Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 32

Book review: In Distress by Katey Hawthorne

In Distress was a must have story on my shopping list, as I’ve read most of Katey Hawthorne’s books and have yet to be disappointed by them. One thing that makes her Superpowered Love series so good is how each book gives you little crumbs of world building that don’t mean so much by themselves, but the more of the series you read, the more you appreciate this hidden society of awakened, people with various elemental super powers. It’s kind of like reading a universe of one-shot comic books, and even though all the stories have unrelated casts, the world they share continues to build on what you already know.

In this episode, Eddie Kim is a D&D nerd who wakes up to find his apartment on fire, and a superhero is pulling him out of danger at just the right moment. Except, Ed doesn’t know this guy at all, and how did he get in the apartment in the first place? This is really good question, but sleep-addled and still stuck partly in an erotic Game of Thrones dream, Ed kisses his hero, who surprisingly returns the kiss before asking him to keep the rescue a secret and bounding off into the night.

Ed doesn’t have much success with this, and his nerdy friends decide to help him out by putting out a missed connections ad on Craigslist. Thing get weird when someone responds to the ad, and Ed is pretty sure it’s not the right guy. Then the real deal shows up, and Ed learns he’s put his hero Callum in danger with another faction of awakened.

I like Ed a lot. He’s a gender fluid guy, neither a full-time top nor a bottom. He’s pretty comfortable being a guy, but he isn’t put off by being seen as feminine either. And he’s a nerd, something I can respect, given my many shared nerd roots with him. I mean, I don’t even like Game of Thrones (I know, I’m a heathen), and I still got the jokes about Jon Snow. Anyway, I also like Ed’s friends and co-workers, who are fully aware of his promiscuous way and don’t have a problem with him. One of the straight guys in his gaming club even has fun with their characters having a gay romance because he knows it tickles Ed. Now that’s a dedicated role-player.

Callum Race is a bulky but pretty jock, but there’s not much to his back story that fleshes out his personality. His reasons for breaking into Ed’s home are explained, and he has good reasons for his late night vigilante activities. But there’s just not much scene time to get into his head. What little there is suggests that he’s a cute nerd too, but I really wanted more.

That would be one of my few complaints about this episode, that it’s really short. The problems Callum has aren’t complex, and the bad guys are kind of thick, making Ed’s job a lot easier than it could have been in other books. But this left me wanting more time devoted to Callum to flesh him out as more than just a cool guy (no really, he’s icy cool) with with a vendetta to settle. The story is in, out, and done like a…no, wait, that joke is too easy. Never mind.

One other minor nitpick comes after Callum asks whether Ed prefers to be called he or she. By itself, it’s very sweet and romantic, but the conversation that follows gets slightly preachy. Keep in mind, I’m bi and trans, so I know all of what’s said in this scene is probably new information to some readers. But the way it’s presented feels like the author stepping into the middle of a romantic moment to educate the reader about good etiquette with a gender-queer lover. In moments like this, I tend to agree with Billy Joel about leaving a tender moment alone.

Setting that aside, In Distress is yet another fine addition to the Superpowered Love series, and another great story from Katey Hawthorne. I really like all of her gay romance stories, and I’m hopeful that one day she’ll experiment with lesbian romance, or with a romance where one of the characters is trans. If any cisgender writer is going to get that right, I’m sure it’s her.

So I give In Distress 4 stars and recommend it to fans of gay romance, or to fans of superhero stories with an open mind about the private lives of the characters. Either way, Katey Hawthorne’s books are a great way to spend an evening or two.

Book review: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Let’s just get out of the way that the blurb is a complete lie. As in nothing about it is true. Normally, I’d devote a whole page of insults about this because I hate being sold a book on a false promise. But when I finished White is for Witching, I really felt sorry for the poor bastard who had to sum this up and make it sound mainstream. Like for instance, the blurb says the main character starts eating chalk after the death of her mother. This isn’t true, and Miranda had suffered from pica long before her mother died. The blurb also called Ore Miranda’s friend, but Ore is Miranda’s lesbian lover. I can almost understand that lie, as nothing makes people scatter from a book like a gay interracial relationship.

But it’s not just their relationship or Miranda’s affliction that’s hard to sum up. How does the blurb maker explain the challenging narrative structure shared by two characters in first person perspective, a house that’s a habitual liar and a psychopath, and an unidentifiable third person? How will they slip people into this challenging mixture where narratives can flip on a word and cause jarring confusion about who is speaking? No, if one had to sell this book on honesty, it simply wouldn’t sell. So the blurb is a complete lie because it has to be.

How do I shelve this book? Is it dark fantasy or literary horror? Maybe it’s both? There’s not much I can say with certainty about the story because there’s a lot of unreliable narration going on. About the only character who can be considered mostly reliable is Ore, and her part in the book doesn’t come until just after the midway point. Until then, the story bounces between Miranda Silver’s twin brother Eliot, the house they live in, and a third person who handles duties for Miranda. By the shift in tone, it’s clearly not the house speaking for her, but I don’t think it’s any of her relatives either. Perhaps it’s just God. (In the sense that the author is speaking directly for her creation.) Certainly, it’s when the third person narrative takes over that the story has the most clarity. Eliot and Ore both have limited views, and their perspective is tinted by their own particular insecurities. Eliot is afraid of loving his sister a little too much in that incesty kind of way, and Ore is insecure about herself because she’s adopted.

But these two are still far more reliable than the house, who eats people, and who makes excuses for doing it. Nothing the house says can be taken at face value because the house hates people. So what history the reader gleans about Miranda’s ancestors is all suspect precisely because the house is looking to excuse his psychopathic behavior. And yes, I call the house him because there’s a distinctly male voice in his victim blaming approach. Because of this narrative style, nothing the house says can be taken as reliable. Not the birth of his awareness, and nothing he says about Miranda, her family, or the staff working inside the house. In this way, it’s like asking for the truth from someone who’s delusional. What they tell you will make perfect sense to them, but it will not be anywhere remotely close to the truth.

So what this story is really about is a house haunting the people who live inside it, preying upon the women in one bloodline because they have a history of mental illness that he likes to exploit to keep them trapped. The moment they want to leave, he eats them and then excuses his behavior by lying about what the women were “really” doing. I wasn’t so clear on this point right up until near the end when the house begins disparaging Eliot’s narration, and then it became clear who the biggest liar was. It’s the house. The cold, maniacal, manipulative house who looks for reasons to hate and destroy the people living inside it. Even when he seems to be describing his actions in a straightforward manner, later scenes from other perspectives make his story sketchy at best.

