Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 56

The Host--Chapter three

Wanderer is pissed. She thinks she's been given a defective host because the Seeker wants information from her. She's also not used to being pissed, and this pisses her off even more.

Have I raved enough about how much I love the concept of Xenocidal pacifists? Because it almost makes up for sparkling vampires. It also almost makes up for this being a Stephenie Meyer novel.

There is an aside about intuition being the sixth sense. Okay. Yeah. Whatever, Stephenie. The Seeker asks what could be wrong, and Wanderer says her memory is defective. She was trying to access the memory the Seeker wanted, and the memory isn't there.

Hey, Unnamed host chick? You go, girl.

There is babble about attachment points being correctly adhered to. For some reason this makes me think about The Human Centipede, which I have never seen and have no intention of watching ever, so my brain is kind of in this state of IDK WTF right now.

Then we have inner dialogue about Wanderer adapating to the body.

Again: I fucking love this. My numerous issues with S. Meyer aside, I love every part of this. Do not worry, my loyal blog readers. You will get much indignation from me. But for right now, everything about this concept is ringing all of my bells. Wanderer is not used to the human body, the human body is fighting her every inch of the way, and adaptation for the xenocidal Soul is not easy.

Kudos for making your Yeerks pacifists, Meyer. Also note: I am not letting you get out of this. My lingering love for K.A. Applegate will not allow it.

Wanderer starts freaking out about color. Aww, Meyer. Did somebody give your son the first book from the Andalite's perspective? That's soo sweet. I remember Ax freaking out about flavor something fierce, and then you had the time Cassie shapeshifted into a Yeerk to infiltrate and rescue the traitor yeerk whose name I can't remember. She was so happy to get to see again. Ah, good times, good times.

This is totally Animorphs fan fic, FYI.

 NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

The Seeker explains about the memory defects. It's worth mentioning at this point, the Seeker is a brown person. Dark hair, olive skin. Wanderer is white. Every other major character in this book is white. The Seeker is the only antagonist worth writing about. And she's also the ONLY brown person in the ENTIRE BOOK. Actual race is also never mentioned, but "Olive completion" isn't something commonly applied to caucasian folk.

Way to go, S. Meyer. I feel dirty for liking  anything you write already.

(Also, brown loyal blog readers? Olive is a terrible descriptive term for skin tone. Olives, my dears, are green, and they are only an acceptable thing if they are either Kalamata or in a Hendricks Dirty Martini, Dry, with a twist. Or if they are black. Black olives are wonderful things. Is it too late to mention that I can only read this book slightly drunk? I'm slightly drunk right now. Imagine that.)


Wanderer has been inserted into this host because she prefers an Adult. Wanderer prefers to take over somebody else's body long after they've had time to develop their own Personhood. Wanderer does not consider this personhood an actual thing. Wanderer is a --

OH COME ON. SHE DESERVES IT.

*sigh* Fine. Fine.

Wanderer is a waste of alien glitter skin. There. Are you happy, Robot Susan B. Anthony?

Wanderer is then told about the resistance human Adults typically put up to being turned into prisoners in their own bodies Hosts for Souls.

Apparently a Soul took over an adult named Kevin. The Soul was a musician. Oh, I'm sorry, he had a Calling in Musicial Preformance. Because he was from the Blind World Planet of the Bats Singing World. Only Kevin was a mechanic. So the Soul becomes a Mechanic, which is a HUGE scandal. And then the Soul begins blacking out as Kevin takes his own body back, once in a while. Eventually Kevin the Host knocks a healer out and tries to cut the soul out of his own body. 

The souls react by removing the soul from Kevin and giving him a little kid to inhabit, while Kevin himself is destroyed.

Goodnight, sweet prince Kevin. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

(In case you haven't guessed, I don't like the Souls much.)

The Seeker assures Wanderer that she is not the average soul, while simultaneously guilt-tripping her for not choosing an immature host. Wanderer, meanwhile, feels ashamed that she isn't strong enough to supress our STILL unnamed human host.

Wanderer asks the Seeker why she was not implanted into this Host, as obviously the Seeker wants to know where the fuck the wild human came from. Seeker says that she's "No skipper", which means a body-jumper, which is apparently something that is frowned upon.

Wanderer then gives us the host's name. Melanie Stryder.

Melanie, for 90% of this book, will be my heroine. For the last 10% she will be the scum of the earth, but we're going to ignore that for the time being.

Melanie is also twenty years old. Finally, FINALLY, S. Meyer is writing about somebody who is not underage when the story starts.

Wanderer tries to remember why Melanie was trying to meet her cousin. She tells the Seeker where they can find Melanie's note, and then Melanie hijacks her own mouth to find out if they found Sharon. Melanie is hogtied in her own head and she is still fighting hard. Fuck you Wanderer. Melanie, have a beer.

Wanderer finds out its too late for the Seekers to find Melanie's buddies. Melanie feels relief. Wanderer just feels even more pissed at how present Melanie is in her own body. Well, again, Fuck you Wanderer. This ain't your house to begin with.

Melanie also remembers the pretty-faced boy's name" Jared. Wanderer turns this over to the Seeker, and the chapter ends. 

Narcissus in Chains--chapter 61

Anita interrogates the surviving wereheyena. His name is Bacchus.

