Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 37

A rambling return to Dragon Age: Origins

I did a review for Dragon Age: Origins, but didn’t actually finish it. I hated the Loghain storyline, and didn’t feel like going after the big Archdemon at the end because having to fight Loghain, even though he should have been arrested, made my eye twitch. But I watched hubby play through the game to the end, and I decided, What the hell, why not start a new campaign and try again?

(By the way, this has major spoilers if you prefer to avoid that. Just FYI.)

The second time through I played a Dalish Elf rogue, Pokish McStabbers, and I skipped a crap-ton of side quests to just hit the high points and pick up Shale. I let most of the possible companions go, or killed them, as in Zevran’s case. (Hey, you try to kill me, I don’t want you in my camp.) I was totally setting myself up for the most challenging fight eva, EVAH.

Well I got to Loghain again, right? And I’m fully ten levels under what my first character had because of all the side quest skipping. But this time, I chose a different path through the conversation, resulting in all but one arl on my side. Aaaaand, Loghain still gets to call a duel instead of being arrested. Yeah, my eye twitched a lot.

So he does rally as his first move and Pokish chooses to…SUMMON BEAR. She got to cast it before he charged her, so he met a nice furry tank to divert some of his anger on. The fight after that was pretty short. But just as I’m calling for death of the dick regent, at long, long, last, Riordan steps in and says that Roghain could do the binding ritual and become a Grey Warden. Anora points out that there’s a one in three chance it would kill him painfully. And I’m thinking, Russian roulette? Sure, I can work with that.

BUT NO. Alistair gets all pissy and demands hot sticky death for Loghain, and Anora loses her shit and orders Alistair’s execution. I got everything settled down, but Alistair chose to be a whiny prick and leave. So I load back up the previous save, and go through the fight again. Loghain didn’t do rally on the second fight, just charged me. So he got two free shots while I was still summoning the bear. Then I beat the shit out of him again, and when Riordan steps up, I went, “Nuh-Uh! You shut up and back up, bub, because I’m not putting up with Alistair’s whiny ass for this whole game and not get him to the throne for the king you stupid humans so rightly deserve!”

Or it was more like “No, Loghain must die” in the game dialogue options, but I embellish in my in-home role play of some games.

We get to the castle for the night before the big battle, and Pokish talks Alistair into having sex with Morrigan for a ritual to save all the Grey Wardens, no matter who cuts down the archdemon. It’s a “nice” dramatic point, BUT there’s a flaw in this. Back at level ten, I whacked Morrigan’s mother, Flemmeth, as a favor for her. Flemeth, you see, is a demon residing in a woman’s body. And yet, when Alistair killed Flemmeth, he didn’t drop dead in the way Riordan described at the end of the game. So for me, that whole “One of us must die,” and Morrigan’s offer for hawt sex with Alistair, is really kind of thin writing. But eh, not a deal killer like the Loghain thingie was.

Anywho, in all this time, I’ve got companions back at the camp who I gave gifts to make them love me no matter what. Did I just kill your uncle? Here, let me gift that away. But, they also level up even if they’re back at camp, so before the big battle starts, I got to bump up all my personal army with more hit points and spells or feats.

Nevertheless, All my characters are in the level of 17 to 18, and I got pretty nervous. I decided to make my main party Pokish, Alistair, Morrigan, and Wynn, and my backup crew was down to Leilana, Shale, Oghren, and Barkykins, my faithful war hound.

I had a fantastic time smashing the army at the gates, what with all my guys just running around killing everything in sight with one hit kills. I rarely had to fight with anything, and it was all over so fast. Then the two teams divided, and we went in to find the Archdemon general inside Denerim, and these fights were…interesting. A lot of the army is cannon fodder and falls with relative ease. But those generals. Damn, they have a shit ton of hit points.

After hitting the two general, the game suddenly cuts away for a battle with the B line cast defending the get. I’d appointed Leilana as the leader, and it was only after I started the fight that I thought, Oh shit, both my healers are in the other party.

Turns out I didn’t need to worry. All those point boost in dexterity and strength along with bow mastery meant Leilana was doing a great Legolas impersonation, plucking arrows with insane speeds and dropping a great many Hurlocks and Genlocks before they get get through the gate, much less meet the soldiers between the darkspawn and my crew. And when the bigger stuff got through, Leilana summoned a wolf, and it and Shale pounded on whatever broke the rear while Oghren charged up to the gate to serve as a welcoming party. We only lost two of the soldiers, and the fight went by really, really fast.

I kept checking the levels because in the first game, I was higher level, but struggling to survive in every battle. But this time around, even being reduced in level, I was seemingly unstoppable.

The action at the gates done, the game returned to Pokish and her crew, and the next rooms were funny little puzzles. They were FULL of one-hit armies, enough that a swarm of them might be overwhelming. So the trick was positioning Morrigan just close enough to cast Inferno with Wynn healing her from a dozen arrow shots during her casting time. Getting that bad boy cast can clear a hallway quick. Other sections of Drakon Tower called for Pokish to do scout work, but it wasn’t until the end that I needed a different tactic. A Hurlock Alpha spotted us and did a rally call to summon two ogres. I pulled the party back out of range, and they didn’t pursue, so I had time to…SUMMON BEAR. I had Pokish go in under cover of stealth and hit one of the ogres,drawing them out of the room and into a kill box. Morrigan and Wynn both have paralyzing spells, but Morrigan’s failed while Wynn’s didn’t. This still gave the party the chance to waylay one ogre and kill it before the other could free itself. Then we surrounded the second and made hamburger out of it too.

I then sent Smokey in far enough to catch the Hulrock’s attention, in effect, making him the tank while Wyyn and Morrigan both ran into firing positions. Wynn cast Tempest, a storm of lightning damage, and Morrigan went with Inferno. Poor sucker roasted in a little under three seconds.

And at last, we made it to the roof to fight the ARCHDEMON! DUN-DUN-DUN!

Remember, I watched hubby play, and hubby spent a LONG, LONG time trying to get in close with his fighters, and he didn’t do much to manage his mages. Well I figure, “Fuck that, I’m taking two mages to the front line, and both my other party members have bows and mad archery skills. Let’s just sit back and missile this motherfucker before Pokish strolls in for the killing blow.”

