Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 55
February 5, 2013
Caress of Twilight--Chapter 2
Okay. long day at work=done. Request for time off that PROBABLY won't be honored (...wanted to go see relatives for my b-day) turned in, and beer=opened. Life is good. How bad could this possibly be?
Whoo. That was a close one.
Also, apparently huge-ass murder rate=grumpy people. Merry Gentry is not the kind of person who should be using the word "grumpy". She's got about as much cutesy in her as a horned toad. You know, the lizard that shoots jets of blood out of its eyes whenever it feels threatened? Yeah. Not a lot of cutesy there.
So a guy has come to Merry's job as a PI.
Her firm doesn't do divorces/cheating investigations. Which means her PI firm must have fuck-all to do, because boring stakeouts of horrible people's homes are a PI's bread and butter. (Google "kimkins" and imagine how it felt to be the PI attached to that case. Go ahead. Google it. It's a trainwreck. It's fucking beautiful.)
By the way? I do not buy that Jeremy Gray's (AKA Merry's boss) firm doesn't do the only thing that will net his firm money. So far our onscreen cases have involved one divorce. Albeit one that involved magic, but divorce is divorce is divorce, and what Merry and Co. do now isn't all that different from having to sit outside Mrs. Robinson's house, waiting for the latest Christian Gray clone to appear.
Also? Merry keeps a man under her desk. He's part goblin and is small, but still. Merry Gentry keeps a man under her desk. This makes The dude from Ghost look fucking restrained.
Anyway, a dude has arrived at Merry's firm. And LKH has learned since the last book that we do not want to see paragraph on paragraph of the main character describing herself. Instead, she lets the dude do it:
At this point, folks, I don't think LKH even writes the first third of her books anymore. I think she just copy-pastas major descriptions in and then tags plot points on like basil leaves.
Oh yeah. How's this for Mary Sue, folks: Merry has three colors in her eyes. Folks, have you ever paid attention to actual eye color before? I have. It's part of doing art. I ignore it, because real eye colors are boring, but I do pay attention. And for all the importance we put on eyes, they don't really come in a lot of variations, and we really don't notice the color all that much. I have seen my boss almost every fucking day for the past three years, and I cannot tell you with any confidence if her eyes are blue or brown (her son's eyes are brown, but that's less because I know him better and more because his dad was hispanic)
Basically, LKH is shoving three colors into a piece of biological real estate that is barely big enough to hold one.
But CW! This is a very special mark of being Sidhe, and it's important and yadda yadda bullshit. These guys are green and gold and white and brown and whatever other colors LKH felt were particularly shiny today. Tri-colored irises are not even consistant within the race itself. As we will soon find out. There was no thought put into this. World building fail, ladies and gents. It knows no bounds.
Ah, but why is Jeffery Randomname putting so much effort into hitting on Merry? Because if a Fae puts extra effort into their apperance, it's bad form not to compliment them on how sexy they look, and Merry took care to dress all in green today. Green, boys and girls, is a complimentary color to red, which is the color of her hair, which is the exact color of rubies, and therefor she put extra effort into being pretty and thus must be hit on to be polite.
And then the suck stops for about five seconds, because Merry realizes this means Jeffery has been coached on how to act with her, which means his employer must know something about the Fae...or else, be Fae themselves.
She asks who the employer is.
Jefferey refuses to tell her.
This goes back and forth for several pages.
Then finally he drops enough hints for Ms. Gentry, professional PI to discern that he's talking about Maeve Reed, the GOLDEN GODDESS OF HOLLYWOOD (caps required)
And LKH wins her first set of worldbuilding brownie points, because if you are immortal, hotter than the surface of the sun and destined to be young-looking and hot forever, and you can act? Hollywood is the place for you. Maeve Reed is Sidhe and an exile from the Seelie court for Reasons. No one knows what these Reasons are, but they exist. They exist enough for Taranis, the King of the Seelie court, to have beaten Merry almost to death for asking about them.
Maeve wants to meet with someone of her own kind.
Merry and one of her guard, Rhys, is shocked and elated and a little awed that the GOLDEN GODDESS OF HOLLYWOOD (caps required) wants to meet with them. Doyle is more like "Da fuq?" which requires long exposition about how the Fae came to hollywood and how Hollywood wants more fae.
Also, through all of this? Kitto, Merry's desk-man, has been pawing at her legs. Because we need to be reminded about having sex even though the plot is still in the hopeful stage of LKH-devolution.
Merry doesn't say Maeve Reed's name aloud because Taranis might be able to hear her. The Queen of Crazypants, Anadais, can hear things spoken in darkness. EVERYTHING spoken in darkness. So maybe Taranis can hear things said in daylight? Rhys is quick to assure her this isn't true, and that bit of Filler goes the way of sex scenes and Clary Frey's friend Simon.
Merry and the guards retreat to discuss the job without Jeffery Randomname looking on, and the chapter ends.
THE WINDOWS OF MY OFFICE SHOWED A NEARLY FAULTLESS sky, like somebody had taken a single blue cornflower petal and stretched it to fill the air above us....hold on hold on I've got a bucket--
Whoo. That was a close one.Also, apparently huge-ass murder rate=grumpy people. Merry Gentry is not the kind of person who should be using the word "grumpy". She's got about as much cutesy in her as a horned toad. You know, the lizard that shoots jets of blood out of its eyes whenever it feels threatened? Yeah. Not a lot of cutesy there.
So a guy has come to Merry's job as a PI.
Her firm doesn't do divorces/cheating investigations. Which means her PI firm must have fuck-all to do, because boring stakeouts of horrible people's homes are a PI's bread and butter. (Google "kimkins" and imagine how it felt to be the PI attached to that case. Go ahead. Google it. It's a trainwreck. It's fucking beautiful.)
By the way? I do not buy that Jeremy Gray's (AKA Merry's boss) firm doesn't do the only thing that will net his firm money. So far our onscreen cases have involved one divorce. Albeit one that involved magic, but divorce is divorce is divorce, and what Merry and Co. do now isn't all that different from having to sit outside Mrs. Robinson's house, waiting for the latest Christian Gray clone to appear.
Also? Merry keeps a man under her desk. He's part goblin and is small, but still. Merry Gentry keeps a man under her desk. This makes The dude from Ghost look fucking restrained.
Anyway, a dude has arrived at Merry's firm. And LKH has learned since the last book that we do not want to see paragraph on paragraph of the main character describing herself. Instead, she lets the dude do it:
“I’ve never seen anyone whose true hair color was Sidhe Scarlet. It’s like your hair is made of rubies.”
At this point, folks, I don't think LKH even writes the first third of her books anymore. I think she just copy-pastas major descriptions in and then tags plot points on like basil leaves.
“The green of your jacket brings out the green and gold in your eyes. I’ve never seen anyone with tricolored irises before,”
Oh yeah. How's this for Mary Sue, folks: Merry has three colors in her eyes. Folks, have you ever paid attention to actual eye color before? I have. It's part of doing art. I ignore it, because real eye colors are boring, but I do pay attention. And for all the importance we put on eyes, they don't really come in a lot of variations, and we really don't notice the color all that much. I have seen my boss almost every fucking day for the past three years, and I cannot tell you with any confidence if her eyes are blue or brown (her son's eyes are brown, but that's less because I know him better and more because his dad was hispanic)
Basically, LKH is shoving three colors into a piece of biological real estate that is barely big enough to hold one.
But CW! This is a very special mark of being Sidhe, and it's important and yadda yadda bullshit. These guys are green and gold and white and brown and whatever other colors LKH felt were particularly shiny today. Tri-colored irises are not even consistant within the race itself. As we will soon find out. There was no thought put into this. World building fail, ladies and gents. It knows no bounds.
Ah, but why is Jeffery Randomname putting so much effort into hitting on Merry? Because if a Fae puts extra effort into their apperance, it's bad form not to compliment them on how sexy they look, and Merry took care to dress all in green today. Green, boys and girls, is a complimentary color to red, which is the color of her hair, which is the exact color of rubies, and therefor she put extra effort into being pretty and thus must be hit on to be polite.
And then the suck stops for about five seconds, because Merry realizes this means Jeffery has been coached on how to act with her, which means his employer must know something about the Fae...or else, be Fae themselves.
She asks who the employer is.
Jefferey refuses to tell her.
This goes back and forth for several pages.
Then finally he drops enough hints for Ms. Gentry, professional PI to discern that he's talking about Maeve Reed, the GOLDEN GODDESS OF HOLLYWOOD (caps required)
And LKH wins her first set of worldbuilding brownie points, because if you are immortal, hotter than the surface of the sun and destined to be young-looking and hot forever, and you can act? Hollywood is the place for you. Maeve Reed is Sidhe and an exile from the Seelie court for Reasons. No one knows what these Reasons are, but they exist. They exist enough for Taranis, the King of the Seelie court, to have beaten Merry almost to death for asking about them.
Maeve wants to meet with someone of her own kind.
Merry and one of her guard, Rhys, is shocked and elated and a little awed that the GOLDEN GODDESS OF HOLLYWOOD (caps required) wants to meet with them. Doyle is more like "Da fuq?" which requires long exposition about how the Fae came to hollywood and how Hollywood wants more fae.
Also, through all of this? Kitto, Merry's desk-man, has been pawing at her legs. Because we need to be reminded about having sex even though the plot is still in the hopeful stage of LKH-devolution.
Merry doesn't say Maeve Reed's name aloud because Taranis might be able to hear her. The Queen of Crazypants, Anadais, can hear things spoken in darkness. EVERYTHING spoken in darkness. So maybe Taranis can hear things said in daylight? Rhys is quick to assure her this isn't true, and that bit of Filler goes the way of sex scenes and Clary Frey's friend Simon.
Merry and the guards retreat to discuss the job without Jeffery Randomname looking on, and the chapter ends.
The Host--chapter 6
Kathy the comforter suggests Wanderer start going out and making friends--if for no other reason than to bore Melanie to death.
Then she recommends Wanderer have sex. Melanie really doesn't like that idea, but neither does Wanderer, who accuses Kathy of loving her mate, Curt, because the host bodies loved each other. Kathy admits this is possible, and suggests Wanderer go find a boyfriend anyway.
Because being tied to a man solves everything.
Kathy suggests that eventually the Seekers will find Melanie's Jared, and that pretty much ends the appointment because Melanie has a full on panic-attack at the thought and Wanderer runs out of the office. Yeah, if you want to prove that you can handle the host, lady, you're not doing a real good job. She runs home, leans on her doorframe, and contemplates vomiting into her bushes.
And that's when the Seeker shows up. She recommends--almost insists--that Wanderer go take care of her host, because "health care is so easy and effective".
...Oh. I GET IT NOW.
Souls are LIBERALS. WOW, Meyer. Just fucking WOW.
Anyhoo, the Seeker is confrontational and reactionary. And rude. And mean. And Wanderer doesn't like her at all. And she's the only brown person we've met so far. I really hope they whitewash this one for the movie.
Melanie tries to laugh off the e-mail Wanderer sent earlier. Wanderer goes along with her, in part because she doesn't want to let on how badly she controls the host. But I also think it's because Wanderer doesn't like the Seeker and letting Melanie drive for a sec means Wanderer doesn't have to deal with it. Melanie tries to push a little too hard, though, and Wanderer says "Knock it off, she'll know what we're doing and that would be bad".
Or something like that.
Yes. The confrontational nature of the Seeker is going to unify Wanderer and Melanie against a common enemy. Because we haven't already seen this trope nine million times. (Hell. I've even used it.)
The Seeker accuses Wanderer of not having Melanie under control, and then starts laughing at her. Wanderer tries to ignore her. She realizes that Melanie is distracted by the Seeker and finds a memory of lines, something that will lead her to Jared and Melanie's brother Jamie. The Seeker interrupts this memory-mining by saying she'd expected better of Wanderer, that she's very dissapointed, and at this point I want somebody to do a good old fashioned human beat-down on this woman, because she's horrible.
Wanderer reminds the Seeker that Seekers have fucked up settlements before, causing half a species to mass suicide due to being careless. You go, mass-suiciding plant life.
She asks the Seeker to leave, and implies that she means "This city" and not just her house. The Seeker replies that Melanie and Wanderer are her only assignment, and that she's sticking around until she gets lucky.
Then she recommends Wanderer have sex. Melanie really doesn't like that idea, but neither does Wanderer, who accuses Kathy of loving her mate, Curt, because the host bodies loved each other. Kathy admits this is possible, and suggests Wanderer go find a boyfriend anyway.
Because being tied to a man solves everything.
Kathy suggests that eventually the Seekers will find Melanie's Jared, and that pretty much ends the appointment because Melanie has a full on panic-attack at the thought and Wanderer runs out of the office. Yeah, if you want to prove that you can handle the host, lady, you're not doing a real good job. She runs home, leans on her doorframe, and contemplates vomiting into her bushes.
