"How did the author even come up with this idea? Someone must have taken her aside when she read this out to them and said 'you can't publish this as a romance, it's creepy!' Please tell me at lease one person told her that!"

I'm going to go into it in more detail later, but from what Fitzpatrick says, she originally began the story as a rough outline with Nora, Vee as her bitchy frenemy, and the totally human but bad boy Patch harassing her in Biology. Five years later, she finally got it down the way she wanted. She decided that Patch actually had a secret and that his secret is that he's a fallen angel, which she describes as "the ultimate bad boy".

In other words, the only reason it got published was probably because she changed him from being a human abusive jerk to being an abusive jerk who was not human. Twilight cash-in. -_-