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Your next stop: the 'Twilight' zone

Thousands of fans have visited the town where the vampire novels are set. The town is drinking it up.

COLUMN ONE

November 15, 2008|Susan Carpenter, Carpenter is a Times staff writer.

As Sydney and her friends mugged for the camera, a man in a pickup drove by and smiled at them with a pair of white plastic fangs.

"We probably wouldn't do this for another book," said Sydney, 17, who lives in Redmond. "Maybe Harry Potter, but that's a little too far away."


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A few blocks over, Anna Vandenhole, 46, was traipsing down the sidewalk of Forks Avenue, on the hunt for an official Bella bracelet -- a piece of costume jewelry festooned with charms and Swarovski crystals that Meyer herself helped design.

"We're just looking for trinkets and the photo ops. They've already got their T-shirts," Vandenhole said, glancing at her 17-year-old son, Sonny, and his girlfriend, Ashley Parker, 16, who were wearing matching black Twilight T-shirts.

Vandenhole had already succeeded with part of their day's mission. Her digital camera was brimming with photos she'd taken of the local hospital, a stranger's two-story bungalow, an old red pickup truck -- places and items that, to a non-Twilighter's eye, are just a hospital or a house or a truck. To a Twilight fan, they're the truck that Bella drives, the high school where she and Edward begin their romance, the hospital where Bella is taken after her true love saves her from being killed by a van. Characters who, to many Twilight fans, have been so thoroughly and emotionally rendered in print that they seem real.

"How often have you ever taken a vacation to see a grocery store, a high school and a hospital?" asked Janet Hughes, owner of JT's Sweet Stuffs, a brightly lit candy shop that sells Twilight delights: Edward Bites (chocolate-covered peppermint bark) and Bella Creams (mint butter creams). "We've had people from all over the world."

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'Welcome race fans and vampires," trumpets the sign for Weston Motors, an auto shop along State Route 101 that is the first Forks business a visitor sees when driving in from Seattle.

"Edward Cullen didn't sleep here!" reads a letter board at the Olympic Suites Inn, just a couple hundred yards farther up the tree-lined road.

That's before visitors have even reached the main drag. Travel toward Forks' one lighted intersection, and tourists can eat Twilight sandwiches at the sub shop or rent Bella's Suite at the Dew Drop Inn.

Many locals have played along with the themes in the Twilight books -- and business has boomed.

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