And that’s exactly what happened too. When the fight started, I had the option of summoning one of five armies, so I picked the 50 humans. They kept the Archedemon occupied so long as the daft soldiers didn’t crowd around us, and then we’d get briefly mauled. It didn’t help that an army of one-hit darkspawn reinforcements arrived with a few slightly tougher friends. This forced Pokish to…SUMMON–oh hey, didn’t I pick up the skill for summoning a giant spider? Why, yes! Yes, I did! SUMMON SPIDER. Is what I was going to say. I know, you were expecting bear. So was I until that moment.

Pokish, the newly born spider Webikins, and Alistair went to work on the army, leaving Wynn and Morrigan free to keep pummeling missile or elemental attacks from a safe distance, and the soldiers acted smashingly in the operation human shield operation, a cunningly cunning plan devised by the department of redundancy department. By the time that we’d cleared the enemy horde, the Archdemon was down to a sliver of health, so I moved Pokish into place and…said, “Wait, that’s bigger than a sliver. I want this thing barely breathing.”

Alistar and the mages dropped a few more nasty surprises on the Archdemon, and when Pokish made her first swing, that was the last blow.

And how do I feel after killing the Archedemon/dragon? Um…underwhelmed. On the one hand the one-hit crunchies DID give me a kind of sense of progression from my humble roots as a nobody to being death incarnate to darkspawn, and their sheer numbers falling to my four party members regardless of which crew I worked with was pretty epic looking. But for all that build-up, this Archdemon is just a dragon with a lot of friends, most of them little crunchies that didn’t even slow down my plans. An army that big should have gotten something more than a ho-hum reaction out of me. But it really was just another day at the office.

Maybe part of my success had to do with almost all of the party having long range options to hit enemies from far away, or that two of them also had melee options . Or maybe it was being able to conjure animals as an extra party member. And then again, maybe I’ve just played long enough that juggling all five party members (with the companion animals) isn’t as big a deal this time around.

So, I beat the game, and I have to say, I’m giving it four stars, even with the parts I hate. Setting aside Loghain and the Archdemon’s surprising wimpyness, on both plays, I’ve found myself enjoying the combat and my ability to take different paths through a conversation, thus getting a new story out of this run-through. I like that it genuinely feels like role-play, where there’s enough dialogue options that I can find something I think Pokish would say in character. The graphics and character designs get a tad rough in close-ups, and I kinda hate how my character never actually speaks her lines, and only talks in battle. But I do admit, the game thoroughly scratches the same itch I got from playing paper and dice games with my friends in my late teens. I’ve played through two campaigns, racking up 146 hours of game time, and I intend to start up an elf mage next, just to see what kind of hell I can cause with three mages and Leilana as our sole rogue.

I STILL hate the Loghain bits, and I think it drags my enjoyment of the game down a bit. But any game I’ve sunk this much time into has to be good, and certainly worth the money I paid for it. And I haven’t even hit the DLC stuff yet, so I might have to keep playing this game until sometime next year. Which is about the time that Dragon Age III will be out. Nice.

Book review: City of Glass by Cassandra Clare

City of Glass took me two days to read, and I find myself both satisfied at the conclusion and a bit baffled because there are two other books in this series, if I recall correctly. But this third volume ties up all the nagging questions I had from the prior books, and even addresses something I was unhappy with in the first book.

The starting conflict in this outing is that Clary wants to go to Idris, where she expects to meet a mage who will cure her mother with an antidote for the sleeping potion she took. Jace does not want her to go along, but rather than come out and explain his reasons, he chooses to lie to Clary about the time that the other shadowhunters plan to depart to Idris through a portal. Jace enlists help from Simon to lie and say Clary changed her mind about coming along, but before this plan can be put into action, the shadowhunters are attacked by forsaken. Simon is wounded badly, and Jace is forced to take him into Alicante, the capitol city of Idris. This is against the law, and Simon soon finds himself imprisoned and being used as a political pawn of the new Inquisitor. (I think it’s a job requirement to being an inquisitor, “must be a dickhead.”)

Clary still manages to make her way to Idris with Luke, and he also can’t be in Alicante because of his lycantrhopy. He’s forced to leave Clary with his sister Amatis, who is supposed to keep Clary hidden. But Amatis doesn’t have any more luck getting Clary to stay put than Jace did. Clary and Jace meet and have a huge fight, and Jace’s cruel brush-off sends Clary fleeing him and meeting Sebastian, who volunteers to help Clary on her quest. He also seems to be attracted to Clary, but she senses something wrong with him despite his charm and good looks.

Jace and Clary eventually make up and take on the quest to cure Clary’s mother together. But when they return to Alicante, the city is burning and full of demons. Valentine has once again made a move in his bid to cleanse the shadowhunters of corrupting influences, and after the first wave of demons retreats, Valentines demands that the shadowhunters accept him as their leader or he will kill every last person in the city.

Along with this main plot are revelations about Jace and Clary, about Valentine and Jocelyn, and about Sebastian. That’s already a lot to take in, but there’s also many romantic subplots going on, so many that I almost needed to keep a scorecard. The story bounces around to follow many characters, and there isn’t one scene that I wasn’t totally drawn into. I was just as interested in scenes with Simon, Alec, and Isabelle as I was with those including Jace and Clary. I never felt like skimming a section because no matter who I was following, I found their side of the story just as interesting.

The ending was deeply satisfying, and it feels like the proper end to a trilogy instead of being another book in a longer series. I’m sure there’s more that can be done with the few loose ends left over, but most of my lingering questions have already been answered.

I give City of Glass five stars, and I would recommend it to fans of dark fantasy and paranormal romances. I’m very much looking forward to the next book, City of Fallen Angels, and to finding out what happens next.

Book review: The Dead Girl’s Dance by Rachel Caine

After the cliffhanger ending of the first book in this series, Glass Houses, I HAD to read this book to find out how the author got her characters out of the disaster they’d been left in. The opening chapters of The Dead Girl’s Dance manages to turn the situation around, though not without giving me a scare for the first chapter.

In this second story, Shane’s father Frank returns to town with plans on killing a lot of vampires, but he’s not even remotely fit for the role of a hero. An alcoholic with a history of beating Shane, he seems perfectly cool with letting his biker gang buddy attempt to rape Eve and Claire. Within a few chapters, I was actively hoping for any vampires to get to him, and I didn’t care how evil they were. But then, I admit that this is a bias on my part, and if you present me with a story about vampire hunters, I’m more likely to take the side of the vampires. Hey, one group is an endangered species, and the other is typically a white supremacist militia who are unable to tell the difference between revenge and justice. Which I suppose is why this story works for me, because the hunters are basically human scum with a righteous streak, and while the vampires are evil, I’d happily side with the blood suckers over the stake strokers.

