Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 40

Return of the Epic Spam

In Episode one we met a haunted house that liked to kill people via social media and then tie them into pretty bows around chairs. I think.

Well, the Epic Bot is back, and this time it has the plague:

For breakfast, I grab an orange from the refrigerator and allow it to function. What treatment of chickenpox rash is a Smallpox Symptoms. When using this cream you will want to be dead and just watching everybody while I chill rooms, treatment of chickenpox rash flicker the lights, and pull the drapes open and shut. A theatre has existed on this site since 1834. One of them had tears in his eyes. Your health care provider may talk to you about your symptoms. The term shingles has Latin connections. The man always paid.

So we have computerized oranges, and a disease that looks like chickenpox but is actually smallpox, and the only treatment makes you want to be dead. It also chills rooms and makes the lights flicker and creates poltergheist activity, so apparently you are posessed by ghosts in treating this plage. An old theater is involved, somehow, and it's weeping. OH, BUT THE TRUE HORROR IS REVEALED: SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. IT'S A LATIN CONSPIRACY TO STEAL ALL YOUR MONEY.

Epic spam. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

The Wolf Gift chapter 6 and WTF IS THIS AMAZON

Okay. We'll get to the review in a minute, but just in case you don't already know...

AMAZON IS GOING TO START SELLING FANFIC

And my loyalties are divided.

On the one hand, I'm kind of like "Well...DUH. This was going to happen eventually." And on the other hand, I'm suddenly every fic ever showcased by Topless Robot, and now have the sudden violent urge to go huddle over in a corner. And on the third hand...(It's an octopus)...as somebody who has very much written fanfic and then filed the serial numbers off...uh, wouldn't that be like, incredibly boring after a while? Having to stick to that cast of characters and keep them all in character...no. Thank you. I get enough headaches.

Thoughts, my lovelies?

Now. For the book.

I sat down and I asked myself if there was anything Ruben could do to make me hate him more. I mean, I already will have the image of a werewolf taking selfies with his iPhone in my brain for all eternity. Really, he can't be more of an ass than he already--

REUBEN DROVE THE PORSCHE too fast on the way to work. The car was always a chained lion in the city.

Oh, right. He's a twenty-three year old entitled author's fantasy, and the author gave him a Porsche.

Ruben needs to go die.

AND, of course, the city has forgotten all about the kidnapping of forty-two children, and is now squarely focused on Ruben's wolfy escapades. Which consisted of a lot of roof hopping and the murder of a single rapist. Because the murder of a rapist is much more interesting than missing kids.

And OF COURSE the woman he rescued has come to him for an interview.

At least Peter Parker had to take his own fucking pictures. The universe didn't drop a camera full of film in his lap.

And while there are lots and lots of articles about how he rescued this chick--all of them tongue in cheek--none of them mention werewolves. One of them mentions Lon Chaney, but at this point I'm getting irritated with how specialy special Anne Rice wants her werewolf story to be. HE IS A FUCKING WEREWOLF. USE YOUR WORDS. 

 Ruben tries to back out of doing the coverage on the excuse that, hello, he just survived a murder/wolf attack and he doesn't want to do another one. His boss says "You're doing it anyway" and walks out of the room.

Everybody in this book is an asshole.

And just in case you think I'm overdoing the superhero comic comparisons:

Reuben went speechless. The blood was pounding in his face. Where the hell are Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen?

Yeah. Anne? If you're going to rip off the most popularized tropes in comic books and try to pass it off as something unique and literary, at least pretend not to be intimately familiar with what you're yanking. I swear to god if there is an actual Spiderman reference I'm going to...there's gonna be one isn't there?

Before he filed the story, he Googled the words “man wolf.” Just as he suspected, the name had been used— for a minor character in the Spider-Man comics, and for another minor character in the manga-anime series Dragon Ball. But he also noted a book called The Man-Wolf and Other Tales by Émile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian, first translated into English in 1876. Good enough. It was in the public domain as far as he was concerned.

TRANSLATION: Anne Rice googled "man-wolf" found the following, decided that it was public domain, somehow also decided that it didn't sound absolutely freaking stupid, and then decided that writing about this search process was the absolute best thing possible. I mean, it worked for Stephenie Meyer. All the hot kids are googling their paranormal afflictions. 

Literally. I just googled it for the fun, and the first result is JJ Jamison's kid, twice, and then a bunch of...uh, gee I hope that's not porn, and then yet more links to Marvel wikis, and Dragonball is the seventh result. That book mentioned is the first result on the second page, hosted via project Gutenberg.

She did, however, leave out all the skatebording links. Because apparently Man-Wolfs are a trademark brand of skating shoes.

Oopsie.

And she did all this because "werewolf", a term that is very much public domain, that requires no explination, and that would be the first fucking word anybody would apply to this thing, is not special enough for specialy special Ruben.

There's also a bizzare disconnect between the pop culture references and, you know, reality:

He’d also checked out the YouTubes of reporters in North Beach describing the “back-alley beast.”

Maybe it's just me, but I have never heard youtube videos being called "Youtubes", like they're apples or something. I get that Rice is seventy, and half this stuff wouldn't be in her lexicon, but she shouldn't try to force it so damn hard. It's much more noticable to be using pop culture references wrong than it is to not use them at all.

In short: Ruben writes the story, mails it off, freaks out a little, but not so much that he can't write about his own paranormal escapades, and then goes home. End of chapter.

This has gone all the way through suck and come back around to entertaining. I now want Ruben and Edward Cullen to sit down for blood tea.

The Wolf Gift--Chapter 5

Fair warning, my lovely loyal blog-readers: This is now memorial weekend. Memorial weekend is the day when most waitresses sit in their room and contemplate the sharp objects in their apartment. It is busy, is what I mean to say. THOU SHALT TIP YOUR AMERICAN WAITRESS Is what I mean to say. TIP, my beloved ones. TIP. TIP.

Where are we in the book, now?

IT WAS FRIDAY.

Right. We're about to rip off Stan Lee.

Which is a little like stealing candy from an infant, but it's obvious Anne Rice doesn't care.

Ruben is now aware that a whole bussload of students has been kidnapped. Because, you know, just one kid being abducted is too common for our Sunshine Boy to in vestigate. Oh, No. The agony of the kidnapped child must be multiplied across many families for this to be worthy of Ruben's time.

Hey, what kind of kidnapping is this?

He had the news blaring from the radio all the way. All that was known was that the entire student body of forty-two students, aged five years old through eleven, and three teachers had vanished without a trace. A sack containing the teacher’s cell phones and a couple of phones that had belonged to the students had been found at a call box on Highway One, with a printed note: “Wait For Our Call.”

Did they add a pink bow? They really should have added a pink bow. I mean, this is obviously "Generic kidnappers R us," so they ought to have a Douglas Adams special here...

Oh, and the kidnappers were careful. No public school scum for them. No. This was a private school. So we can all sympathize with the kidnapping victims. Because we all went to private school

(...FYI I did go to private school for one year. It was the most miserable year of my life)

(My sympathies are with the kidnappers, is what I'm saying. I'm sure after the fifth hour of Veggie Tales Silly Songs with Larry, they're willing to give the kids back.)



(Welcome to my child. AKA The Ransom of Red Cheif)

 Oh, and we are assured that the teachers are, and I quote "Earth mothers" and the children are the best kids in the universe (I was on the basketball team for my private school. Because I was tall, and because there were a grand total of three girls in the seventh and eighth grades, and I was the difference between having a full girl's team, and having to stick with the co-ed division, which sadly existed in the North Texas Rabidly Christian Private School universe. One of my teammates spent the entire drive between Stephenville TX and Abilene singing Silly Songs with Larry. MY SYMPATHIES ARE WITH THE KIDNAPPERS.



(imagine. Three straight hours of THAT. Verbatum. Also: WHO GAVE CGI TO CHRISTIAN CONSERVATIVES IN THE 90s? AND CAN WE TRY THEM FOR CRUEL AND UNUSUAL WHATSIS?)