And that's when the Seeker shows up. She recommends--almost insists--that Wanderer go take care of her host, because "health care is so easy and effective".
...Oh. I GET IT NOW.
Souls are LIBERALS. WOW, Meyer. Just fucking WOW.
Anyhoo, the Seeker is confrontational and reactionary. And rude. And mean. And Wanderer doesn't like her at all. And she's the only brown person we've met so far. I really hope they whitewash this one for the movie.
Melanie tries to laugh off the e-mail Wanderer sent earlier. Wanderer goes along with her, in part because she doesn't want to let on how badly she controls the host. But I also think it's because Wanderer doesn't like the Seeker and letting Melanie drive for a sec means Wanderer doesn't have to deal with it. Melanie tries to push a little too hard, though, and Wanderer says "Knock it off, she'll know what we're doing and that would be bad".
Or something like that.
Yes. The confrontational nature of the Seeker is going to unify Wanderer and Melanie against a common enemy. Because we haven't already seen this trope nine million times. (Hell. I've even used it.)
The Seeker accuses Wanderer of not having Melanie under control, and then starts laughing at her. Wanderer tries to ignore her. She realizes that Melanie is distracted by the Seeker and finds a memory of lines, something that will lead her to Jared and Melanie's brother Jamie. The Seeker interrupts this memory-mining by saying she'd expected better of Wanderer, that she's very dissapointed, and at this point I want somebody to do a good old fashioned human beat-down on this woman, because she's horrible.
Wanderer reminds the Seeker that Seekers have fucked up settlements before, causing half a species to mass suicide due to being careless. You go, mass-suiciding plant life.
She asks the Seeker to leave, and implies that she means "This city" and not just her house. The Seeker replies that Melanie and Wanderer are her only assignment, and that she's sticking around until she gets lucky.
February 4, 2013
Caress of Twilight--overview and chapter one
The difference between Anita Blake and Merry Gentry is night and day.
Don't get me wrong, kids. They both suck. They both are frustrating mashups of really shitty porn and an episode of Buffy. But the primary difference between Anita Blake and Merry is, Merry Gentry was never actually any good. The sex in Merry Gentry was there from the beginning. The first book is the same as the latest book.
Exactly the same. The only difference between Kiss of Shadows and Divine Misdemenors, the latest Merry book, is that the so-called "plot" has evolved a little bit, a couple plot points have been resolved, and the number of people in Merry's bed has expanded exponentially. Also, Merry Gentry and Anita Blake might both collect men like the crazy cat lady does kitties, but at least Merry Gentry's men aren't actually cats.
But because you're not expecting anything good? The books are actually enjoyable. It's like when you pick up a Paladin of Shadows book. You are not exactly expecting respectful represenations of women. (...actually if you are sensative re: rape and women's issues and you pick up a John Ringo book you're pretty much doomed to downing scotch with a bleach chaser. It's just that he's probably going to be sitting there with you muttering "I'm sorry" over and over again that makes the whole thing kind of redeemable) So you know there will be painful sex scenes, bad descriptions, and "plot" that got attacked by the porn-moths when LKH left the thing out to dry.
The first chapter opens with Merry in bed with two men.
We're not wasting any time with this one.
The men are Rhys and Nicca. FYI most of the Sidhe court nobles are Welsh and/or Celtic gods that LKH read about on wikipedia. Neil Gaiman she is not, folks. (...I could be reading American Gods. Or better, Anansi Boys. I need to stop overthinking this). Merry then describes her bed, the moonlight, the moonlight's effect on the bed (...moonlight bleaches things.) the ocean, how much she's missed her home, and how she's more famous than Elvis.
Yes, folks. LKH's main character is a fairy princess who is more famous than Elvis. We are not even pretending this isn't self insert porn. Also: Bondage Disney Princess, we meet again.
Rys is a white person. Nicca is brown. He's brown. Did you get it, yet people? He's Brown:
This is a prime example of the Overly Specific Romantic Descriptions we're going to be bombarded with. It's not enough that the character has red hair. No. It's red like rubies spun out into hair. Everything gets this super-uber-ducky cutesy wootsy treatment that would work for the magical folk if the entire fucking main cast were not magical folk. The fucking weather gets the melodrama spooned on. It goes way past bad writing, through annoying, and all the way back into "MY GOD ITS FULL OF STARS"
Also: I do not like LKH describing anything as wet. Ever.
And then we get a description of the uber-special magical wing tattoo Nicca has, which we can't see because the dude is sleeping on his back.
And then Doyle comes into the room.
Guys, I do have one tiny little confession to make. I could have cared less for shape shifting kitty cats but there is a reason I've spent four years working on a fairy urban fantasy thing of my very own. Suffice to say that this time around, most of the guys in the room are my type.
And the sex is still unsexy.
Anyhoo, Doyle is a big black man. Not black as in human brown, black as in pitch, tar, and outerspace. He can heal things with his tongue, and he has a braid that goes down to his fucking ankles, I shit you not. He's a warrior. With a convenient six feet of rope dangling from his scalp begging to be yanked on.
All I can hear is the costume designer from the Incredibles ranting about why capes are out. Specifically, the part where a dude gets sucked into the intake on a jet engine.
Doyle's other nickname is "Darkness", he served the batshit insane Unseelie queen as her guard for a thousand years, and because the Queen is batshit insane, he hasn't had sex the entire time. His two purposes in life are to keep Merry alive, and to get her pregnant. Folks, I do not understand how this man can walk. There are a bunch of other men here to try to get her pregnant, and whoever does it gets to be her future King and they'll be monogamous for all eternity and we're going to stop the ride right here.
Apparently the big crisis for the Faerie is infertility. Which is good, because they are immortal fuck machines. Seriously. That's all they do, care about, think about, talk about. That and sadistic power plays, but more often than not these involve sex. So if these immortal fuck machines could also reproduce effeciently, non-magical humanity would be utterly fucked. So apparently love matches that don't produce children are out, and a young faerie is to cat around until they either impregnante or become pregnant, depending on if they're tab A or slot B...and then they are to get married and fuck only each other for the rest of their long, long, long, long lives.
This is not how you manage an infertility crisis.
The way you manage an infertility crisis is, once someone is proven to be fertile you have them screw as many people as possible. The men should be making the beast with two backs with a different chick every night, the women should have their cycles timed down to the second, and there should be either massive orgies or prolonged uses of turkey basters. Or IVF, which saves us all from the porny, messy part. But the people with functioning ova and testies should be doing everything they can to make absolutely sure their genes get passed around to as many people as much as they possibly can.
I have the same issue with Save the Pearls, a deplorable book that fails to do anything other than suck. If the problem is your species is dying out, then the fertile members of it cannot afford monogamy. You cannot even afford to let them limit themselves to two kids, because that just replenishes the population, it doesn't help it actually grow. You can apologize to each other and buy each other flowers after the species-saving orgies. Or the IVF treatments, which would save everybody a lot of hassle.
Back to book.
Doyle spends a few minutes sex-talking to Merry about how he could kill all three of them right then. The other two men react by pulling guns out. Merry does not do the obvious Mae West imitation involving pockets, and instead tells them to knock it off.
They do not. In fact, the "I'm a bigger badass than you" shit goes on for several more pages, until Doyle points out that somebody has tested Merry's magical wards around the place and has probably roasted its poor little hand. Then we get exposition about how Merry's cousin Cel wants to kill her, but he's being punished for his last attempt (the punishment is being coated in the Magical Potion of Sex until his eyes melt, and then being locked away from every woman ever for six months.) and he won't try to kill her until he's done being sexually deprived. They have six months to get her pregnant and secure her safety and the throne.
And they are sitting around talking.
Logic. We do not have it here.
Finally Merry points out that Doyle only found the handprint because he saw the unidentified Fairy Object test the wards himself. Doyle implies strongly that somebody might be trying to wipe out Cel, Merry and the Queen of Crazy herself, because why the fuck not? Merry insists that anybody trying to kill her will just be her cousin. Everybody kind of stands around looking at the window while Merry has a cool-sounding inner monologue, and the chapter ends.
Next chapter: Merry goes to work. And you know what? Much as I hate Sookie Stackhouse (I HATE Sookie. Everybody else in Bon Temps is cool but I have a passionate utter loathing for Sookie) at least she had a real job.
Don't get me wrong, kids. They both suck. They both are frustrating mashups of really shitty porn and an episode of Buffy. But the primary difference between Anita Blake and Merry is, Merry Gentry was never actually any good. The sex in Merry Gentry was there from the beginning. The first book is the same as the latest book.
Exactly the same. The only difference between Kiss of Shadows and Divine Misdemenors, the latest Merry book, is that the so-called "plot" has evolved a little bit, a couple plot points have been resolved, and the number of people in Merry's bed has expanded exponentially. Also, Merry Gentry and Anita Blake might both collect men like the crazy cat lady does kitties, but at least Merry Gentry's men aren't actually cats.
But because you're not expecting anything good? The books are actually enjoyable. It's like when you pick up a Paladin of Shadows book. You are not exactly expecting respectful represenations of women. (...actually if you are sensative re: rape and women's issues and you pick up a John Ringo book you're pretty much doomed to downing scotch with a bleach chaser. It's just that he's probably going to be sitting there with you muttering "I'm sorry" over and over again that makes the whole thing kind of redeemable) So you know there will be painful sex scenes, bad descriptions, and "plot" that got attacked by the porn-moths when LKH left the thing out to dry.
The first chapter opens with Merry in bed with two men.
We're not wasting any time with this one.
The men are Rhys and Nicca. FYI most of the Sidhe court nobles are Welsh and/or Celtic gods that LKH read about on wikipedia. Neil Gaiman she is not, folks. (...I could be reading American Gods. Or better, Anansi Boys. I need to stop overthinking this). Merry then describes her bed, the moonlight, the moonlight's effect on the bed (...moonlight bleaches things.) the ocean, how much she's missed her home, and how she's more famous than Elvis.
Yes, folks. LKH's main character is a fairy princess who is more famous than Elvis. We are not even pretending this isn't self insert porn. Also: Bondage Disney Princess, we meet again.
Rys is a white person. Nicca is brown. He's brown. Did you get it, yet people? He's Brown:
Most of Nicca was shades of brown. His skin was the color of pale milk chocolate, and the hair that fell in a straight fall to his knees was a rich, dark true brown. Not brunette, but the color of fresh turned leaves that had lain a long, long time on the forest floor until when stirred they were a rich, moist brown, something you could plunge your hands into and come away wet and smelling of new life.
This is a prime example of the Overly Specific Romantic Descriptions we're going to be bombarded with. It's not enough that the character has red hair. No. It's red like rubies spun out into hair. Everything gets this super-uber-ducky cutesy wootsy treatment that would work for the magical folk if the entire fucking main cast were not magical folk. The fucking weather gets the melodrama spooned on. It goes way past bad writing, through annoying, and all the way back into "MY GOD ITS FULL OF STARS"
Also: I do not like LKH describing anything as wet. Ever.
And then we get a description of the uber-special magical wing tattoo Nicca has, which we can't see because the dude is sleeping on his back.
And then Doyle comes into the room.
Guys, I do have one tiny little confession to make. I could have cared less for shape shifting kitty cats but there is a reason I've spent four years working on a fairy urban fantasy thing of my very own. Suffice to say that this time around, most of the guys in the room are my type.
And the sex is still unsexy.
Anyhoo, Doyle is a big black man. Not black as in human brown, black as in pitch, tar, and outerspace. He can heal things with his tongue, and he has a braid that goes down to his fucking ankles, I shit you not. He's a warrior. With a convenient six feet of rope dangling from his scalp begging to be yanked on.
All I can hear is the costume designer from the Incredibles ranting about why capes are out. Specifically, the part where a dude gets sucked into the intake on a jet engine.
Doyle's other nickname is "Darkness", he served the batshit insane Unseelie queen as her guard for a thousand years, and because the Queen is batshit insane, he hasn't had sex the entire time. His two purposes in life are to keep Merry alive, and to get her pregnant. Folks, I do not understand how this man can walk. There are a bunch of other men here to try to get her pregnant, and whoever does it gets to be her future King and they'll be monogamous for all eternity and we're going to stop the ride right here.
Apparently the big crisis for the Faerie is infertility. Which is good, because they are immortal fuck machines. Seriously. That's all they do, care about, think about, talk about. That and sadistic power plays, but more often than not these involve sex. So if these immortal fuck machines could also reproduce effeciently, non-magical humanity would be utterly fucked. So apparently love matches that don't produce children are out, and a young faerie is to cat around until they either impregnante or become pregnant, depending on if they're tab A or slot B...and then they are to get married and fuck only each other for the rest of their long, long, long, long lives.
This is not how you manage an infertility crisis.