In the end, Claire manages to save her friends and her enemies, and the final chapter gives some closure while leaving open several loose ends for future books. Everyone comes out of this tale a little more damaged for the journey, but they survive and become stronger in the process. This is not a bad way to keep a series going, in my opinion.

I do have a few minor complaints this time around, and the biggest is in how Shane and Eve abuse Michael and push him to make a major decision near the end of the book. It’s clear he would have had to make this decision on his own eventually, but both his closest friends, people he’s grown up with, have to rub in his face that he’s unable to help them with their problems outside the house where he’s trapped. It’s not just that they bring it up, it’s the way they do it, with the intent of causing the most possible emotional damage. They treat the problem like it’s his fault, and for people who’ve known him this long, it just feels too cold-hearted, especially from characters who claim that they would do anything for each other. Claire is the only one not to engage in this kind of attack, and she’s the one who’s known Micheal for the shortest time. It’s kinda douchey behavior, and it doesn’t really feel in character for either Shane or Eve, but especially not Eve.

The other problem has to do with an attempted date rape on roofies, for two reasons. First, despite being drugged, Claire manages to remain conscious a long, long time after the drug kicks in, and it’s only after there’s nothing else to describe that she conveniently blacks out into a rescuer’s arms. But the other problem is, Claire has a moment of bonding with her attempted rapist, holding his hand to comfort him because he’s scared of dying. It’s just this side of absurd. She just broke the guy’s nose, and he and his friends were threatening to hurt her while she’s unconscious and unable to fight back. But that’s all water under the bridge three minutes later? Nuh-uh, I’m not buying that.

And while I’m at it, why is attempted rape so consistently hit on as the go-to tension device for YA writers? In this book alone, the device is used twice, and both scenes ring just as hollow. If this weren’t a trend, I might not be so bugged about it. But in my opinion, way too many YA stories use the heroine’s virginity as a blunt emotional tool. I hate to say it, but for me to feel anything for this kind of setup, at least once in a while there needs to be a recognition that not everyone gets rescued. As it stands now, I rarely feel anything in these moments, and it’s just like the cop getting kidnapped by the serial killer on any crime show. There’s no sense of danger in the scenes because you already know a rescue is coming. If authors want to corrupt that expectation, they they need to defy the readers’ expectations by not ending the scene in a rescue. Which is terrible, I know, but if you’re willing to stab a character, douse them in acid, and almost kill them repeatedly in progressive books, then why is the character’s “purity” so sacred? It’s okay to almost beat your heroine to death repeatedly, but letting her suffer something that one in three women goes through is “too much”?

Setting aside those two complaints, I did enjoy the book, and I’m grateful this one didn’t end on a cliffhanger. But I am likely going to buy the third book in the series, Midnight Alley, sometime soon. I like all the characters, and the premise of a vampire-controlled town in the middle of Texas is of course an easy sell for me. The writing style is fast paced with just enough details to set the scene before getting back to the action, so there’s always a sense of urgency even in the quieter moments. I read the whole book in a little over a day, and would have finished it in one had it not been for a monster headache stomping my head in.

I give The Dead Girl’s Dance 4 stars, and I’d recommend it to fans of fantasy and fans of YA looking for a story where the lines between good and evil are nice and muddied.

Book review: Glass Houses by Rachel Caine

Deciding I needed to mix up my current reading list with some vampires, I picked up Glass Houses and got sucked in quickly by the main character, Claire, and her plight involving some bullies at her dorm. Claire is threatened by Monica, a seemingly snooty rich girl who quickly reveals that she’s got a psychotic streak. Looking for a place to stay off campus, Claire is adopted by the members of the Glass house, owned by Michale Glass. He and his friends Shane and Eve take Claire in to protect her from Monica and her friends, but they also let Claire in on a secret about the town of Morganville, Texas. It’s a hotbed of vampire activity, and everyone’s developed an interest in Claire.

I like Claire, and her introduction as a bullied smart kid gives me an instant sympathy for her. Her developing friendships are surrounded by tense escapes from various vampire factions, and the book has a blurring pace that rarely lets up. There’s secrets that each of Claire’s friends are hiding, and each secret was intriguing and pulled me deeper into the story.

And then…cliffhanger ending. Like, I kept flipping from the last page to the acknowledgments, thinking there had to be a missing chapter. It’s one of those sucker punch endings that makes me twitch, because instead of granting closure, it makes the rest of the story feel like everyone’s struggling was all in vain. But it will keep me reading the next book in the series because I want to see how the author gets her characters out of the mess she left them in.

Even with that ending, I’d give Glass Houses four stars and would recommend it to all fans of vampire stories. It’s a great start to a series, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Let’s look back at 2013, shall we?

I don’t really do new year’s resolutions, since I find it’s an exercise in frustration, and it can often trigger depressions when I find I have a whole list of things not accomplished. I do like to look back at a year and try to sort out if it was a good year or not. And looking back on this one, it wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t all that I was hoping for, either.

Let’s start with the good stuff. I wrote a lot, even getting out a five-book series in just four months. I also wrote some other novels and novellas that have been sitting on the back burner a while, and as the year closes, I’m near the middle of a fourth Sex Doll novella, which I THINK will close out the series.

I read 33 books this year, a goal I’ve been tracking on Goodreads since 2010, when I’d read 32 books. At a certain point this year, I was complaining about not reading as many books as I did when I was a kid, but then someone pointed out what should have been obvious, that the size of the books I read now are a lot longer. I used to read stuff that was maybe 150-200 pages, and now most of my reads are in the 490-600 page range. So yeah, it makes sense that I can’t read as many. I am happy that I found time to read between torture sessions with the muse, and this year, I enjoyed a lot more of the books I read, which I attribute to having slightly better luck in picking books this year. Last year it seemed like I’d just gotten so picky that nothing could please me. But this year, I’ve read a number of books that I could not put down once I started them.

I did the garden again, and I got a decent batch of food out of most of what I planted, not including the tomatoes. Still no luck getting them to produce without having some kinds of problems, and no clue what I’m dong wrong there. But everything else grew…well, no there were the carrots, too. They were technically from last year’s garden, but they survived the winter, and I was thinking, “Man, these are gonna be huh-yuge!” But no, they were wimpy, scraggly thin roots, and most were so tough they were inedible. But yeah, everything else grew fine, and the exercise outside did me some good.

