Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 38

Game review: Spelunky for PS Vita

I’ve been meaning to play this game for a while, and with the port to the Vita being a nice 14.99 euros, I figured it might be worth the money for a few hours of distraction. Before plunking down my cash, I decided to watch a YouTube run-through of the game, and then I downloaded the demo. What this taught me quickly was that Spelunky is really hard. It’s also really addicting. So I paid for the full version, and after many, many hours, I can safely say I’ve played as high as I’ll be able to make it for a while. I’ve reached Olemec, the first of the two big bosses in the game, and he tosses me around like an unwanted rag doll.

There’s not much of a story to Spelunky, but what is there is full of Indina Jones clichés. I swapped out the default hero with a woman, and I turned the “damsel” into a dude in the options menu. So in my version of the story, a bored rich white woman with a penchant for green decides to go to some middle eastern or Asian desert to desecrate a tomb, smash ancient pottery, and steal whatever she can find in the name of white supremacy…er, glory, I meant. Taking along only her hunky personal masseuse (Johnny No, so named because every time he dies, I shout “Johnny, NOOOO!”) and a pathetically short whip, this would-be explorer had no idea that she and her hunky young gigolo would be trapped in a cursed underground dungeon where even death could not grant her freedom. The only way to escape is to trek down through the lowest levels of the tombs and mines to reach the demon behind the curse and confront them.

Game play in Spelunky reminds me a bit of Super Mario, and a bit of many other 2D platformers from my childhood. Only this is ridiculously hard. I’ve been killed about a hundred different ways, including being pummeled, stabbed, burnt, eaten by piranha, mind blasted by aliens, crushed or shot in traps, and any other manner of horrible demises. Each time, I’m presented with the options of a quick restart, or a full restart that takes me back to the first room of the game.

The thing is, once I made it past a world without dying, I met a tunnel man who would ask for items to make shortcuts. To access these, I needed to give him an increasing number of bombs and ropes, plus another item that changes with each request. (Note: you have to give him 3 items for each shortcut, meaning you can’t access the higher worlds without playing the current world at least 3 times.) First it was 10,000 gold, and then a shotgun. On the third shortcut, his last request is a key taken from the mines in world 1 and carried through 8-9 levels depending on when you find the key. Just making this one trek took me roughly two days of steady playing, and when I finally got him the key…I died two seconds into the next world.

But at last I fought my way down through the Egypt world and met the first boss, Olemec, a giant floating head who I’m supposed to trick into stomping the floor to break it and send him falling into magma. But what really happens is, he squishes me. A lot.

But let’s talk about the levels in between squishing. You start off every run with 4 hearts, 4 bombs, and 4 rappelling ropes with grappling hooks. The bombs help you break through walls or floors, and the ropes make climbing or descending long drops safer. You can find more bombs and ropes in crates scattered around the levels, or in shops. You can also get more hearts by taking the damsel, male, female, or canine, to the exit, and once you use the exit too, they’ll give you one kiss to replenish a lost heart. Your goal is to reach the exit in a timely manner and explore everything in between before an unseen timer counts down to zero and releases a giant ghost who will kill you with one hit if they touch you.

A word of caution about shopkeepers: don’t set off explosions too close to their shop or they’ll go nuts with a shotgun until they either die in a trap or hunt you down. There’s also environmental explosions or rolling boulders that can also set them off, and once they’re pissed, their fellow shopkeepers will hunt you throughout every level after that.

The shopkeepers also have a gambling wheel, slave labor, and they’ve hired the damsel as a kissing prostitute. Yes, really. While I often bought extra kisses to build my hit points back up, it just didn’t sit well with me to hire someone who was in essence a dumb human shield to wander out in front of me and get killed a few minutes later.

Also, while I’m on the topic, there are altars to Kali, and I saw in a couple run-throughs on YouTube that folks could lay damsels down on the altar as a sacrifice. This doesn’t strike me as a very Indy thing to do, so I don’t do it. I do, however, drop enemies on it on occasion. And there are levels where you can find a golden skull, and if you get this treasure to Kali’s altar, you can summon a gold monkey who shits treasure. Yes, really. (You can also carry the skull to the exit to get a treasure bonus.)

Obviously, I like the game, or I wouldn’t be playing it enough to drain the Vita’s battery multiple times in one day. That said, there is some stuff bugging me about the game. Mostly it’s the stuff like the slave labor or the damsel rescuing. And really, you’re not rescuing them anyway. You’re just dropping them off in the tunnels between levels in exchange for a kiss before they wander into a trap ahead of you. So then you can rescue them again and again and again.

But anywho, these are relatively small gripes, and the game is loads of fun to play. The graphics are simple tiles, and every level is different thanks to random generation. So there no risk of getting burned out playing the same thing over and over. There’s a huge variety of enemies, some of which are like mini-bosses who will require many whip hits to kill. The treasure you collect can allow you to buy special items that will improve your character and make moving around the levels slightly less stressful. The music…is there. It’s not great or terrible, but it isn’t memorable. At least it’s not annoying is how I’ve tended to listen to it for so long.

If I could make requests about available options, I’d like to see the chance to turn off the haunting ghost and make proper exploration in the dungeons less of a pain. Also, I might have liked to add a few extra hearts to my starting count to ramp down the difficulty level somewhat. But even if the game is hard, it never feels cheap. Well, maybe the ghost feels a bit cheap, but the thing is, I’ve not really had a gamer rage moment after dying. I just say “Okay, one more try,” and hit quick restart to put me back at the beginning of the current world.

I guess I like it because it scratches that itch for a simple 2D platform game without having to bog me down with too many gimmicks. It does have a few nifty items like the climbing gloves that let you scale walls, a pickaxe to mine your way through walls or floors, and a rocket pack to fly around traps and descend the deepest pits without fear of taking falling damage. There’s also some guns and boomerangs, and a gold cape that lets you float sort of like Mario does with a tail. I’ve probably only scratched the surface of what you can find in this review, and I think part of the game’s charm comes from finding something new to play with for a few levels.

Overall, I give Spelunky 4 stars, and I’d recommend it to anyone with a Vita looking for a fun platformer with lots of tricky challenges. It’s a good value for the low price, and good for a few laughs when you find some spectacular new ways to die.

Book review: The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

My usual reading habit is to have at least 3-4 books open at the same time, and I try to read one chapter before moving on to the other books. In this way, if I’m struggling to like a story, I can put it down and read something else to clear my head. However, there are times when a story is so compelling that I will set down my other books and read that one story with an obsessive need to finish. The Raven Boys was that kind of story. I read the first three chapters, thought about setting it down to read something else, and then thought, “well, I’ll just read one more before I do.” And I never put it down to read anything else.