And this is why this book will be so very challenging for most readers, because it’s lying to you in such a way that it defies direct interpretation. You have to take these different views and think sideways about what’s really going on. There’s a lot of unanswered questions in the end, subplots that are mentioned early on but never resolved clearly. The ending is abrupt and depressing, reminding me bit of an old ghost movie, The Haunting of Julia. It’s the sort of story that leaves me feeling deeply unsettled, and I consider that a far more effective form of horror than a million buckets of blood or a room full of severed body parts. It’s the kind of creeping dread that makes you feel hopeless and uncertain rather than going for a visual shock.

I’ll give White is for Witching 5 stars, but I’d suggest it to readers who don’t mind being lied to and left to their own wild guesses about what’s really happening. It’s the kind of story that leaves a lot to the imagination of the reader, so people looking for direct interpretation will be put off by its ambiguity. But if you can get past that sticking point, I think it’s worth your time. This was my first book by Helen Oyeyemi, but after this first sample, I’m going to pick up her newest release, Boy, Snow, Bird. She is a talented and challenging writer and could quickly move up my list of favorite authors.

Book review: Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater

You may remember from my review of Lament that I’d talked to the author on Twitter, and I’d had to ask which book came first in the series, and she’s said that the second book was better. I said that it would remain to be seen if that was the case until I’d read Ballad, and now I have. So, was it better? Um, no. I mean, from an objective point of view, the writing is improved, yes. But ultimately I liked the first book more of a couple of reasons, and I’ll get to them in a bit.

I read this book in one night, so obviously I liked the story. I mostly liked James Morgan and his story of getting over his unrequited loved for his best friend Deirdre Monaghan. I liked his budding romance with a fae muse who chooses the name Nuala (not her true name), and I like the back story that makes Nuala an outsider to her own people. I liked the fae being a wicked and fickle race with their evil plans, and I liked seeing the return of Deirdre’s aunt Delia, the villain I love to hate.

But, there were two major issues I had with the story, and the biggest is that James is a world-class, grade A dumb ass. Seriously, there’s a point in the story where he overhears the bad guy’s whole evil plan, and there’s absolutely no chance he could have misunderstood the stakes involved or who their key target was, and he…decides to work on his play. I kind of lost it and had to go on a Twitter rant because of how stupid he is not to piece together the clues and want to do something about it. It can’t be blamed on him being self-centered, even though he is. No, he’s just a total moron who lets the plot unfold because he’s not all that concerned about a plot to kill everyone at his school.

And the other problem is a YA trope that always rubs me the wrong way, and that is, nobody talks to anybody else. About anything. I suppose I could understand why Deirdre doesn’t talk to James, because after James almost died in the first book, she wants to protect him from the fae. And I can understand Nuala forgetting a few important details because almost dying distracted her from the big picture. But James doesn’t talk to Deirdre, or to the teachers and school staff who clearly know something about the fae, or to Nuala. He just doesn’t talk about anything important. Maybe it’s part of his character to always be cracking jokes, but he certainly didn’t come across as being this dense in the first book, and he’s the first to confess to Deirdre about having psychic powers in Lament. Here, the stakes are so much higher, and after going through a monumental life changing event, I really expected him to grow up. Instead, he turns into a stupid little kid, and the whole plot unfolds because he never says anything until it’s too late.

The final 25% of the book is easy to predict because it mirrors the events in the first story. So it isn’t hard to tell that James will be forced to make the exact same choice that Deirdre did in the first book, and it’s not hard to predict where the final confrontation will take place because it again mirrors the finale of the first book. And I think that annoyed me because James has seen all this before, and he’s been told twice what the bad guy’s plot is, and he’s still too stupid to do anything about it until the final chapters. And even then, its not his choices that save the day. It’s other people who save his dumb ass from certain doom.

So, with these complaints, it might be surprising that I’m giving Ballad 4 stars. But my score isn’t so much about James and his flaws as all the other elements in the story being so interesting. And James does have his moments, like when he agrees to get his roommate Paul drunk, and then gives him non-alcoholic beer and lets Paul get crazy on a placebo effect. He has his moments when he tries to make Nuala’s dreams about being a director come true. And the ending here is more upbeat than the first book, granting James a happier story than Deirdre had. It’s still no happily ever after, just more positive, and I liked that.

But like I said, I don’t think Ballad was the better book. I enjoyed Lament much more, and I think Deirdre flies mental circles around James. I didn’t dislike the story, and I could still heartily recommend it to fans of dark faerie tales. The ending implies that there’s at least one more book in the Gathering of Faeries series coming, and yeah, I’ll be looking forward to it regardless of whether the story is told from James’ or Deirdre’s point of view.

But there’s a point very late in the story before James finally talks to the right people (far too late to stop the plot) that the school president says “Look. You’re not an idiot,” and my immediate reaction was, “Oh yes he most certainly fucking is.”

And I might not have as much of a problem with this if James had been presented from the start as a moron. But instead, he came across as a smart guy in the first book, and this second book constantly tells me he’s a gifted guy. But what his actions show me is a dumb ass who’s almost too stupid to live.

Even so, yes, I’m giving Ballad 4 stars, and I look forward to the next book in this series, and to more books from Maggie Stiefvater in her other series. I really like her dialogue and her take on different mythologies. I just don’t always understand or agree with the directions she takes with her characters. But hey, they’re her stories, and she’s free to write them however she likes.

Book review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Last night while looking for a new read, I really only meant to read a few pages of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but I was sucked in from the very first sentence. Within three pages, Arnold Spirit had my complete empathy, and he never once lost it. A lot of what he writes about I grew up with too, only under slightly different circumstance. But the similarities were there enough that I knew what he was going through, and why he was feeling the way he did.

After starting his first year of high school on the rez, Arnold discovers he’s been given the same geometry book given to his mother thirty years ago. His anger about that leads leads to him being suspended, and one of his white teachers comes to his home to tell him he’s absolutely right to be mad, that it means he’s one of the few Indians with any hope left in himself. This teacher advises Arnold to leave and go where he can find hope, and when Arnold asks his parents where the most hope is, they answer, “with white people.” Thus, Arnold decides he wants to go to Reardan, a white farming community school twenty-two miles away. Which instantly makes him a traitor to his people, and to his only friend, Rowdy. Even knowing what he’s losing to take this journey toward self-discovery, Arnold makes this sacrifice, and his bravery is what made him so endearing to me right from the start.

I’ve had some problems with certain books that made small town schools out to be exactly like inner city schools, but this book doesn’t do that. It feels exactly like the small town schools I went to, and that’s another huge point in this book’s favor. Every encounter Arnold has with these redneck white kids reminds me of something from a small school. It feels truly authentic in a way that few stories have, even stories that I enjoyed.