And then there’s the health report, which was also relatively good. I’ve had fewer relapses, and fewer episodes of depression. I still had both, and sometime around the end of summer, I started going through a massive spike in fatigue attacks. The muse might have had something to do with that, but even on days when I did nothing at all, I could just drop, and my whole body got sore like I’d been working out at the gym. These fatigues were so bad that I’d even get brain fuzzed, leading to the voices in my head playing word salad. At that point, all I could do was lay down and wait for my brain and body to get back online.

The voices…I talk about this in abstract terms so often online that people must think I’m joking. But yes, I hear voices, and not all of them are nice. They bring images sometimes to back up their ideas, and I know they’re there, and I don’t listen to them. Still this year, they’ve been right pissy things, always complaining about shit I don’t care about, or about old shit I don’t want to think about anymore. That in turn sends some other voices off into really violent suggestions, along with the images to hint at what their plans would look like near the end. Dealing with those voices makes me cranky, and about the only way I could deal with it is to stay offline and let them whine in isolation. Crazy is no fun, people.

And then there were the nightmares. Three solid fucking months of nightmares, which also forced me to stay offline and avoid stress. They did finally go away, and most of my dreams these days have been pretty nifty. There have been a few triggering dreams, the kind that make me wake up feeling agitated. The last happened on Christmas day, but I fortunately got over it quickly. The real trouble with dreams is, you’re never the writer or the director, just the audience to a film made up by the lizard part of your brain. So sometimes they dredge up really old stuff, the kind I don’t want to think about anymore, and they dress it up with newer surroundings. But it’s still the same old shit, and it hurts to feel pulled back into hell just because my subconscious is ready for a trip down memory lane.

The sum of all these issues is, I spent a lot more time offline, and without doing promotions, my sales slipped a lot. I’d reached record heights in spring, and I thought at the time that I would have a release ready every month up to January. If sales had kept up, I probably still would have been able to stick to that plan. But they dropped to single digits in the fall, and winter hasn’t been much better, even after I started promotions back up.

I try to look at it as a two-fold problem. One is, I stopped promoting, and two is, I’ve seemingly run up my supply of readers in my current social networking. I’m a niche writer, and lots of people overlook me, either because of who I am, or because they think they know what kinds of books I write and dismiss me. So to get anyone reading my stuff is something of a miracle, something I’ve said and written over and over this year. It’s still true, too. There’s millions of books out there, old and new, and hundreds of thousands of new books coming out every year. With all those choices, somehow someone still chooses me? Miracle. Small-scale, sure, but still a legitimate miracle. So yeah, it does suck to sit down at the end of this month and only count up five sales. But then I think how lucky I am that I even have that number. And then it’s not so bad.

I got reviews and ratings from some readers, and most of them were positive. Reviews, though, are like some kind of harmful upper. The high that comes with them doesn’t last very long, and in the absence of more, the withdrawal symptoms included sweaty palms, grinding teeth, and random paranoia episodes. I always feel like I want more, and logically, I know it’s the same thing as the sales. What I get is a miracle, especially considering how much of it is positive reviews. Even the books I knocked off as goofy diversions have had good reviews. And a few followers keep me updated on their progress through my catalog. The tweets are often just an update and a quick comment, but on days when I’m struggling with review withdrawals, they do tend to pick me back up.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a complete year for me without offending someone, and this year, I knocked a grand slam number of Twitter folks into hysterics. I’m STILL discovering people who’ve blocked me through random RTs. They appear in my timeline and it’s only then that I find I can’t pass them on because I’m blocked, and I’ve never even talked to those people. That’s how far out on the offense radar I went. Oh well, I only had…three epic meltdowns this year. Have to mark that down as a positive on account of it being an improvement from previous years.

Laying out some of my problems like that, it really does feel like a bad year. But I read many good books, and I played some fun games. I’ve had conversations on Twitter with random people and covered an insane amount of topics. I wrote a huge number of books, and hey, for a complete nobody, I still manage to get sales on my writing. It could also be called a good year because I’ve had worse problems in previous years, and this year, thus far, I have yet to get one of these nasty colds everyone is so fond of passing around. Even my allergies seemed to settle down more this year.

2013 was a mixed bag, but it was a bag with more good than bad in it, and I’m letting it go without many regrets. Having said that, man, I sure hope 2014 brings better sales, a few more reviews, and at least one award nomination that I don’t have to pay for to nominate myself. I don’t even have to make the short list, yo. Just a nomination, is all I’m hoping for. And no, these are not resolutions. Because if I didn’t get them, that would just lead to binge drinking and drunk tweeting while ringing in 2015.

Kidding aside, I hope 2013 was merciful to you and yours, and that 2014 will be a great year for all of you. And thank you as always for reading my stuff.

Book review: Loop by Koji Suzuki

I knew eventually I’d have to read Loop to complete this series, but when I initially couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere, I opted to Wiki it, and read the basic synopsis. It put me off of reading it, so I figured I’d just set aside until I forgot the finer points of the synopsis.

I finally reached that point and got started, and for the first 400 pages, I didn’t feel anything at all. While I felt the first books were creepy and scary in some parts, if a bit dry, this book is dry as a bone left in the middle of a desert, and there’s nothing I can feel for the story or the characters. Kaoru is a bland character, and his “loving dad,” Hideyuki, comes off as creepy, but isn’t quite creepy enough to provoke a reaction. His mother Machiko is flat and more a background noise than a functioning character, and his romantic interest, Reiko, is seduced in a clinical description that makes their first time together sound like rape. Following intimate scenes and thoughts are worded in such a way as to negate any stimulating reaction. Passages speak of a woman’s “sex organ” and her “fluids” in such a way that all I could do was shake my head at the consistently clinical tone.

And then the punchline came, and I got pissed. I want to break down why it’s such a massive failure, but I can’t without spoilers. All I can say is, there’s no logical reason given for why the ring virus was even possible in the first place. The question is asked, but the answer is “I don’t know.”

This book is a huge cop out written to undermine the apocalyptic buildup of the first two books. The explanation given for how the ring virus became a cancer doesn’t make sense, especially with the virus being coded from within a virtual reality simulation that was made to emulate our world exactly. Even when the scientists admit that such a thing as a psychically viral tape couldn’t have existed in the virtual reality, they give no explanation of how such an anomaly could have been introduced without an outside source. And the explanation for how the virus got out of the computer and mutated is just as poorly thought out. So there’s roughly 200 pages of dry medical lecturing leading up to a lot of shrugging and “I dunno” on the most important aspects of the plot twist.