This is rather a complicated story with a slow introduction to the characters and their world. Blue is the daughter of a psychic who doesn’t have the gifts herself, although she is able to augment the energies of the supernatural world for some unknown reason that has to do with her father, a man she’s never met. Gansey is a rich private school student whose life was touched early on by magic, leading him to chase after stronger proof of magic’s existence. Ronan is a rich boy whose life has come unhinged after the murder of his father, leaving him with his distant older brother as an ill-fitting guardian. Noah is the mysterious boy with a tragic history, and Adam is a poor scholarship student who longs to overcome his abusive home and make something of himself out from under the shadow of his father or his rich friends.

This is the main cast, but there’s also fascinating subplots involving Maura, Blue’s mother; Calla, Orla, and Persephone, Maura’s friends; and Neeve, Maura’s older sister, who may be dabbling in witchcraft without telling her family. Even the bad guy of the story has his own subplot to help explain his motivations for his crimes, both past and present.

When the story opens, Blue is confronted with news that a prophesy she’s lived with for years will finally come true. Blue has known since early childhood that kissing her one true love would kill them, but it’s an abstract concept because she has rules about never getting close to boys. A second rule is that she should never deal with “raven boys” the name given to the students of the private school for the raven patch on their uniforms. Then Neeve shows up to explain that this is the year Blue will fall in love. Neeve takes Blue out to a ley line where the spirits of those who will die in the following year travel. Blue has been to this place many times without seeing anything, so she is shaken to find the specter of Gansey in front of a ruined church.

Gansey is unaware of this connection to Blue, but while searching for the same ley line, his audio recorder picks up the conversation between his spectral self and Blue, and this sets them on an inevitable course to meet.

They do not meet instantly, and even when they do meet, neither is aware of who the other is. There’s no instant sparks, either. Gansey puts his foot in his mouth from the start, and Blue treats him accordingly. It isn’t until nearly a hundred pages later that these two realize they have a connection to each other, and even then, their relationship is guarded and slow to develop.

This is something I really enjoyed, the slow buildup and the gradual unfolding of the story that gives clues out like crumbs along a forest floor. All the clues are there, but it isn’t until the next one is revealed that the previous hints have enough context to make sense. The further into the story I got, the more all the pieces fell into place neatly. The world building and character development are both pitch perfect, and I can’t think of one thing I’d have preferred to play out differently.

In particular, I liked the subplots involving Adam and Noah. I can’t even explain Noah’s story without spoiling the reveal, so I won’t. But Adam is a victim of physical abuse from his father, while his mother lets it happen. When he finally comes to terms with this and talks to the cops, I really felt for him. To accept help meant relying on others, and Adam was determined to find freedom on his own terms. When he accepts that he needs help, it isn’t the cathartic moment of revelation that sets him free. Rather, it is another reminder that he’s unable to define his own destiny. Having lived with the fallout of abuse, I felt this was realistic and painfully honest.

If I have any complaints, it’s only that the story ended too soon for me, and perhaps that the sequel, The Dream Thieves, is not yet available here in Italy. But I am looking forward to reading more of this series, especially after that thought provoking closing line. It’s not really a cliffhanger, but it is a statement that leaves me wanting to know more.

I’ve read a number of good and great books this year, but The Raven Boys may be the best story I’ve read all year. The cast are not instantly likeable, and require some investment to get past their many layers of armor. Which how it should be, in my opinion. It makes all of the characters feel more complex and realistic, and it makes every new discovery about their histories more satisfying. The various subplots all weave together to form a perfect picture, and nothing feels like added fluff to pad the story out.

I could gush for a long time about this book, but most of what I want to praise fall into spoiler territory. So I’ll conclude by giving The Raven Boys 5 stars, and I would recommend it to anyone loving a good fantasy story. It reminded me a bit of Good Omens, A Wrinkle In Time, and IT, and I can’t think of a single thing that I didn’t like about it. Really, do check it out. It’s totally worth the time you’ll put into it.

Editing and KDP update…

My problems with Amazon’s KDP site seem to be fixed, and I’ve been able to upload edited versions of A Frosty Girl’s Cure, Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition, Saving Gabriel, Thicker Than Blood, and the Peter the Wolf omnibus edition. If you don’t follow me on Twitter to know what the drama was, I couldn’t click on any of my book links on the KDP site without 404 errors, and not even my account page would work. I kept being advised to use the Contact Us form, and that wasn’t working either. I had to resort to going to Amazon and chatting with a customer service rep to have them pass along my problems to the KDP staff, and even then their first email back advised using the Contact Us form. Oy. But we got it sorted out, and my catalog is now updated to make my recent releases cleaner and closer to typolessness. (Totally a word. I just made it up, but it’s okay. I’m a writer. That’s what we do, make shit up.)

I also got to talk to someone at Kobo about my problems uploading the omnibus, and it turns out I’d somehow saved the file as normal HTML instead of filtered HTML in Word, resulting in a bunch of compile errors in the epub file. I saved the file again and it uploaded without problems.

So now I’ve covered all of my most recent releases, and what’s left in my editing queue is the new stuff. I’m not ready to work on any of these just yet, mainly because even if I do get the books ready to publish, I can’t afford to pay cover artists yet. Once I can afford to buy a cover, I think my next release will be the third Tobe White book, Adventures In Trolling. My other project is Third Wheel Romance Blues, but I’d like to research a manga series referenced in the book before I attempt revisions on it. Which also will require having some funds free, and for now, I just don’t have the cash to spare.

I’m in a weird place as far as writing goes. The muse is hot to write a story, but I’m not interested in it. This has not stopped her from pitching the book with random scenes. But I’m not biting for two reasons. The first is my typical complaint that what she’s aiming for won’t sell, but the other is that this idea is practically a retread of Peter the Wolf, sans the magic elements. For this reason, I’ve dubbed her project Peter the Wolf Lite, and I’m not biting.

It’s not like I don’t have other writing projects that we could be working on. we’ve got the last zombie era novella to write, a third Sandy Morrison book, a fourth Tobe White book, and a sequel to Saving Gabriel. All of these projects are more appealing to me, but until the muse settles down and stops wandering, I’m not going to get much done.

I suppose there is an upside to this. With the muse and I hitting an impasse, I’m free to read some books and make a little progress in my TBR pile. I only need to finish reading one more book to reach my goal of 25 books on the Goodreads reading challenge, and two books will get me up to my number of read books from last year. It’s unlikely that I’ll hit 32 books, which was my number in 2010, but I’m happy about my numbers because this year has a lot more 4 and 5 star books than last year, when I hit a long string of 2 and 1 star stories.

