Unless you have been asleep in a coffin filled with earth from your mother country, you will know by now about the Twilight phenomenon and its impact on the small town of Forks, in Washington state. The bare bones: in 2003, a tyro writer called Stephanie Meyer, who lives in Arizona, decided to set her toothy teenage vampire saga in a place where the gloomy weather would enable the Cullen coven (who live off animal blood) to attend school on cloudy, rain-sodden days. She discovered that a struggling logging town called Forks was the downpour capital of America, so it is there that the pale and interesting Edward Cullen is drawn to the equally wan human Bella Swan. Visitors began to trickle into the town in 2006, drawn to key locales such as the high school where the lovers first meet, unkempt, driftwood-strewn La Push beach, with its dramatic sea stacks, and the spooky, moss-draped rainforests. Then came the movie franchise — the second instalment of which, New Moon, opens here on Friday — and tourist numbers leapt a thousandfold above what a dazed chamber of commerce now refers to as BT — Before Twilight.
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