The way you manage an infertility crisis is, once someone is proven to be fertile you have them screw as many people as possible. The men should be making the beast with two backs with a different chick every night, the women should have their cycles timed down to the second, and there should be either massive orgies or prolonged uses of turkey basters. Or IVF, which saves us all from the porny, messy part. But the people with functioning ova and testies should be doing everything they can to make absolutely sure their genes get passed around to as many people as much as they possibly can.
I have the same issue with Save the Pearls, a deplorable book that fails to do anything other than suck. If the problem is your species is dying out, then the fertile members of it cannot afford monogamy. You cannot even afford to let them limit themselves to two kids, because that just replenishes the population, it doesn't help it actually grow. You can apologize to each other and buy each other flowers after the species-saving orgies. Or the IVF treatments, which would save everybody a lot of hassle.
Back to book.
Doyle spends a few minutes sex-talking to Merry about how he could kill all three of them right then. The other two men react by pulling guns out. Merry does not do the obvious Mae West imitation involving pockets, and instead tells them to knock it off.
They do not. In fact, the "I'm a bigger badass than you" shit goes on for several more pages, until Doyle points out that somebody has tested Merry's magical wards around the place and has probably roasted its poor little hand. Then we get exposition about how Merry's cousin Cel wants to kill her, but he's being punished for his last attempt (the punishment is being coated in the Magical Potion of Sex until his eyes melt, and then being locked away from every woman ever for six months.) and he won't try to kill her until he's done being sexually deprived. They have six months to get her pregnant and secure her safety and the throne.
And they are sitting around talking.
Logic. We do not have it here.
Finally Merry points out that Doyle only found the handprint because he saw the unidentified Fairy Object test the wards himself. Doyle implies strongly that somebody might be trying to wipe out Cel, Merry and the Queen of Crazy herself, because why the fuck not? Merry insists that anybody trying to kill her will just be her cousin. Everybody kind of stands around looking at the window while Merry has a cool-sounding inner monologue, and the chapter ends.
Next chapter: Merry goes to work. And you know what? Much as I hate Sookie Stackhouse (I HATE Sookie. Everybody else in Bon Temps is cool but I have a passionate utter loathing for Sookie) at least she had a real job.
GRAY FOX coverart WIP
Hi, Raziel. Nice to finally see you in person. :D
The Host--Chapter 5
Business first. Gray Fox is on schedule for its ETA, and Blue Ghosts is still free-with-coupon over on Smashwords. Here is the coupon code: TU68W Go get a copy
So. Where were we?
...Wanderer's going to her counselor's office. I'm sorry. Comforter. It sounds like a blanket. And her "comforter" is kind of a wet one, if you know what I mean.
We find out that Wanderer has been avoiding her counciling appointments and refuses to call her comforter by name. Which is Kathy. Because calling posessed humans by the human's name makes her uncomfortable. It's like the soul doesn't have full posession of the body that they stole.
Wanderer is working as a history teacher. Teaching soul history. Her class is the most requested in the university.
Is it Brigham Young U? It's BYU, isn't it.
Wanderer asks Kathy why she keeps a human name. Kathy explains that when the Yeerks Souls arrived on planet, they had to pretend to be human and mantain the human's connections and relationships, so she and her "husband" Curt got into the habit of being human. And they don't want to break it now.
Wanderer asks how much influience the host normally has on the soul. This moves into a discussion about how much Melanie--and by extension, Wanderer--misses Jared. Because of course it does. Life has no meaning outside of relationships and sex. Then they discuss apperances and peanut butter, and Kathy asks why Wanderer keeps cutting her hair.
Wanderer answers that it pisses Melanie off.
Kathy is horrified that Melanie is still that present. But you know what? For a perfect, pretty soul, that sure is some penny-ante shit on Wanderer's part. Let's cut off our hair to spite our inner human, y'all.
Kathy offers to recommend a new host for Wanderer. Wanderer refuses because it's her fault Melanie won't go away. Wanderer just isn't strong enough to surpress the woman whose body she stole. Yes. Because self hate is critical to good drama.
And hey, Wanderer's starting to come off as a whiny Bella Swan clone with even more privelage issues. It's time for S. Meyer to set the record straight for us:
Wanderer says she can't hand the host off to another soul. Kathy says Melanie would obviously be destroyed because she's defective. Melaine says "fuck all of you" and points out that being a xenocidal pacifist is a manifest contradiction and that Souls are all mostly terrible people. Wanderer replies (mentally) that the body is hers now, she's not giving it up, and humans have done such terrible things. The skreed against humanity in this book is really, really, really long, and it's not the last one we're going to hit. Stephenie Meyer hates humans. That should probably be the subtitle of this book.
Wanderer dismisses Melanie as a displaced non-entity occupying a corner of Oklahoma the reservation her mind. This body is hers, she likes it, and she won't let it be destroyed.
End of chapter.
So. Where were we?
...Wanderer's going to her counselor's office. I'm sorry. Comforter. It sounds like a blanket. And her "comforter" is kind of a wet one, if you know what I mean.
We find out that Wanderer has been avoiding her counciling appointments and refuses to call her comforter by name. Which is Kathy. Because calling posessed humans by the human's name makes her uncomfortable. It's like the soul doesn't have full posession of the body that they stole.
Wanderer is working as a history teacher. Teaching soul history. Her class is the most requested in the university.
Is it Brigham Young U? It's BYU, isn't it.
Wanderer asks Kathy why she keeps a human name. Kathy explains that when the Yeerks Souls arrived on planet, they had to pretend to be human and mantain the human's connections and relationships, so she and her "husband" Curt got into the habit of being human. And they don't want to break it now.
Wanderer asks how much influience the host normally has on the soul. This moves into a discussion about how much Melanie--and by extension, Wanderer--misses Jared. Because of course it does. Life has no meaning outside of relationships and sex. Then they discuss apperances and peanut butter, and Kathy asks why Wanderer keeps cutting her hair.
Wanderer answers that it pisses Melanie off.
Kathy is horrified that Melanie is still that present. But you know what? For a perfect, pretty soul, that sure is some penny-ante shit on Wanderer's part. Let's cut off our hair to spite our inner human, y'all.
Kathy offers to recommend a new host for Wanderer. Wanderer refuses because it's her fault Melanie won't go away. Wanderer just isn't strong enough to surpress the woman whose body she stole. Yes. Because self hate is critical to good drama.
And hey, Wanderer's starting to come off as a whiny Bella Swan clone with even more privelage issues. It's time for S. Meyer to set the record straight for us:
“Listen to me. You are strong. Surprisingly strong. Our kind are always so much the same, but you exceed the norm. You’re so brave it astonishes me. Your past lives are a testament to that.”Too bad we don't actually get to see Wanderer being brave.
Wanderer says she can't hand the host off to another soul. Kathy says Melanie would obviously be destroyed because she's defective. Melaine says "fuck all of you" and points out that being a xenocidal pacifist is a manifest contradiction and that Souls are all mostly terrible people. Wanderer replies (mentally) that the body is hers now, she's not giving it up, and humans have done such terrible things. The skreed against humanity in this book is really, really, really long, and it's not the last one we're going to hit. Stephenie Meyer hates humans. That should probably be the subtitle of this book.
Wanderer dismisses Melanie as a displaced non-entity occupying a corner of Oklahoma the reservation her mind. This body is hers, she likes it, and she won't let it be destroyed.
End of chapter.
February 3, 2013
Narcissus in Chains--Endgame
Anita goes back to the club with Zeke to rescue Cherry and Micah. Not to save everybody else. Just Cherry and Micah. The text goes out of its way to point this out. Anita doesn't care about anybody else.
This is the first time Anita has actively behaved like a sociopath. I'd say good job if LKH hadn't been so heavy handed with Anita's crazy through the rest of this story.
They go into the club and meet up with Chimera. He's wearing bondage gear so Anita can't see his face, so we all know Chimera is somebody we've encountered before in this book. He sends Gina to go get medical care, and then he and Anita sit down to have a fun chat.
The amount of fail we are about to hit, boys and girls, is truely, truely epic. No sex. We can be greatful for that much.
Anita notes that the snake-men worship Chimera, and that his voice is somewhat familiar.
Anita says free my leopards.
Chimera says No, and you might as well sleep with me now because I want you.
This goes back and forth for a while.
Eventually Chimera monologues about how he can only do this because the big boys (werewolves?) don't protect the little guys. Well, good point Mr. Crazyhat. Anita says, basically, Yeah, but you're doing it wrong, RTFM for being a human, jerk. At which point Chimera freaks out and rips off his mask, revealing that he is Orlando King.
It took three readthroughs of this chapter, and one quick fflip-through back to the start of the book for me to remember who the FUCK Orlando King was. To fill you in, way back in chapter twelve, he was the bounty hunter at the police office who went from "Kill all monsters" to "let's not kill monsters anymore, it's kind of boring now." Apparently he got infected with werewolf and decided he'd rather die than be a monster, it drove him insane, gave him Hollywood Disassociated Identity Disorder (as opposed to real DID) and somehow allowed him to be infected with every werewhatever EVER. He finally shifted in a tribe of South American weresnake people, who decided to worship him as a god.
So in one character we not only have good old fashioned -ism fail (ableism in this case) but we also have that age old "Dumb Natives Worship the White Man" trope. Yeah, it happened ONCE, but that was because Cortez had either the best or the worst timing in the world, depending on which color your skin was.
And then Orlando's other personality comes out, and you know what? LKH can't write crazy people. True crazy is not Nick Cage crazyeyes all the time. True crazy, of the sort she's trying for--ie scary and fucking dangerous--is either dopy and repressive, like the Green River Killer (I can't remember his name, but watching the interrogation video between GRK and the lead detective that got him is facinating. He looks and acts exactly like a rabbit) or it's flamboyant, charming and ruthless--Ted Bundy. Neither of these actively show their crazy until they're killing, and I would imagine even then, you can see something of the mask in the true son of a bitch. Orlando King should not function well enough to fill the roles LKH wants him to fill. The DID alone should be borderline incapacitating.
Also? Chimera is not Tyler Durden. Orlando King, if he has issues with what he is, should have turned his fucked-up ass over to the nearest set of cops and said "I'm criminally insane, I will testify against myself, this is where the bodies are buried."
Anyway, Chimera decides to show Anita just how fucked up he is and ushers her into the next room. The chapter ends.
Last chapter, sports fans.
Chimera took all his victims, put them onto hooks, and hung them from the ceiling as suspended meat curtains while they are still alive. He lets Anita into this room and then turns off the lights so she can go bump into his victims, cause them pain and freak herself out.
The image is creepy. I think, though, that this is a case of Your Milage May Vary, because I don't find it very effective. One, I have no attachment to the hanging meat curtains. I don't know their names or who they are. I don't care that they are in massive amounts of pain. Two...there are a LOT of bodies in this room. One person in pain and agony is bad. Two are worse. But for me, anything over five trips this weird overload circut. I OD'ed on Holocaust documentaries about a month ago (...Netflix) and I found that the big, sweeping pictures of dead bodies in piles didn't get to me at all. There was so much human misery that the image of limb on limb on limb just looked like so many dried logs. What got to me were two images: A single, skeletal holocaust victim being loaded into a truck, and a picture of the beds the Jews were forced to sleep on. They were simple things that my brain could easily latch onto, comprehend, and then extrapolate into the millions.
Hundreds of people being tortured by Chimera? I have no involvement. I had the same issue with Nathanial being pinned butterfly style by swords. The gore went through "burtal" and went right into "boring." My brain cannot comprehend this, and so I don't feel "EVIL SON OF A BITCH." What I fell is just...meh. Also a little "Aww, how sweet. You tried to scare me."
Sadistic evil is not Chimera torturing hundreds of men with meat hooks. Sadistic evil is Annie Wilkes saying "God I love you" right after she breaks Paul Sheldon's ankles. (...or cuts off his foot, depending on if it's the movie or the book).
But Anita finds herself steadied and calmed by the touch of blood. Specificially by finding a pool of blood on the floor of the room. She thinks about letting a man bleed out until he dies, and finds herself calmed and healed by this.
You remember what I said about sadistic evil, folks? Here we go. It does not work in a positive, hero-figure protagonist. And I know Anita may not have been that in a real long time, but LKH is still trying to sell her as a hero figure.
And you know what? Given that these men have been up there for days? There should be less blood on that floor and more...uh...bathroom. If you get my drift.
Chimera enters the room, looking for Anita. Anita thinks that the smell of "blood, sweat and flesh" is hiding her scent. It's probably more the scent of urine and shit that she's currently rolling in. Even more so because the first thing to go when you die are the bowels.
Chimera begins torturing people, demanding Anita tell him why he should stop. Anita only says that "Orlando knows the answer". And while the image of hanging meat curtains hasn't gotten to me the description of single blood drops and the sudden chorus of "Answer him!" coming out of the dark is fucking creepy. It's like with a little bit of polishing I'd be less "meh" and more "mommy".
