long-ago cancelled) sequel/prequel/retelling of the Twilight saga from Edward Cullen's perspective that is exactly what we all need right now. Right? 

Midnight Sun, which will be released on August 4, 2020, revisits the events of the first book in the series, Twilight, except this time we get Edward's feelings about his first meetings and subsequent earth-shattering romance with regular human high school student Bella Swan, instead of the reverse. But why now???? you might be wondering. Well, Midnight Sun has actually been around a for a while. It was supposed to come out as Twilight Fever was still peaking, but after 12 chapters of the book leaked online from an unknown source in 2008, Meyer decided not to go through with publishing it. Instead, she put the draft up on her website for free, so any of her readers could give it a look (the page now redirects to the publication announcement) and promised to come back to it at a later date. 

To help Robert Pattinson and the first film's director Catherine Hardwicke get more into Edward's character, Meyer let the two of them read a few chapters of the unfinished book while they were filming so that they could gain more insight into the vampire's perspective on events. And this wouldn't be the first time Meyer has revisited Twilight -- after she finished the first series, she published Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, a gender-flipped novel in which vampire "Edythe Cullen" seduces human "Beau Swan." If you think those names are weird, just remember the Twilight series ends with a baby named "Renesmee." 

Funny enough, Meyer told fans at a Comic-Con panel in 2015 that on the date she had finally built up the motivation to dive back into Midnight Sun, E.L. James, author of the Fifty Shades of Grey series, announced that she would be writing Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian -- a companion novel to the first book in which Christian Grey becomes the narrator. After that, Meyer said, she threw up her hands and forgot about her book for a while, but not for good! This August, we're all heading back to Forks. 

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Emma Stefansky is a staff entertainment writer at Thrillist. Follow her on Twitter @stefabsky.