Arnold ends up joining the basketball team, but believes he isn’t good enough to play. All his life on the rez, he was bullied and made to feel like the lowest of the low. So it surprises him that he not only makes the team, but that his teammates and coach build him up and cheer him on to be better. For once, Arnold has something to be proud of, and at the same time, years of bullied conditioning make him feel guilty for daring to have a little confidence. God, I know exactly how that feels.

Throughout the book, there’s this crazy roller coaster of emotions. A chapter that’s really funny will lead to another that’s sad, or to one that makes me angry. And not angry at the writing or the character. Angry at the world, because I can truly believe this kind of story happening somewhere to a real kid. A lot of it happened to me. I can totally relate to Arnold and his story.

There’s several deaths on and off the rez that shake up Arnold, and despite these tragedies, he continues to go to school. He plays basketball up into the finals, and he graduates and comes to terms with his best friend. The book ends there, but I really wanted to follow Arnold through every year of high school, and even to his years in college, wherever he chose to go. His is a story I know well, and yet, it’s all new and unfamiliar, and I want it to keep going.

I don’t have any complaints about this book. I loved everything about it. Every line is perfect, and every scene hits with its own special kind of emotional impact. I felt just about every possible emotion reading this, and I’m in awe of how good the book is. When I gushed to hubby this morning about it, I almost started crying talking about the ending. Yes, damn it, it’s that good.

So I give The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 5 stars, and I think everyone should read it. Everyone. If you don’t want to read this because “it’s anti-Christian” you’re just making up excuses. There’s nothing against Christians in this book. You might want to avoid this if you’re a racist, but I’d advise you to read it anyway in the hopes that you might learn something about yourself in the process. If you don’t want to read it because Arnold talks about masturbation, you’re in denial about being a teenager. Because I tell you truthfully, when I was Arnold’s age, I could have competed with him for the gold medal of the Masturbation Olympics. Aside from some great jokes about solo love, there’s no sex in this book, and only a little romance on the side. There’s nothing in this book that’s offensive, and if you don’t read it, you’re just cheating yourself out of an amazing experience. GO READ THIS BOOK. NOW. Please.

And now I’ll shut up, because any further gushing would spoil the story.

Book review: My Sister’s Reaper by Dorothy Dreyer

I’ve been waiting for a long time on My Sister’s Reaper. The blurb posted on Goodreads had hooked me many months before the release date, but when the ebook came out, the publisher hadn’t allowed it to be sold outside of the US. I checked in with the author and the publisher several times, always being told it was “coming soon.” (Soon apparently doesn’t mean what I think it does.) Eight months after it released in the US, the author sent a tweet to me to say the book was available, and as I’d already been waiting so long for it, it got bumped up the the top of my TBR pile. So, was it worth the wait? Well, yes, but the story was not without some frustrations. I’ll get to those here in a moment.

The story starts off with the main character, Zadie Stonebrooke attending a cemetery party with her best friend Naomi. She hopes to meet upperclassman Gavin there, and she does. The party quickly turns to questions about Zadie’s older sister Mara, who only three weeks before stepped in front of a bus and is now in a coma. Zadie, hoping to impress Gavin, says that she can get her sister out of her coma. The other people at the party tease her, but Gavin seems genuinely interested in whether she can pull this off.

Zadie is someone who has always been different and has known it from an early age, having summoned a snowstorm and a yard full of frogs among other things. But despite her claims about reviving her sister, she isn’t sure this is something she can pull off. But it does work, and Mara returns home. Mara is not back to normal, and she’s aware that Zadie did something to save her. Rather than be grateful, she’s furious because this threatens to prolong her suffering. Mara, it turns out, is also gifted, and something is coming after her because of her powers.

Zadie meets another guy at school, Chase Black, who is the nephew of the local town witch, and after a series of calamities, Zadie visits Lilura to find out what she and her sister are, and why Mara is being pursued by a reaper.

I rather liked Zadie during the first 60% of the book, and her outsider status combined with knowing from an early age that she isn’t normal made her easy for me to relate to. I liked the story enough that I read roughly half in a single sitting. But then Zadie becomes a victim of YA stupid. Despite Gavin and Naomi being at the revival ceremony and knowing she’s got powers, Zadie suddenly can’t talk to them about herself because “They’ll think I’m crazy.” So Zadie lies to them so badly that they both leave her. Further, Zadie begins lying to herself. She gives up on the training she knows she needs to save her sister, and she complains that she wishes she could go back to being normal. But she was never normal, and this denial doesn’t mesh up with what she already said.

It gets worse. After Mara, possessed by the reaper, kills someone and gets questioned by the police, Zadie says, “…but I knew deep down inside she was the same, good-hearted Mara I grew up with.” NO. Again, it was already established in the first half of the book that Mara had become distant and cold to Zadie, and Lilura had explained that the reaper was coming after Mara because she was using her magic for selfish reasons. It’s one thing for Zadie to want to rescue Mara no matter what because they’re sisters, but Mara hadn’t been a good-hearted person for a while, and this attack is a karmic backlash due in large part to her bad behavior.

Naomi comes back to forgive Zadie, and this somehow inspires Zadie to pull her head out of her ass and return it to reality. She goes to Lilura and says, “I was being an idiot.” This is literally the first accurate thing she’s said in ten chapters.

What really annoyed me about these chapters is that they felt like the use of a trope, the main character in denial, simply for the sake of padding the story. It feel completely out of character for Zadie, and though I enjoyed most of the book, this section had my eye twitching for how dumb Zadie becomes. It’s not just that she’s lying to people who already know the truth. It’s that she begins lying to herself to the point that it comes off as delusional.

And before I move on, I want to address the constant use of the word skank as applied to one of Mara’s friends. I know I’ve mentioned this in other reviews, but it really gets on my tits that the YA formula for the value of teen girls is “Pure virgin good, skank bully bad.” It bugs me how Emily has a boyfriend, Mara’s ex, but she’s also stalking Gavin and threatening Zadie about seeing him. This story already had a great premise without needing to toss in the unlikable “skank ho” as a rival. Much like Zadie’s temporary case of YA stupid, I feel like the story could have been better served by cranking up the tension of waiting for the reaper to attack again. When the book is racing through these grittier scenes, it’s gripping and intense, bordering on a horror story. But when it devolves into YA soap opera tropes, it just sucks all the excitement out of the story and leaves me aggravated.

Moving along, once Zadie returns to training, she’s given a task to help Lilura and Chase make a weapon against the reaper, and Gavin follows her on this trip, leading to him forgiving her. He follows her to the Black house the next night, and there Zadie confesses about her powers. It’s then revealed that Gavin’s connection to her is…VERY convenient for the resolution of the story. It also sets up a romantic triangle for later books, as both Chase and Gavin have feelings for Zadie, and she seems to like them both as well. Part of me kind of wishes the later books would deviate from the YA formula and allow them to become a trio, but of course Zadie will be forced to choose one eventually. Because otherwise, she’s a skank. *Sigh* Yay, heteronormative YA values.