Another personality comes out, somebody we'll name Calm for this review, and directs Anita to Micah and Cherry. Cherry has been abused to within an inch of her life. Yeah. No gentle people are getting out of this shit-fest unscathed. I told you I didn't like the idea of a girl named "Cherry" in this fucking book. She's pretty much comatose. Micah is hanging in a way I can only describe as "Disemboweled Christ".
Anita demands that Cherry be released. Chimera, however, doesn't want to lose one of his only women, because Narcissus kept women out of his pack. Apparently the matriarchial heyenas cannot allow women into the pack, without the men losing their ability to lead.
This is gonna piss you off in about another few paragraphs.
LKH then tries to use Rape as a way to make Chimera scarier. Given the fact that Anita has been raped twice and has raped once, this is not going to work. At all.
And then we find out that
1. Orlando King is homophobic
2. Orlando is secretly homosexual
3. Chimera is manifestedly homosexual AND
4. Chimera would rather rape Micah in front of Anita, rather than the other way around.
Yuck.
And then we have a full on arguement between the individual personalities. Apparently they have massively strange co-consiousness.
And then...WEREWOLVES! EVERYWHERE! Yes, Richard has come through and is invading Chimera's bunker because we've crammed an entire book's worth of plot into two chapters, and fuck if I know how to end it without pulling werewolves out of my ass.
Chimera accuses Anita of trying something. Well...duh. She attacks Chimera because she finally has to do something in this book, and of course the Ardeur raises its ugly head yet again. Anita starts acting sensual and sexy even though she's still in the room full of hanging men (...I really hope LKH never decides to have a Anitaverse themed tarot deck because that would be the worst Hanging Man arcana EVER) and Chimera becomes very afraid of female sex.
The power of female sexiness is beating back the emblem of male homosexuality. I cannot make this up, folks.
Anita then senses somehow that Orlando King really wants to die. He's now given her permission to end it so what follows won't technically be murder. And then Anita senses that Richard will soon be killed, so there must be an end to all this shit soon.
Chimera rips Micah open. He is compared to ripe fruit being dropped. Good simile, but overused. Next!
And now it's time for Anita's stupid ongoing crusade against morality to suddenly make sense. Anita realizes she can use her magic to drain Chimera the way Jean Claude drained Gretchen. It's something she never wanted to be, but the only way to save her people is to become the monster she so feared and oh holy fuck I am so sick of this riff. LKH is trying to justify some life choice she hates through her fiction, and it's sapped the whole story of its energy.
She drains Chimera down to dead bones, and then uses his life energy to save Micah and Richard and make Jean Claude ever-the-more fluffy. Anita's strong, empowered will rescues the werewolves from Richard's "broken will" and gives them all the power to live. Her love is strong, blog-readers. Strong enough for everyone.
It also makes her eyes glitter like stars because this is apparently magic she stole from Obsidian Butterfly in the previous book.
And then Richard tells Anita to fuck off because he "didn't want to live that badly."
Kids, I'm not even touching that one.
Jean Claude, of course, is shiny happy fun-times because he's got a shitload of power going through his veins. Looks like his investment in corrupting Anita sure had paid off big-time.
Richard's disgust is not that Anita killed somebody, it's that the process felt so damn good. So it's not disgusting practices prudes oppose, it's the pleasure itself. Right.
Richard runs off. Orlando dies. Micah comforts Anita. And then there is an implied orgy that Richard misses out on because he is a prude.
And now ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the BONUS ROUND.
See, there are always nine million loose ends LKH doesn't bother to tie up in the book itself, but she doesn't like having them dangle between books. So we have an Epilogue. And even when the book itself is good, the Epiloges are always multiple pages of WTF.
Richard makes Anita the pack's assigned killer. Then he dumps her. She's not sorry. Anita kills Jacob-Chimera's-ally, though Richard insists they keep Paris alive. Whatever.
Anita doesn't shapeshift. The entire conflict of this book is not a thing at all.
All the snakes die, all the other were-whatevers form an animal coalition to prevent nasty things like Chimera from happening again...and then they elect Anita as chairman, so I guess it didn't work after all.
Jean Claude and Micah the rapist-traitor are both proud of Anita for violating her dearest-held mortals and draining a closeted homosexual man to death through psychic rape-sex. This is a relationship that will live on through the ages.
I'm going to skip a paragraph and wrap the rest of it up, and then come back to the lone little gem in this epilogue. Anyway, Anita wakes up "pressed between Micah and Nathanial", Nate is her pomme-de-sang, everybody's in a happy little love nest that migrates between Anita's bed and Jean Claude's, there are lots of fang marks, and Antia's human friends are probably planning a massive intervention just as soon as they decide rock bottom has been reached.
And now are you ready? Are you ready for the biggest piece of WTF in the history of books?
Well, maybe he's just intersexed. That would be more than a little biologically compliant within the world of heyenas, and as much as I despise the character himself--he identifies as male, right?--it's...actually interesting. Surely LKH wouldn't introduce something this rarely used purely for shock--
We will never know.
Laurell, leaving aside that biology doesn't work that way, you've spent the entire book demonizing people who don't identify as straight cis-gendered (...am i using that right?) Anita-lovers. DO NOT PRETEND TO BE PRO-CHOICE AT THIS POINT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT.
And maybe Narcissus is keeping the child because he was raped and he's taking it back now, thank you very much. Biology doesn't determine what the child will be like. (That said, I don't like the idea of Narcissus reproducing either, though it has more to do with Narcissus being Narcissus. Even if he could protect his kid from his urges and provide the kid with a safe psychological platform upon which to grow, and I do not think he could do that, he failed to detect Chimera's fucked-uped-ness in time to keep his pack safe. I think that healthy people should get to have all the kids they want, and am pretty sure that GLBT people--I'm not limiting this to couples--can make for better parents than a lot of het people I know. But Narcissus is the last person on earth who should ever have a kid. )
So there you go, folks. Narcissus in Chains. It's there. It's done. I never have to revisit this shit-fest ever again. Fuck this book. Fuck this book forever. Tie it to the railroad tracks, burn it in a fire, immortalize the trees that died to print this garbage as martyrs in the fight against climate change. Light candles and hope shit like this goes away someday forever.
...I'm starting the second Merry Gentry book tomorrow. You're welcome. The only thing I can promise is, it's not going to be THAT bad.
This is the first time Anita has actively behaved like a sociopath. I'd say good job if LKH hadn't been so heavy handed with Anita's crazy through the rest of this story.
They go into the club and meet up with Chimera. He's wearing bondage gear so Anita can't see his face, so we all know Chimera is somebody we've encountered before in this book. He sends Gina to go get medical care, and then he and Anita sit down to have a fun chat.
The amount of fail we are about to hit, boys and girls, is truely, truely epic. No sex. We can be greatful for that much.
Anita notes that the snake-men worship Chimera, and that his voice is somewhat familiar.
Anita says free my leopards.
Chimera says No, and you might as well sleep with me now because I want you.
This goes back and forth for a while.
Eventually Chimera monologues about how he can only do this because the big boys (werewolves?) don't protect the little guys. Well, good point Mr. Crazyhat. Anita says, basically, Yeah, but you're doing it wrong, RTFM for being a human, jerk. At which point Chimera freaks out and rips off his mask, revealing that he is Orlando King.
It took three readthroughs of this chapter, and one quick fflip-through back to the start of the book for me to remember who the FUCK Orlando King was. To fill you in, way back in chapter twelve, he was the bounty hunter at the police office who went from "Kill all monsters" to "let's not kill monsters anymore, it's kind of boring now." Apparently he got infected with werewolf and decided he'd rather die than be a monster, it drove him insane, gave him Hollywood Disassociated Identity Disorder (as opposed to real DID) and somehow allowed him to be infected with every werewhatever EVER. He finally shifted in a tribe of South American weresnake people, who decided to worship him as a god.
So in one character we not only have good old fashioned -ism fail (ableism in this case) but we also have that age old "Dumb Natives Worship the White Man" trope. Yeah, it happened ONCE, but that was because Cortez had either the best or the worst timing in the world, depending on which color your skin was.
And then Orlando's other personality comes out, and you know what? LKH can't write crazy people. True crazy is not Nick Cage crazyeyes all the time. True crazy, of the sort she's trying for--ie scary and fucking dangerous--is either dopy and repressive, like the Green River Killer (I can't remember his name, but watching the interrogation video between GRK and the lead detective that got him is facinating. He looks and acts exactly like a rabbit) or it's flamboyant, charming and ruthless--Ted Bundy. Neither of these actively show their crazy until they're killing, and I would imagine even then, you can see something of the mask in the true son of a bitch. Orlando King should not function well enough to fill the roles LKH wants him to fill. The DID alone should be borderline incapacitating.
Also? Chimera is not Tyler Durden. Orlando King, if he has issues with what he is, should have turned his fucked-up ass over to the nearest set of cops and said "I'm criminally insane, I will testify against myself, this is where the bodies are buried."
Anyway, Chimera decides to show Anita just how fucked up he is and ushers her into the next room. The chapter ends.
Last chapter, sports fans.
Chimera took all his victims, put them onto hooks, and hung them from the ceiling as suspended meat curtains while they are still alive. He lets Anita into this room and then turns off the lights so she can go bump into his victims, cause them pain and freak herself out.
The image is creepy. I think, though, that this is a case of Your Milage May Vary, because I don't find it very effective. One, I have no attachment to the hanging meat curtains. I don't know their names or who they are. I don't care that they are in massive amounts of pain. Two...there are a LOT of bodies in this room. One person in pain and agony is bad. Two are worse. But for me, anything over five trips this weird overload circut. I OD'ed on Holocaust documentaries about a month ago (...Netflix) and I found that the big, sweeping pictures of dead bodies in piles didn't get to me at all. There was so much human misery that the image of limb on limb on limb just looked like so many dried logs. What got to me were two images: A single, skeletal holocaust victim being loaded into a truck, and a picture of the beds the Jews were forced to sleep on. They were simple things that my brain could easily latch onto, comprehend, and then extrapolate into the millions.
Hundreds of people being tortured by Chimera? I have no involvement. I had the same issue with Nathanial being pinned butterfly style by swords. The gore went through "burtal" and went right into "boring." My brain cannot comprehend this, and so I don't feel "EVIL SON OF A BITCH." What I fell is just...meh. Also a little "Aww, how sweet. You tried to scare me."
Sadistic evil is not Chimera torturing hundreds of men with meat hooks. Sadistic evil is Annie Wilkes saying "God I love you" right after she breaks Paul Sheldon's ankles. (...or cuts off his foot, depending on if it's the movie or the book).
But Anita finds herself steadied and calmed by the touch of blood. Specificially by finding a pool of blood on the floor of the room. She thinks about letting a man bleed out until he dies, and finds herself calmed and healed by this.
You remember what I said about sadistic evil, folks? Here we go. It does not work in a positive, hero-figure protagonist. And I know Anita may not have been that in a real long time, but LKH is still trying to sell her as a hero figure.
And you know what? Given that these men have been up there for days? There should be less blood on that floor and more...uh...bathroom. If you get my drift.
Chimera enters the room, looking for Anita. Anita thinks that the smell of "blood, sweat and flesh" is hiding her scent. It's probably more the scent of urine and shit that she's currently rolling in. Even more so because the first thing to go when you die are the bowels.
Chimera begins torturing people, demanding Anita tell him why he should stop. Anita only says that "Orlando knows the answer". And while the image of hanging meat curtains hasn't gotten to me the description of single blood drops and the sudden chorus of "Answer him!" coming out of the dark is fucking creepy. It's like with a little bit of polishing I'd be less "meh" and more "mommy".
Another personality comes out, somebody we'll name Calm for this review, and directs Anita to Micah and Cherry. Cherry has been abused to within an inch of her life. Yeah. No gentle people are getting out of this shit-fest unscathed. I told you I didn't like the idea of a girl named "Cherry" in this fucking book. She's pretty much comatose. Micah is hanging in a way I can only describe as "Disemboweled Christ".
Anita demands that Cherry be released. Chimera, however, doesn't want to lose one of his only women, because Narcissus kept women out of his pack. Apparently the matriarchial heyenas cannot allow women into the pack, without the men losing their ability to lead.
This is gonna piss you off in about another few paragraphs.
LKH then tries to use Rape as a way to make Chimera scarier. Given the fact that Anita has been raped twice and has raped once, this is not going to work. At all.
And then we find out that
1. Orlando King is homophobic
2. Orlando is secretly homosexual
3. Chimera is manifestedly homosexual AND
4. Chimera would rather rape Micah in front of Anita, rather than the other way around.
Yuck.
And then we have a full on arguement between the individual personalities. Apparently they have massively strange co-consiousness.
