Meyers' heroes, Bella (left) and Edward Cullen, came to her in a dream. Photo / Supplied

Meyers' heroes, Bella (left) and Edward Cullen, came to her in a dream. Photo / Supplied

If you have even the most fleeting acquaintance with a prepubescent girl, chances are you've heard about the film of New Moon, the second in Stephenie Meyer's bestselling quartet of vampire novels.

At a "stars meet the fans" event in London's Battersea Park last week, the hysteria that has greeted each publication day quickened into a bacchanalian frenzy. It came complete with nubile tweens with "Bite me" scrawled across their foreheads, thanks largely to the pallid charms of Robert Pattinson, the young British actor who graduated from a bit part in a Harry Potter film to playing the glitteringly beautiful 107-year-old vampire, Edward Cullen.

Edward, for those who haven't been exposed to a hot blast of tween fervour, is not your average bloodsucker. For a start, he's renounced the part about suckling virgins' necks. Instead, he's part of a posse of "vegetarian" vampires, who have foresworn the hard stuff - your actual humans - in favour of hunting game in the woods.

Second, he's attending high school (Edward is stuck forever in the simulacrum of a devastatingly attractive 17-year-old boy) in Forks, a small town in Washington State, where he's unwillingly fallen in love with Bella Swan, Meyer's human heroine.

This thrusts him into the quandary that drives the entire series - if he goes beyond first base with Bella, he will end up destroying her with his unleashed vampiric lust. Bella's best friend, incidentally, happens to be a werewolf, and for much of the quartet she's caught in a big old supernatural tug of love between the two.

Stephenie Meyer is big business these days, heir apparent to J K Rowling's crown. Though her novels throb with all the emotion and eroticism that the vampire genre demands, penetration - of either sort - is endlessly delayed, making them ideal for an audience who have outgrown the charms of the bespectacled wizard, without necessarily having reached the age of consent.

Since the publication of her first novel, Twilight, in 2004, Meyer has sold more than 70 million books and is credited with single-handedly shoring up young adult publishing, plugging the gap in bookshops after sales of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows began to die down.

This year, Meyer was ranked by Forbes as the 26th most powerful celebrity in the world. The origin story of Twilight is almost as fantastic as its contents. Stephenie Meyer is famously a Mormon, living in Arizona with her husband, Christian, known as Pancho, a former accountant who is now a full-time father to their three sons.

Though she majored in English literature at the Mormon Brigham Young University in Utah, becoming a novelist was not something she intended, and the only job she had previously held was as a receptionist. The story, which has gained the patina of myth without losing its gawky confessional quality, also possesses a supernatural element.