Even if a better explanation had been given, the worst book’s offense is that it’s never scary, nor even creepy. At least with some bad books I feel something, even if it’s just boredom. But I felt nothing for this book until very close to the end. And the anger I felt was more about how this final book takes everything that was scary about the first two books and chucks them out a window in favor of a “one man saves the world” solution. It’s ludicrous, it doesn’t stack up even according to the new rules laid out by this book, and not one event is all that memorable because of the bored tone the narrator takes.

I can’t say there aren’t some interesting ideas about life in a virtual reality made to resemble our world and the cyclical nature of the universe. But those ideas are buried as marrow dust inside a dry bone, and I don’t feel like it was worth the effort of reading the book to explore those themes. I would much rather have read a bleak final entry that killed off the whole world with the ring virus than this denial of everything that happened in the first two books. In fact, this book ruins the series for me so much, I’m going to have to treat it like the Star Wars prequels and pretend they never existed. In my altered history, there was a third book where Sadako killed everyone, and the whole world ended. Boo-hoo. But my version is still a thousand times better than this book.

I give Loop two stars, and would only recommend it to readers of the first two books who feel a need to complete the series.

Book review: The Host by Stephenie Meyer

I picked up The Host about a month before the movie came out, and I watched the movie first. This was probably a good choice because had it been the other way around, I might not have enjoyed the movie for all the changes made to the story.

I started reading the book in my usual way, taking one chapter at a time between other books, but within a few days, I was skipping my other books to read several chapters at a time. I got about a third of the way through and I could not stop. I read the other 440 pages in one night, finishing around 7 AM with burning eyes and a sore back. And it was totally worth the discomfort. If I have any complaints it would be something like, “Why isn’t Meyer working on a new book by now?” Seriously, I don’t care what she chose to write next. She could do a western and I’d give it a shot.

The Host is the story of Wanderer, a planet-hopping alien with a proud history among her people as an explorer of new worlds occupied by the souls. (Not the proper word for their race, but their terminologies change from planet to planet depending on the language of their current hosts.) Wanderer is placed in the body of Melanie Stryder, but quickly discovers that her host is still aware and fighting against her attempts to access Melanie’s memories. Wanderer is meant to turn these memories over to the seekers, the soldiers of her race, so that any remaining humans she knows can be located and converted.

This is an alien invasion story in the final stages of the war, and the souls have mostly secured the entire population by this point. What I like is how the story takes place from the perspective of the enemy coming to understand that their “peaceful” invasions are a nightmare for the hosts they occupy. There’s also an intriguing glimpse into alien societies due to Wanderer’s long life of planet-hopping. Among her people, she is revered because she’s been to eight other planets and lived one life cycle on each. So she works as a teacher to her people, many of whom have never traveled to more than one planet.

But with Melanie always in her head, Wanderer finds herself falling in love with the people her host cares about most of all, her brother Jamie, and her lover, Jared. Wanderer leaves on a road trip to Tucson to consult with a Healer about leaving her host, but during the trip, Melanie convinces her to take a detour that leads them back to Jamie, Jared, and Melanie’s aunt and uncle, who have created a small community of humans hiding in the middle of nowhere.

The humans are understandably not happy to see an enemy in their midst, but Melanie’s uncle, Jeb, is insistent that they not only keep her alive, but slowly come to accept her as a part of their group. Not everyone is so hot on this plan, and several times, Wanderer is almost killed. But Jeb’s plans bring around some of the refugees, and soon Wanderer finds herself returning to her calling as a teacher.

Another thing I like is the take on romantic triangles. Wanderer loves Jared because of Melanie’s memories, but Jared has hardened his heart to her. Another refugee, Ian, who tried to kill Wanderer upon her arrival, has a change of heart that begins with guilt and turns into something deeper. But herein lies the problem. Melanie is still inside Wanderer, and she still loves Jared. She loathes Ian for his interest in Wanderer, and this makes romance somewhat difficult when one’s chaperone is directly inside one’s head. The issue is further complicated when Jared realizes Melanie is alive inside Wanderer, now called Wanda as a nickname. Melanie doesn’t like his affection toward Wanda either, because Jared is Melanie’s man, not Wanda’s. So poor Wanda is stuck between loving two men, and not being able to have either because of Melanie.

Wanda’s love for her refugees leads to her returning to civilization to gather supplies for them, and upon returning to the compound, she learns that one of the seekers tracking her has been captured after killing a human. Wanderer has no love lost for this seeker, but she cannot embrace the humans’ need for revenge, and she must find a solution that will save one of her people while still keeping her new family safe.

And, I have to say, I really like the solution Wanda comes up with. Meyer’s got a gift for coming up with pacifist solutions to her conflicts, and I felt the same way about the conclusion of Breaking Dawn. I also like how the ending doesn’t conclude like the movie does. In the movie, everything is tied up so neatly with a few minutes of epilogue, and there’s this balance struck between the souls and the humans. The problem with this ending is that it’s a lot to happen in a few months, especially when one considers how almost the entire planet, a population of billions, is occupied. Also, the movie suggests that all humans would just come back to their senses after the removal of the souls, while the book makes clear that some humans cannot ever recover themselves from this invasion. The resolution in the book only hints at a possible peaceful future without pushing for a happily ever after. It’s clear that there will still be hard times ahead. But Wanderer has love, and so does Melanie, and they both have hope in a better future. I love this kind of ending, and definitely prefer it over the ubiquitous happily ever after.

I give The Host five stars, and I’d recommend it to most fans of sci-fi, with the possible exception of people who only like “hard” sci-fi. There’s certainly a lot of devices and concepts familiar to the genre, but the souls’ terminology for all their technologies are bound to simpler human words, and fans of hard sci-fi might not like the lack of techno-jargon. But I think most everyone else will enjoy this as a refreshing take on the alien invasion trope.

November updates…

November was a bit of a rough month for me all the way around. I had to stay home while hubby went to the comic cons in Lucca and Rome, and the cold weather has drained me to the point that even a little housework or a walk around the block will put me flat on my back for a few hours. Monthly sales were in the single digits again, meaning I still don’t have the funds to pay a cover artist for any of the books currently in the editing queue. After getting up to 45 sales in one month this year, going back down to 7 is dispiriting.

In previous entries, I’d mentioned that the muse was pitching a story I didn’t feel like writing, something I called Peter the Wolf Lite. But after weeks of trying to push her to get back to the series we already had open, she was still offering me random scenes from this one rejected idea. As is usually the case with my muse, I gave up and decided to write this story, even if I felt it was a trunk novel right from the beginning.