Also: We are assured that the private school of 42 students had their own very special bus made special. Just for them.

My private school went on a feild trip once, from Stephenville to Austin. Those of you unfamiliar with TX might assume this is simple. This is a five hour drive that began at five AM, comprising the entire seventh and eighth-grade classes. About ten students in all. We drove in the teacher's little volvo and my father's much more spacious suburban. This was back in 98. I remember the boys got stir crazy first, and began issuing chinese fire drills at every single fucking stoplight once we hit Austin city limits. The girls mantained their sanity until about two PM, when we were on our way back (having toured the governors mansion back when Dubbaua was the TX state governor, and the capitol building) and they purchased a set of wax bottles of sugar, which they somehow managed to spill on every concievable surface during the process of consumption. I also remember my dad having to beg the girls not to hang pieces of paper towel and/or t-shirts out the window, becuase this signaled to police that we had a medical emergancy onboard, and we didn't have a medical emergency onboard, just teenaged girls with WAY TOO MUCH SUGAR.

I SYMPATHIZE WITH THE KIDNAPPERS, IS WHAT I AM SAYING.

Oh, but we are assured that Rubans Thumbs are on the case. They are on the case with his iPhone.

  Reuben’s thumbs were going as he typed on his iPhone, describing the picturesque three-story building, surrounded by venerable oaks, and masses of wildflowers, including poppies, and marguerites and azaleas blooming on the shady grounds.

Our grounds had tulips. Dying tulips, because whoever got assigned the landscaping didn't understand that Texas, even North Texas, doesn't have a winter. We also had poppies, but those grew along the railroad tracks we weren't supposed to walk beside.

Ruben goes to the school. A random photographer asks him for advice. NOTE TO WOULD BE PHOTOGRAPHERS: DO NOT ASK OTHER PEOPLE FOR ADVICE, BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT YOU GET:

“Get the whole scene,” said Reuben a little impatiently. “Get the sheriff up there on the porch; get the feel of the school itself."

NO, REALLY? AND WHAT DOES THIS ACCOMPLISH?

And then Ruben is struck with AINGST, my loyal blog-readers. AINGST. BECAUSE MAYBE HIS INHERITING A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR MANSION IS GOING TO DRAW HIM AWAY FROM HIS JOB AS A WONDERFUL REPORTER AT THE RIPE OLD AGE OF TWENTY THREE.

HAVE I MENTIONED YET THAT THE AUTHOR IS SEVENTY ?

And then we get a blow-by-blow account of Ruben's life after he goes home. Because, you know, that crime scene full of weeping parents, that's totally boring.

This happens:

An extraordinary restlessness came over him. He got up, paced, went back to bed. He was lonely, hideously lonely. He hadn’t really been with Celeste since before the massacre. He didn’t want to be with Celeste now. He kept thinking that if he was with Celeste, he’d hurt her, bruise her somehow, run roughshod over her feelings. Wasn’t he doing that these days without their putting it to the bedroom test?

It goes on to a fantasy about Marchant. Because a kidnapping involving innocent children is all about you and your infidelity.

And now we get Ruben's first transformation. And instead of it being a malstrom of pain IE An American Werewolf in London, it is, of course, a transcendant experiance of which ONLY RUBEN COULD BE WORTHY.

Gag me.

Every particle of his body was defined in these waves, the skin covering his face, his head, his hands, the muscles of his arms and legs. With every particle of himself he was breathing, breathing as he’d never breathed in his life, his whole being expanding, hardening, growing stronger and stronger by the second.
\

I'm not kidding. Please. Gag me with a spork.

We also get random, unattributed dialogue!

“Oh, but you knew, didn’t you? Didn’t you know this was inside of you, bursting to come out? You knew!”

RUBEN. WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO?!?

AND OF COURSE, his transformation has something to do with Marchant. Because OF COURSE IT DOES.

And then he is fully transformed in a truely orgasmic way, and...you know, I was kidding about the Spiderman references. Really. Rice didn't have to actually employ them:

 From one house to another he sped, going lower and lower as he made his way down towards the traffic and noise of North Beach, flying so fast now that he scarce touched down on the smaller slopes, his clawed hands flying out to grasp whatever he needed to hoist his easy weight and send him flying over the next street or alleyway.

Tell me you do not see Toby McGuire swinging between the rooftops here.

He sees a random rape victim and rescues her. No big. To him, anyway. I mean, she's going to be scarred for life, but Ruben gets to rescue her so it is all okay.

I mean, he only rips the rapist's throat out.

 This happens:

A hideous scent rose from the man, if indeed it was a scent. It was as if the man’s intent was a scent, and it maddened Reuben.

RUBEN CAN NOW SCENT EVIL JUST BY SMELLING IT.

Now. How do we treat the rape victim after all this?

The woman stood stark still, her arms crossed over her breasts, staring at him. Feeble, choking sounds came out of her. How utterly miserable and pitiable she was. How unspeakable that anyone would do such evil to her. She was shaking so violently that she could scarce stand, one naked shoulder visible above the torn red silk of her dress.

There are a lot of buzzwords I could use for this, but I'm going to stick with the simpliest and most effective pairing; FUCK YOU RUBEN.

ALSO: PITIABLE. NO. JUST FUCKING NO. GO BACK TO GIRL SCHOOL AND REMEMBER HOW TO GIRL, ANNE. RAPE VICTIMS SHOULD NOT BE PITIABLE. THEY SHOULD BE SOMETHING THAT INSPIRES WROTHFUL VENGENCE. NOT PITY.

And of course the rape victim rejects Ruben's attempt at comfort, mostly because it involved him ripping her rapist's throat out. Of course Ruben, in all his perfection, will be misunderstood. Of course he will.

I am now invisioning a werewolf in Roschach's clothing, rambling about how the Comedian is dead. Which is probably the wrong reference but if you want to invoke comic book orgin stories, Watchmen is one of the better ones. Aside from the whole "Rape saved the entire world" theme.

Ruben then teleports back to his bedroom.

I am not making that up.

And then he sees himself in the mirror. And he reacts with perfectly natural horror and--yeah, I'm not fooling any of you, am I?

“So this was the manner of beast that saved me in Marchent’s house, was it?” He laughed again that low, irresistible rolling laughter. Of course. “And you bit me, you devil. And I didn’t die from the bite and now it’s happened to me.” He wanted to laugh out loud. He wanted to roar with laughter.

There isn't enough "Fuck you" In the world.

Seriously. This is his first transformation. It really shouldn't make me want to dip the bastard in acid.

And just when you think it can't get any better, this happens:

He wanted to cover his face with his hands. But he didn’t have hands. Instead, he held up the iPhone and clicked a picture of himself. And again and again.

Yes. My beloved Blog-Readers. Ruben's first impulse when he discovers he is a werewolf is to use his iPhone to take a selfie.

There is only one comment worthy of this beautific moment:


Ruben considers using his powers to go conquer evil...but he decides he's better off getting a drink of water first.

OUR HERO.

And then he passes out, changes back, and checks his iPhone for his selfies, which naturally reveal the manwolf looking back at him. Because I guess Stephenie Meyer ruined werewolf for Ms. Rice, and we have to use a word paring less passe.

And then we get the natural freak out of "OH MY GOD I AM A WEREWOLF."

Only those words are never used.

And of course he justifies the fact that his first act as a werewolf was killing a man by the fact that the man was a rapist.

Okay, you got a point, but you still killed a dude in less than twelve hours of being a full blown wolf. Please. Spare me the attempt at morality.

And then we get Marchant transcendant, because of course the life of a backally rape victim cannot compare to the glories of a rich white woman who happened to leave our protagonist her house.

Can this chapter end now? Please?

And then this happens:

No one must know because not a single person in this world could be trusted not to incarcerate the thing he’d become, and he had to know infinitely more about what had happened and whether it would happen again and when and how. This was his journey! His darkness.

It's a little premature to say "trees died for this" but folks? TREES DIED FOR THIS. LOTS. AND LOTS. OF TREES.