When it comes to a score, I feel conflicted about what to give. The first 60% was really good, approaching the 5 star territory. But there’s ten chapters where I was willing to chuck Zadie out of a high-rise office building window for becoming delusional and selfish at a time that felt completely out of character for her. But the final few chapters do try to make up for it. Even so, the ending is made pretty convenient because of what Gavin is, and that also dragged down my enjoyment a bit.

Still, I’ll give My Sister’s Reaper 4 stars, and I will be looking to read more books in the series. I just hope the publisher doesn’t make me wait the better part of a year before I’m allowed to buy the ebook. (Regional restrictions really suck, y’all.)

Why we can’t all just get along…

There’s been a lot of discussion going on among the people I follow on Twitter about the need for diversity in activism versus solidarity toward single-issue platforms, but I think I’ve avoided discussing it because I’d already written in the past about this topic. But recently there was this article about the growing feud between supporters of Parker Marie Molloy and the fans of Andrea James and Calpernia Addams that’s making me want to revisit it and provide new context.

I think in the past, I’ve come across as bitter about the constant fractures in civil rights movements, but at the heart of my frustration is a recognition that we cannot hope to build a cohesive platform against oppressive groups. It’s always felt to me like people with an agenda toward discrimination have more willingness to set aside personal differences in their points of view if it means keeping a group they collectively don’t like disenfranchised. So for instance Catholics and Baptists might not agree on how to worship, but they will work together to oppress gays and trans people. So in this modern world where even basic human rights are a political football to be kicked around, the pro-discrimination groups always have a number advantage over the minorities they want to discriminate against.

But as the above linked article shows, even within the trans community it is all but impossible to find solidarity around any given issue. We can’t even agree on what words we want to be identified by, or who is allowed to use certain derogatory terms. There are some folks in our camp who feel we should band together with the larger gay and lesbian lobbies and work under a unified banner, but many others feel this is counterproductive because the GL lobbies do not address the concerns and needs of the B and T factions.

They have a valid point. After Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was overturned, the GL lobbies have not made any efforts to remove section 9 provisions that make being trans an offense worthy of a court martial. While GL lobbies continue to fight for marriage equality, they aren’t doing much to deal with discrimination legislation that their B and T factions have been asking for. And for that matter, the GL lobbies have never talked about bi members who are needing legal recognition of partnerships consisting of over two people of any gender. Many have avoided this because it plays into the religious right’s arguments that gay marriage is a slippery slope to bigamy, but by remaining quiet on the issue, they’re effectively erasing and silencing a large group of people they claim to represent.

Keep in mind, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t also be fighting for the issues that they think are important. But if they insist on labeling themselves as GLBT lobbies, then they ought to be bringing up the issues that the B and T factions feel are equally important alongside their own issues. That’s not happening, and the longer it doesn’t happen, the more bitter many members of our factions become at the continued erasure. But what are we given for our anger but more admonishments not to fracture the movement?

This is the kind of erasure that comes as a result of solidifying many diverse groups with separate needs into a single platform that chooses only a few key issues to campaign for, and it should be noted how many of these platforms campaign for legal changes that only benefit the most successful and affluent members of a minority. Which is to say, the white upwardly mobile factions.

It’s not just trans folks dealing with fractions like this. Feminism has this wide assortment of groups who all feel like they have to speak out against the larger factions because their needs are not being addressed. The larger groups with the most influence have centered their campaigns around abortion and pay equality, and while these issues are important, they don’t address the needs of millions of women from other races and cultures.

I’m not even going to get into the trans-exclusive groups who feel they’re being attacked by trans activists despite many of their most vocal members calling for the legal eradication of our basic human rights. What I’m talking about instead is how these calls to lean in and lend support to a few key issues tends to erase individual experiences and needs in every community. I’m talking about things like the polarizing topic of legalizing sex work, or even the recognition that someone can be a sex worker and still be a feminist, or the need for modern feminism to accept more input from black, Hispanic, and Asian women, who all feel that the platform at the top is looking mighty white. And yes, I’m talking about trans feminists, who have to keep pointing out to other feminists that their gender is still valid even if their genitals are not surgically altered.

As much as I’d like to see a larger coalition that combines the collective bargaining power of more oppressed groups, the problem remains that the larger a lobby becomes, the less ability it has to speak for all its members. In the cases of both GL and feminist lobbies, what ends up happening is that their collective campaigns speak only to the needs of their white financially stable members, while everyone else is ignored or derided for breaking apart their movements.

Yes, it is frustrating to me that we can’t all get together to fight against oppression, but the fact is, simply being in a similar position does not mean we all have universal experiences or universal needs. What I need as a white bisexual transsexual is not going to be the same as a black or Hispanic person with similar gender and sexual expressions. We might have some parallels in our needs and histories, but they also have to deal with additional discrimination from whites due to their race, and they have to deal with violence and aggression from their own peoples. A person of a different race with my exact same gender identity and sexual orientation will even have to put up with discrimination from gays and lesbians of the same race because being trans and bi is not seen as a valid choice. It’s “being confused,” or “fence sitting,” or “trying to have it both ways.” The gays and lesbians who believe these things are the same people who will later approach those same bi trans folks and tell them, “You should let us speak for you.” Sure, let a group of people who don’t even believe in you speak for you at the bargaining table. How could that possibly go wrong?

I find this to be endlessly frustrating at times. I find it just as frustrating when someone tells me I don’t know what real discrimination is because I’m white. I’ve dealt with abuse from early childhood, even within my own family. The abuse I’ve suffered was physical, emotional, and sexual, and even when I reported it, it was condoned by people in positions of authority over me because “maybe I had it coming.” I know exactly what systemic discrimination feels like, and I have never felt like I had any support group that spoke for me and my needs, nor any legal recourse against the constant forms of discrimination I dealt with. So I may not have direct experience with racism, but I can’t imagine it’s any less unpleasant than what I grew up with.

But, having fought for and won some battles to gain legal recognition of my chosen gender, I can also look around and admit that there are others who have it worse than me. And that’s heart-breaking to understand. I’ve been beaten so badly that I had bones broken. I was abused so constantly that I was afraid to go to school, a supposedly safe place for kids. I was sexually abused and sexually assaulted by other kids, and I could not get any adults to believe me, much less to help. My life was pure hell. And yet, other people have it worse than me because they had to put up with all that I suffered, plus racism.