And then...WEREWOLVES! EVERYWHERE! Yes, Richard has come through and is invading Chimera's bunker because we've crammed an entire book's worth of plot into two chapters, and fuck if I know how to end it without pulling werewolves out of my ass.
Chimera accuses Anita of trying something. Well...duh. She attacks Chimera because she finally has to do something in this book, and of course the Ardeur raises its ugly head yet again. Anita starts acting sensual and sexy even though she's still in the room full of hanging men (...I really hope LKH never decides to have a Anitaverse themed tarot deck because that would be the worst Hanging Man arcana EVER) and Chimera becomes very afraid of female sex.
The power of female sexiness is beating back the emblem of male homosexuality. I cannot make this up, folks.
Anita then senses somehow that Orlando King really wants to die. He's now given her permission to end it so what follows won't technically be murder. And then Anita senses that Richard will soon be killed, so there must be an end to all this shit soon.
Chimera rips Micah open. He is compared to ripe fruit being dropped. Good simile, but overused. Next!
And now it's time for Anita's stupid ongoing crusade against morality to suddenly make sense. Anita realizes she can use her magic to drain Chimera the way Jean Claude drained Gretchen. It's something she never wanted to be, but the only way to save her people is to become the monster she so feared and oh holy fuck I am so sick of this riff. LKH is trying to justify some life choice she hates through her fiction, and it's sapped the whole story of its energy.
She drains Chimera down to dead bones, and then uses his life energy to save Micah and Richard and make Jean Claude ever-the-more fluffy. Anita's strong, empowered will rescues the werewolves from Richard's "broken will" and gives them all the power to live. Her love is strong, blog-readers. Strong enough for everyone.
It also makes her eyes glitter like stars because this is apparently magic she stole from Obsidian Butterfly in the previous book.And then Richard tells Anita to fuck off because he "didn't want to live that badly."
Kids, I'm not even touching that one.
Jean Claude, of course, is shiny happy fun-times because he's got a shitload of power going through his veins. Looks like his investment in corrupting Anita sure had paid off big-time.
Richard's disgust is not that Anita killed somebody, it's that the process felt so damn good. So it's not disgusting practices prudes oppose, it's the pleasure itself. Right.
Richard runs off. Orlando dies. Micah comforts Anita. And then there is an implied orgy that Richard misses out on because he is a prude.
And now ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the BONUS ROUND.
See, there are always nine million loose ends LKH doesn't bother to tie up in the book itself, but she doesn't like having them dangle between books. So we have an Epilogue. And even when the book itself is good, the Epiloges are always multiple pages of WTF.
Richard makes Anita the pack's assigned killer. Then he dumps her. She's not sorry. Anita kills Jacob-Chimera's-ally, though Richard insists they keep Paris alive. Whatever.
Anita doesn't shapeshift. The entire conflict of this book is not a thing at all.
All the snakes die, all the other were-whatevers form an animal coalition to prevent nasty things like Chimera from happening again...and then they elect Anita as chairman, so I guess it didn't work after all.
Jean Claude and Micah the rapist-traitor are both proud of Anita for violating her dearest-held mortals and draining a closeted homosexual man to death through psychic rape-sex. This is a relationship that will live on through the ages.
I'm going to skip a paragraph and wrap the rest of it up, and then come back to the lone little gem in this epilogue. Anyway, Anita wakes up "pressed between Micah and Nathanial", Nate is her pomme-de-sang, everybody's in a happy little love nest that migrates between Anita's bed and Jean Claude's, there are lots of fang marks, and Antia's human friends are probably planning a massive intervention just as soon as they decide rock bottom has been reached.
And now are you ready? Are you ready for the biggest piece of WTF in the history of books?
We rescued Joseph, the lions’ Rex, and his wife is still pregnant, four months and counting— a record.Congrats, Joe. I hope we find out in a later book that your wife kept the baby. Everybody deserves to be happy. Moving on:
Narcissus turned out to be a hermaphrodite,
Well, maybe he's just intersexed. That would be more than a little biologically compliant within the world of heyenas, and as much as I despise the character himself--he identifies as male, right?--it's...actually interesting. Surely LKH wouldn't introduce something this rarely used purely for shock--
and he’s pregnant, too.Wow. Just...fucking wow. This is a throwaway sentence at the end of this shit-tastic book. I do not know why LKH thought this was a good idea. I don't know why she thought of this at all. Why is this in the book. Seriously. WHY IS THIS IN THE BOOK?
We will never know.
I’m not sure Narcissus should be breeding, especially knowing who the father is, but it’s not my choice.
Laurell, leaving aside that biology doesn't work that way, you've spent the entire book demonizing people who don't identify as straight cis-gendered (...am i using that right?) Anita-lovers. DO NOT PRETEND TO BE PRO-CHOICE AT THIS POINT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT.
And maybe Narcissus is keeping the child because he was raped and he's taking it back now, thank you very much. Biology doesn't determine what the child will be like. (That said, I don't like the idea of Narcissus reproducing either, though it has more to do with Narcissus being Narcissus. Even if he could protect his kid from his urges and provide the kid with a safe psychological platform upon which to grow, and I do not think he could do that, he failed to detect Chimera's fucked-uped-ness in time to keep his pack safe. I think that healthy people should get to have all the kids they want, and am pretty sure that GLBT people--I'm not limiting this to couples--can make for better parents than a lot of het people I know. But Narcissus is the last person on earth who should ever have a kid. )
So there you go, folks. Narcissus in Chains. It's there. It's done. I never have to revisit this shit-fest ever again. Fuck this book. Fuck this book forever. Tie it to the railroad tracks, burn it in a fire, immortalize the trees that died to print this garbage as martyrs in the fight against climate change. Light candles and hope shit like this goes away someday forever.
...I'm starting the second Merry Gentry book tomorrow. You're welcome. The only thing I can promise is, it's not going to be THAT bad.
February 1, 2013
Gray Fox--BOOK SAMPLE!!!
Here's a free sample of GRAY FOX, sequel to BLUE GHOSTS and SILVER BULLET.
Haven't read either? That's fine. Read through to the end for a free coupon for the Smashwords edition, good until 2/15/2013
Casey Winter could deal with bloodthirsty fairies. It was her ex-husband she had issues with. “I think it’s time that we should talk,” Jackson Winter drawled, and Casey clutched the phone tighter. A bizarre combination of butterflies and acid gnawed at her gut. This just wasn’t fair. Not after the week she’d just had. A mermaid tried to kill her, a crazy, overpowered Faerie huntress blackmailed her into chasing a man-eating Phooka, and just last night she’d stopped a Boggart from turning the Lexington Museum into God’s Own Slaughterhouse. She hadn’t even gotten to sleep since that last one. The universe owed her a break after a week like that. How the hell, she thought, as she slid down to the cold kitchen floor, did my ex husband even get this number? “I’m going to say you agree,” Jack drawled. She could hear his smile, could almost see his shiny, laminated teeth. She rolled her eyes. Jack had been born and raised in Nebraska. He didn’t have a southern accent any more than she did. A Texas accent, maybe, but that Southern Drawl was from Virginia, or the Carolinas, or Georgia. And the voice crawling out of the phone was sticky sweet like deep fried Georgia peaches. An affectation. He preached to the masses of Atlanta in their native tongue. Otherwise it was yet another aberration of a cancer-damaged brain. If he could get a whole new personality thanks to that last stroke, why not a new accent to go with? “What do you want?” She asked.“Well, sunshine, I wanted to hear from you. It’s been a little while. I was hoping that maybe it’s been long enough. You and I could get some water under that bridge.” A pause, and a sound of paper rustling. “Besides, you’ve met a few interesting new people these days. I want to make sure you’re okay.”It was amazing. Only Jack could creep her out in ten seconds flat. The only new people in her life since she’d left Jack were the Faerie Exiles of Corpus Christi. And him knowing about them? That was a very bad thing.But did he really know about them? Or was he just fishing. If it was the latter…well, she’d be able to fish him out, too. She racked her brain for good bait. Well, she’d heard through the grapevine that Jack wasn’t getting along with her church. His preaching was very hellfire and hard line, and he’d had a couple spectacular showdowns with other churches. She gripped the phone tighter and gave a thin, tight smile. “Jack,” she said, steadily. “I’ve been going to Laguna Fellowship for years.” So had he. The old him. The gentle, sweet, kind man she’d known, before cancer and stroke and medical nastiness took him away. This man wasn’t him.“Don’t bullshit me, sunshine. You know who I mean.”“No,” she said. “I don’t. I don’t know you at all.”The last time she’d seen her ex husband, he’d been standing over her hospital bed, apologizing profoundly for hurting her. Next to last time: Jack standing over her, a blood-soaked rolling pin slipping from between his fingers. What he’d done read like the aftermath of a car wreck. Shattered skull, right eye socket, cheekbone, and jaw. Broken collar bone, three broken ribs on right side, one punctured lung. Multiple compound fractures to right knee, which was the medical way to say “he turned the bones into marbles”. The problem with the last year of her marriage had not been that her husband was a bad man, she’d decided. It was that for the first few years, he’d been a good one. You’re told to stand by your lover when they become ill. That it is good, and brave, and loyal. They don’t tell you what to do when your virtues turn lethal. She’d had to make it up on the go.“This is a violation of the no-contact order, Jack,” She said. Her heart was pounding like a bongo drum, her mouth was dry, her hands were shaking. Her voice was dead calm. “I’m hanging up and calling the judge.”“That’s fine,” Jack said. “You go right on ahead and do that. I don’t want to trouble you too much. I just wanted to make sure you were alright.”“That’s not your job anymore.” She paused. “And why wouldn’t I be alright?”“People talk.” He said. She could hear the shrug on the other end of the line. “Some more than most. There’s a lot of rumors coming in from your part of the world. Makes for interesting listening.” A long pause. “Has that dwarf gotten his kid yet?” Doug Green and Tim Anderson were both members of Marco Creed’s little group. Doug was human. Tim was a literal dwarf. They were openly gay in South Texas and trying to adopt a kid. Sometimes Casey thought they deserved a medal. She liked them both a lot…and Jack’s church wasn’t known for being a hotbed of tolerance and fellow-feeling.She pressed her lips together and didn’t say a word.“It’s a scandal up here, you know. Our Good Folk aren’t too much happier about gays adopting than the rest of us. And that Merrow girl, the one that tried to kill you? I only found out about it after the fact, but it damn near stopped my heart when I did hear. Thank God you’re hard to kill,” there was a sad little hurt laugh. “Well, you should know,” she said. It was a struggle to keep her breathing steady now. Jack knew about the Exiles. A lot about them. Fan-freaking-tastic. She took a deep breath. Hell, they probably contacted him for the same reason they’d contacted her.Her Jack, the real Jack, had been a fantasy artist. They’d both been Christians, albeit of the “Pass the Harry Potter and the D&D manuals while I open another beer” variety. God was God, and he was powerful enough for airy-fairy nonsense to be clean and safe. God wasn’t in the things you wanted; he was behind them, the Thing above all things you didn’t dare admit to yourself you wanted. Once you did that, well, the plot was lost and all Earth and reality would be spent looking and seeking for the lovely echo of that one, true Thing. And if you wanted Fairies and magic and pretty glowing unicorns, you were really wanting that part of God best expressed as glitter and power and wildness. Throw in a little Romans 14 philosophy, and it wasn’t odd for the Winters to spend Sunday mornings attending church, and Sunday evenings attending Laguna Fellowship’s underground Dungeons and Dragons game, 3.5 rules only. It went without saying, they’d also been huge nerds. But that was before the cancer. The New Jack had lost that quality completely. There’d been a child-like neediness to the new him that Casey had felt driven to take care of. He’d had to relearn reading and writing, and as for artwork…well, where the real Jack had been hyper-realistic, the New Jack didn’t know ham from hemispheres. Up until the final night, he’d used words, not fists. Two months into his new life, he’d become obsessed with a Houston mega-church. When he begun studying the Bible and reading sermons fanatically, Casey had hoped that maybe he’d found some kind of solice and could begin to heal—and by extension, stop calling her fat, plain, stupid and lazy just because she’d rather earn a paycheck than attend his massive ego. When he’d landed a job as assistant pastor to massive Georgia based Hill Fellowship, she’d believed that, finally, it would all iron out.She’d made herself into the good little pastor’s wife, had even begun discussing a Christian line of books with her agent, Emma Parker. Neither of them had been very enthusiastic. And for a brief period, it really did look like life was finally sane again. That changing herself to fit him really had bought her peace. And then Jack had gone to town on her with a rolling pin.Since she’d left, he’d become full pastor and owner-in-all-but-name of The Hill. He’d built a new building for it and had a congregation of almost one hundred thousand people a Sunday. Three satellite campuses, a television program every Monday at nine p.m. And, rumors said, Pastor Jack could perform miracles. He’d downplayed these rumors something fierce, otherwise several thousand watchdogs would have reported him for fraud, but the rumors were still there.She’d gotten nothing. Not a dime for her medical bills, not a cent of alimony. She’d even had to send him all of his artwork. She’d kept one lone canvas, her earliest novel cover, but that was it. He’d been very insistent. She didn’t think that he’d actually wanted the artwork. The New Jack’s attitude towards fantasy was very hard line: Burn Harry Potter. Beware the dangers of role playing games. Don’t fraternize with anything remotely resembling evil, as defined by Jackson Winter. All his old art had been of fairies and elves and soft green unicorn glens. The only reason he’d wanted them, she supposed, was to burn them.And this was the guy who knew about Exiles. Jack would call them demons. Not because he actually believed in demons, but because that was one of the words that tended to turn people’s brains off. Like “witch” or “gay” or “abortion.” Shout enough of those words at the right people, and they’d set fire to the world. Probably the reason a manipulative little shit like the New Jack had wanted a church in the first place. Burn, baby. Burn. The whole idea made her cringe.