FINALLY Ruben's dad makes him stop admiring himself in the mirror because his job is calling him and SOMEBODY in this book needs to act like a frickin' adult.

Yeah. Trees died for this shit.

The Wolf Gift--chapter four

So editing on the fourth Starbleached installment is going well. Due to this being summer and work going OMFG THE BRITISH TOURISTS ARE COMING THE BRITISH TOURISTS ARE COMING I think I'm doing rather well getting things done. This summer is basically going to be Work Till I Drop on all fronts, and I really hope I can pull it all off.

So. On to the Wolf Gift.

So I actually think that RF had a good point the other day. Maybe Rice is building Ruben up for a great disasterous fall from grace. Maybe this story will be about an obnoxious little shit redeeming himself from being an obnoxious little shit. I still have that hope, but...well...

“They will not tell me what happened!” he roared at his mother, who at once demanded that the police come and give him the answers he was entitled to have.

It's shrinking. Fast.

Yeah, the police have Ruben handcuffed to the gurney.  Marchant's death is handled offscreen with an infodump via Ruben's girlfriend. Yes. The girlfriend he cheated on is the person his family goes to for info on what, exactly, happened in the World's Perfect Mansion.

Ruben needs to officially die in a fire.

But he could still get better. Wikus van de Merwe was an unlikable piece of shit throughout most of District 9 and that made his heel-face turn fucking awesome. Let's hold out hope, my friends. Let us hold out hope.

So when he finally wakes up for good, a cop asks him if he had sex with Marchant. He says yes, and submits to a DNA test because he knew his semen would come up in autopsy. He didn't remember making a 911 call but said call was made via his phone, and somebody muttered "murder, murder" into the phone, so he must have made a 911 call. And I hope you like that summery, because that's about the same delivery, sans Rice's graceful, pretentious prose.

And of course his beautiful girlfriend Celeste is right there by his side, and she hasn't brought up his infidelity yet.

I want ring side seating when that conversation goes down.

So. Now we're going to get the unavoidable "Ruben Is Suspected Of Killing Marchant" subplot, wherein he is innocent and must prove his innocence, and cannot because somebody is pulling strings behind the scene, and so a'la Richard Kimball must go on a long escapade involving werewolf safehouses and--

Twenty-four hours later, when he was moved to a private room, Celeste brought the news that the killers had been Marchent’s younger brothers. She was powerfully energized by the perfectly outrageous story.

Are. You. Shitting. Me.

GOD DAMN IT ANNE! This was a subplot that would at least justify the superhero plot I can see coming from three miles away AND YOU ARE THROWING IT AWAY BECAUSE YOU CANNOT STAND THE TENSION OF RUBEN BEING IN TROUBLE.

Look. I hate that subplot. I hate it with passion and fire and loathing beyond belief. I hate it in every movie I see it in. Mostly because I cannot stand that kind of tension at all. But from a writer's pov? BRING IT. THE FUCK. ON. Yes. It's cliche. Un-cliche it somehow. You're a writer. You can do it.

But no. We toss the only source of tension that exists in this book so far. We've gone from flatlined real-estate plot to SUDDEN! RANDOM! ATTACK! to "oh, her brothers did it, you're off the hook. Natch."

Also? Nobody gives a shit about the random animal that killed Marchant's brothers and bit Ruben on the face. Because it's just a random man-eating mountain lion/other LARGE predator that just randomly walked into a human residence and ate two people. 

Yes. They were bad people. It still ate them. 

Ruben wonders why the beast left him alive... And then Ruben's mom, the world class doctor, says this.

“If it was rabid, it was behaving erratically,”

Uh...yeah. I'm sorry. If I were a doctor and my child had been bitten by a kitten in an area known for rabies, my child would be getting the prophylaxis treatments long before this conversation even began. Because, as Ms. Rice is so kind to point out:

Rabies was almost uniformly fatal once the symptoms presented. There was no choice but to treat for rabies at once.

Except you waited a couple days to start giving him the treatment. Gee, Ruben's Mom, that was real careful of you.

Ruben now has survivors guilt for outliving Marchant. This is a perfectly reasonable reaction, and I can't critize it.

...UNLESS this is "OH, HOW I LOVED MARCHANT" in which case Ms. Rice needs to tone the melodrama down a little bit.

And then...uh...

More medication. More painkillers. More antibiotics. Reuben lost track of the days.

That's probably the laziest. transistion of time. EVER. I mean...couldn't we at least have had some kind of scene and/or chapter break? That reads like thirty seconds pass, not days. We either need more text, or we need a handful of short, choppy scene breaks.

Or, you know, we skip to the part where Ruben gets out of the hosptial and things actually start happening to him again.

And of course Ruben hears his mom talking about how much her son is -GASP!- changing behind their back. Because in a werewolf book we need to go through that whole "period between bite and first full moon" in a handful of quickly summerized paragraphs. That's absolutely the best way to handle it. Too bad we wasted the first two chapters on Ruben's relationship with a dead woman, because all those words would be really useful here.

And OF COURSE he's the hottest patient on the ward, and OF COURSE we need to know this.

This is how ALL The plot-related threads have been handled so far in this chapter:

Speculation about the mysterious animal continued. Couldn’t Reuben remember anything else, asked his editor Billie Kale, the feminine genius behind the San Francisco Observer. She stood beside his bed.

 “Honestly, no,” Reuben said, pushing hard against the drugs to look and sound alert.

Couldn't you give another character a couple lines of dialogue?

Oh, right. "Honestly, no."

Well, the reporters DID break the news about Ruben's infidelity to Celeste. And now they're going to fight about it, rig--oh, who the fuck am I kidding. It's handwaved away too:

“It’s not that bad,” she said. “Well, just forget that part.” She comforted him, as if he was the one who’d been wronged.

Ruben is obviously the only person in this book with feels. Let us accept this and move on.

Oh, but it gets worse. OH MY GOD. IT GETS WORSE. See, one week after the killing Ruben finds out that Marchant willed the house to him. 

She’d done this about an hour before she died, speaking with her San Francisco lawyers about it by phone, and faxing several signed documents to them, one of which had been witnessed by Felice, confirming her verbal instructions that the house should go to Reuben Golding, and that she would bear the full cost of gift taxes on the transfer, which would leave Reuben in possession free and clear. She’d arranged for twelve months’ prepaid taxes and insurance.

Here is the timeline for the story so far:

-Marchant meets Ruben
-Marchant gives Ruben the World's Longest Tour of the World's Perfect Mansion.
-Ruben elects to buy the house.
-NOT KNOWING THAT SHE IS ABOUT TO DIE IN (I SHIT YOU NOT) SEVEN MINUTES Marchant calls her lawyer and alters her will to leave the house she wants to sell to a kid who wants to buy it.
-SEVEN MINUTES LATER MARCHANT DIES.

Thank GOD she did that, because otherwise the World's Perfect Mansion would be all tied up in probate court and Ruben would have to live in some lesser dwelling unfit for his godly manly manwolfy-ness.

And no. The cops don't suspect a thing, because "Everyone knows" you can't bite yourself on the face with a werewolf. EVERYTHING SOLVED!

And then Ruben starts halucinating in the hospital. Okay, everybody knows his hearing just got dialed up to werewolf, but still...this is so...uh, not riviting.

And then Celeste emphasizes again that she doesn't care about him sleeping with a strange woman less than an hour before she died. Oh, but she does this wearing the ruby bracelet he gave her. Okay. That explains it.

Oh, and, uh...Ms. Rice? You know how you went on and on and ON AND ON about how you don't need an editor?

That woods was his now.

I'm leaving that there. You know. For now.

So Mom is freaking about about Ruben being better and how the hosptial keeps losing his test results. I guess because there isn't a check mark for "Werewolf." You know, Jacob's transition in New Moon wasn't this fucking bland or clueless, and that was from the girl's perspective.

Seriously. Nobody reading this book believes that Ruben has rabies. Rice is famous for writing vampires, this book was waved around as a return to form, and it's got a wolf on the cover. There is only one possible solution. 