Part of me wants to complain that we are not in the Grief Olympics, that all our pains are equally valid, and yes, this may be true. But not all of our platforms are treated equally. The groups most likely to get air time are those who speak of a unified experience, and usually, that means white washing the cause so that it only tends to speak for the most affluent section of any given minority. What happens to everyone else is erasure of their needs, and if those less advantaged groups speak out against the white washing, they’re chastised for “poisoning the well.”

For as frustrated as I feel at our inability to unify, I also can’t deny that there is a need to keep all our voices distinct and separate. If there were a platform that spoke for my needs, it would still not address the needs of hundreds of thousands of people, possibly even millions. The moment that platform which spoke for me unified with a larger group for added clout, I can be sure some or all of my needs would be erased in favor of appeasing this larger whole.

So no, we cannot all get along and set aside our differences. This is because some of our differences are the direct result of so-called allies downplaying our needs and harassing us to let them speak for us without bringing our issues to the bargaining table. What they want from solidarity is our added clout for collective bargaining power, but they are not willing to hear us or admit that their focused platforms are not as universal as they claim.

I wish it were not the case, but the fact is, at this point, even in the face of a unified enemy, we may be better off remaining separate and distinct. We need to draw attention to our diversity, and to our many separate needs that cannot simply be addressed with a single law or court decision. We need to keep speaking out to our specific needs, even as larger collectives shout down at us to stop diluting their message. Because if we won’t speak for ourselves, clearly, no one else will, either.

Game review: Guacamelee for PS Vita

New rule: I will NEVER EVER buy a Drinkbox game again. I’m going to be right upfront with my score, too, 2 stars. I can’t give it 1 because that would imply that Guacamelee was badly broken. But NO, it’s designed to be this sadistic.

The story? Juan is an agave farmer who was never good enough to be a luchador. On the day of the dead, the president’s daughter returns to town, and she’s got a crush on Juan, inviting him to the festival for a date. Then out of nowhere, an evil dude named Calaca kills Juan and kidnaps the president’s daughter. On the other side, Juan is given a luchador mask, and then he is told to pursue Calaca and his minions to save the day before it’s too late.

I kind of knew this game wasn’t for me because a training session with a chicken for a coach led to a button combination that I could not get right. Even after making attempts at it for a few days, I could not do it. I put the game down and went on to play other stuff for a while. Only I’m now down to only one last game to play, and this is it. So I went ahead and wrestled (pun intended) with that one combo until I finally got it. Looking back, I wish I’d just given up and never tried again.

The biggest problem I had was the locked arenas, where after progressing through some tricky platforming sections, the hallways bar shut and force you to fight a certain number of enemies to leave. The higher up in levels you go, the more painful and sadistic the combinations of enemies becomes. As you upgrade with new movement powers, enemies grow shields that have to be broken with a specific move. This can be damned hard to do because the stick is tricky about directions. If that weren’t complicated enough, after defeating one boss and gaining the ability to swap between the lands of the living and the dead, these locked arenas will feature enemies in both dimensions, and while Juan cannot harm creatures in the opposite dimension to the one he’s in, they CAN hurt him. They can also fire through walls, and in later levels, those homing missile attacks are so aggravating that I want to do bodily harm to whoever thought that was a good idea.

But the arenas aren’t the only problem. As the game has this mechanic for swapping from one world to another, levels after you get it will require button combinations that can only be called fucking painful. For one section alone, you’ll have to double jump, hit the right shoulder button to swap dimensions, and then hit the triangle button to cling to a moving wall. Oh, and you have to keep doing this over and over quickly to pass the section. Fail just once and you’re started back at the bottom again.

I made it cussing and screaming all the way up to Sierra Morena, where I encountered a locked arena that I could not pass. I finally hit my limit for hand pains and said fuck it and pulled up the walk-through on YouTube to watch the final sections. And as I watched those three videos, I kept saying “No fucking way am I ever doing that.”

Before I get to the ending(s) I want to talk about the “humor” in this game. It comes in two flavors. There’s the meme humor, where the game makers tack up posters with cartoon versions of memes, and there’s jokes in the dialogue. Neither of these are funny. Drinkbox did the meme humor thing in Mutant Blobs Attack, and it wasn’t funny then either. All it does is show that they have an awareness of pop culture, not that they have a sense of humor. And as for the jokes in the dialogue, they might be found funny by very small children. But anyone past middle school has heard better humor.

So, while watching the final mountain level on YouTube, I found myself commenting, “Man, Juan better at least get a blow job out of this.” Because in that final series of levels, there are so many cheap tactics and locked arenas that only the most devoted person could make it to the end and fight for his one true love.

*Spoiler alert*

But Calaca kills the president’s daughter after being near defeat, taking on his “true form” as a giant demon. Juan beats him, but the president’s daughter is still a corpse. And fuck you for playing. Fuck you, fuck your ass, fuck your urethra, fuck every single one of your pores; that’s what you get for all the abuse the game heaps on you. Your woman done got killed, and the only way to be with her is to die, too. So in the end credits, Juan dies, and they’re all dead happily ever after.

Fuck you, Drinkbox. Just once, I’d like to see you make a game that’s genuinely fun to play instead of painful. For that matter, just once, I’d like to see you make a game that’s funny. So far, you haven’t been able to do it.

*Takes deep breath* I should mention that there is an alternate ending that requires you to collect all of the “mask orb” pieces. Do that, and your woman lives, and everyone lives happily ever after. But you know what? The work required just to get the sad ending isn’t worth it, and there’s a shitload of extra pain involved to getting the alternate ending.

So let’s see…find something nice to say. Okay. Graphics were good, with lots of bright colors for both worlds, and character and enemy models were fluidly animated and nice to look at. The music isn’t bad. It’s not great, but it never got grating or made me think about turning the volume down despite repeated plays. The controls…no, fuck you, Drinkbox. Maybe I wouldn’t have had such a hard time playing if I could remap buttons, but the controls menu option just leads to a screen explaining which buttons do what. Whether using the D-pad or the left stick, trying to activate certain abilities was a nightmare. I had a similar problem in the recent Strider reboot, and for the exact same reason. If a certain enemy shield requires a specific power to break it, nine times out of ten, I’ll activate the wrong power.

I will say this: games like this prove how well built the Vita is. Even after mashing buttons a million times, I still haven’t broken my first unit. When I do, it’s going to be tragic because Sony stopped making the OLED units, and it’s so pretty and bright that I’m going to hate going back to LCD.

I’ll admit, I was tempted to give Guacamelee 1 star for most of the game, but I tend to reserve that for something that’s a broken, buggy piece junk, and as I said at the start, this was designed to be aggravating and painful. Well, mission accomplished guys, so you get two fucking stars and a promise that I will never buy another one of your games.

And in conclusion, fuck you, Drinkbox.