“What do you want?” She asked, her voice going colder.“I’m worried. I know you and I had our issues, but my world feels a lot better knowing that you are around. I want to make sure you’re keeping a safe distance from these people..” “What I do with my life isn’t your business,” Casey said. She was getting angry now. Angrier still, because an unwelcome little voice told her that Jack was sort of right. It was national news that she’d been targeted by the Corpus Christi Sniper. Her books had even seen a teeny, tiny upsurge in sales, thanks to her name being plastered on every murderabilia site in the country. But the shooter had been Faerie, and no way was that common knowledge. Marco Creed had taken the bullet for her, but he’d also put her in danger twice since. And with the exception of Doug Green and Leslie Fielding, every member of Marco’s gang could kill Casey twice, maybe three times over without breaking a sweat.But I trust them not to. She thought. The difference between a good man and a bad one isn’t their gun collection or their power level. It is that, when given a situation and the power to take advantage of it, a good person won’t. Ever. Marco Creed, Abbey McShay, Tim, Doug, Leslie…they were all good people. Jack wasn’t.But you didn’t put Ero the Phooka or Raziel on that good-guy list, either. And you’ll listen to them. She shivered.Jack was still talking.“Maybe I can make it my business.” He said. “Some of the chatter I’ve heard says it’d be bad if the wrong people found out you were the one with the gun that day.”“Are you threatening me?” She asked. His voice softened. “I just want you to know, people down there are talking. I’m not the trouble here.”Oh, yes you damn well are. “Spit it out, or I’m hanging up.” “That gray bitch who runs things down there, she been real up front with you?” The casual misogyny put Casey’s teeth on edge. He still had a point. Good manipulators never move without one. Casey didn’t know Raziel well, or, if she thought about it, the other Faerie. Apparently, Jack did. And he definately knew about Lyrene McHally.The McHally clan was, apparently, blood-thirsty as hell. They wanted a life for a life. Their daughter died, someone else should go with her. But that was all based on what Raziel had said. She had promised Casey protection only as long as she did Raziel’s favors. If Raziel was lying, she didn’t have a hold on Casey anymore.If she was telling the truth, Jack had one, too. Her skin crawled at the idea. If Jack decided he wanted her dead, all he had to do was jump on a plane to Scotland and whisper in a little fish’s ear. Raziel could do the same thing. A rock and a hard place, she thought. Trapped between a blackmailer and her abuser.Screw it. Let’s kick over the ant-pile and see what falls out. “No,” Casey said, softly. “No. She hasn’t been open at all.” “Shit,” Jack muttered. Her pulse increased.“We got a big group of the Good Folk up here. There was a gentleman up here who ran things behind the scenes, more or less. A few of the Good Folk asked if I could assist them in getting rid of this gentleman. I did. It was messy. I’m not real sure why I’m not dead right now. About a month ago, I was told this gentleman is a dear old friend of the lady running things down there. And that he was holding a hot grudge against me for throwing him out of Atlanta.“Now, I don’t know if they’re still buddy buddy, but I do know that he’s mighty pissed at me and he might target you. And if the gray lady is still his friend, she might deliver you tied up in a real pretty bow. I’m trying to keep you safe, Karoline. You don’t get it. You are my life. I would die before I let anyone hurt you.”“Anyone else, you mean.” She closed her eyes and ran her fingers down her jeans.“That was a mistake. It isn’t fair to hold my mistakes against me. I’m much better now. If you just gave me a chance--”She heard a car outside. Probably Marco with her Nissan. “I’m hanging up now.” She said.“Wait. WAIT!” Hanging up was satisfying. God. Nobody got under her skin the way he did. It’d been almost a year since she’d had to talk to the son of a bitch. Almost a year since she’d had to remember that she still loved him. It hadn’t been long enough for either wound to heal. But he was her abuser. You can forgive that, it’s healthy to forgive it, God knew, she needed to forgive it…but you don’t forget, and you don’t let your guard down. That made forgiving very, very hard. She rubbed her right knee and felt the scars through her blue jeans. The joint was artificial. It had taken her six months to learn how to walk again. Jackson Winter might have a lot of power, money, and he might actually feel guilt, but it didn’t make him any less of a waste of skin. In this incarnation, anyway.She listened to the fan belt whine as her car turned off.. Another car pulled into the drive, its engine a purring kitten in comparison to the new Nissan’s. If she had to admit the good stuff, it was that Jack had given her useful information. Maybe even enough to leverage her way out from under Raziel. And Marco was here with her car. She rushed to the door, wanting nothing quite so much as she did Marco. Not for comfort, but for reminding. The world was not full of ugly people. There were still a handful of men that keep themselves restrained. Sure, he was prickly, and he had that white-knight protectiveness that was both romantic and frustrating, but magic was a potent lure. His had something to do with being an elf, but most of it was sex. Twisting the knob, she threw the door open before the person behind it had a chance to knock…and gave them both a huge start.It wasn’t Marco Creed.Raziel looked down as if from an endlessly great distance. The Elestrin leader was Faerie, and Casey was mortal. To Raziel, that was the distance between a throne and the grave. Casey straightened her shoulders and met the other woman’s eyes square. Disappointment that it wasn’t Marco flash-boiled into anger in nine seconds flat.There’s a gentleman…a friend of the lady who runs things down there. I don’t know if they’re still buddy, buddy, but…Casey smiled. Not sweetly. “Just the person I wanted to see.” She said.And she dragged the great huntress into her house without waiting for an answer.
GRAY FOX is due out February 15th at Amazon.com, Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. And grab a copy of BLUE GHOSTS on Smashwords before then, using this coupon: TU68W
Haven't read either? That's fine. Read through to the end for a free coupon for the Smashwords edition, good until 2/15/2013
Casey Winter could deal with bloodthirsty fairies. It was her ex-husband she had issues with. “I think it’s time that we should talk,” Jackson Winter drawled, and Casey clutched the phone tighter. A bizarre combination of butterflies and acid gnawed at her gut. This just wasn’t fair. Not after the week she’d just had. A mermaid tried to kill her, a crazy, overpowered Faerie huntress blackmailed her into chasing a man-eating Phooka, and just last night she’d stopped a Boggart from turning the Lexington Museum into God’s Own Slaughterhouse. She hadn’t even gotten to sleep since that last one. The universe owed her a break after a week like that. How the hell, she thought, as she slid down to the cold kitchen floor, did my ex husband even get this number? “I’m going to say you agree,” Jack drawled. She could hear his smile, could almost see his shiny, laminated teeth. She rolled her eyes. Jack had been born and raised in Nebraska. He didn’t have a southern accent any more than she did. A Texas accent, maybe, but that Southern Drawl was from Virginia, or the Carolinas, or Georgia. And the voice crawling out of the phone was sticky sweet like deep fried Georgia peaches. An affectation. He preached to the masses of Atlanta in their native tongue. Otherwise it was yet another aberration of a cancer-damaged brain. If he could get a whole new personality thanks to that last stroke, why not a new accent to go with? “What do you want?” She asked.“Well, sunshine, I wanted to hear from you. It’s been a little while. I was hoping that maybe it’s been long enough. You and I could get some water under that bridge.” A pause, and a sound of paper rustling. “Besides, you’ve met a few interesting new people these days. I want to make sure you’re okay.”It was amazing. Only Jack could creep her out in ten seconds flat. The only new people in her life since she’d left Jack were the Faerie Exiles of Corpus Christi. And him knowing about them? That was a very bad thing.But did he really know about them? Or was he just fishing. If it was the latter…well, she’d be able to fish him out, too. She racked her brain for good bait. Well, she’d heard through the grapevine that Jack wasn’t getting along with her church. His preaching was very hellfire and hard line, and he’d had a couple spectacular showdowns with other churches. She gripped the phone tighter and gave a thin, tight smile. “Jack,” she said, steadily. “I’ve been going to Laguna Fellowship for years.” So had he. The old him. The gentle, sweet, kind man she’d known, before cancer and stroke and medical nastiness took him away. This man wasn’t him.“Don’t bullshit me, sunshine. You know who I mean.”“No,” she said. “I don’t. I don’t know you at all.”The last time she’d seen her ex husband, he’d been standing over her hospital bed, apologizing profoundly for hurting her. Next to last time: Jack standing over her, a blood-soaked rolling pin slipping from between his fingers. What he’d done read like the aftermath of a car wreck. Shattered skull, right eye socket, cheekbone, and jaw. Broken collar bone, three broken ribs on right side, one punctured lung. Multiple compound fractures to right knee, which was the medical way to say “he turned the bones into marbles”. The problem with the last year of her marriage had not been that her husband was a bad man, she’d decided. It was that for the first few years, he’d been a good one. You’re told to stand by your lover when they become ill. That it is good, and brave, and loyal. They don’t tell you what to do when your virtues turn lethal. She’d had to make it up on the go.“This is a violation of the no-contact order, Jack,” She said. Her heart was pounding like a bongo drum, her mouth was dry, her hands were shaking. Her voice was dead calm. “I’m hanging up and calling the judge.”“That’s fine,” Jack said. “You go right on ahead and do that. I don’t want to trouble you too much. I just wanted to make sure you were alright.”“That’s not your job anymore.” She paused. “And why wouldn’t I be alright?”“People talk.” He said. She could hear the shrug on the other end of the line. “Some more than most. There’s a lot of rumors coming in from your part of the world. Makes for interesting listening.” A long pause. “Has that dwarf gotten his kid yet?” Doug Green and Tim Anderson were both members of Marco Creed’s little group. Doug was human. Tim was a literal dwarf. They were openly gay in South Texas and trying to adopt a kid. Sometimes Casey thought they deserved a medal. She liked them both a lot…and Jack’s church wasn’t known for being a hotbed of tolerance and fellow-feeling.She pressed her lips together and didn’t say a word.“It’s a scandal up here, you know. Our Good Folk aren’t too much happier about gays adopting than the rest of us. And that Merrow girl, the one that tried to kill you? I only found out about it after the fact, but it damn near stopped my heart when I did hear. Thank God you’re hard to kill,” there was a sad little hurt laugh. “Well, you should know,” she said. It was a struggle to keep her breathing steady now. Jack knew about the Exiles. A lot about them. Fan-freaking-tastic. She took a deep breath. Hell, they probably contacted him for the same reason they’d contacted her.Her Jack, the real Jack, had been a fantasy artist. They’d both been Christians, albeit of the “Pass the Harry Potter and the D&D manuals while I open another beer” variety. God was God, and he was powerful enough for airy-fairy nonsense to be clean and safe. God wasn’t in the things you wanted; he was behind them, the Thing above all things you didn’t dare admit to yourself you wanted. Once you did that, well, the plot was lost and all Earth and reality would be spent looking and seeking for the lovely echo of that one, true Thing. And if you wanted Fairies and magic and pretty glowing unicorns, you were really wanting that part of God best expressed as glitter and power and wildness. Throw in a little Romans 14 philosophy, and it wasn’t odd for the Winters to spend Sunday mornings attending church, and Sunday evenings attending Laguna Fellowship’s underground Dungeons and Dragons game, 3.5 rules only. It went without saying, they’d also been huge nerds. But that was before the cancer. The New Jack had lost that quality completely. There’d been a child-like neediness to the new him that Casey had felt driven to take care of. He’d had to relearn reading and writing, and as for artwork…well, where the real Jack had been hyper-realistic, the New Jack didn’t know ham from hemispheres. Up until the final night, he’d used words, not fists. Two months into his new life, he’d become obsessed with a Houston mega-church. When he begun studying the Bible and reading sermons fanatically, Casey had hoped that maybe he’d found some kind of solice and could begin to heal—and by extension, stop calling her fat, plain, stupid and lazy just because she’d rather earn a paycheck than attend his massive ego. When he’d landed a job as assistant pastor to massive Georgia based Hill Fellowship, she’d believed that, finally, it would all iron out.She’d made herself into the good little pastor’s wife, had even begun discussing a Christian line of books with her agent, Emma Parker. Neither of them had been very enthusiastic. And for a brief period, it really did look like life was finally sane again. That changing herself to fit him really had bought her peace. And then Jack had gone to town on her with a rolling pin.Since she’d left, he’d become full pastor and owner-in-all-but-name of The Hill. He’d built a new building for it and had a congregation of almost one hundred thousand people a Sunday. Three satellite campuses, a television program every Monday at nine p.m. And, rumors said, Pastor Jack could perform miracles. He’d downplayed these rumors something fierce, otherwise several thousand watchdogs would have reported him for fraud, but the rumors were still there.She’d gotten nothing. Not a dime for her medical bills, not a cent of alimony. She’d even had to send him all of his artwork. She’d kept one lone canvas, her earliest novel cover, but that was it. He’d been very insistent. She didn’t think that he’d actually wanted the artwork. The New Jack’s attitude towards fantasy was very hard line: Burn Harry Potter. Beware the dangers of role playing games. Don’t fraternize with anything remotely resembling evil, as defined by Jackson Winter. All his old art had been of fairies and elves and soft green unicorn glens. The only reason he’d wanted them, she supposed, was to burn them.And this was the guy who knew about Exiles. Jack would call them demons. Not because he actually believed in demons, but because that was one of the words that tended to turn people’s brains off. Like “witch” or “gay” or “abortion.” Shout enough of those words at the right people, and they’d set fire to the world. Probably the reason a manipulative little shit like the New Jack had wanted a church in the first place. Burn, baby. Burn. The whole idea made her cringe.