Nobody Special had a rough start, and for at least two weeks, I would write about seven pages before deleting the whole thing and wandering off to sort out why it was wrong. Each attempt felt like too much too soon, an infodump that I wasn’t feeling. But we got an intro I didn’t mind so much, and the main character, Scott Wagner, ended up being nothing at all like Peter Holmes. His relationship to Emily Barnes is also vastly different from Peter’s relationship with Alice Culpepper, and I started to get into the flow of the story once I saw that this wasn’t a retread of an older idea.

What I didn’t know at the time was the ending, and I was near the final chapters when the muse informed me of the upcoming suicide that would lead to the conclusion. Well, that’s a trunk novel for sure, I thought. Having to kill a character is bad enough for me, but letting them kill themselves is doubly troubling. It’s like, I’m God in these worlds I make up, and if I really love my characters, I should save them. But my muse insists that nothing good can be considered worthwhile without some bad to balance it out, and even if a suicide feels like a wasted life, there can be a lesson learned in the aftermath of such a tragedy.

I went along with the proposed ending, and it turned out to be less bitter than I was expecting. Looking over the finished draft again, I had to wonder if it was a trunk novel or not. It’s not a supernatural story, so there’s no magic or monsters. There’s not really a bad guy, and the antagonist is a father who is fixated on preserving his child’s innocence to the point that he cannot see they are growing up into a fine young adult. He cannot appreciate what he has, and so he keeps demanding respect for his authority to the point that he ends up pushing both his child and wife away.

The story is nothing at all like Peter the Wolf. Scott’s story is more about his growing desire to be someone worthy of his adopted parents’ attention, which leads him to take up music studies and form a band with his best friend, Emily. Over the years in between, Scott begins to recognize how much Emily loves him, and he comes to love her in the same way. But long before they reach that point, Emily’s father treats Scott as a bad influence in his daughter’s life. As Scott himself notes late in the story, it’s not a conflict on the scale of Romeo and Juliet. But it is a realistic struggle, and I think it says something important about how tough love can be taken too far and achieve the exact opposite results of what a parent was hoping for.

Why I still think it’s a trunk novel has to do with marketing. Who is my intended audience? Is this a YA story? I’m not really sure it is, nor is it a cautionary tale for adults. It isn’t a romance exactly, and while I shudder to use the comparison, it may be closer to one of Nicholas Sparks’ so-called “love stories.” It’s not like my dark fantasy books, so selling it to past readers might not work out. I suppose for now, the best thing to do is to put it on the back burner and make a decision on it at a later date.

I’m going to move on to another story in a few days, probably a sequel to The Life and Death of a Sex Doll. The muse seems willing to entertain my requests again now that I’ve completed this experiment, and I’m getting other scenes and ideas from her because I’ve humored her. I don’t think she cares whether I sell Nobody Special or shelve it. She just wanted to tell this story to me, and since I’ve done my part, she’s ready to get back to work.

Anyway, I guess that’s it for this update. I wish I could give an upcoming release date for a new book, but the budget won’t be there for a new release this month, and next month probably isn’t looking too good either. Maybe I can get something out before Spring, but if I don’t sort our how to bring sales back up, it could be a long, empty start to 2014.

No, wait, there is one last thing. I’ve heard back from one of the beta readers for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. They had read Peter’s entire series, so for them, the introduction had a bit too much back story information. But they still liked the book, and they said after the first hundred pages, they couldn’t put it down. Then they asked for book two, so I sent it to them. That’s a good first positive impression, and we’ll see how the rest go. I’m still waiting to get word back from any of the beta readers coming to Alice’s series without reading Peter’s. We’ll see if they feel the introduction is too much information, or not enough and they still feel lost.

I should have a couple new book reviews up this month, and closer to the end of the month, I’ll look back on the year and ramble a bit. As you do at the end of the year. As always, thanks for stopping by to read my stuff, and I hope you’re all having a warm and happy holiday season.

Game review: Persona 4 Golden for PS Vita

Having had quite enough of video games with twitch controls, I decided to go with a slower paced RPG this month, and Persona 4 Golden had long had my attention due to the modern setting and location. Most JRPGs use angsty teenagers as the cast, but they also set them in high fantasy locations where the land is suddenly overrun with monsters and “evil threatens to destroy the world” again. So it’s actually pretty refreshing to see a game where evil isn’t “ancient and hungry,” but is instead relatively young and just bored and in need of something to do after school.

The premise is that your protagonist, who you name (more on that in a second), arrives in the small country town of Inaba to be cared for by his uncle, Dojima, after his parents have to leave Japan for work. It’s never said what work this is, but it does leave you in a small town with nothing to do for a year. So it’s pretty darned convenient for you that a serial killer shows up to give you a hobby. Hmmm…serial killer invades a small town and has to be stopped by a teenager. Where have I read that before…oh right, I wrote a book about that. X^D This may explain why the premise worked for me so easily.

Dojima has a very young daughter, Nanako, who never gave her age. I guessed she had to be about six based on her behavior. She’s a real cute kid, but with Dojima being a cop who’s hardly ever home, she’s also a classic victim of neglect. Needless to say, I felt tons of empathy for her very early on in the story, so much so that I spent a great deal of time with her even if none of these scenes had much to do with the main game.

At the time of the game starting, I didn’t know if I got to choose my gender in game or not, but I assumed I could. So when asked for a name, I wrote Fukiko Ami. Mayber ten minutes later, I was introduced to a fellow classmate, Amagi Yukiko. I laughed pretty loud about that because it was just random dumb luck. But I decided that if the story had a romantic aspect, Yukiko would end up being the love of my life. It did, and she took time to warm to me and get over her insecurities. This part of the story, I rather liked, as it felt like a realistic and slow build-up to the relationship.

The game’s first few days are devoted to getting to know your local classmates, Hanamura Yosuke, Satonaka Chie, and the aforementioned Ms. Amagi. They’re familiar characters to anyone who’s watched a few anime shows, and they don’t break out of their tropes to reveal much depth. But the writing is serviceable, and the voice acting for the English dub floats somewhere between passable and tolerable.

The story really begins to take off when a newscaster having an affair with a politician comes to town to get away from the attention of her colleagues. The newscaster is murdered and is found hanging upside down from a TV antenna, a position that’s repeated with a second victim just days later.