Game review: Tomb Raider for PC

I’d been avoiding this game for a while, and not so much for “the scene” as for the company’s attitude that gamers couldn’t identify with Lara Croft despite doing so for many, many games unless the makers abused Lara so gamers would want to protect her. This is sexist in so many ways, it’s not even funny, and I was way past amused and into pissed off before the Tomb Raider reboot ever released. But then reviewers picked it up, and they insisted it was all a big misunderstanding, and the game is so awesome, all previous marketing mistakes should be forgiven. It went on to become a huge success, with lots of people extolling its virtues, including women and girl gamers.

I still chose to wait until the game went on sale on Steam, reducing my financial investment and hopefully reducing my disappointment should the game prove to be a dog. So let me just say right off the bat, “Man, I’m so glad I got this on sale.”

(Let me also say I’m battling a nasty cold, so if this gets a bit loopy or wandery, that’s the reason for my rambling.)

This game review will read a lot like my posts for all Rockstar games, because while Tomb Raider has gorgeous graphics, it has a lousy story. From the start, every scene is written in service to building tension, even if in doing so, the scene doesn’t make sense. Logic flies out the window thirty seconds in, and from there on out, it resides on a completely different island than the one this game takes place on.

The story starts off with Lara almost drowning and being pulled out of a flooded hall just seconds before dying. She then runs to a split in the middle of the boat (which has broken completely in half), tries to jump the gap, and falls in the water. And herein lies two or possibly three flaws right off the bat. First of all, the boat is still too high above water for the corridor Lara was in to be completely flooded. Second, a boat split completely in half would have sunk instantly, and would not bob on the surface. Don’t believe me? Go look up the Edmund Fitzgerald. Even if one assumes the ship was breaching over a coral reef, there would be no bob, and no filled hallway. But if the boat was still farther out when it broke, Lara falling into the water in between the two halves would mean she’d be sucked back into the boat’s lower levels.

I could do a list of flaws from the beginning, but just moving from the boat scene and all the problems up to the caves that constrict for no reason other than to make Lara’s first escape skeery and more claustrophobic would take me many, many pages. So instead, I just want to highlight a few and let the rest go. Because hell, it’s all running on video game logic anyway, which is several steps down from Hollywood action movie logic.

Welcome to an island where Lara can burn down certain wooden barriers in seconds without setting fire to all the surrounding driftwood walls and door, and without ever burning out her first torch. It’s an island where Lara can’t kick down a flimsy door or wall, but she can kick out certain metal panels where it suits a sense of dramatic tension. All doors require using an ax as a pry bar, because reasons, and because reasons, you’ll have to upgrade the ax to get into more secure doors, even if the surrounding walls are made of wood so weak the wind is blowing off planks in front of you. Later on, Lara can shoot a rope and arrow at doors and pull them apart in a burst of splinters, but she can’t use an ax to break them down. And later still, she can’t pull concrete barriers using the rope, but she can locate a motorized pulley that can. Yes, instead of yanking this 90-pound mini-spitfire off her feet and slamming her into the barrier, the concrete wall blows apart in an explosion of dust and debris thanks to science. Or because reasons. Mostly very stupid reasons, I suspect.

The story goes like this: Lara is part of a reality TV crew who are coming to look for an ancient island that no one can prove exists. Only, for an island no one can prove exists, it boasts a high population of men. This is because HUNDREDS of ships and planes crash on this one island over the years with nobody really making much of a big deal about it on the internet. It’s the sort of story you might pitch from the 60s or 70s when the world wasn’t so closely connected, but the reboot doesn’t make much sense about how so many ships crash here without an international search effort. Basically, it happens this way or else there wouldn’t be an army of cult members to hunt and stalk Lara and her friends. (It could be argued, however, that the enemies could have been ghosts, revenants, or demons, since Tomb Raider clearly isn’t going the Uncharted route in trying to to explain ancient mysticism as so much snake oil, smoke, and mirrors.)

After almost drowning when their ship breaks in two, Lara swims to shore and promptly gets kidnapped and strung up by her heels. (Which actually later directly contradicts what these guys normally do with woman they capture.) Lara’s escape is a ridiculous action set-piece where the walls of the cave squeeze together for absolutely no reason, and where crazed men keep trying to drag her under falling boulders. She climbs out of this collapsing tunnel to a series of stick waggles and quick time events and emerges out onto a hillside cliff to gaze out at a gorgeously lit beach filled with shipwrecks. (Whereupon there is never any other instances of the “seismic activity” that collapses tunnels.) From then on out, she’s chasing after her friends and members of the crew to play catch up, about half the time to watch them die horribly and swear revenge.

Let me illustrate how dumb this game is. After her friend Samantha is taken, Lara finds her bag. She takes out Sam’s digital camera and somehow shoves it up her own ass instead of putting it back in the bag and carrying the bag with her, since she doesn’t have one. Then she takes out Sam’s radio and asks, “Sam, can you hear me?” With. Sam’s. Radio.

And this is the great bloody moron that I’m told time and again is really a super genius. Long after I’d pieced enough clues together to see where the story was going, Lara was still in her own little world, clueless until it was absolutely impossible not to notice the obvious. Until then, whenever any other characters asked what was going on, Lara’s stock answer is “I don’t know.” Which is goofy, because like I said, I knew from the documents I’d collected at 20% of the game what was going on, who was behind the shipwrecks, who the cult leader was, and what they planned to do with Lara and her friends. I wouldn’t consider myself a Sherlock Holmes, but clearly, Lara isn’t either.

But so let’s move on from the story. What’s the game play like? It’s like Uncharted, mostly. It’s the same set pieces, the same platforming sections on conveniently painted pipes and ledges, and almost the same feeling in combat. Tomb Raider, however, takes a turn for the annoying with a metric shit-ton of quick time events, and not a one of these wasn’t irritating to me. I rather liked Uncharted: Golden Abyss, but there was the water slide section that I despised, and lucky me, Tomb Raider duplicates that sequence TWICE.

The graphics are just as strong as Uncharted, and this is where the makers didn’t do too badly. But it’s not a perfect presentation. Take for instance the windy sections, where Lara leans hard to one side against a furious wind. Yet her ponytail remains limp down her back. Her torch stays lit in this stiff wind with no change in the flame’s direction or strength, and none of the banners or flags in the scene wave with the wind. So long as there’s no strong wind to ruin the illusion, the game looks pretty good.

The weapons…well they’re okay. They aim well enough, but they lack any sense of punch even after being upgraded to do more damage. The one weapon that didn’t feel weak is the bow. Once you get one skill point spent on the charged shot, you can drop most enemies with a single head or neck shot. If not for the clusterfuck enemy swarms the game sometimes tosses out, there’d be no need to use any of the other weapons. As Lara progresses through the game, she gets bigger and better bows, turning it into the weapon of choice for most situations. I’m not saying the other weapons are useless after upgrades. I’m just saying the bow is a bit overpowered by comparison.

