All across America last weekend, thousands of teenage girls lined up outside bookstores dressed as vampires or werewolves. Some of the shops provided red make-up so the girls could apply vampire bite-marks to their necks. Others offered “plasma punch”, a strawberry-coloured drink. Not since the heyday of Harry Potter have so many books been sold at after-midnight launch parties.

For the US publishing industry, struggling to fill the blockbuster void left by JK Rowling’s hero, a new kind of wizardry has arrived. It is all the work of Stephenie Meyer, a 34-year-old housewife from Arizona who has suddenly become the fastest-selling author in the world.

On its first day in print last Saturday, Meyer’s new book, Breaking Dawn, sold 1.3m copies in the US alone. Her British publisher – Little, Brown – is already into its fifth reprint; on the day the book was released, Borders bookshop in Oxford Street, London, sold 400 copies in the first 20 minutes.

Breaking Dawn is the 745-page fourth instalment of a high-school vampire series that was initially rejected by nine publishers, but which has collectively sold more than 10m copies worldwide over the last three years – far behind Rowling’s 400m, but fast enough for Meyer’s publisher to believe she might one day catch up.

The Twilight Saga is no ordinary vampire series – it boils with desire that all goes painfully unconsummated – and Meyer turns out to be far from an ordinary author, whose Cinderella-like rise from obscurity almost matches Rowling’s.

Five years ago, Meyer was a full-time mother of three small boys, living in a large modern house in Cave Creek, a Phoenix suburb on the edge of the Arizona desert. Her husband, Christian (known as Pancho), is an accountant whom she first met when she was four years old and married when they were both 21.

She is also a straitlaced Mormon who doesn’t drink alcohol or smoke and, before she started writing, had never read a vampire book or seen an R-rated (for late teens) film. Nobody was more surprised than she when one night she had a dream about a teenaged girl who met a surprisingly courteous vampire. The handsome young man explained to the girl that he really wanted to drink her blood, but couldn’t bring himself to kill her.

Although she had studied English literature at Brigham Young University – the Mormon college in Utah – Meyer had never written even a short story and had considered going to law school because she felt she had no chance of becoming a writer. “My whole life, I told myself stories, and I just didn’t think that anyone would want to hear them,” she said, when I caught up with her on tour in Chicago last week. “I was very insecure.”

Yet her dream was so vivid and frustrating – she woke up before discovering whether the vampire had succeeded in restraining himself – that she determined to write it down and make up an ending.

Thus was born Twilight, the first volume in the vampire saga, written largely in secret as she looked after her children and tried not to disrupt her husband’s routine. “I didn’t tell him what I was doing while I was writing it,” she said. “I said, ‘It’s just a project, it’s nothing, it’s fun.’ He was terribly confused when I spent so long at my computer, but the truth is I was embarrassed to say, ‘Well, it’s about vampires’.”

The heroine of her saga is Bella, a timid and slightly clumsy newcomer to the high school at Forks, a small town near America’s Pacific coast. Bella falls for Edward, who has remained 17 since he died in 1918 and belongs to an unusually ethical vampire clan that has forsworn human blood. Later she meets Jacob, who turns out to be a werewolf.

A classic love triangle is thereby set up, and for much of the next 2,500 pages – the sum of all four mammoth volumes – Bella grapples with the peculiar agonies of vampire romance. Will she become a vampire herself to spend eternity with Edward, her true love? Will Edward’s improbably noble restraint survive his lust for Bella’s pale neck? Or will she abandon him to remain (sort of) human with Jacob?

The plot is closer to Jane Eyre than Drac-ula, with a heavy dose of Romeo and Juliet. And the series is carried along by an elastic sexual tension that one critic has characterised as “the erotics of abstinence”. It is to Meyer’s significant credit that even though her characters never have sex, her books are still quite sexy.

The woman who has successfully combined the most conservative social values with the most bloodthirsty literary genre turns out to be a cheerful, confident, fast-talking type who doesn’t seem insecure at all. She’s a roundish, bouncy figure who disguises her weight well in smart black pants and tailored shirt.

She remains unsure where her very unMormonlike dream came from, but she attributes her broader interest in stories to the books read to her by her father. “Dad would read to us at night, then stop in the middle of an exciting scene and put the book away,” she said. “So I would have to sneak into his cupboard during the day to read ahead. I always had this sense that reading was an exciting thing, and I loved big, fat books. I went from Gone with the Wind to Little Women to Pride and Prejudice because they were the biggest books my parents had, and they were stories that weren’t going to end too fast.”

Although she had considered going into the law, the birth of her oldest son, Gabriel, changed her mind about working. “Once I had Gabe, I just wanted to be his mom,” she said. She insists that she started writing Twilight with no thought of publication: “I wasn’t intending that anyone read it; it was just for me.”

Then one day, her older sister telephoned to complain that they never talked to each other. “She said, ‘Why haven’t you called me? What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m kind of writing this story,’ and she said, ‘So let me see it.’ When I finished writing it, she said, ‘We have to get this published.’ And I said, ‘Aaargh,’ and she said, ‘Well, give it a try’.”

Even her husband was doubtful, once she confessed what she had really been doing all those nights when she came to bed late. “He wasn’t very enthusiastic, because he was trying to protect me,” she said. “He knew how hard I would take rejections and I think he was concerned I was going to get hurt. And nobody would want to live with a rejected Stephenie.”

Rowling famously clocked up 12 rejections before the first Potter volume was accepted by a publisher. On top of the nine that rejected Meyer, five other publishers simply ignored her. The 15th offered a $750,000 three-book deal.

Meyer insists that she does not consciously intend her novels to be Mormon propaganda, promoting the virtues of sexual abstinence and spiritual purity; but she acknowledges that her writing is shaped by the values she learnt from her family and the church. “I don’t think my books are going to be really graphic or dark, because of who I am,” she said. “There’s always going to be a lot of light in my stories.”

Her style tends towards galloping melodrama, with minimal flourish. A random page from Breaking Dawn starts: “I blinked the tears out of my eyes, torn. ‘Oh Edward’ . . . ‘Tell me Bella,’ he pleaded, eyes wild with worry at the pain in my voice.”

To be fair, Meyer makes no attempt to present her work as literary genius, but it’s obvious criticism hurts. “It’s a bit hard for me: I’m very thin-skinned. I used to read all the reviews on Amazon.com. I could read 100 five-star glowing reviews and the one review that’s one-star – ‘This is trash’ – that’s the one that sticks with me.”

Like Potter, Twilight has generated innumerable internet websites, both laudatory and mocking. Meyer tries to play down the comparisons to Rowling but wonders how she handles all the obsessive fans who adopt her characters as their own. “I’d love to hear her take on fan fiction and the idea that the fans own the characters. And I’d love to hear her experiences with her movies, whether they were a good or a bad thing for her.”

The first Twilight film will open in America on December 12, starring Robert Pattin-son as Edward. Meanwhile, Pancho Meyer has given up his job to manage her finances full-time, her sons now have a nanny and Meyer misses them terribly when she’s on the road. She has no intention of moving from Arizona, where she loves the desert space and sunshine.

Meyer is also bursting with new ideas. Indeed, the success of the Twilight series appears to have unleashed a torrent of creative energy – all those stories she once told herself are now possible future novels. She claims that she has already written 15 outlines for new books – more vampire stories, yes, but also books about aliens, ghosts and mermaids.

“Now I’ve found out that people actually like my stories, it’s definitely not a problem coming up with ideas about what to write next,” Meyer said.

She works best, she added, when the house is wrapped in silence, her children are asleep and her husband has gone to bed. Like the vampires she creates, she really comes alive after midnight.

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