NEW YORK (AP) – The new EL James book “Grey” shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list ahead of its June 18 release on the promise it will flip the perspective of her hard-sex “Fifty Shades” story from innocent Anastasia Steele to kinky Christian Grey.
But her hordes of fans may not realize it’s not the first time James has explored her massively popular trilogy from Christian’s point of view.
The new book, due out on Christian’s birthday, began like the previous three erotic novels, as “Twilight” fan fiction using Stephenie Meyer’s original characters, hot vampire Edward Cullen and clumsy innocent Isabella Swan. James wrote about 50 pages as an “outtake” from Edward’s point of view for a fundraiser that benefited a charity in 2010 as she toiled in the FanFiction.net “Twilight” community of writers under the pen name Snowqueens Icedragon.
“Some material in the book is drawn from that previous work,” acknowledged Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group that includes the “Fifty Shades” trilogy’s imprint, Vintage Books.
The new book, “Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian,” was announced Monday and comes, James said, in response to numerous fan requests that she tell his side of the story. It’s what she reportedly said back in 2010, when she first wrote from Edward’s point of view to help raise money to fight childhood cancer with other fan fiction writers for the nonprofit Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.