Speaking of Goodreads, I went over my list of books in the system, and several have earned a number of ratings with no reviews. These generally range from 3-5 stars, with the occasional 2 or 1. I just want to say how grateful I am to the folks on Goodreads who read my books and left a rating. Even the lower rankings say “Okay, I read your crappy book,” and it helps me feel a little less lonely knowing I’m not just shouting into the void.

That’s just about it for this report. I will mention that I started reading Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Boys, and it is very good. How good? I’m already 200 pages in with no desire to read the other books I have open. It’s so good, I’m going to skip working today to read more. My only complaint is, there’s still no release date for the sequel, The Dream Thieves, here in Italy, and I may be forced to order the book from Amazon UK. (And this is how you can tell I’m a book addict. Even being flat broke, I’m considering buying more books online.) So you can expect that to be my next book review, and unless something goes horribly wrong in the other 250 pages, expect a glowing review.

Until next time, thanks for reading my stuff.

Book review: Finale by Becca Fitzpatrick

It took me a long time to finish reading Finale, the fourth and last book in the Hush, Hush…sequence. (That’s what the cover calls it. I guess quadrilogy is no longer a cool word, or something.) It is easily the weakest of the four books, and I had to give up and walk away about 25% of the way in because the story was just head-scratchingly dumb. It’s one of two books I started with great excitement during the summer because the previous entries had me staying up late to blur through the pages, but which let me down by going in directions that just didn’t make sense. The other book is Insurgent by Veronica Roth, and my review for it will be coming sometime soon. (It will probably be more harsh than this review.)

In both cases, I went back to the books after reading Warm Bodies, and that book was so terrible, it made this book slightly more bearable. (Hey, that rhymes!) I liken it to watching Jonah Hex right after watching the last Resident Evil movie. I found myself saying “Sure, it was bad, but was it Resident Evil bad?” And this is the same case. Sure, Finale is bad, but is it Warm Bodies bad? No, not quite.

In the third book, Silence, Nora had been forced to swear an oath to her father to lead his army of nephilim against the fallen angels and had been made into a full-blooded nephilim. Should she fail to do her job, her oath would not only kill her, but also her mother. With these kinds of stakes on the line, I was set to expect a tense book full of supernatural politics and battles. Instead, the book opens with Nora meeting her new right hand man, Dante, who proposes that he can train Nora for battle in 72 hours. He also suggests that he and Nora can run a popularity building campaign if she breaks up with Patch and pretends to be dating him…in 72 hours. And these are the longest 72 hours ever.

I can’t say that much of anything made sense in this book. The introduction of new characters was rushed and dull, and the plot unfolded with a number of scenes that left me asking “Do what?” Even when Dante’s plan is revealed near the end of the book, his motivations and goals are so hazy and badly explained that the book comes off as a mess.

There was one thing that felt realistic, and that was the handling of Nora’s new addiction to devilcraft. Nora’s internal logic around her continued use of strength-enhancing potions rings true of any addiction. She says things like “This will be the last time,” or “I only need this until things settle down.” Being a former addict myself, I found these inner voices to be honest. It’s also a realistic reason for why Nora lies to Patch about taking devilcraft.

But that’s about the only thing that worked for me, and for most of the story, I had to force myself to finish. I am glad that I read the book, or else I’d always be wondering how the story ended. However, knowing how it ends, I’m left disappointed by the plodding and nonsensical direction this final arc took. I want to say that it’s nice that Nora at least comes into her own strength in the final act, even rescuing Patch for once. But ultimately, her behavior throughout the book is a bit wishy-washy. She’s gullible, ridiculously jealous, and just as prone to leap to conclusions without any proof. And she’s usually wrong in her suspicions.

The romantic aspect still didn’t work for me, but that’s at least been the one consistent thing throughout the entire series. There’s not been one kiss or romantic scene in the series that gave me tingles, and I don’t find Patch to be all that great a leading man. He’s manipulative and domineering to the point that his decisions to protect Nora result in making bigger problems for him and Nora both. But there’s no point at which Nora calls him on his behavior, and her fawning worship of Patch comes off as kinda pathetic.

So I have to give Finale two stars. I’d only recommend it to people who’ve already read the first three books and just have to finish a series. As I said, I’m glad I read it to get closure, but I can’t say I feel any inclination to do a reread. And really, it could be worse. This book could have been Warm Bodies bad.

Editing update and that Kobo kerfluffle…

Hubby went off to Lucca for Lucca Comics and Games, and as I started the beta reading phase for Alice’s first book, I had to do something besides revisions. I opted to edit some recent releases, and so far I’ve uploaded new versions for Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess and Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life. I’ve also edited Thicker Than Blood and added the updates to the Peter the Wolf omnibus edition, but last night both Amazon and Kobo had problems with their sites, preventing me from uploading. I’ve got the new files on Gumroad already, so you can find Peter’s updated books through my blog bookstore.

Editing will be my top priority this month, and I plan to update Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition next, followed by Saving Gabriel and A Frosty Girl’s Cure. I won’t say this is the last pass through the books, as every few months, I like to go back and see if I can find more typos. Additionally, folks will sometimes email me or tweet with mistakes they caught, and I will make passes through the books to fix whatever mistakes they found. No book is ever a done deal so long as there are mistakes left, and I hope I’m making it clear that my highest priority is giving you the best books I possibly can.

Moving on to other topics, most of you will probably know by now that Kobo pulled all indie-published titles from their UK store for a short time based on what they called “intense media scrutiny” over certain adult-oriented books. What really happened was that an online journal noted the names of some books and made up a story that Kobo was selling rape, incest, and bestiality porn. But here’s the thing: the books being brought up were not real books. These are fake ebooks with keyword-based titles meant to trick certain people into buying them. It’s a scam where the victims can’t report the crime, because who wants to complain that the rape porn book they bought was a fake?

In any case, with just a few vocal complaints, Kobo yanked all indie books for a time, and they stated over and over again, “this is not censorship. We’re merely deciding to clear out the books that don’t fit our standards.” In the end, they put most books back up, and so far as I can tell, none of my books were pulled from the site.