 And then Ruben goes home to write, and we get Anne Rice's idea of what writing should be like. In which you apparently write for five hours and then e-mail your boss the first draft. So in other words, from her POV it's completely accurate. Oh, but he wants his boss to "cut where she needs to". Because editors totally do that.

Yeah. Writer-readers? If your editor cuts shit out of your book, as opposed to redlining it and letting you do it? Find another editor. 

 And then Ruben makes an offer on the contents of the house, so that he can keep all the nicnacks and fancy papers. And his lawyer tries to talk him out of it. But he won't be talked out of it. And then this happens:

Not like me to talk like that, is it, he thought. But he hadn’t been rude, really, just eager to advance the plot.

EVEN THE MAIN CHARACTER THINKS THIS BOOK IS FREAKING SLOW.

And then--I guess because Marchant's lawyers were all like "Okay sure" instead of "We don't know what you're talking about" Ruben sneaks out of his house, runs along the beach, walks into a random bar, orders a coke, and attempts to pick a fight with the ugliest guy there. Who shrugs and leaves in a "What's your problem, meth-head" kind of way.

Ruben follows

...Yeah. Anne? Stan Lee called. He'd like Spiderman's origin story back now, thanks.

So he beats the snot out of the thug, for some reason, and then goes back home. Mom is freaking out because he was gone, he's freaking out a little tiny bit (VERY little) because he beat the snot out of Random Dude and OH YEAH HIS HANDS ARE NOW TOO BIG.

He has a conversation with his brother the Catholic Priest (OH GOD I FORGOT ANNE RICE HAS RELIGION NOW) (I don't mind religious books. I love religious books. I hate religious books where the religion got shoehorned in and left there by mistake) and drops heavy hints that he's developed the ability to sense evil just by looking at bad people.

...right. And in the real world, we call that a psychotic break.

This chapter is never going to fucking end.

So Ruben has flashbacks to the murder--this is, again, perfectly normal, understandable, and borderline good writing--and then we fastforward to when Ruben's lawyer and Marchant's people decide to sell Ruben all the house's contents. That was quick.

His family discusses how much he's changed .His family discusses how he should sell the house. Pretensious conversations about evil happen. Again--heavy hints that Ruben can now sense evil by looking at it.

The chapter finally ends with Ruben freaking out his girlfriend by being confident, and with his nurse giving him his last rabies shot.

Well...maybe he'll be actively cool as a werewolf?

The Wolf Gift--Chapter 3

My new favorite album is a tie between the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack and The Immediate's Trailerhead: Triumph album. When I die I want my funeral to either start or end with Tales of the Electric Romeo first because it is awesome and second because that is the best title in the universe.

I also have an appointment with a real live counselor. I caved. I hate getting counciling, I hate needing help, I really hate asking my mom for this because she starts out "here's the number" and ends somewhere along the lines of "...but you need to be nicer to yourself". Personally, I think I am as nice to myself as I deserve. Which probably means I need to see the councelor.

Hopefully this one will be a good one.

Right. So where are we?

A LOUD CRASH. Glass breaking. He woke up. The lights were out. He couldn’t see anything. Then he heard Marchent scream.

Oh, RIGHT, with what ought to have been chapter one. Given that there will eventually be a police report made (this dude is so whitebread square OF COURSE HE WILL CALL THE COPS) we could have done all the introductions and guilt trips over sleeping with somebody who isn't his girlfriend after the action happened.

(And if Ruben doesn't call the cops he is TSTL.)

One thing I have noticed about Anne Rice, and it's something that drives me absolutely batshit, is that she likes filter words. I mean, I like them too but I'm trying to wean myself off them. Filter words are crutches for writers who don't actually want to write about whatever it is onscreen. They're a way of filtering (duh) the action and keeping yourself away from the scariness. I just re-read a couple of action scenes from Cerulean Sins, and while LKH has it too, it's not quite as bad. Ruben chases after the source of Marchant screaming, somebody grabs him, and the book breaks out in a severe case of the was-doings. Ruben was grabbed and was strangled while the flashlight was rolling on the floor. This is the pairing of death in my opinion because it both shoves unneeded words in there AND removes the reader from the scene. Adding "was" to a sentence makes it past-past tense and it makes action passive. It screams "I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH THIS", and it's something that any half good editor (or author with Word's "find" function and a shitload of patience) could fix. (...yes. I have done this. Yes. It is exactly as boring as it sounds. Yes. I recommend you do this too.) And everything is filtered through Ruben's perspective. He heard things happen. He saw things happen. This is the literary effect of watching a movie through several layers of cotton batting. It's boring.

And given that Ruben is having the everloving shit beat out of him, that's a bad thing.

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about:

Reuben saw the flash of metal, and felt the sharp stab of the blade going into his stomach. He had never felt rage like he was feeling it now, but as the two men beat him and kicked at him, he felt the blood pumping out of his stomach.

You've even got that beautiful triple filter with a helping of tell, don't show up there in bold. Up until now I wasn't aware that Ruben was feeling (hah!) anything at all.

So the two Random Dudes are attacking him, and then suddenly a Random Dog bursts in, attacks the attackers (I think? It's not very clear) and then bites Ruben on the face before letting go and sitting on him.

And then the Random Dog is gone and Ruben is dying. And he elects to take his sweet fucking time in the process. He digs his phone out but drops it. Picks it up. Drops it again. Sirens show up even though he didn't manage to call anybody, and...uh...

Yeah, writing from the perspective of somebody drifting in and out of consciousness sucks. It's not going to flow well and being clear wouldn't be realistic, but being realistic makes your reader want to punch your book. That said, (and I am in the glass house on this one) why do writers like to knock their main characters out so much? Nevermind that it is medically unsound to have a character get knocked out by a punch/blow to the head and get back up again (if they're out for more than a few seconds they have brain damage. If they're out a few minutes they risk forgetting how to read) is there one good damn reason why we couldn't have had a clear description of what's happening to Ruben? Like, have him be one of those rare people who can describe scary hospital things as they happen? King's account of getting hit by a van is very clear, very concise and pretty entertaining, given how his hips were attached to his body wrong at the time. This is a critical scene in the book and it kind of reads like Ruben got sideswiped by a carnival and stuck under the merry-go-round.

They get him on the gurney (Oh, I'm sorry. He was on the gurney) and get him into the ambulance and that is the end of the chapter.

...it's still better than Anita Blake.

The Wolf Gift--Chapter 2

So let's just dive in again tonight, shall we?

So far our protagonist has revealed his name is Ruben and that he is a celebrated journalist at the ripe old age of twenty-three, he's elected to buy a mansion, cash, that he has a girlfriend and family that think he's a naive kid (GEE I WONDER WHY) (something I didn't bring up in the last chapter because OH MY GOD it was bloody boring) and despite said girlfriend, he's screwing the mansion's owner.

Chapter two opens with Ruben waking up.

Folks, I have a rule: the first thirty seconds of a movie and the first few paragraphs of a book tell you what the experience will be like and how good it's going to be. So far, it's a hard rule. I can count on one hand the number of times a movie has started out awesome and ended badly (Looper comes to mind. AWESOME premise but you can totally tell the minute they stopped playing with "time traveling murder victims" and tried to actually have a story) and I cannot think of one movie that started out bad and ended good.

So far in this book we've gotten names, appearances, sex, and a really pretty house.

This book is supposed to be about werewolves. I do not have high hopes anymore.

 Marchant went and got Ruben's clothing out of the car for him and laid it out all neat. Because that's what women do. Ruben spends a few minutes glorifying adultery, and thinking about how betraying his girlfriend "wasn't easy" (...could have fooled me) and how he'll remember it for the rest of his life as a wonderful thing, and how he probably would never tell Celeste, the girlfriend, because that would hurt her feelings and that would be bad.

There are a handful of things that hurt other people worse than cheating on them. Full blown addiction. Your actual death. Ruben has just established himself as an irredeemable POS in my opinion and he will have to save most of the universe and resurrect Elvis to redeem himself.

Oh, and the reason why Ruben just cheated on his girlfriend with the first couple of pages of the book? Celeste wasn't impressed with his writing and this hurt his feelings.

