This is all sounding a little too familiar. Here's how the story goes:

A mother with no writing experience is struck by inspiration. She sits down one morning and starts to jot down a story. She creates characters and sketches out a whole world for them, full of magic and danger and dramatic rescues. Her characters are almost ordinary, which is their charm, except for the fact that they are (fill in the blank: wizards or vampires). She sends the story to a publisher, not expecting much in the way of a reply, but soon finds herself writing a successful multi-book series and earning millions of dollars.

Yes, the creation of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series and its subsequent arc toward fame recall J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" success story to no small extent. "Breaking Dawn," the fourth and final book in Meyer's series, was released amid festivities this past weekend, with a first printing of 3.2 million copies. There are already nearly 10 million of her books in print. There are hundreds of fan sites dotting the Internet. At bookstores across the country, release parties for "Breaking Dawn" included the same costumed fans, trivia contests and debates that a year ago heralded the release of the last Harry Potter book. The "Twilight" movie hits theaters in December. And Meyer's books are also thick as doorstops.

"Twilight" and its sequels are vampire romance novels for teenagers. But the series is only nominally about suave, bloodsucking representatives of the undead. After all, Meyer is a devout Mormon from Phoenix, and her books are squeaky clean.

Meyer's vampires don't hail from Anne Rice's world of darkness; the Cullen family of the "Twilight" series comprises seven vampires who exercise self-control by not drinking human blood because it's immoral. They rely on the less nutritious, less delicious blood of animals; Edward has a predilection for mountain lions, while his brother Emmett prefers grizzly bears.

So in Meyer's books, nobody sucks anybody's neck, let alone gets stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake. And while they're first and foremost romance novels, nobody has premarital sex.

Instead, discussions of feelings and emotions and such fill Meyer's tomes. "Twilight" is written from the perspective of Bella Swan, a high schooler who is in love with classmate Edward Cullen, a 107-year-old vampire. Meyer lingers for pages at a time on their exchanged looks, passionate declarations and innocent touches. They can't be together that way because he might kill her by accident, but she loves him unequivocally, even though he's a monster, and he loves her back, even though she's klutzy. The adolescent yearning is palpable.

This could explain why "Twilight's" readership is predominantly female.

"It's much more of a girl's book -- it appeals to a female readership in the same way Jane Austen does," says Amy Clarke, who teaches an undergraduate Harry Potter course at the University of California at Davis. "I'm not putting it in the same class of literature, but it has a lot of similarities."

Fans insist that "Twilight" is not a girl book or a boy book, not a vampire thriller or a romance story. Tingley says she wouldn't have published the book had it really been a vampire romance. "I don't publish genre fiction," she says. But when she read the manuscript in 2003, "I had such a strong response to it that I knew other people who wouldn't identify themselves as vampire or romance fans would feel the same way I did."

The themes in the books, in Tingley's view, are ageless. At its core, the story is about choice. The Cullens choose not to prey on humans; Bella must choose whether to become immortal. Although the "Twilight" series is marketed in the industry's young-adult category (age 12 to 18), Meyer tackles issues of identity and relationships in a way that appeals to 50-year-olds and 10-year-olds alike.