“What do you want?” She asked, her voice going colder.“I’m worried. I know you and I had our issues, but my world feels a lot better knowing that you are around. I want to make sure you’re keeping a safe distance from these people..” “What I do with my life isn’t your business,” Casey said. She was getting angry now. Angrier still, because an unwelcome little voice told her that Jack was sort of right. It was national news that she’d been targeted by the Corpus Christi Sniper. Her books had even seen a teeny, tiny upsurge in sales, thanks to her name being plastered on every murderabilia site in the country. But the shooter had been Faerie, and no way was that common knowledge. Marco Creed had taken the bullet for her, but he’d also put her in danger twice since. And with the exception of Doug Green and Leslie Fielding, every member of Marco’s gang could kill Casey twice, maybe three times over without breaking a sweat.But I trust them not to. She thought. The difference between a good man and a bad one isn’t their gun collection or their power level. It is that, when given a situation and the power to take advantage of it, a good person won’t. Ever. Marco Creed, Abbey McShay, Tim, Doug, Leslie…they were all good people. Jack wasn’t.But you didn’t put Ero the Phooka or Raziel on that good-guy list, either. And you’ll listen to them. She shivered.Jack was still talking.“Maybe I can make it my business.” He said. “Some of the chatter I’ve heard says it’d be bad if the wrong people found out you were the one with the gun that day.”“Are you threatening me?” She asked. His voice softened. “I just want you to know, people down there are talking. I’m not the trouble here.”Oh, yes you damn well are. “Spit it out, or I’m hanging up.” “That gray bitch who runs things down there, she been real up front with you?” The casual misogyny put Casey’s teeth on edge. He still had a point. Good manipulators never move without one. Casey didn’t know Raziel well, or, if she thought about it, the other Faerie. Apparently, Jack did. And he definately knew about Lyrene McHally.The McHally clan was, apparently, blood-thirsty as hell. They wanted a life for a life. Their daughter died, someone else should go with her. But that was all based on what Raziel had said. She had promised Casey protection only as long as she did Raziel’s favors. If Raziel was lying, she didn’t have a hold on Casey anymore.If she was telling the truth, Jack had one, too. Her skin crawled at the idea. If Jack decided he wanted her dead, all he had to do was jump on a plane to Scotland and whisper in a little fish’s ear. Raziel could do the same thing. A rock and a hard place, she thought. Trapped between a blackmailer and her abuser.Screw it. Let’s kick over the ant-pile and see what falls out. “No,” Casey said, softly. “No. She hasn’t been open at all.” “Shit,” Jack muttered. Her pulse increased.“We got a big group of the Good Folk up here. There was a gentleman up here who ran things behind the scenes, more or less. A few of the Good Folk asked if I could assist them in getting rid of this gentleman. I did. It was messy. I’m not real sure why I’m not dead right now. About a month ago, I was told this gentleman is a dear old friend of the lady running things down there. And that he was holding a hot grudge against me for throwing him out of Atlanta.“Now, I don’t know if they’re still buddy buddy, but I do know that he’s mighty pissed at me and he might target you. And if the gray lady is still his friend, she might deliver you tied up in a real pretty bow. I’m trying to keep you safe, Karoline. You don’t get it. You are my life. I would die before I let anyone hurt you.”“Anyone else, you mean.” She closed her eyes and ran her fingers down her jeans.“That was a mistake. It isn’t fair to hold my mistakes against me. I’m much better now. If you just gave me a chance--”She heard a car outside. Probably Marco with her Nissan. “I’m hanging up now.” She said.“Wait. WAIT!” Hanging up was satisfying. God. Nobody got under her skin the way he did. It’d been almost a year since she’d had to talk to the son of a bitch. Almost a year since she’d had to remember that she still loved him. It hadn’t been long enough for either wound to heal. But he was her abuser. You can forgive that, it’s healthy to forgive it, God knew, she needed to forgive it…but you don’t forget, and you don’t let your guard down. That made forgiving very, very hard. She rubbed her right knee and felt the scars through her blue jeans. The joint was artificial. It had taken her six months to learn how to walk again. Jackson Winter might have a lot of power, money, and he might actually feel guilt, but it didn’t make him any less of a waste of skin. In this incarnation, anyway.She listened to the fan belt whine as her car turned off.. Another car pulled into the drive, its engine a purring kitten in comparison to the new Nissan’s. If she had to admit the good stuff, it was that Jack had given her useful information. Maybe even enough to leverage her way out from under Raziel. And Marco was here with her car. She rushed to the door, wanting nothing quite so much as she did Marco. Not for comfort, but for reminding. The world was not full of ugly people. There were still a handful of men that keep themselves restrained. Sure, he was prickly, and he had that white-knight protectiveness that was both romantic and frustrating, but magic was a potent lure. His had something to do with being an elf, but most of it was sex. Twisting the knob, she threw the door open before the person behind it had a chance to knock…and gave them both a huge start.It wasn’t Marco Creed.Raziel looked down as if from an endlessly great distance. The Elestrin leader was Faerie, and Casey was mortal. To Raziel, that was the distance between a throne and the grave. Casey straightened her shoulders and met the other woman’s eyes square. Disappointment that it wasn’t Marco flash-boiled into anger in nine seconds flat.There’s a gentleman…a friend of the lady who runs things down there. I don’t know if they’re still buddy, buddy, but…Casey smiled. Not sweetly. “Just the person I wanted to see.” She said.And she dragged the great huntress into her house without waiting for an answer.
GRAY FOX is due out February 15th at Amazon.com, Smashwords and Barnes and Noble. And grab a copy of BLUE GHOSTS on Smashwords before then, using this coupon: TU68W
The Host--chapter 4
There are two chapters left Narcissus, and I don't want to do them back to back against the load of fail I did yesterday.
So. Host today, and we go back to regular schedules tomorrow.
Also? Tonight? Sample of Gray Fox goes up. I know, I know, hold down your excitement. There will also be several short stories released at random times this month, whenever I feel they are ready. So come back tonight to read things that hopefully don't suck.
After reading Laurel K. Hamilton's desperate scrambling for theme for the past two months, I find myself with renewed respect for Stephenie Meyer. Again: I feel dirty. But she is either the single most subtle writer I've ever read, no bullshit, or she is completely unconscious of theme and is just somehow doing it on her own without consious volition. I think it's the latter, given the way this book ends.
So the chapter opens with a hungry Wanderer hiding in the bushes. We figure out in very short order that this is a dream from Melanie, because no pretty perfect soul would ever be hungry and hiding in random bushes on a planet.
Melanie is raiding a house for food. She thinks about how perfectly the aliens mantain human lives and habits. They want the culture, folks, and the memories and the music and language and science, but they don't want any of that icky human stuff hanging around. You've heard of whitewashing? Well, kids, this is brainwashing.
Melanie takes her food and runs, only to bounce off another person. She panicks because it's probably an alien...except it isn't. He realizes that Melanie is still human-driven and in his joy and exhuberance he kisses her.
She knees him in the groin. By the way, this is Melanie's One True Wub for this episode, and since he's going to go unnamed for-fucking-ever I'm going to blow the suspense right now and tell you his name is Jared.
Also. Dear authors of all sorts everywhere: STOP WITH THE NON-CON SHIT. IT IS GETTING VERY OLD.
And of course once Jared proves his humanity it is all sunshine and apocalyptic rainbows and unicorns in gas masks. He has a car, Melanie has a brother. They will survive the peaceful xenocidal aliens together.
Wanderer wakes up, curses at her human body for remaining so human, and immediately e-mails the Seeker with the name and last known location of Jared and Jamie.
Melanie promptly flips her shit.
Wanderer promptly flips her own shit because Melanie should not have any shit to be flipping. A surviving Host has never happened before, let alone one who has survived surpressed for MONTHS.
Melanie tells Wanderer she hates her. Wanderer tells Melanie to leave if she hates her so much. Wanderer also decides that she will have to visit her Comforter (councelor) and discuss her horrible inability to completely supress the human whose body she stole. Wanderer feels humiliated.
End of chapter.
And there's one thing I want to know: Did a Social Justice Warrior get hold of S. Meyer on a plane trip somewhere? Because you think that theme of repression and privelage are blatant now...kids, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
So. Host today, and we go back to regular schedules tomorrow.
Also? Tonight? Sample of Gray Fox goes up. I know, I know, hold down your excitement. There will also be several short stories released at random times this month, whenever I feel they are ready. So come back tonight to read things that hopefully don't suck.
After reading Laurel K. Hamilton's desperate scrambling for theme for the past two months, I find myself with renewed respect for Stephenie Meyer. Again: I feel dirty. But she is either the single most subtle writer I've ever read, no bullshit, or she is completely unconscious of theme and is just somehow doing it on her own without consious volition. I think it's the latter, given the way this book ends.
So the chapter opens with a hungry Wanderer hiding in the bushes. We figure out in very short order that this is a dream from Melanie, because no pretty perfect soul would ever be hungry and hiding in random bushes on a planet.
Melanie is raiding a house for food. She thinks about how perfectly the aliens mantain human lives and habits. They want the culture, folks, and the memories and the music and language and science, but they don't want any of that icky human stuff hanging around. You've heard of whitewashing? Well, kids, this is brainwashing.
Melanie takes her food and runs, only to bounce off another person. She panicks because it's probably an alien...except it isn't. He realizes that Melanie is still human-driven and in his joy and exhuberance he kisses her.
She knees him in the groin. By the way, this is Melanie's One True Wub for this episode, and since he's going to go unnamed for-fucking-ever I'm going to blow the suspense right now and tell you his name is Jared.
Also. Dear authors of all sorts everywhere: STOP WITH THE NON-CON SHIT. IT IS GETTING VERY OLD.
And of course once Jared proves his humanity it is all sunshine and apocalyptic rainbows and unicorns in gas masks. He has a car, Melanie has a brother. They will survive the peaceful xenocidal aliens together.
Wanderer wakes up, curses at her human body for remaining so human, and immediately e-mails the Seeker with the name and last known location of Jared and Jamie.
Melanie promptly flips her shit.
Wanderer promptly flips her own shit because Melanie should not have any shit to be flipping. A surviving Host has never happened before, let alone one who has survived surpressed for MONTHS.
Melanie tells Wanderer she hates her. Wanderer tells Melanie to leave if she hates her so much. Wanderer also decides that she will have to visit her Comforter (councelor) and discuss her horrible inability to completely supress the human whose body she stole. Wanderer feels humiliated.
End of chapter.
And there's one thing I want to know: Did a Social Justice Warrior get hold of S. Meyer on a plane trip somewhere? Because you think that theme of repression and privelage are blatant now...kids, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
January 31, 2013
Narcissus in Chains--chapter 62+63
So my computer ate most of the last review, and it took me ALL DAY to work this out. Crap. Well, that tells you how terrible things are in the Anitaverse. The Internet itself is trying to keep more of this shit from spewing out across its...uh...whatevers.
Ah well...where were we?
Anita grilling Bacchus. Well, while she's grilling Bacchus, the doorbell rings. Nathanial zips right up to answer it and Anita yells at him to see who it is first.