We are supposed to like this guy, right?

Ruben tours the Beautiful House, and of course it has more antique nicnaks than a museam, and of course it has a big library, and OF COURSE we get the Obligatory Listing Of American Literature (Aren't You So Impressed) and of course the titles mentioned are all the ones you had to study in highschool and college.

And now Ruben is fantasizing about marrying Marchant. The woman he has known for all of one day.  IDK if this is Anne Rice's attempt at immaturity (if so, good show Anne) or if she just thinks this is how romantic connections work.

He continues to tour the house. He sees Marchant and thinks about how she is his One True Love, and how Celeste, his other One True Love, will be completely understanding about him cheating on her with an older woman who is a total stranger because Celeste cheated on Ruben with an ex-boyfriend twice, and that means she now has to be understanding towards him, so there.

Using lots of big words while being a self-centered git does not equal maturity. 

Ruben goes back to bed. The chapter ends.

I have no idea what any of that accomplished.

Where the fuck are the werewolves?

The Wolf Gift--Overview and chapter one

Ann Rice is famous for two things: Vampires and sucking.

I have read two thirds of Interview with a Vampire, most of The Vampire Lestat, and all of Queen of the Damned.  Interview was readable as long as Lestat was onscreen. Lestat was a love letter to its main character's ego, and Queen of the Damned...let's just say the best thing the movie ever did was dump the entire Egypt sequence in favor of focusing on Stuart Townsend's pectorals. I do happen to own a copy of Tales of the Body Theif but have not read one page. I can't make it through the "I know I fucked up" introduction. The writing itself is very stuffy. It's self important, VERY self-centered, and very "I'm pissed at God but we're not talking about that", if that makes any sense.

As for Ann Rice herself...she's got a bit of an ego problem.

Somewhere between deciding that she didn't need an editor and deciding that not only is she the Best Christian Evar11!!one! but that it's perfectly acceptable to write the life of Christ in the first person from the POV of Jesus (Click on the "look inside" feature and read it. OH MY FUCKING GOD) she kind of lost her tenuous grip on reality. Among her greater hits is taking out a full page add to harass the owner of a restaurant just because Lestat happened to look into its window back when it was a used car dealership, and she's a little miffed that the new owner changed things around and of course the already linked and classic attempt at flaming her critics (SPOILER! IT DIDN'T WORK!)

Suffice to say that if I were ever going to respect her, it died about the time Mekare ate her sire's brains (also: WHAT THE FUCK WAS WITH THE GLORIFICATION OF FUNERAL CANNIBALISM? WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DO THIS ANNE RICE? WHY?)

However, my stepfather purchased The Wolf Gift, something that Anne apparently thought was a good idea. And he loved it! Of course, this isn't saying much, given that my stepdad's other favorite things are the WWE (...Yeah, CM Punk needs to die, but it's worth it for the close up of Randy Orton's abs) and, I shit you not, Twilight. (This is all the evidence you need that there is a God, and that he is a sadist) It has been sitting in the bathroom for the last month, and as all the other options are the most misogynistic westerns in the history of Things (one of them is White Squaw, and it is about as good as a western named White Squaw would be) I have been reading random paragraphs out of it for the last month.

As far as I can see, Anne Rice hasn't changed one iota.

However, I have not read the thing cover to cover yet. And there are a small handful of books that I like that are horribly written (...I am a fan of David Eddings and Terry Brooks. I know. You don't have tell me. Here's my critic badge. You may set it on fire) so who knows? Maybe this will be tolerable. Let's dive in, shall we?

Here's the first paragraph:

REUBEN WAS A TALL MAN, well over six feet, with brown curly hair and deep-set blue eyes. “Sunshine Boy” was his nickname and he hated it; so he tended to repress what the world called an irresistible smile. But he was a little too happy right now to put on his studious expression, and try to look older than his twenty-three years.

Oh my god, this is really going to suck, isn't it?

Let's get the biggest fail out of the way first, shall we? Simi colons do not work that way.  That's one of the best graphics in the universe and any writer should have a print out taped to their wall, minimum. You may have a simi-colon, or you may have a "So". You may not have both.

Tell me again how your perfectly edited books don't require an editor, Anne.

Two, and this is a big one, kids: OUR MAIN CHARACTER IS TWENTY THREE.

I remember being twenty-three. I remember being dumber than a bag of rocks at twenty-three. There's a head-up-your-ass sense of entitlement that comes with being twenty-three, and it takes a couple more years to flush that out of your system. I can already predict that our hero is going to act like he's forty, and have the maturity to not do twenty-three ish things like, oh, not finish a bottle of vodka in one sitting (to my credit, I never did that) or trust the strange man when he says he absolutely can sell your first book to an agent (...I did that, though. And that's dumber than swallowing a bottle of vodka)

So Ruben, no last name, is walking up a pretty hill with lots of adjectives and a woman named Marchant Nideck. 

This is the point where I've stopped reading every single time. Mostly because Marchant is not only beautiful, she has beautiful blond hair that has never faded. Ever.

My mother is a natural blond. My mother is younger than Marchant. My mother had to start dying her hair at thirty because fading is what hair does when you get old.

Reuben is here to write a story about Marchant's house. Oh, yes. He's a celebrated journalist. AT TWENTY THREE. And he's been asked to do a puff piece on Marchant's beautiful old mansion because she's selling it and...uh. Yeah. It's a nice old house.

Reuben wasn’t dressed for this, really. He’d driven north in his usual “uniform” of worsted-wool blue blazer over a thin cashmere sweater, and gray slacks. But at least he had a scarf for his neck that he’d pulled from the glove compartment. And he really didn’t mind the biting cold.

HE IS TWENTY THREE YEARS OLD IN TWENTY THIRTEEN. I DO NOT THINK HE WOULD BE WEARING THAT THANK YOU. God. I collect scarfs and the only one I've ever actually worn in public is the cheap-as-shit yellow thing my mom gave me the same week my boss instituted an all black uniform. Because good fabric is cooler than costume jewelry.

 Also, Anne Rice has a love affair with adjectives. But I don't think they like her back.The description of the house is full of them. Every noun is wagging one. There is rough-hewn stone and steep gables and an awful lot of sprawling. The thing missing is atmosphere and connection and anything even remotely interesting.

Ruben loves the house. He then goes on to list every address he's ever lived in, and while I don't know Californian geography as well as I do Texas, I have a feeling that most of these places are basically River Oaks. He goes on about the archetecutre, and how he dreams of having a house like that when, and I quote, "he was a famous writer and the world beat too broad a path to his door."

Ruben? Honey? I wouldn't start placing bets on that career until you've figured out that adding words to a cliche doesn't make it any less of one.

And then they start talking.

“What’s wrong with you, Reuben, what’s the matter?” asked Marchent. “You had the strangest look in your eye.”

PEOPLE DO NOT TALK THAT WAY.

Yeah, Ruben wants the house. Ruben wants the house. RUBEN wants the house. In case I haven't made this really clear, RUBEN REALLY WANTS THE SHINY HOUSE. And just in case we miss the fact that Ruben has money out the yin-yang, this happens:

His father might actually love this place, he thought. Yes, Phil Golding was in fact a poet and he would surely love it, and he might even say so to Reuben’s mother who would scoff at the whole idea. Dr. Grace Golding was the practical one and the architect of their lives. She was the one who’d gotten Reuben his job at the San Francisco Observer, when his only qualification was a master’s in English literature and yearly world travel since birth.

Oh FUCK YOU, Rubes. The closest thing I've ever gotten to world travel was a couple trips to Canada.

And Ruben isn't just a reporter, he is apparently Cameron Buck Williams, reincarnated as an Anne Rice  character. I hope Jerry B. Jenkins is getting good money for the character timeshare. Seriously, he's been with his paper six months, he is twenty fucking three years old, and he's writing feature stories that have gotten criminals put behind bars.

Apparently he and Marchant are now best buds and they will be spending days together.