In the aftermath, a lot of indie writers began a campaign called Kobogeddon to push readers over to Smashwords and punish Kobo. It seems they’ve forgotten that Smashwords also pulled titles, but their PR campaign covered for them in a rather effective way. Mark Coker was writing on his blog that it was all PayPal’s fault that he couldn’t sell Lolita. Which is bullshit because when I emailed him to ask about some of my titles with similar themes, he said they had NEVER allowed such material on their site. He then pulled three of my books from the market, but left up many other books with similar themes, as well as my only porn title that also didn’t fit with their guidelines. It was his inconsistent approach and his false public PR campaign that made me choose to pull all of my books from Smashwords, and to this day I won’t promote books through Smashwords because I find Mark Coker’s lies to be more galling than those told by Kobo or Amazon. The thing I want to stress is, my decision not to work with Smashwords is a personal choice, and it’s not something I’d push on other people.

No vendor out there hasn’t dabbled in censorship at some point. Amazon blocked all books with GLBT themes, even children’s books, and then turned around and blamed it on “some guy in France.” So it’s important to keep in mind that all the major vendors have screwed over the indies at some point, all the while trumpeting that they were the indie’s best friends.

It’s my ability to remember events past the current year that prevents me from feeling outrage over Kobo’s current fuck-up. Indies, it’s not a question of if a vendor will screw you over, it’s a question of when. Everyone will do it at some point, and you really just have to grin and bear it. The alternative is trying to sell books on your own, and I can speak from past experience and tell you, that won’t work. People who use Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords will continue to shop where they’ve become accustomed, and you will lose sales by not pushing those markets.

And readers, really, just buy your ebooks where you like. I’d love for you to buy my books directly through my blog bookstore because I get the largest cut of the sales from Gumroad. But very few of you shop at my blog, and I don’t mind if you go to Amazon to pick up a book on your Kindle. And if you prefer Smashwords, well I’m sorry you can’t find my books over there. But I have a personal beef with the head honcho blatantly lying to people in public while doing something completely different in private. It angers me more that people continue to insist he’s a champion of the indies in the wake of Kobo’s fiasco precisely because they seem to have forgotten that he’s screwed some indies over as well.

In any case, use the vendor you feel most comfortable with, and don’t worry about shopping with whoever is the current darling. Sooner or later, the vendors all fuck us over, and there’s no need for you to play bookstore hopscotch to find the least scummy store. They’re all a bit scummy, really.

I want to close out this ramble by thanking those of you who bought books this month already, both at Amazon and Kobo. Like I said, I’d love if you could shop at my blog bookstore, but hey, a sale is a sale no matter where it comes from. I really do appreciate your continued support, and in addition to working on new releases, I’ll keep polishing the older books to make them nicer reads for you. Thanks again. Your support is what keeps me going despite all of these headaches and frustrations.

Book review: City of Ashes by Cassandra Clare

Okay, having read the second in the Mortal Instruments series, I now have a better clue of why that lady was wishing bad things to happen to fans of Cassandra Clare. It can be summed up in two words: romantic incest. Do I agree now and wish the author’s fans had something bad happen to them? No, but I may be biased because I had a few play cousins in my youth.

Before get to my actual review, I have to ask these women who hate every YA book with questionable relationships: why is it that boys can read the most violent stuff in books and comics, or play the most violent games, and no one would suggest it influences them, but girls must only read positive romantic relationship examples or else we think they’ll rush off into abusive relationships? Aren’t you women promoting this idea in effect saying that teen girls are too stupid to distinguish fantasy from reality, but boys are smarter and more capable of doing so? Aren’t you in fact endorsing sexism as your defense of hating books with questionable or unhealthy relationships? Do you think after reading the Mortal Instruments series, teen girls will sex up their brothers because they’re too dumb and impressionable to know better? Because I really don’t think they will, and I think wishing bad things to happen to the fans of this series is spiteful in a distinctly patriarchal kind of way.

With that mini-rant out of the way…I really rather enjoyed City of Ashes, the second book in this series, even though I saw most of the plot developments coming a mile off. It was easy to guess what roles Maia and Simon would have in Valentine’s plans, and for a supposedly charismatic super genius, Valentine’s actually pretty predictable and about as charming as a rattlesnake. He’d have been caught early on if the adult shadowhunters had listened, but I think there’s a YA rule for dark fantasy that says the adult “good guys” must behave as bigger dickheads than the villains. I think maybe this is to make the irrational decisions of the teens look sane by comparison.

The Institute is now being overseen by Imogen the Inquisitor, who reminds me of that pink-suited torture loving chick in Harry Potter, and for all the same reasons. You have to wonder why a person would be given a job as an investigator when she has a distinct inability to listen. Even after her reasons for being this way are revealed, it turns out she’s a mother in denial about what a shitty son she had, and while that’s realistic, it’s not endearing. Which is why the only nice thing I can say about her is, she had the decency to die in this book instead of returning to ruin later books with her douche-baggery.

As for Valentine, he’s really the weakest part of the book, a cutout villain who says pretty much what you’d expect, and stops just short of rubbing his hands together and going “muah-hahahahaha!” It’s a good thing his kids and their friends are so much more interesting, but much like Voldemort in Harry Potter, Valentine isn’t the real reason for reading these books. He’s just the thing that must be dealt with in the last 40 pages or so. Which makes me feel bad for him, because he needs a personality and some sense of being a real person. Instead, he feels like a walking stereotype from the Darth Dickhead School of Villainy.

There’s all kinds of romantic tension going on, and not just between Clary and Jace. There’s also sparks between Simon and Clary, Simon and Maia (a teenage werewolf with a history that made her instantly endearing to me), Alec’s unrequited love for Jace, and Alec’s relationship with Magnus, the high warlock of the city. There’s so much going on, you almost need a scorecard to keep track of it all.

Overall, I liked the story, and unlike the first book, there weren’t any sections where the dialogue felt forced. There WAS a repeated use from Clary that the names she was thinking for someone was “unprintable,” which seemed to me like a strange choice of words. It was almost like Clary was acknowledging that she was a fictional character being written, and thus knew she couldn’t think any dirtier words so she could remain safely YA.

But my problems with the writing are all very minor complaints, and I liked this book enough that I set two others aside to stay up and read the last 150 pages of this in one session. Always a good sign that something has my attention, the late night “I need to finish this book” reading binge. Which is why I’m giving City of Ashes 4 stars. I’d recommend it to fans of dark fantasy on the caveat that there is romantic incest going on up in here, and if you’re one of those people who only wants to read about healthy relationships…well, I feel sorry for you being so banal and afraid to have your precious worldview challenged with an abnormal, unhealthy relationship. As for myself, I can safely say that reading this has not increased any desire to make out with my brother…although when he acts like a jerk to me, that is kind of alluring and sexy. (>_>)

Kidding! I kid. I are a kidder. Anyway, this is a good place to stop the review, isn’t it? Yes. Ahem, goodbye.