Yeah. How many home invasions did it take for us to learn THAT lesson, Ms. Heap Big Vampire Hunter.
Nathanial announces that it is Zeke, the werewolf from the club. Ya'll remember Zeke, right? The Werewolf who...uh...yeah, it's been two rescues, a LONG awaited gunfight and about four fucking...uh...fucking scenes for us to get here. We're not going to remember a wolf who was introduced WAY way back in chapter Something Before Ten. If this guy was major HE SHOULD BE IN MORE THAN ONE SCENE.
Fun fact: I've written two books now (This Found Thing and Gray Fox) in which I wrote the climax of the story in the middle of the first draft. Do you know what it feels like to realize the PERFECT ending conflict is occupying the middle third of your story? To realize that not only do you have to move things around, you have to remove conversations and in many, MANY cases invent new ones, you have to figure out how the fuck to foreshadow it, you have to figure out a new way to introduce a character or two, and then you have to re-read it about an extra ten times to make sure, absolutely sure, that you have removed every trace that the climax was actually the thing that happened after chapter two.
But you know what? You do it. And if you realize that you need to throw out two thirds of a book because your last third is actually the whole story you want to tell? You do that too. Because sometimes you can't write and you need to fuck around for a hundred pages before you find the sweet spot. I've done it. (Oh god do not get me started on what Starbleached is doing to me. DO. NOT. I beg you.) but the thing is? Laurel, darling? It should not be this clear that this is what you are doing. Your job is to make ME happy. Not you. This is called "Writing". Not "Masturbation."
Anita goes to the door with Bodyguard and a large number of weapons, which are carefully described. And when she glances out the window she discovers a bloody picture of Micah being chained up and tortured.
Anita decides to let Zeke in. Bodyguard says she can't kill him until they know what they're doing next. She says I know, thus establishing her cred as a bad ass. Then Bodyguard gives an "OMG you're so tough" speech that RUINS her cred as a bad ass.
Chapter ends.
Next chapter.
Zeke also has a picture of Cherry being chained up and tortured.
This is how we know Anita is a horrible person. She has known Micah less than two days now? And Cherry is something like her ward. She's one of the leopards Anita has to care for (leaving aside the utter squickiness of a girl in this series, specifically, named "Cherry". It's like having a kid named "meat" in a room full of pit bulls) and Anita has known her for years.
MICAH is the one she freaks out over. MICAH. Not Cherry.
Anita also monologues about how her sitting there talking to Zeke calmly (about all the shit Bacchus just told us) is a sign that she is insane. Anita, babydoll, if you are insane than a police negotiator is a fucking psychopath. What you are is a human being who understands that emotions will not help. Normal people hit that stage all the time. Usually the first time they have both a major emergency and kids. The pard are kind of your kids. You have to function if you want to go rescue your kids.
Stop trying to make being crazy something sparkly and special.
There is discussion of what a panwere is. It's a were that is more than one animal. Chimera, IMHO, should shapeshift into an actual fucking Chimera for his late intro to be a forgivable thing, and he does not. I am pissed.
By the way, this is a HUGE thing. This is a universe breaker, game changer revelation. Shifters CANNOT become more than one thing up until now. Everything we understand about Anitaverse weres is now out the window.
And I have used more words talking about it than the actual book does.
So Chimera wants Anita as a mate because she's a panwere too. Okay. Yeah. Whatever.
Because Anita does not seemed convinced at Chimera's bad-ass cred (probably because he's existed as a thing for less than three chapters in a sixty-fucking-five-chapter book) so Zeke sends out for Gina. You remember Gina, right? Right? Because I sure don't. I *THINK* it's the chick Micah went back someplace for, but she's not on my radar. AT ALL.
Gina comes in. Gina is yet ANOTHER victim in this book. She's been tortured. Zeke tells Anita that Chimera is unstable and is attacking people, and he wants to start a palace coup and get Chimera out. He has a history of going into other people's territories and killing the alphas so he can take them over and rule as top...uh...whatever. And it's a problem because the big guys--wolves and whatever--don't protect the little guys, and am I going too fast for you? Oh, I'm sorry. MAYBE IT IS BECAUSE THE ACTUAL PLOT THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING AWESOME IS BEING DUMPED ON MY PLATE AS I AM TYPING THIS.
This was the book that could have been, people. Infiltration. Investigation. Gunfights. Admittedly with heyna analogues who are Everything Straight People Fear About Gay Guys, but as non PC as that sounds even THAT would have been better than watching our main character MIND RAPE PEOPLE SHE SHOULD CARE ABOUT. This could have been a good--if horrifically everything-ist--book, and instead we got the crap I've been slogging through for two months.
So we get a list of what Chimera is: Wolf, leopard, lion, bear, snake, heyena. Goody. That explains where all the alphas are going. Chimera is a sexual sadist, though, and he only kills people after he breaks them. "Break" is defined as "forced to shapeshift" because the breaking point of the human soul is something easily identified, and the concept of "give a little bit until the son of a bitch lets his guard down" is obviously something that nobody employs, ever. He hasn't been able to force the lion or dog to shift, and Narcissus isn't broken either, so all three are still alive.
And hey, you remember Jason and Paris from Richard's pack? The dude who wanted to beat Richard and the chick that wanted to screw him? They're with Chimera too. Because RICHARD is WEEEEAAAAAAAK, folks. As if this hasn't been pounded into our brains six thousand times already.
And Micah is with Chimera too. He was supposed to get the leopards the way Jason was supposed to get the wolves, but he didn't count on Anita being there.
Which means that the guy that raped Anita, let us not forget that, is allied with the big bad of this book, and everybody will be okay with that forever. Probably because Chimera is doing awful things to everybody.
Gina goes on a monologue about how Micah is now being tortured because Micah betrayed Chimera and protected Anita, and how that means Anita stole him from Chimera, and I am trying REALLY HARD not to read gay/bi subtext into this, because I already did that once and my brain does not like going in the Hole of Homophobia that is at the core of this book. But it's not working real well.
Finally, after monologuing more about how wonderful the traitor-rapist POS Micah is, Anita agrees to go rescue him and kill Chimera.
Right.
Ah well...where were we?
Anita grilling Bacchus. Well, while she's grilling Bacchus, the doorbell rings. Nathanial zips right up to answer it and Anita yells at him to see who it is first.
Yeah. How many home invasions did it take for us to learn THAT lesson, Ms. Heap Big Vampire Hunter.
Nathanial announces that it is Zeke, the werewolf from the club. Ya'll remember Zeke, right? The Werewolf who...uh...yeah, it's been two rescues, a LONG awaited gunfight and about four fucking...uh...fucking scenes for us to get here. We're not going to remember a wolf who was introduced WAY way back in chapter Something Before Ten. If this guy was major HE SHOULD BE IN MORE THAN ONE SCENE.
Fun fact: I've written two books now (This Found Thing and Gray Fox) in which I wrote the climax of the story in the middle of the first draft. Do you know what it feels like to realize the PERFECT ending conflict is occupying the middle third of your story? To realize that not only do you have to move things around, you have to remove conversations and in many, MANY cases invent new ones, you have to figure out how the fuck to foreshadow it, you have to figure out a new way to introduce a character or two, and then you have to re-read it about an extra ten times to make sure, absolutely sure, that you have removed every trace that the climax was actually the thing that happened after chapter two.
But you know what? You do it. And if you realize that you need to throw out two thirds of a book because your last third is actually the whole story you want to tell? You do that too. Because sometimes you can't write and you need to fuck around for a hundred pages before you find the sweet spot. I've done it. (Oh god do not get me started on what Starbleached is doing to me. DO. NOT. I beg you.) but the thing is? Laurel, darling? It should not be this clear that this is what you are doing. Your job is to make ME happy. Not you. This is called "Writing". Not "Masturbation."
Anita goes to the door with Bodyguard and a large number of weapons, which are carefully described. And when she glances out the window she discovers a bloody picture of Micah being chained up and tortured.
Anita decides to let Zeke in. Bodyguard says she can't kill him until they know what they're doing next. She says I know, thus establishing her cred as a bad ass. Then Bodyguard gives an "OMG you're so tough" speech that RUINS her cred as a bad ass.
Chapter ends.
Next chapter.
Zeke also has a picture of Cherry being chained up and tortured.
This is how we know Anita is a horrible person. She has known Micah less than two days now? And Cherry is something like her ward. She's one of the leopards Anita has to care for (leaving aside the utter squickiness of a girl in this series, specifically, named "Cherry". It's like having a kid named "meat" in a room full of pit bulls) and Anita has known her for years.
MICAH is the one she freaks out over. MICAH. Not Cherry.
Anita also monologues about how her sitting there talking to Zeke calmly (about all the shit Bacchus just told us) is a sign that she is insane. Anita, babydoll, if you are insane than a police negotiator is a fucking psychopath. What you are is a human being who understands that emotions will not help. Normal people hit that stage all the time. Usually the first time they have both a major emergency and kids. The pard are kind of your kids. You have to function if you want to go rescue your kids.
Stop trying to make being crazy something sparkly and special.
There is discussion of what a panwere is. It's a were that is more than one animal. Chimera, IMHO, should shapeshift into an actual fucking Chimera for his late intro to be a forgivable thing, and he does not. I am pissed.
By the way, this is a HUGE thing. This is a universe breaker, game changer revelation. Shifters CANNOT become more than one thing up until now. Everything we understand about Anitaverse weres is now out the window.
And I have used more words talking about it than the actual book does.
So Chimera wants Anita as a mate because she's a panwere too. Okay. Yeah. Whatever.
Because Anita does not seemed convinced at Chimera's bad-ass cred (probably because he's existed as a thing for less than three chapters in a sixty-fucking-five-chapter book) so Zeke sends out for Gina. You remember Gina, right? Right? Because I sure don't. I *THINK* it's the chick Micah went back someplace for, but she's not on my radar. AT ALL.
Gina comes in. Gina is yet ANOTHER victim in this book. She's been tortured. Zeke tells Anita that Chimera is unstable and is attacking people, and he wants to start a palace coup and get Chimera out. He has a history of going into other people's territories and killing the alphas so he can take them over and rule as top...uh...whatever. And it's a problem because the big guys--wolves and whatever--don't protect the little guys, and am I going too fast for you? Oh, I'm sorry. MAYBE IT IS BECAUSE THE ACTUAL PLOT THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN FUCKING AWESOME IS BEING DUMPED ON MY PLATE AS I AM TYPING THIS.
This was the book that could have been, people. Infiltration. Investigation. Gunfights. Admittedly with heyna analogues who are Everything Straight People Fear About Gay Guys, but as non PC as that sounds even THAT would have been better than watching our main character MIND RAPE PEOPLE SHE SHOULD CARE ABOUT. This could have been a good--if horrifically everything-ist--book, and instead we got the crap I've been slogging through for two months.
So we get a list of what Chimera is: Wolf, leopard, lion, bear, snake, heyena. Goody. That explains where all the alphas are going. Chimera is a sexual sadist, though, and he only kills people after he breaks them. "Break" is defined as "forced to shapeshift" because the breaking point of the human soul is something easily identified, and the concept of "give a little bit until the son of a bitch lets his guard down" is obviously something that nobody employs, ever. He hasn't been able to force the lion or dog to shift, and Narcissus isn't broken either, so all three are still alive.
And hey, you remember Jason and Paris from Richard's pack? The dude who wanted to beat Richard and the chick that wanted to screw him? They're with Chimera too. Because RICHARD is WEEEEAAAAAAAK, folks. As if this hasn't been pounded into our brains six thousand times already.
And Micah is with Chimera too. He was supposed to get the leopards the way Jason was supposed to get the wolves, but he didn't count on Anita being there.
Which means that the guy that raped Anita, let us not forget that, is allied with the big bad of this book, and everybody will be okay with that forever. Probably because Chimera is doing awful things to everybody.
Gina goes on a monologue about how Micah is now being tortured because Micah betrayed Chimera and protected Anita, and how that means Anita stole him from Chimera, and I am trying REALLY HARD not to read gay/bi subtext into this, because I already did that once and my brain does not like going in the Hole of Homophobia that is at the core of this book. But it's not working real well.
Finally, after monologuing more about how wonderful the traitor-rapist POS Micah is, Anita agrees to go rescue him and kill Chimera.
Right.
January 30, 2013
Narcissus in Chains--chapter 62
So Anita takes Bacchus back to her house.
...why would you bring somebody who tried to murder you back to your house?
Anyway, she gets more club maps and is told that Chimera is unstable. Anita, he mailed somebody their lover's tongue. You can probably figure that out on your own. While she's grilling Bacchus,
...why would you bring somebody who tried to murder you back to your house?
Anyway, she gets more club maps and is told that Chimera is unstable. Anita, he mailed somebody their lover's tongue. You can probably figure that out on your own. While she's grilling Bacchus,