At the same time this mystery is starting to develop, Chie is telling “Ami-kun” about the Midnight Channel, an urban legend about looking at a TV at midnight during rainy nights, which would reveal that person’s true love. Only, it turns out, the TV isn’t showing each person’s true love. Instead, it seems to be showing the next victims of a serial killer, often many days before they will strike. Ami tries to touch the screen and instead gets stuck in the screen, something no one believes until he demonstrates the ability on a big screen TV at Junes, the shopping center run by Yosuke’s family.

With a goofily scripted scene, Chie, Yosuke, and Chie end up in a TV world filled with fog, where they meet Teddie, a stuffed bear mascot who apparently has a hollow body. Teddie tells the kids that only he and shadow monsters live in this place, but recently, someone has started shoving people inside. Teddie suspects it is Ami or Yosuke, and during a second visit, he extracts a promise from them to find out who is really doing it. Thus, each time a victim is kidnapped and appears on TV, you have to head over to Junes to enter the TV and fight through several themed dungeons full of shadow monsters until you can find the victims and save them from their dark doppelgangers.

I have to pause to say, Ami’s character manifesting this power right after the bad guy does is…well, more than a little convenient, and it’s never explained who else has this ability, what the TV world is, or how our two worlds interact. This is kinda like the force and light speed in Star Wars. It’s probably better if you don’t get an answer, because the answer would just be stupid.

However, there’s another difference between the protagonist and everyone else. Everyone else who enters the TV world has to face a shadow taking on a the form of their darker repressed sides. This formula actually gets really tired over the course of the game because there’s not one deviation from the first encounter. The heroes run into the final room and can’t tell which person is which despite the shadow form having gold eyes, a glowing blue aura, and a fucked up voice. The real person denies this shadow self, despite EVERYONE screaming “Don’t say it!” every single time, and the boss fight is on. When said boss is defeated, the victims come to terms with their other self, transforming their shadow into a persona. These reminded me a lot of the stands from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and in much the same way, they have magic abilities that get stronger as you level up.

But Ami doesn’t fit this pattern. Ami doesn’t ever encounter a shadow of himself. When Yosuke’s shadow attacks him and Yosuke, he just calls “persona,” and bam-presto, he’s ready for his first battle. Despite never having done anything like this before. And all right, I like the fighting and most of the rest of the game, but this is a real sticking point for me. Ami is super special, but it’s never hinted at why this may be the case. I didn’t need a full explanation, but at least some dangling carrot to stir my imagination might have been nice.

In any case, the game falls into a pattern of going to school and studying for exams or hanging out with your friends until the Midnight Channel comes on during rainy nights to tell you who the next victim is. Then it turns into a standard turn-based RPG where you battle shadows in TV-land to earn XP and get strong enough to beat the boss monsters.

Since your personas gain power from relationships in the real world, you’re encouraged to join some clubs to form social links. I went for the Soccer club, and I took part-time jobs working in day care and as a English translator at home to make more social links and earn cash on the side. The jobs also improve some other stats that influence your role-play options, but to be honest, this was kind of irritating. I got tired of being given three options in conversations, only to be told I wasn’t brave enough to use two of them. If I can’t use them, then don’t bother asking for my input at all. I mean, really, this thing is a visual novel about half the game where people talk at me while I just nod and mumble anyway. So if I don’t have the bravery for two out of three answers, just pick the fucking third option and move on.

Other grating problems had to do with all the adults. At the school, the teachers all act like they’re either batshit insane or they’re incredibly insulting to the students. One teacher, I was hoping would get killed because of how awful they were to the students, and when they did turn up dead, I cheered. Later on, when other characters were talking about how sorry they were that he’d been killed, I kept saying aloud, “I’m not sorry. Fuck that asshole, in the asshole…with an asshole.” But they weren’t the only one to be this insulting, and another teacher refers to a student in a lower class as “underdressed jailbait” to the entire classroom. It’s a particularly catty moment from a slutty teacher who’s trying to show off to her class in a way that feels over the top creepy. (I don’t even remember her name, and I just started calling her Slutty McBoobies after that first encounter.)

I don’t know why the writers had creepy stuff like this in the game when the rest of the teachers acted like they were staffing a primary school with five-year-olds. In fact, there’s this huge tone problem with the entire game where some very dark, very adult ideas are shoehorned onto a kid’s game world. I would have enjoyed the game more if it had gone either direction and stayed that way, but the bounding around from kiddie stupid to creepy adult was definitely more cloying as the game went on.

Dojima also becomes an irritation because he’s rarely home, and when he is, he acts like his nephew is a troublemaker who needs a stern parent. This attitude is aggravating near the middle of the game when I’d spent most of my time studying and earning near perfect grades while working two jobs on the side, taking care of Nanako, AND solving each kidnapping case as they came up. I spent more time with Nanako than I ever did with Dojima, and being saddled with a neglectful guardian who only comes home long enough to shout about “damned kids these days” left a really bad taste in my mouth. The lowest low point is when Dojima comes home drunk and complains about “stupid youngsters” because his case is now being turned over to a young private investigator. Yeah, that’s unlikely as it is, but even running with it and suspending disbelief, here’s a guy who spends almost every single night standing around doing nothing, and then bitches and moans when other people do his job better than him. He’s an asshole, and I really wouldn’t have minded the killer knocking him off too. Alas, no such luck.

Another writing problem has to do with one of the victims who I saved and becomes part of my gang. Kanji has a shadow form that’s flamboyantly homosexual, even speaking with a stereotypically gay lisp. (Because being gay is as much a speech impediment as it is a lifestyle choice, doncha know.) Every other person who accepts their darker side acknowledges in some way that this shadow form was expressing desires that they didn’t have the strength to admit they had. But Kanji goes right back into denial about being attracted to guys, and Yosuke spends the rest of the game making homophobic comments about not feeling safe alone with Kanji. Meanwhile, Kanji insists that he’s really just interested in sewing, and is totally not gay. He’s totally gay, though, and that his denial was played for comedy value bothered me worse than the “safe gay” buddy trope in western YA novels.

Kanji’s need to prove his manhood leads to the three males going to Okina to hit on girls as a personal challenge, and this for me was SO not cool because by this point in the game, I was already working toward an intimate relationship with Yukiko. But there was no option to back out of the challenge, so not only did I have to put up with being the creepy cheating horny male looking for a score out of town, but I also ended up having to watch a fat chick joke when Yosuke’s “score” turns out to be the fattest, ugliest girl from his school. She sits on his bike and destroys it, and then complains that Yosuke shouldn’t buy cheap junk if he wants to impress her. Ha ha ha, fat people are funny. Man, fuck that noise. I wish I could say this was the only time the character was used for cheap humor, but the same character is used as the butt of another joke a few days later in the story.