Pity me, my dear loyal blog readers. Pity me greatly. The dialogue is abysmal.

“Now, I really have insulted you, haven’t I?” asked Marchent. “Forgive me. I think all of us ordinary mortals tend to mythologize people as good-looking as you. But of course what makes you so remarkable is that you have a poet’s soul.”

And it's already been covered that Ruben really wants to fuck Marchant.

Oh, and YOU HAVE A POET'S SOUL?

As for the descriptions...well...

There were no trees to the west of them. The view was open for all the obvious reasons. But the wind was positively howling off the ocean now, and the gray mist was descending on the last sparkle of the sea. I’ll get the mood of all this, he thought. I’ll get this strange darkening moment. And a little shadow fell deliciously over his soul.

NOT THAT WE NEED TO KNOW WHAT THOSE REASONS ARE, MIND. NO. THEY ARE JUST OBVIOUS.

Oh, yeah, and Ruben is wealthy enough to buy the World's Perfect Mansion right now, no questions asked.

Then we find out that Marchant's uncle, the one who left her the house, was an enviromentalist who disappeared. That's totally going to come up in a later chapter.  Eventually, they get out of the wind and go inside the World's Perfect Mansion.

Ruben thinks about all the reasons why he shouldn't buy it. In cash. And he proves that he's kind of an entitled son of a bitch in the process:

He’d quit the English Ph.D. program over the foreign-language requirements, and really didn’t have a life plan at all. Wasn’t it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was?

I'm working as a waitress for people who think I'm furniture. I haven't had a weekend off in over a year. FUCK YOU RUBEN.

 So then Ruben and Marchant--neither of whom have a personality other than 'Gimmie"--move on to the huge photo of Marchant's uncle Felix. It was, we find out, very expensive. There are interesting people in it. One interesting person is named Margon Sperver. What there isn't, is any hint of a story. Can we get to the point please?

Marchant figures that all six of the men in the expensive photograph vanished with Uncle Felix. Because plot, I guess.

They continue to tour the house. It's a very nice house.

We get Marchant's life history. Her parents are dead. She has two brothers who didn't get money from Uncle Felix. She got a lot of money from Uncle Felix.

They continue to tour the house.

It's nice, but it's not this nice.

 Oh, and Marchant's brothers are unrepentant drug addicts who use rehab to get as many drugs as they possibly can before being discharged. Because they give you drugs in rehab. And Marchant is going to give them lots of money because she has family guilt.

I have no sympathy for this family.

extortion— you know, drunken calls in the middle of the night, threatening suicide, and I usually end up sooner or later writing a big check. They bear with the lectures, the tears, and the advice for the money. And then they’re gone again, off to the Caribbean, or Hawaii, or down to Los Angeles on another bender. I think their latest scheme is to break into the pornography business. They’ve found a starlet that they’re cultivating. If she’s underage they may end up in prison, and perhaps that’s inevitable. Our lawyers certainly think so. But we all behave as if there’s hope.”

You know, it takes a lot for me to sympathize with an unrepentant addict, but that speech managed to pull it off. How do you manage to be both an enabler and an ass in the same fucking paragraph?

AND IS THIS CHAPTER GOING ANYWHERE?

Oh, and Ruben is a literary genious because he can quote Nathanial Hawthorne from memory.

And then he tells her he'll buy the house and they start kissing.

END. CHAPTER. END.

...and it does, about three paragraphs later, when Ruben gets a good look at Marchant's bed.

This is going to suck.

Cerulean Sins--Endgame

Okay folks. Buckle down. We're powering through the shit in one great big go. I read through it to see how much I could knock out tonight, and in addition to the answer being "all of it" it's kind of a perfect storm of fuckery.

Oh, and it'll be The Wolf Gift next. I don't promise it'll be funny--though given that this is Anne Rice, it probably will be--but I do believe it'll be better than this shit.

So. Anita goes to the crime scene where our ass-pulled plot device AKA villian escaped the police.

To get it out of the way so we can focus on the rest of the chapter, he did it by cleverly growing out his claws (something that, depending on which chapter of Narcissus in Chains you're reading, only powerful alphas can do, or that merely powerful weres can do.) skewering a cop and using him as a meat sheild to get to the nearest window. And then escaping because "the" sniper wasn't covering that side of the building.

Yeah. They're taking down a killer werewolf with SWAT and they only brought ONE FUCKING SNIPER. And why the FUCK would they position the guy so that he isn't covering a window that faces the door of Rapey McWerewolf's apartment? Why would there not be two or more snipers? Oh, but Rapey was nice and calm when they put handcuffs on him--handcuffs for humans, not were-whatevers, apparently--and he got them all by surprise.

Guys, it is official: LKH hates cops the way that Stephen R. Donaldson hates women.

(God. The Gap series. I am still having flashbacks)

It also isn't very clear how many cops are in pieces. Mayhem and violence were implied by the last chapter, but the hallway is nice and neat, according to Ms. "I got glued to my boyfriend via our condom" and only two names are brought up. The rest of the squad is apparently at the hospital, but the commander is still on site, unharmed but in so much shock everybody including Anita is trying to pitch him into the nearest ambulance. Zerbowski says that they didn't know weres could partially shift. Anita says she knows and the FBI knows and that really should have been in the last breifing that everybody didn't get, apparently.

There's also some really subtle criticism for the cops remembering their training and not going full auto on Rapey's ass. Right now I am assuming this is a hotel or apartment complex (THE TEXT ISN'T REAL CLEAR, OKAY?) so I am also assuming it had less to do with training and more to do with not killing innocent bystanders.

Zerbowski and Anita trace Rapey's steps until Anita gets a call. Apparently there's now a warrent of excution on Mr. Van Anders.

Let me get this off my chest right fucking now: This is the single WORST idea any human could possibly perpetuate. Having that warrent in hand is effectively Anita's permission to kill whomever and whatever she sees fit, and as long as the things she kills are not 100% human, nobody gives a flying fuck. Now. I understand that you cannot do a direct vampires=repressed minorities, because repressed minorities are not superpowered creatures who can eat you. What sane body of humans allows this shit to go down and not protest? For fuck's sake, every time Texas executes somebody, the local catholic branches go into Candlelight Vigil Lockdown Mode (which is awesome until you realize that means they're holding vigils for people like George Rivas,) You really expect me to believe that vampire rights groups aren't willing to truck a few thousand people out to act as human body shields? Thus, you know, making not shooting things in public places kind of critical?

ALSO: WEREWOLVES ARE NOT AND HAVE NEVER BEEN COVERED UNDER THE "WE KILL DEAD PEOPLE" LAWS, CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG.

But no. Anita is now free to go fill Rapey McWerewolf full of holes. Off we go. She snags some dirty clothes and heads off to recruit a werewolf to go catch another werewolf.

So she can kill him.

 (Please don't go to Richard's house. Please don't go to Richard's House. Please dont--"

Next chapter.  She goes to Richard's house!

AND THIS IS THE FIRST THING HE SAYS:

He caught me off guard by starting. “If you’d stuck to my morals, Asher would be dead right now, or worse, trapped in Europe with that monstrous bitch.”

POINT THE FIRST: No, Richard. What you did in the banquet was not morality. It was gross fucking stupidity. The time to pull that shit was either BEFORE Musette showed up or after. NOT DURING. YOU MIGHT AS WELL HAVE HUNG A SIGN AROUND YOUR NECK SAYING "I AM A TENDERIZED WOLF STEAK MARINATED IN MY OWN STUPID. EAT ME."

MASSIVE POINT THE SECOND: Anita just saved her own ass by adhering to a moral code that discomforted her and interfeared with her line of work that she did not believe in at the time (not using animal sacrifices to make her Wiccan teacher happy made her zombies all drippy. Customers aren't happy, but the Aryan Terrorists who recruited Rapey Wolf got scared off). The ONLY reason Richard's moral code is bad is because it gets in the way of her sex (and Richard is being literally suicidally dumb, which is not related to his ethics and is entirely related to his biochemistry) (which is fucked up because he got raped a couple weeks ago by his girlfriend. Who is Anita. And he isn't getting any form of therapy or assistance because everybody in this book sucks) Apparently morals only count if they don't involve blocking the things between your legs.