Beta readers needed, please

After several revisions, I’m finally ready to send out beta copies of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, book 1 in the Alice the Wolf series. I’m looking for beta readers among folks who’ve read Peter the Wolf, and also for those who haven’t. From the people who didn’t read the first series, I’m curious to know if they feel lost, or if I’ve given enough background info to put them in the loop without going too far into history dumps.

I’m looking for people willing to point out typos and mistakes, or even just to mention what doesn’t work for them, or what feels confusing or ambiguous. Beta readers don’t need to give detailed book reports unless they feel like it.

For those who don’t know about either series, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore follows several years after the events of Peter the Wolf. In the final book in Peter’s series, Peter Holmes admitted that his abuse of Alice had been harmful to her, and he turned himself over the FBI and left Alice Culpepper to give her space to grow up without him. Since then, Alice has slowly healed from the torture she suffered under Peter’s vindictive mother, Naomi Lupita, and she’s come to accept that her relationship with Peter was wrong. But she’s still a social outcast with few friends among the local humans and weredogs, and her problems with her lycanthropy only get worse after she suffers lunar madness while babysitting a child for a friend of the family. Needing to find a way to vent from the constant stress of hiding her secret animal nature, Alice decides to make an abrupt change by playing football at Dallas High School. Becoming a team player gives her a place to belong, and her outlook on life improves. Then she encounters a new werewolf who follows her back to town, and with its arrival, much more is at risk than her social life. The secrets the wolf brings will rattle Alice’s faith in her family and force her to choose between protecting the people she loves or siding with the wolf who wants them dead.

Sound interesting? If you’d like to get a doc copy of the first book in the series, you can email me at zoe_whitten@yahoo.com, or you can tweet to me on my Twitter account. And if you like the first book, I’ll be sure to ask you to beta the other books in the series when they’re ready. But you’re under no obligation to read the whole thing. So if you just want to check out the first book, you can do that too.

I’m going to hold off on further revisions to the other books until I head back from the first round of beta readers. I don’t want to tinker too much if it turns out I need to ax or add stuff to address their concerns. In any case, thanks in advance to anyone who volunteers to check out the new series. With your help, maybe this can be my best work ever.

Game review: Grand Theft Auto V and GTA Online

I’ve just completed the single player side of Grand Theft Auto V, and this will probably be as lengthy and sporadic as my review of Red Dead Redemption, another Rockstar game. Overall, I feel like the game was worth the 70 euros I paid for it, having invested just over 60 hours running around the city. But, while I enjoyed exploring the world, the story and the characters left me feeling dissatisfied pretty much from start to finish.

I want to try and avoid spoilers as much as possible, but some of my complaints about the story will be spoiling small parts of the game, so if you prefer to not know anything until you’ve played it yourself, feel free to skip this review. And before I get to the complaints, I want to mention all the good stuff.

Let me start off with the design of the city of Los Santos, which is a visual treat no matter where you visit. Rockstar makes some of the most intricate and beautiful game worlds I’ve ever seen, and much like Red Dead Redemption, I got a lot of enjoyment out of just exploring the locations rather than taking on missions. I didn’t just drive from point A to point B, and sometimes, I didn’t drive at all. Walking around gave me a better chance to appreciate all the fantastic details both during the days and nights. I’d climb up the sides of building and billboard just to get a better view. You know it’s got to be a pretty place if I’m making so much effort to look around.

Something else that really helps this city feel alive is the diversity of the people populating it. The pedestrians and drivers are all different shapes from skinny to chubby, and they all dress in different ways depending on which blocks you’re driving in. Adn with so many models of cars, trucks, and SUVs on the road, you rarely feel like this couldn’t be a real city somewhere.

Walking around does make a lot of the canned dialogue loop pretty fast, though, and so after the first ten hours or so, following people to listen in on their conversations on the phone loses its appeal. Also, groups of people talking to each other on street corners or at bus stops tend to fall into a formula where one party makes a random comment, and the other person usually replies in a derogatory way. Nine times out of ten, their response is “whatever.” Again, after a few hours, this kind of exploration loses the excitement of discovery because even when you hear something new, it’s still the same formula of pithy comment and indifferent reply.

Walking around also reveals how much of the world is just there for decoration. You can’t go into most of the buildings, and even those you can enter will stay locked until you need them for missions. The few places you can enter freely are clothing stores and gun shops. You can’t go to any of the fast food places to buy food, or enter any of the other kinds of stores. Most of the stores have grainy repeating textures pasted over the windows, and while you won’t notice it driving past at 100 mile an hour, you pick up on these things quickly by walking around.

There’s also some stuff I picked up on that you’d never notice if you were just driving around. Like, the city has a functional train service, but not a bus service. Which is weird, because there are buses all around town, and there are bus stops. But I’ve stood at stops for upwards of two days in game-time, and never saw a bus at the stop. The other people waiting at the stop with me eventually just give up and walk away. Another random thing I’ve noticed is that despite all the traffic on the streets, there’s rarely that many cars in the parking lots and garages. In a city this congested, you would think finding a parking space would be had. But no. And in some cases, a whole parking garage might only have two cars for the entire three floors. I know it’s probably a rendering issue preventing the makers from filling up those spaces, but for as much life is on the streets, it’s quickly revealed as an illusion if you stare too long.

But enough walking. Let’s talk about the cars, the real reason you play any GTA game. Driving in Los Santos is a lot of fun, and not just for the huge selections of vehicles you can choose from. There’s also a great variety of radio stations to listen to, and sometimes I pulled over to the side of the road just to listen to the songs. About the only stations I never sampled were the talk radio channels. The parody ads are often amusing, and it was the ads that most often got a laugh out of me for their unexpected punchlines. The stations do not have a lot of songs, though, and so you will have to swap channels to avoid hearing the same songs over and over again. But I like almost every song from every station, with a few exceptions. And it’s easy to change the channel when one of those songs come on, so it’s not really a problem.

If there’s anything I’d wish for to be added to the UI, it would be an option for a speedometer. I know it probably doesn’t matter to most fans of the series, but it’s something I like to check when playing Forza, because over time I get a feeling for what speed I can safely hit and still corner without losing traction. Here, it’s a guessing game how fast I’m going, so I frequently spun out going around turns because I didn’t brake enough first.

There are lots of side activities you can do without getting into the story, or into a car, for that matter. You can visit a shooting range to play around with the guns, or play tennis, golf, or darts. You can also do Yoga, though this isn’t really all that interesting. I did like tennis and golf, and darts wasn’t too bad, though not very challenging. You can also compete in triathlons, but I didn’t find this to be much fun. Bassically it’s a long, long time to be mashing the A button, and even making first place isn’t all that fun. Compared to golf or tennis, it’s really dull.