Ultimately, the mystery unfolds with the reveal of the killer being another student, who escapes into the TV to avoid arrest. This leads to your team going back inside for another dungeon crawl to save the killer from their shadow form. It’s not nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped, but it’s not the worst ending I’ve ever seen either.

The game promises over 100 hours of game play, and I assume that refers to taking on all the possible side missions. Having only taken on a few of these side quests, my game came to a conclusion at twenty-six and a half hours. I can’t say I care about doing the side quests in later missions because they’re all fetch quests with ridiculous goals. As an example, a woman is obsessing over hating snacks, so I had to get some “meat-flavored gum” to get her back into loving snacks again. It’s not all that interesting, and after finishing a few side quests, I just ignored the people with quest prompts floating over their heads. “Can you find me X item?” No, asshole, go find it yourself. The town isn’t that big, so the only reason you’re asking me to go on a fetch quest is that your ass is too lazy to walk a block or two.

Ahem. Overall, I’d say I enjoyed the game, both the high school social subplots and the dungeon crawling. I also felt like a lot of the mystery aspects of the story were well done and kept me guessing about who the killer might be. But the constant bounding from goofy to creepy made the story less enjoyable. Humor in dark writing is one thing, but this kind of comedy is for little kids in a game that feels like it’s aimed at a more mature audience. It rubbed me the wrong way, and I also didn’t care for the attempts at humor where homophobia and fat phobia were shoved in my face.

Graphics-wise, it’s clear that this is a port of a PSP game, with every character and enemy model being extremely low-res and jerkily animated. It’s not a bad job, but because the game sometimes has cut scenes done in a proper anime style, the game itself feels a bit too blocky. The real world locations around Inaba are tiny and sparsely decorated, but this does mean very small load times, and having lived in western small towns of roughly the same size, I will admit that they all tend to have a certain functional blandness about them. The dungeons are extremely confined corridors with shadow monsters not sharing the same appearance as the larger variety of enemies you’ll face once the turn-based combat starts. There is a large assortment of enemies, none of which feel like the usual suspects from JRPG games. Many enemies are visually appealing despite their blocky appearance and janky animation cycles. The large variety of enemies ensured that the battle never felt like a grind, even if that’s what I was doing.

The personas, based on various tarot cards, were all interesting both visually and for the discovery of new abilities, but even with fusion of different cards, the spells they use tended to overlap very early on. Additionally, my companions’ personas were able to keep leveling up to find new abilities, but all my personas tended to top out with relatively weak attacks, making me the least useful member of the team in the later levels. I wanted to get the nifty spells my teammates had, but no matter which person I selected, one I’d filled my menu with basic spells, I stopped seeing new spells. So that was a bit of a pain in the ass.

The game music is okay, but there’s only a few tracks for the various locations, and after a while, they get old. It’s not annoying enough to turn down the volume for, but it was repetitive enough to make me wish they’d had a few more songs for each location to cycle through.

I can’t see going back to play this over to unlock other personas or try other directions with my choices. It’s one of the games that I’d consider good for one playthrough before I move on. It’s not bad, and setting aside the more grating characters and situations, I’d say I got my money’s worth out of it. So I give three stars to Persona 4 Golden, and I’d recommend it to Vita gamers looking for a laid-back RPG that skips the high fantasy setting and the ubiquitous save the world plot. Just don’t go in expecting anything too deep from the writing, as this is a YA visual novel as written by someone who couldn’t decide if they were making an angsty teen drama or a slapstick buddy comedy for little kids.

Book review: Kiss of Life by Daniel Waters

So, I finish Generation Dead, and I’m thinking I can’t wait to read the next book and find out what happens next. Well, what happens next is, the writer falls in love with his bigot antagonist, and decides that he should be the main character for the second book.

Let’s start with the “trial” of Pete Martinsburg, in which there is no prosecution’s case, no testimony from Phoebe about who Pete was aiming at, no testimony from the police about Pete’s blood alcohol level or his illegal possession of a firearm, WHILE TRESPASSING AND INTOXICATED, and only the slimmest fucking scene with the defense attorney asking if Adam thought Pete meant to kill anybody. Adam says no, so Pete gets off with…ACCIDENTAL DISCHARGE OF A FIREARM??? WTF? The only reason this happens is because the writer had nothing else to do except use the same bigot, even if they should have gone to jail. If only the writer cared about anyone else in the story this much. Then the other characters might have had interesting stories that were also just as stupid and convenient as Pete’s.

Every other chapter is all Pete, all the time. His story is so…it’s convenient bullshit, is what it is. And I might have forgiven that if the other characters were doing something interesting, but they’re just stuck in a holding pattern, doing nothing while waiting for Pete’s chapters. Tommy leaves town and emails in his role. Collette leaves town with an undead punk singer. (but not before spending an eternity telling jokes with Margi that are NEVER funny. Every scene with them is painfully stupid to read.) Tak and “the resistance” are making stupid flyers and vandalized art displays like that means anything useful for their cause. Karen is just so awesomely pretty and smart and perfect and…God I want to vomit. Any scene with Adam is put into this god-awful first-person stream of consciousness that no other zombie uses, resulting in brutally painful passages to read whenever the focus turns to him. And even then, the vast majority of his scenes are him practicing martial arts in the most vague terms possible. Phoebe become so unlikeable that by the middle of the book I didn’t care if she and Adam got together. Even after they did resolve their dull problems conveniently, she still found new ways to vaporize the last of my sympathy for her. The ONLY person I can say I still liked by the end was Margi, and that’s only because she’s a bit character whose only role is to act as backup to Phoebe or Collette. Beyond that, she has no life, and barely any personality.

And then the bigots unleash their plan, and it’s fucking stupid. Even the derpy cops in The Powerpuff Girls could have solved this case with minimal effort, but the cops here don’t because the writer loves Pete so much, they become the star of the series. Everyone else is a bit character, and Pete is the person who gets the most scene time. You would think a book series about the undead would explore their problems from their side, but NO. Instead we’re stuck following a stupid jock with a hard-on for the undead because his girlfriend didn’t come back as a zombie, and boohoo, life is so unfair that he has to destroy all the zombies.

There’s a third book to this series, and it’s all about Pete and Pete’s plots against the undead. Well fuck it, I’m done. This makes yet another series where I really loved the first book, only to have the writer decide to veer off in a direction that makes me feel cheated for caring in the first place.

One star, and if I could give negative stars, this would be one of the few books this year I’d give it to.