Anita says she wants to save women from dying. She shoves the pictures of the dead women under Richard's nose. THEN she asks him to lend her a werewolf.

Anita Blake just shoved pictures of an incredibly brutal rape and murder under the nose of someone who has issues involving both his own rape (WHICH SHE DID) the accidental death of people under his care, and the animal instincts he's losing control of because HELLO, he is depressed out the yin yang. This runs as her being heroically confrontational with an intransigent borderline enemy. In reality it's just cruel as fuck.

Richard tells Anita that he's "decided to live".

You know what the real fun of depression is? It's the knowledge that at any hour, under the right and/or wrong circumstances, your brain can be hijacked by your own hormones. You no longer have total control of your brain. And by "hormones" I mean the crying jags, the rages, and the hell that is suicidal ideation. It has nothing to do with your normal thought processes. At the time it feels perfectly normal and sane and right, and then you wake up the next day thinking "WHAT THE FUCK WAS WRONG WITH ME?" So yeah, that "decided to live" just means his brain chemistry is a little less fucked today than it was when he decided to yank the wolves out from under Jean Claude. Richard does not need Anita shoving murder pictures in his face. He needs to be hospitalized.

At one point Richard tells Anita she didn't have to show him those pictures, that it's going to haunt him. She's all like "Yeah, well, I saw the real deal, your nightmares can't possibly be worse than mine".

Yeah, because it's not like Richard is a werewolf. It's not like he fucking ate his rival, that people under his watch didn't accidentally kill and eat their human lovers during sex, and that he has probably seen something like those bodies every time he kills a deer. OH, WAIT. ALL THAT IS TOTALLY TRUE.

And rather than let Anita marinate in her own insensitivity, LKH has Richard get violent and shove her up against a wall. Because nothing neutralizes your own main character's utter lack of empathy like misogynistic violence!

Next chapter.

Anita takes four werewolves to go confront Rapey McWerewolf in a crowded mall.

Well, if nothing else this ought to be a good confrontation. They elect not to evacuate the mall, because having a competent police force in an LKH book is like having Thomas Covenant have consensual sex with a woman who isn't his own fucking daughter. We find out that Rapey McWerewolf is positioned between a bunch of teenage girls and a couple of young mothers playing with their children in the food court. Anita approaches him with her gun out but WHOOPS, she gives the game away and he sees her.

SO. Now we have the big violent fight in which the children endangered by Anita sucking at her job become meat sheilds and we have to compare morality and--

I fired into his body twice more before I got close enough to watch his mouth open and shut. Blood blossomed from his lips, and turned his blue shirt purple. I circled wide, so I could get a clear head shot. 

He lay on his back and bled, and managed to cough blood, and clear his throat enough to say, “Police have to give warning. Can’t just shoot.”

 I let out all the breath in my body, and sighted on his forehead just above the eyes. “I’m not the police, Van Anders, I’m the executioner.”

 His eyes widened, and he said, “No.”

 I pulled the trigger and watched most of his face explode into an unrecognizable mess. His eyes had been bluer than in the photos.

THAT'S IT. THAT'S THE BIG CONFRONTATION WITH THE RAPIST WEREWOLF. No fight. No throwing of tables or chairs. No hiding. No struggle. Anita walks up to him, shoots him in front of several children, and then goes home to snuggle Sigmund. Yes. The villain we ass-pulled at the eleventh hour gets hand-waved away.

Next chapter: Anita snuggles Micah and Sigmund, and reads Charlotte's Web to Nathanial.

AND THEN IT IS TIME FOR THE GREAT PLOT SUMMERY OF DOOM.

Even in LKH's good books, this chapter is always a fucking cop out. It's like, if you can't resolve all your plot threads in one book and you don't intend to carry them over into the next, trim the threads. But no. Everything gets wrapped up in this neat little bow. Anita is arranging a meet and greet between Dolph, his son and his vampire daughter-in-law-to-be. Anita decides that Richard is no longer suicidally depressed. This is like saying that epilepsy is cured when a person is not actively seizing. Anita and Asher and Jean Claude are...um...basically doing the same thing they've been doing since Asher's intro, only now it has to be brought up because it was a plot point in this book.

Valentina and Bartolome are sticking around so they can kill Gregory and Stephen's dad. Unless this happens in the very next book, this is a cop out.

LKH uses quotes out of Charlotte's Web to try to make a profound statement about how pretty fall is. 105 people are melodramatic enough to have highlighted that part of the book.

AND THE BOOK IS DONE! IT IS DONE! I DO NOT HAVE TO WADE THROUGH THE HORROR OF LKH'S UNCENSORED SUBCONSIOUS ANYMORE! YAY!

Cerulean Sins--chapter 57

So the front runners for the Next Book CW Reviews are:

-The Wolf Gift. Ann Rice. The writing is awful. IDK about the plot yet, but again, it's ANN RICE.
-ANOTHER LKH book
-Eternal Prey, Nina Bangs. Shapeshifting dead dinos.

ALSO, on a personal note, my Dad and I had a good conversation. It started because I needed information on foster care, specifically on the training new foster-parents and/or their helpers have to go through, and what the requirements are to have a new home licenced. Suffice to say that foster care in Texas is basically a franchise of a franchise, and I am REALLY glad my Dad saved all of his training materials from back in '92. But then we moved on to how I was doing. I had a couple setbacks this last month (NOT related to last week's business) and he and I talked about them. I mentioned how severely fucked up I was last year, and he told me that he had been on the verge of having me committed.

I had not known this. And it told me how horrendously messed up I was that my reaction was not "OH MY GOD MY FAMILY WANTED TO PUT ME IN THE NUTHOUSE" but was rather "...they noticed. Oh my God, they love me." And this moved onto how rejection of any sort is a major, major MAJOR trigger for me. He told me what he thought the root causes were, and it made a lot of sense. So much so that certain other events are falling into place. This is the good news.

The bad news is...today made it very clear the issue is getting worse and not better. It's one thing to be wailing when you're a weepy mess and you think the world is falling in. It's another thing entirely to be relatively clear headed after a year of some pretty major wins and realize that, despite how AWESOME this last year has been, and how stable my general situation is, my emotional stability has degraded a fair amount, and a couple of doors I closed last year now have to remain nailed shut.

Ah, well. Enough of my depressing shit. Let's interview an Aryan Terrorist!

 We get a description of Aryan Terrorist Heinrick, and this includes a WTF involving coffee:

It had been sitting long enough that the cream had started to separate from the darker liquid, so that swirls of paleness decorated the top of the coffee.

I have never had this happen. I've let coffee sit for about five hours before (...iced coffee, at work, when we get a massive breakfast rush and I forget that half the coffee is there) and it has never unincorporated. It's a nit-picky thing, but it's like...HUH?

At some point (hopefully, a point that I skimmed and missed) Bradley Bradford told Anita that these people might want Anita to raise the dead for them. AGAIN: NOTHING HAS CONNECTED ANYTHING TO ANYTHING BEFORE THIS. We're just like "OH FUCK WE NEED TO END THE BOOK NOW HERE IS A PLOT".

Anita asks Heinrick if he wants more coffee. He says no. She asks if he's had too much coffee. He says no.

We absolutely needed to know how much caffiene Heinrick has had today.

Anita shows Heinrick photos that "Van Anders" (seriously. WE HAVE NEVER MET THIS PERSON. FUCK ME, EVEN CHIMERA GOT A COUPLE PARAGRAPHS ONSCREEN PRIOR TO CLIMAX) did several years ago. He tells her she's lying about there being fresh murders in St. Louis. She shows him the fresh murders. And OH MY FUCKING GOD:

“This woman was killed three days ago.” I got another file out of the stack. I opened it, and fanned the photos on top of it, but didn’t put them with the stack. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I’d be able to match the photos back to the right crime. They were supposed to be marked on the back, but I hadn’t marked them personally, so I didn’t want to risk it. Once you get into court the lawyers get damned picky about evidence and stuff.