I know a lot of people go into GTA games to just fuck around and go crazy, but during my time in the game, I tended to keep my non-mission activities sane. I didn’t drive on the sidewalks, and usually if I hit a pedestrian, it was because the cops rammed me from behind and made me slide off the road an onto the sidewalk. Which is not to say I followed the traffic laws religiously. I ran red lights and drove on the wrong side of the road whenever I was in a hurry and had to get to some location quickly.

But the cops…man, what a joke. I’d read reviews that said they were real sensitive and would bust you for little stuff. I don’t know about that, since I often blew past cops set up for speed traps on the side of the highway while I was doing way over the speed limit. At one point, I was speeding the wrong way up a busy street, weaving through oncoming traffic, and I passed a cop going the other way. I stopped to see if he would react, and he just kept going. So they might be sensitive to players bumping their car, but they aren’t all that observant of whether folks are actually obeying the traffic laws.

For as much fun as driving cars or watercraft can be, the aircraft were all a pain in the ass to use. I hated being given flying missions whether I was given a plane or a helicopter, and I found those mission to easily be the most aggravating. I did like the submarine missions, but aside from the tutorial and one heist, I never got to use it again.

Since I’ve touched on missions, I should finally get around to the story. In a few words, it’s a complete fucking disaster. Even the introduction of Michael to Franklin is stupid and doesn’t make much sense, but ultimately, I almost forgot about that because of how stupid every plot development was handled.

Almost every single review I saw all praised the character swapping feature by highlighting the same mission. They all said, “In one mission, you pilot a helicopter with Trevor while Michael rappels down a skyscraper and Franklin stands on another tower with a sniper rifle.” Sounds exciting, right? Well it’s not. It’s kind of dull, and what no one mentions is that the game’s version of the FBI (FIB) hires the guys to kidnap an innocent man being tortured by the CIA (IAA) so they can torture him and in turn kill another innocent men. Thereafter, every few days, the FIB agents contact you to murder a few more IAA agents because the game’s premise is that these agencies are in hot competition for the same budget money. It’s so ridiculously ludicrous, the idea that government agents would hire criminals to go murder other agents just so they can make more money to “fight crime.”

Then there’s Trevor, a raging psychopath who comes after Michael for revenge, only to keep insisting that they go out on more heists together. And all of Trevor’s plans suck and result in heists that don’t make any money. Trevor is also a chronic whiner. He’s mad because he never got a fair shot in life, and he didn’t have a good childhood. Yeah, I didn’t have a good childhood either, but you don’t see me killing twenty people in an afternoon just because I’m miffed. It’s extra hypocritical of him, because he’s hurting so many people, but then expects the world to give him a square deal. I would have much rather preferred to give him a bullet to the brain and played the rest of the game without him.

But don’t think I’m just going to dump on Trevor, because Michael and Franklin are just as bad. All three character have a case of John Marston syndrome. By that, I mean even though they’re criminals, they still find time to talk down to other people for the way they live. With Franklin, I can almost understand him talking down to his people from the hood, because most of the people he knows are fucked in the heads. Lamar is a fuckwit whose every plan ends in a bloody gunfight and no profits, and yet he chastises Franklin for finding success with his heists and corporate assassination jobs. At the start of the game, Lamar gets Franklin a job as a repo man for Simeon, and then proceeds to rob Simeon of a motorcycle because he didn’t get to be employee of the month. Then he dumps the bike on Franklin, along with his dog Chop. So yeah, Franklin complaining about Lamar’s behavior is almost understandable. But when he lectures Michale and Trevor about their attitude problems, he really is the pot calling the kettles black.

Franklin’s aunt and ex-girlfriend implore him to change for the better, but turn around and tell Franklin that he needs to help Lamar commit petty crimes. With the ex, it’s particularly annoying because she moved out of the hood and plans to marry a doctor, but she still tells Franklin that he should hang around Lamar, who is a low-life thug and always will be because he can’t get his ackrite. It’s all right for her to abandon her roots and leave Franklin because he’s a criminal, but he had better show some loyalty to his friend, even if it means perpetuating more bloodbaths in the hood. It make-a no fucking sense. (No really, if the ex was out of the hood for good, how the fuck did she even find out Lamar needed help? It’s horribly written and makes no sense. It would actually make more sense if Franklin’s aunt had shown up to request help, but not the ex.)

Michael and his family are all the same story, a group of sick people who are all criminally inclined, and yet they have no trouble looking down on each other. Michael starts the game talking about how he “ran whores,” but he’s too good now to let his daughter work in porn, or even to dance provocatively on a reality TV talent show. He’s apparently cheated on his wife with hookers in the past, but explodes in rage when she has affairs with other men. And then there’s Jimmy, who is Rockstar’s attempt to openly mock the gamers playing their games. He’s a wannabe thug who sits on his ass playing video games while spouting lines like “Hermaphrodite, I’m gonna rape you. But you’re probably a fag and like that kind of shit.” And he lectures his dad for being crazy. Yes, really.

What I’m saying is, there’s not one single character who isn’t a drag for the exact same reason, and I don’t see this as a parody. When the game makers spend so much time bitterly mocking everyone, it comes off more as asshole writers who think they’re funny whining about how screwed up the world is without acknowledging their own part in fucking things up. “Boo-hoo, the world is so vapid and shallow, and we want nothing to do with it….but here’s our vapid and shallow game where we’ll make fun of all of you.”

Which brings me to the movies and TV shows. God, they’re awful. They’re not funny, and they just drag on and on. What’s ironic is, Rockstar is complaining about the writing quality of films and TV shows when their own writing quality is pure shit. Their jokes suck, and their mocking of other forms of media comes across as bitter for no reason. I mean, dudes, you’re one of the most successful game companies in the world, and yet every game you make seems to brim with hatred and cynicism.

And I’m sorry, but “it’s a parody” really doesn’t excuse the shit sloppiness of the writing. Every mission is a weak excuse to go to some location and wreak havoc. And I wouldn’t even mind this so much if the criminals I was riding with didn’t spend half the drive time lecturing each other. Like Trevor, a drug dealing mass murderer lecturing Michael on being a lousy father. Or Franklin riding on a repo job with a crackhead’s girlfriend and lecturing her about her drug habits after he’s just murdered twenty dudes in a failed drug deal with Lamar. Seriously, it’s annoying as fuck to spend so much time listening to variations of “Hey, I may be a mass murdering drug slinging whore monger, but at least I’m not scum like you.”

