Abstinence Makes the Heart… Oh, You Know

The big tease turns into the long goodbye in “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” the juiceless, nearly bloodless sequel about a teenage girl and the sparkly vampire she, like, totally loves. When last we saw Bella (Kristen Stewart) and her pretty dead guy, Edward (Robert Pattinson), in “Twilight” the series hadn’t been saga-fied yet the two had concluded their troth, a chaste commitment solidified during moody walks in the woods, some exhilarating treetop scrambling and a knockdown fight with a pack of vamping vampires.

But love is cruel and sometimes so too are multivolume juggernauts like Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, which, because they need a prolonged shelf life, are as much about narrative delay (and delay) as release and resolution. That’s particularly the case here given that Edward belongs to a stylish vampire clan that has given up human blood in order to live, if conspicuously out of place, in a Washington town called Forks. Abstinence is the name of this franchise’s clever game a demographically savvy strategy that the filmmakers exploit with a parade of bared male chests which is why Edward refuses to stick his teeth in Bella’s unsullied neck, despite her increasingly feverish confession.

Like a vampire thirsts for blood, “Twilight” fans have been salivating over “Midnight Sun” for decades. Meyer planned to publish the novel over a decade ago, after the 2008 release of “Breaking Dawn,” the final entry in the original series. But then, an unedited manuscript was leaked, and the book was shelved.

The companion novel follows Edward, a brooding vampire with a tortured soul, as he battles his own nature — how can he love a human whose blood he wants to drink?!

According to the description from publisher Little, Brown Young Readers, Edward’s take is a “decidedly dark” one, though it will be released under the young adult imprint.

Not that its genre will stop adult fans of the series who grew up reading it.