THIS IS IN THE TEXT, FOLKS. IT IS IN THE TEXT. ANITA DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT CHAIN OF CUSTODY. SHE HAS NO FUCKS TO GIVE ABOUT TRIALS. SHE IS THE LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD BE ON THAT SIDE OF THE INTERROGATION TABLE AND THIS FUCKING PROVES IT. Holy shit. Holy shit. There's forgetting gloves and booties, and then there's not bothering to keep your evidence files sorted. WHY DO THEY LET HER IN THE BUILDING?

Heinrick promptly shits himself, and says "He promised he wouldn't kill people here" or something like that.

Well, I suppose if you're an Aryan Terrorist, it helps that all the victims so far were implied to be rich white women. But really? REALLY? He spends twenty four hours in custody being stoic and a couple bloody photographs are all it takes to get his mouth running? After all that work up on him being a soulless killing machine or whatever?

Well, he also probably knows this is his "Get out of America free" card, and that Anita is an idiot, so he's gonna play it up for all he's worth. 

So he spills that they did indeed come to recruit Anita for a mission, and that the team for her recruitment was thrown together in a hurry, and folks, I have to ask:

WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MISSION RECRUITMENT REQUIRES YOU TO BRING A FUCKING SHAPESHIFTING WEREWOLF RAPIST-MURDERER WHO LIKES TO JULIENNE HIS VICTIMS? AND HOW STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO ACCEPT IT WHEN YOUR RAPE-MURDER WEREWOLF SAYS "Don't worry, Leo, this time I promise I'll be good"?!?

Seriously. If "clandestine" and "not killing people horribly" are two of your mission requirements, don't bring the rapey werewolf. WHY WOULD A GROUP EVEN TOLERATE THAT KIND OF FUCKED UP CRAZY? Is the guy an expert bomb-maker? Could he con Henry fucking Gondorff? Could he hack the best computer in the world? WOULD ANY OF THAT JUSTIFY KEEPING RAPEY THE WEREWOLF ALIVE? IS THERE A SINGLE GROUP IN THIS UNIVERSE THAT IS NOT UTTERLY FUCKED UP ON EVERY LEVEL?

Oh, and the plot that involved recruiting Anita? Apparently a leader of an unspecified country died, and this group, which includes Rapey the Werewolf and Heinrick the Aryan Terrorist, wanted to recruit Anita to raise the leader in a condition that would trick the country into believing their leader was still alive. Leaving aside one obvious fail (this being that if a dictator has died, I think the country would know in damn short order, unless the dictator's staff are the folk who hired the Aryan Terrorist and Rapey McWerewolf) THAT COULD HAVE BEEN THE PLOT FOR THIS BOOK. INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE! ANITA DECIDING GOOD VS. EVIL!

And nope, that was solved WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYyyyyyyyyyYYYYYYYYYY back in the beginning when she raised the zombie in chapter two and he was all...drippy. They decided Anita couldn't do what they wanted her to do.

SO WHY THE FUCK WERE YOU STILL FOLLOWING HER THEN?

Well, I'm sure that we will now have daring intrigue involving the hunt for Rapey McWerewolf, and it will involve having to follow clues and set up a trap for Rapey that will involve most of the ca--

“I know where Van Anders is staying. I will give you that address.

You know, I'm WAITING for Anita to start finding her enemy's strongholds via Google Earth. Also: FUCK YOU LKH GOD that is such a cop-out.

They send St. Louis's version of SWAT out to pick up Rapey.

OH, BUT IT GETS BETTER.

Anita talks with Heinrick, and realizes that because her Wiccan friend got squicky over animal sacrifices and made Anita use her own blood, her zombies have been of poor quality and this is what saved her from being kidnapped by Rapey. So someone else's moral qualms have saved Anita's life, basically.

Hey Anita? You remember how you were bitching about Richard's moral code? And how it makes your life harder? You want to re-think that position a little, maybe?

 And then Anita ends the interview and walks out into chaos. Apparently Swat has already reached Rapey, and enough time has passed to let Rapey cut them up. Only it doesn't feel like enough time has passed. It should have taken about thirty minutes minimum for the team to reach Rapey, assemble around his pad, blow the door, and then get torn to ribbons. There were three paragraphs between when Anita passed Rapey's address off to SWAT, and when Rapey ate most of the cops sent to arrest him.

Text=time in a book. If you want to give the reader a sense of time passing, you fill things up with words. This is why a lot of authors waste time on minute details. No. They don't think the upholstery is that important, or that you really need to know how the ray gun works. However, they DO want to make the reader feel as if time has passed. The OTHER acceptable method is to use a scene break or a chapter break, which wouldn't really work here because LKH wants you to have a sense of shock.

The paragraphs between receiving the address and when SWAT got ate read like five minutes. It's a minor discontinuity, and it might not bother anyone but me, but it kind of ruins the whole "OH FUCK HE ATE DETECTIVE BENNY" vibe LKH is trying to give the end of the chapter.

Oh, yeah, and that's the end of the chapter.

You know, I think I broke my caps lock key today.

STARBLEACHED 4 Updates and Things

I'm calling this book the "season finale", as so far Starbleached hasn't been an officially serialized novel. This one is going to be hard. Oh, it's already written and re-reading it has me rather enthused. It's like OH MY GOD THERE IS SO MUCH POTENTIAL HERE, and it seems to be rather shattering for several of the characters involved.

That said I'm having my usual WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING WHEN I WROTE THAT moments.

The most interesting area, for me, is trying to write what science fiction is supposed to be about. My theory behind writing is that human's primary language is symbolism. Language itself is a decision that a word equals a thing, and there's no evidence to suggest why the first person to speak decided that the great-great root ancestor of "tree" meant tree. Stories connect to us on the deepest level through symbolism. Which, ironically, loses a lot of its power when we discover that symbolism is there. It's an unconscious language, not intended to be articulated. We understand on an unconscious level that item X is symbolic of leadership, or love, or defiance. We do not need to understand it on a conscious level. A writer's job is to first write the damn thing, and let whatever unconscious symbolism they've got in their own brain plop onto the page, and then consciously craft everything into something meaningful...and the best works are those where the reader never understands the symbolic language being shoved under their brain's front door. The true art of the craft, in my humble uneducated opinion, is in letting the great majority of the workmanship slide by unnoticed. A watch is not intended to be viewed from the back, but from the front.

Besides. The greatest value of story is not story, but the planting of ideas. And ideas spread the farthest when we think they are our own.

Anyhoo, I theorize that the power of a fantasy story is...well, a "this is who we are" emotion. Our inner life ripped open and painted with elves and dragons and magic. The dragon is alcoholism or racism or fear, or whatever it is that we have to fight through our whole life. And we become fans of a fantasy work when something in it speaks to our inner life and calls to us. When it fails to connect, we go "dragons? What's the big deal about dragons?"

Science-fiction is "this is where we're going". That's why science is a big part of science-fiction (no shit) because it's such a big part of our modern life. But the real power of a sci-fi story is that idea that this is our future. This is where we're going, and if we want to change it or realize it, we have to do something about it. I find it very telling that, right around the time of the Great Recession here in the states (back in 08) we canceled several very optimistic sci-fi television series and replaced them with several highly pessimistic ones. I personally felt that was a collective shift, like we couldn't imagine a positive future and we lost our enjoyment of positive things (because depressed people love misery. Speaking from personal experience. Nothing hijacks your mind and taste quite so profoundly as a bad mood)

...look, the name of the blog is Ramblings of a Creative Double Dipper. It's my space. I get to be as dumb and fake profound as I want.

Anyway, that's something I try to keep in the back of my mind. Where are we heading, as a species and as individuals? What can we expect to happen? In the process of doing this, naturally I'm going to get most of it wrong. I cannot write a story and make it literary. You don't want to see what that looked like. But hopefully I can manage to scrape together enough meaning to make it enjoyable.

Oh, and you guys are awesome on toast. Just wanted to re-enforce that.