I really wish Rockstar would take some of those millions they make on their games and hire a writer. Preferably someone who isn’t going to pound out the same cynical rehash from all their other games. There could have been better ways to get these three together for their heists, and that whole FIB VS IAA angle was utter bullshit and should have been scrapped. I’m not asking for a GTA sans murdering car thieves. I’m asking for a better story where said criminals don’t pull all this moralizing bullshit in every other fucking mission.

And the thing is, when I finally got to the last mission and had to make my choice for the ending, I didn’t have to think more than a second about which ending I took. Once I made my choice and sat through the credits, I took out the disc and put it away. I don’t want to stick around with these people for follow up missions, and I don’t really care what happens after the story ends.

I’d be remiss in not mentioning the torture scene. Rockstar uses this one part of the story to stand on a soapbox and lecture through Trevor that torture is wrong and serves no useful purpose. I agree with the sentiment, and don’t feel the scene was all that horrifying. But the fact is, Trevor is a guy who murdered a dude after he got caught sexing up said dude’s wife. He then kills that dude’s whole gang and declares war on a competitor, all because he’s in a bad mood. So no, I don’t really buy that this is the guy who’s going to give a “torture is wrong” speech. If anything, it feels like Rockstar’s writers are pushing their character aside to lecture the gamers, and it’s not very believable.

And before I move on to the final verdict, I want to mention GTA Online. Which didn’t work during the first few weeks of launch, and which is still kicking me out from every session after a little while. The game says I was ejected by other players, but frequently everyone else was already ejected from the session before me. Also, I’m seeing other players not in the US also complaining about this problem, and I think it’s because the games servers are kicking people with high ping rates.

This would not be a problem if I was just getting kicked, but when I log back in, I get a message that I left a job unfinished, making me a bad sport, and if I continue to get these bad sport ratings, I will only be grouped with other bad sports. Well fuck y’all, I just won’t play at all for now. If and when Rockstar fixes this stuff, I might make a separate review for GTA Online. But for now, their shit is still broken and it makes the online side frustrating.

When I can stay online, I do rather like the races and some of the missions. But there’s not much variety to the offerings, and although the other players say they mission get better once I rank up, the problem remains that I can’t reliably stay online long enough to get a better rank. So I’m mostly limited to robbing stores and doing a short race before disconnecting, and that’s not fun.

Just like Red Dead Redemption, I have to divide my score into two sections for this game. When it comes to the game world and exploring all the many locations, Grand Theft Auto V is a work of art set to a fantastic soundtrack. It should be pointed to as a lesson to other game makers in how to make a pretty sandbox game. If I were basing my score on this factor alone, they would earn five stars. But the story and the whiny characters drags the game down to a 2.5 for me. I’m not even addressing the sexism or the racism going on in this game. Rockstar might claim that this is a parody, and that parodies don’t have to provide solutions to the problems they’re exploring. But rather than parodying these topics, the game feels like it’s perpetuating them. The only time the writers went out of their way to explain the “joke” with the torture scene, they bungled that too. So what we have is a sloppy mess that fails on every level.

“But Zoe,” you say, “It’s just a game, and most of us don’t play for the story. We’re just there to crash cars and steal jets.” And that’s fine if that’s how you want to play the game. But I go into these games for different reasons than you. So this is my opinion of the story, and if you have a different opinion, good for you.

One last time with feeling: I liked the game world, and I liked doing all the stuff that wasn’t related to the story. But Just like Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3, the one place Rockstar still hasn’t made any improvements is in their writing department. And that’s a shame, because worlds this detailed and intricate deserve a story worthy of their gorgeous locations.

Game review: Black Rock Shooter The Game for PSP/PS Vita

Yes, this is an older game, but I just finished it, and it’s a part of Sony’s online store, where you can buy it for either the PSP or the PS Vita. One of the great things about reviewing the way I do is that I’m not in a rush to finish stuff in a week after release to give people a quick score. Whether it’s books, games, or music, I only review what I feel like trying, and however long it takes me to finish doesn’t matter, because I’m not in a hurry.

So, having known about the history of Black Rock Shooter’s main character, but never seeing the anime, I’m not one to reliably say if the game’s story is in any way faithful to the anime. What I can say is that the game’s story is bleak as fuck. Like the end of Evangelion bleak. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but I just want to get this out of the way for people who prefer their stories to be a bit more positive. But whether you get the good or bad ending, the final result is that there’s only one or two people left on Earth, and the scenes during and after the credits don’t do much to change the bleakness. This is the kind of game where you win a battle, and someone still dies horribly anyway. Nothing you do will change this, so it’s all a bit hopeless to plod through.

The main character is Stella, a clone with enhanced strength created by the failing remains of the human race in the wake of an “alien invasion.” I use quotes because there’s actually only 8 aliens, and the rest of their army is made up of blocky robots. Aside from the boss battles, you’ll be fighting these robots with Stella, and the mech designs range from laughable to vaguely intimidating if they weren’t so blocky.

The bosses are all dressed in anime fetish outfits, making one wonder if they intimately studied Japanese tentacle porn before making the decision to wipe out every last living thing on our planet. Which might explain a lot about their desire to erase all life on the planet as well as their crappy clothing styles.

And the humans left over…well let’s just say I didn’t miss them much when they got wasted. In the third stage, the guys (only 10 dudes survived the invasion) discover a woman may be alive in Moscow, and they race across the planet for a mission for “humanity’s last hope.” They do this all the while standing behind Stella as their combat shield, and never once acknowledging that she too might be capable of having kids in a few years’ time. You’d think they’d be more interested in protecting her, but she’s “just a clone,” which I guess makes her inferior as breeding stock.

That’s what makes the guys kinda disturbing. Until much later in the game, the men treat Stella more like their own combat robot than a person, and while they would never think of her in any sexual way, they DID dress her in a combat jacket zipped down to the stomach to show off her bra, knee-high boots, and no pants. Sure, standard issued battle clothing for women in video games, but it does come of as creepy at times.

By this point, you must be thinking, “So Zoe, you hated the game, right?” Well, no, I disliked the story and the side characters. But I rather liked the game. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the combat system, which is very different from anything I’ve played before.

The game’s stages are linear corridors where you use the left stick or the D-pad to move around until you encounter a robot or a boss. Then the game shifts to a fixed battlefield where Stella stands on one side, and her robot or alien enemies stand on the other. You control Stella using the left stick to aim a targeting recticle and the four face buttons and the shoulder buttons to shoot a massive machine gun, dodge attacks, or block them with an energy shield. All these moves make Stella heat up, and if she overheats, you have to sit still and take attacks from the enemy without recourse.