Oh, and Lara only straps her current weapon on her back or hip, while she keeps the rest hidden up her ass along with Sam’s digital camera and all the artifacts she collects. Lara apparently has plenty of room in her trunk for all this junk. But seriously, if the game was aping Uncharted this much, would it have killed the modelers to add a backpack to at least pretend Lara had some cargo space?

Game sections are divided into very predictable patterns. Platform leads to short gun fight. Back to platform, another gunfight followed by a cut scene or action set-piece. And finally, even more platforming leads to a trap arena where you have to kill X number of advancing waves to progress. Wash, rinse, and repeat all the way to the end of the game. Traps are never surprising because as you approach them, the camera locks down, pointing you into the trap and preventing you from looking around. By the third trap, I knew whenever an ambush was coming, so there was never any sense of tension, just a resigned disappointment that I’d be stuck in another arena fight.

The enemy AI is a bit weird. Not necessarily broke, just weird. Lara can run clomping up full-tilt behind guys without them turning around in sections that encourage stealth, but if a scene is scripted for an ambush, they will hear her even at her slowest walking speed. They can see her around corners and pop out of hiding places to scream nonsense like “Now I’ve got you!” Their tactics are mostly the cliched frontal assault rush, but on rare occasions they will send out someone in a flanking maneuver. I kind of wish there’d been more of this kind of tricky combat because that’s when fights felt the most tense and immersive.

In addition to improved skills with her ranged weapons, Lara can upgrade to learn new close combat techniques. These are all QTEs where you will see one button prompt to start the attack, followed by another to make the killing blow. At first, all you can do is tap Y to put guys in choke holds, and then rapidly tap X to strangle them with the bow. But later on, you get options to fight with your axe or arrows, and you can tap B to dodge before getting a QTE to tap Y at just the right time for a finishing maneuver. It’s simple enough to grasp, but I failed the timing of the Y press often that once my rifle was upgraded with a grenade launcher, I often just popped a grenade behind the guys trying to get in close to me rather than play with the combos.

Oh, and I have to mention the wolves. It seemed odd to me right from the start to have them on an island with no obvious ways to migrate there, but then I noticed how wolves would ignore all other wildlife to focus on me. Yet certain scenes show animal carcasses to suggest these “wild” wolves are hunting game. During the start of a stealth section, one of the guards hears howling and complains about being stuck out with the wolves. Yet if you get caught by a guard in the same section, they then shout “Release the wolves!” And only a few scene later, Lara finds a cave where the wolves are caged, speculating that they’ve been bred and trained. They rather conveniently don’t attack anyone else, not the game, nor the cultists, and a pack only attacks one of Lara’s friends when it’s convenient for upping the tension.

There are some secret tombs to break up the monotony and get this Tomb Raider game back to the point of its existence, but the puzzles in these tombs are pathetically simple, even without the right button’s “survival mode” to hold your hand. The built-in hint system makes your objectives glow gold while everything else washes out to shades of grey. But since most objectives and platforms are already painted a la Uncharted, there’s rarely any reason to use it. I usually pressed it because I’d lost track of some animal I was hunting for XP and for really dark sections where it was hard to tell what sections of a wall could be scaled or not.

It wasn’t until I got to an elevator puzzle late in the game that I realized that Lara would explain what needed to be done to pass a puzzle because I was whipping through the rest too quickly to need hand holding. That’s not because I’m super smart. It’s because the puzzles are ultra-dumb. But while working on that elevator, Lara would talk so often about what I needed to do that I started grumbling “Shut up, Lara.”

In addition to hunting animals for extra XP, there’s crates to be broken open for scavenged parts. There’s no specific parts you’re collecting, though. Collect enough junk, and you can upgrade your weapons. It’s more of a currency system than an actual list of parts. This doesn’t make much sense, but it’s par for the course and fits in well with the rest of the nonsensical equipment choices.

Long before the end of the game, I got why Sam was kidnapped, but Lara is dumb about the big boss’ motives right up until the final section of the game. And there’s no boss fight at the end, just larger swarms of enemies to dispatch using the same tactics before dealing with big boss Mathias through a set of quick time events. Again, it’s almost exactly the same as Uncharted. I wouldn’t rightly call that a complaint, though, as I hate boss battles almost as much as I hate QTEs.

The controls are pretty simple to use, and I rarely died from pressing the wrong button, even during the QTEs. Where I died was in those exact timing required moments, and then I died a lot. “Wiggle the left stick! You didn’t wiggle it fast enough. Try again!” And four attempts later: “Wiggle the left stick! Now press Y! You didn’t press Y at the right time! Try again!” *Le sigh*

And I suppose I should address that one scene, the one which got labeled a near rape by the representatives at E3. They didn’t do themselves any favors stirring up women gamers about that, but it’s not a near rape, nor a half rape. It’s just plain old vanilla murder, the same pass or fail conditions we’ve been seeing in Tomb Raider from the first game. I suppose it’s for the best. Had those representatives not botched their sales push at E3, I might have bought the game at full retail and ended up being far more pissy about what a crap story this is. Instead, I’m just slightly annoyed by all the flaws; the super genius main character who’s actually quite dumb, the even dumber friends who keep suggesting splitting up despite knowing what’s on the island, the giant army of enemies on an island that no one seems to know the location of despite thousands of vessels and aircraft ending up there in a modern internet-connected world, and the rather convenient inclusion of a character who just happens to be the chosen one for the evil cult of castaways.

I still hated the writing, but I will admit that there were certain combat or or platforming sequences where the game left me alone and let me play my own way instead of being forced into a hand-holding linear corridor. I also got a rather lovely kick out of using flaming arrows at just the right times, as when a group of cult members started praying near a gas pocket “Flame to the flesh–!” and I said, “Ding! Wish granted!” and let loose, blasting the whole group to kingdom come.

But the good fun bits are jam-packed between sections of terrible writing that I was often dead-panning, “I hate you guys so much right now.” And then there’s those goddamned QTEs. The only way they could have made this game worse was adding a timer to sections. (And thank God they didn’t, or I might never have finished the game.)

I didn’t get 100% complete on this game, and I never do on any game. But I found most of the salvage scraps, all of the secret tombs, some of the scattered documents and GPS tags, and very few of the extra achievement items. (i.e.: flags to burn, effigies to take down, cairns to desecrate.) I only have so much patience for make busy work, and so once I’ve accomplished my goals in a level and found a relic or document, I just say fuck it to the other missing collectibles and move on. Even so, I managed to get 75% complete, which is not too shabby.