There is an item accessed in the item menu with the left shoulder button called Body Cooler that can treat this problem on the fly, but more useful are the four customizable options given to you by using the face buttons with the right shoulder button. These can be buffs, heals, or special attacks, and in all cases, they don’t generate heat. There’s a catch in that they all take time to cool down in their own way, much like magic attacks in RPGs. As you beat certain challenges, you’ll be given more options for what you can use, but you’re limited to only four options during combat. And for me, this is what makes the game a blast. It’s completing a challenge to unlock some new attack or buff, and then playing a few rounds to see what the new weapon or buff is like.

My current configuration has Stella freezing enemies with a “G-1 Stun Snipe” so I can hit them with a pulse cannon, a war hammer, and finish them off with a slash from my Iksa katana. I just unlocked the Volcane, a massive upgrade for my Vulcan cannon, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet. The few times I did use it, it certainly looked badass.

There were some driving sequences that take Stella to battle robots on the busted highways, but I didn’t care much for these sections. You have to time your dodges of enemies to the last second, at which point Stella whips out her sword and slashes the bots as she passes them. If you screw this up, the robots kamikaze dive the bike, and after it takes enough hits, you crash. The latter two stages set up like this were exercises in frustration for me, much like the water sliding sections of Uncharted: Golden Abyss. In fact, trying to get past the third driving stage made me put down the game for a while because it pissed me off. Obviously, I came back to it and got around this sticking point, and I’m glad I did, because the rest of the boss battles make up for this less desirable portion of the game.

In addition to fighting the robots, you also face off against the alien bosses at the end of each stage. It’s the same battle setup as fighting the robots, but the bosses take a bit more strategy to defeat. Beating the bosses also unlocks Free Hunt mode, allowing you to play the stage over without the story bits, and with some extra challenges thrown in to unlock art or movies in the gallery, or other costumes. Normally, I’d say this is just for completionists, but I actually prefer playing this way. Then I don’t have to keep skipping cut-scenes I’ve already seen a number of times. I just get on with the game to unlock more stuff.

So, what we have is a game that I adore for the game play, but I’m not real hot on the story. I’m not saying it’s a bad story. It’s just bleak and kind of creepy. And if I’M saying it’s creepy, considering some of the stuff I write, you know it’s got to be working that creep factor harder than a trench-coated dude fondling stuffed toys on a playground park bench.

As this is a game made for PSP, the graphics aren’t so great, but the music is pretty good, and there aren’t that many games I can recall where the controls and combat feel unique. The boss fights are challenging without being insanely hard, always ending with a climactic camera swooping duel where you rapidly tap the X button to overpower the aliens and then slash them with Stella’s sword or shoot them with her ridiculously massive rifle. I did find a couple boss moves cheap enough to lose my temper, but they weren’t so bad that I’d never want to play them again. And Free Hunt makes the levels more bearable by not killing someone off right after you win. Seriously, that “you win, but you still lose” premise is kinda depressing.

All told, I give Black Rock Shooter The Game three stars. I’m glad I picked it up on a whim, and I can see playing it over from the start, something I don’t often say about most games. If you’ve got a PS Vita and were looking for something to play that’s different, give this a chance.

Book review: Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

I started reading Warm Bodies a few months back and gave up in disgust a quarter of the way through. Then I saw the movie, and I LOVED it, and I wondered how different the book was and picked it back up. I really wish I hadn’t. There’s a reason the movie is so different, and it’s because the story in the book is so horribly inconsistent and constantly full of mistakes that the lousy world-building drags down the characters and makes the whole story one long eye roll.

The book is about R, a zombie who lives at the airport. R claims that the dead don’t remember life, but the book is constantly contradicting this right from the start. The dead have their own religion and government. They have church services, marriages, adoptions, and schools for the kids. None of this would have been so annoying to me if R had perhaps said that being undead had slowed down the brain and made finding consciousness a struggle. But the contradiction of what R says to what happens in the story is constant. In an earlier scene, R says his friend M takes teenage zombies to a bathroom to watch porn while he undresses them and then tries sex. But he says they can’t have sex. Yet, in a later chapter, R’s wife cheats on him by having sex with another zombie guy. I could give more examples, but the point is, whatever R says as the narrator, you can be sure it will be proved wrong in a few chapters.

If this was the only problem with the book, I might give it a pass, but there’s constant mistakes that drove me bonkers. Julie calls her father on a land line from a dead house with no power. Julie claims to have stolen a Polaroid camera from the boneys, somehow making it through an entire airport of zombies and into the boney central hive. Everyone lives in a single stadium, building a city inside, but since R can’t read, all the street signs are helpfully made into pictures. R gets drunk from drinking vodka, but after he vomits, he’s instantly sober. A handgun that Julie’s father drops empties itself by firing over and over when it bounces on the floor. M calls Julie’s house using the phone/intercom system, even though zombies can’t read. Perry, R’s final victim, becomes a conscience for R, even though such a thing has never happened with his previous victims. When his prior victims finally do speak, it’s in third person as a collective that doesn’t make any sense. R can’t heal from any of his flesh wounds, but after breaking bones in a fall, he suddenly develops super speed healing. (But his flesh wounds start to bleed near the end because they never healed.)

Perry’s presence in the book is one long drag, an extended flashback where we have it hammered into us that it’s not really R’s fault for eating him, because Perry was suicidal anyway. But worse than the flashbacks of memory long after his brain is digested are the conversations between R and Perry. It doesn’t make any sense in the context of the story, because it’s never happened before with any of R’s prior victims. This change is as a badly explained as the source of the plague, and every time Perry started talking, I felt the temptation to skim.

And then there’s the fact that almost every living person has colors for last names. Rosso, Grigio, Greene. Taken together with the constant mistakes and inconsistencies, it feels like the author was struggling every step of the way to keep this story plodding along, and even coming up with names was really hard.

None of this stuff shows up in the movie, and the only thing I wish the movie hadn’t changed is that they white washed Nora’s character. But from start to finish, the book is a sloppy mess that desperately needed an editor to convince the author to kill their darlings. The movie shows the kind of editing that the book should have had. I guess other readers didn’t really care about the flaws in the world building, and they were just focusing on the characters. And I will admit, aside from Perry the characters are interesting. But the way the story plays out just rubbed me the wrong way from the start to that god awful ending.

I’m giving Warm Bodies one star, and I’d recommend to zombie writers as an instruction manual for what not to do in a zombie book.