If I were giving a rating strictly on prettiness, Tomb Raider would be worthy of a 5 star rating. But adding up all my various problems with the story and game play, I’m going to give it a 3. I think I’m being damned generous not going down to a two. It’s not so crappy to earn a 1, even if the story is dumber than the secret tomb puzzles. But it has some moments where the prettiful outshines the dumb, and then I could think, “Well, it’s not that bad.” Then something dumb would happen and I’d go back to “I hate you guys so much.” So Tomb Raider, much like Lara’s presentation in the game, is cute but stupid. And lots of skeezy guys will tell you that’s good for at least a night or two of diversion before it gets old.

Book review: Autumn In the Abyss by John Claude Smith

I should preface the review by saying that I had decided a few years back not to review short story collections because I’m not all that fair to the format. I’d changed my mind by reading some flash fiction collections, and I found certain books that I enjoyed quite a bit. But I can’t say I enjoyed much of this collection, and I admit my issues with it are more about my biases than anything wrong with the writing.

I did enjoy the first story in the collection, which bears the same name as the book. But the reason why Autumn In the Abyss worked for me is in its length, being a novelette that builds on a mystery slowly to reveal the fate of a poet who went missing in the sixties, Henry Coronado. The narrator is an agoraphobic shut-in who has become obsessed with solving this mystery, which is surrounded by names of many writers from the same era. This is another reason why the story works for me, because it wraps itself in history in such a way that I can almost imagine that this is something that really happened. It wasn’t until close to the reveal that I guessed the ending, and by then, I was so invested in the story that I didn’t mind finding out why Henry vanished, and why his works slipped so rapidly out of the public eye. There’s also some interesting concepts about the power and purpose of words that tickles at my brain with possible inspiration for stories, and so yes, I really did enjoy this story. If I were giving a score based on this one story alone, Autumn In the Abyss would be a 5 star book.

Then comes Broken Teacup, and I didn’t like it at all. It’s fairly short, and the plot follows men who make snuff porn films. This is the kind of horror story where one should hate the characters and root for the monster which we know is coming for them. But this kind of story rarely has the right impact on me. I think it’s because on any given day, I see similar real news stories about the worst humanity has to offer, and there’s no shock value in seeing these kinds of people starring as the main characters. Similarly, I feel no satisfaction at these characters meeting their demise. To truly horrify me, you have to give me someone to feel invested in, and to feel afraid for in the face of danger. That doesn’t have to be a good person, either. It just has to be someone compelling enough to make me see the threat through their eyes. But Broken Teacup doesn’t give me any time to understand the characters. It’s too short to allow for emotional investment of any kind. There’s these guys, and they torture and kill women for custom porn videos. Then they meet a monster, and that’s the end of the story. This really doesn’t work for me.

The third story, La mia immortalita, starts off with steps in the right direction by introducing me to an artist who is desperate to create a work of art that will gain him a place in history. This is something I can understand, wanting to achieve fame powerful enough to ensure that the world will not forget him after he’s gone. But shortly after weakly building this connection to me, the character reveals a nasty side that almost matches the empty callousness of the snuff pornographers from the previous story. His evil side is barely revealed when the monster appears for another episode of divine justice, and it’s as much the brevity of the story as the empty shallowness of the character that keeps me from enjoying it.

The fourth story, Becoming Human tries to shift gears, following a detective mentally broken and scarred after solving the case the defined his career. Here, while it’s possible to feel something for Detective Roberto Vera, the story of the psychopath he tracked and arrested feels pretty far-fetched, and the story of Vera hunting down a copycat killer and making a shocking discovery is just as out there. Which I don’t suppose I would have minded if the whole thing didn’t feel so rushed. The story ends in such a way that Roberto has closure and possible redemption, but I can’t say I felt anything more for him than I did for the doomed snuff crew. Which is a shame, because I suspect in a longer story, I might feel more invested in a mentally broken but basically good character like Roberto.

Last in the collection is Where the Light Won’t Find You, and it diverts the most wildly from the others in the story while still sharing certain themes and characters. In this story, Derek Jenner is a guy who’s just had a fight with his girlfriend and decides to go to the movies to give her time to calm down. Once at the movie theater, he sees a movie title ominously flickering and asks about it, only to be told it is sold out…in a theater that’s mostly empty. He buys a ticket to another movie, and then goes to the movie anyway, where he sees something he was not meant to. It’s just as brief as the four previous stories, but where this one helps build some investment, and thus a real sense of horror, is that Derek is an okay guy. He’s not beating his girlfriend, they just had an argument and he already feels bad about it. Who hasn’t been there before? So when there’s a threat to his safety, it’s easier to feel worried for him, and to want him to escape.

I kind of wish the other stories had been bumpered with more offerings like this one as a way to balance out all the shallow cruelty. But even then, I don’t think I would feel anything for the second and third stories. They’re sliver thin slices of nastiness where cosmic justice steps in to “redress the balance,” or Karma taking on a monstrous physical form. The same theme is present in the final tale, but it’s the act of changing focus to a more relatable character that helped give me a genuine scare.

So that’s two stories out of five that I enjoyed, two that I felt nothing for, and one that I wanted to feel something if only the antagonist hadn’t broken my ability to suspend disbelief. I feel I should say that all are written well, artfully, even. This is consistent with the previous short stories I’ve read from Smith, but those single stories, found in various online publications, were longer and allowed more time to the development of their characters and themes. So I feel like what’s missing here in two of the three tales is time to develop any feelings for the characters, even if the intended emotion that should be invoked is revulsion.

As a whole I give Autumn In the Abyss 3 stars, and I admit my problems with the some of the stories lies more in their brevity than in their tone. I’m sure this will have more appeal to fans of gritty horror, but aside from the first and last story, the lack of space to roam and explore leaves me wanting more.

Blog bookstore updated…

This is a job I’ve been meaning to tackle for some time now, but I had so many other projects going on that I kept putting it off. But today I buckled down and forced myself to make an update to the blog bookstore. In addition to adding a few books from my catalog that I’d somehow missed on release, I’ve added cover thumbnails for all the books and brief descriptions to let you know what they’re about before clicking the link to Gumroad.

With that major project done, hopefully tomorrow I can get back to writing. I’m this close to finishing a new WIP called The Dragon of Divinity, and I’m also close to writing the last of two new Sex Doll novellas, which I’ll be adding to the original book and uploading at an updated edition. Then I’m going to try and write the last Zombie Era novella, and those three books following Susan’s story after she and Kate left G will be combined into a single volume.

Even before I wrap up these projects, I already have enough books in the queue to schedule new releases into 2015. I’ll be wrapping up a couple series, and putting out some new standalone stories as well. If anything, it should keep me busy.