Bacchus. Ulysses. Narcissis. Yeah. Why do the were heyenas have a naming theme? And why is that theme greek? The text mentioned earlier that Narcissus has been "adding to his ranks" until he has five, six hundred men. Just men. And they're all gay. And this is the middle of midwestern America. And LKH is expecting me to believe that Narcissus is grabbing random gay guys off the street of St. Louis and infecting them with were-heyena and he managed not to hit a John, or an Andy, or a

...WAIT. WAIT ONE FUCKING SECOND.

Narcissus has been infecting random men with therianthropy because he wants more people on his side. Narcissus, a gay person, is kidnapping and infecting "normal" people with a blood borne disease that utterly totally and permanently alters your life because he wants more allies.

Go fuck yourself, Laurel. Go. Fuck. Yourself. If you cannot figure out why that is disgusting and creepy and oh, so very wrong, you need to go back to human school and learn how to be one. GOOD. FUCKING. GOD.

And Narcissus is either limiting his recruting to gay greek men with romantic names, or he's taking their names away and replacing them with his own choices. In real life, Narcissus is a bad caracature of a marganilized people. In this universe he is a dangerous, dehumanizing predator rather like Anita, and in both worlds he needs to be erased before he does more damage to lable he identifies with.

 And then Narcissus introduces "Chimera", a panwere who is apparently into even more BDSM stuff than Narcissus. Chimera has abducted all the pack's lovers. Because of course the romantic partners are going to be easy to identify and hold onto. The feminine half of a gay partnership always dresses like Bobby Trendy.

And in case you can't recognise it, kiddies, that was sarcasm.

So the only person who can rescue these poor tortured wereheyenas from their own apathy is Anita. Somebody linked me to an article yesterday about how she's a straight warrrior or something. Yeah. No. If straight people get to elect a warriror my vote is going to go to somebody who can manage to avoid the penis when she doesn't actually want it. We don't need a warrior, though, so that election should be delayed a few more decades.

So if Anita doesn't co-operate with Chimera, he will kill all the weak little were-heyenas that Anita now has to protect. What does Chimera want?

Anita. As his mate.

Once again, the way to rescue a bunch of frightened shapeshifting predator men is through sex.

Anita is reluctant to come to the rescue until Bacchus reminds her of a traumatic point in her life, in which she was mailed parts of people she cared about to try to make her do something. At this point me and my dudes would be in the car halfway back to turn Chimera into a grease stain, but Anita has to be convinced and cajoled into having sex rescuing people.

Anita wonders why she wants to help someone she tried to kill. My vote is, because you are a person and these are also people and if you are a good human being you help other people not have parts chopped off of themselves. Anita decides its because she's an oversocialized, hormonal female.

That's what the text says. That's not me.

How did I go from trying to kill him to feeling bad for him? Maybe it was a girl thing, or maybe I’d been oversocialized as a child.

She gets a layout of the club from Bacchus, and the chapter ends.

The Host--Chapter 3

So I've been reading for fun on the side, and I have found the best book ever. Warm Bodies. It is a zombie love story, and the zombie is one of the two lovers in question. The writing is fucking. awesome. The story itself has a point and a heart, and it's something that everybody everywhere should be reading.

Right. Back to The Host.

I kind of sort of like Twilight, in that trainwrecks don't happen every day and we have to take what we can get. But the one scene I hated more than anything else wasn't the scene where Edward eats the baby out of Bella's stomach, or the watching-her-while-she-sleeps-thing, or the abuse of native cultures, or the misogyny, or the massvie amount of Mormon propaganda in the book.

It was the fucking tent scene in Eclipse. To explain, S. Meyer decided that there wasn't enough tension, so she decided to have Edward, Bella and Jacob all sleep in the same tent, and had Bella overhear a conversation between Ed and Jake about who gets to keep Bella. Folks, I have pretended to be asleep before, and I have been actually asleep before, and the only time I really overhear a conversation is when I'm playacting.

But it's time to repeat the preformance of the Stupidest Scene Ever by having our STILL unnamed main character overhear a conversation between her doctor and the Seeker. Let me give you the bullet points:

-humans are violent nasties and humanity is an infection
-Souls have "callings" that determine their jobs.

Time out. If you're not raised borderline fundie, you probably don't get the overtones of that terminology. You do not decide to go into religious jobs. You are called. As I understand it, Mormons take it one step further. Your husband or wife is determined by angels up in heaven, if you are successful it is because you are obeying the hand of God, ect. ect. I'm not criticizing the belief system, but I DO want to point out that it leaves people open to massive amounts of exploitation. Back to book:

-Seekers are horrible people.
-Souls own the entire United States, and consider everything they overtake "civilized". Free humans are uncivilized.
-The Seeker and the Healer hate the everloving fuck out of each other
-Our STILL unnamed main character soul is about as active as Bella fucking Swan, and I already don't like her. This will change a little bit, but not that much.

And then, finally, FINALLY, our main character gets a name: Wanderer. Because she's been to so many worlds and refuses to settle down.

Wanderer uses her time lying frozen on this medical bed to think about the other planets she has been on. Apparently it was in the drip trap of HP Lovecraft's fridge. Telepathic, thousand-eyed plants. Wow.

Wanderer also decides that only the uncivilized soul would become a Seeker. Violence is just so far beneath the true soul.

However, because "Good citizenship was quintessential to every soul"  (oh Applebloom, I am so very, very sorry) Wanderer remembers every aspect of her body's last life that she thinks the Seeker might want. The body came to Chicago to find her cousin. But when Wanderer tries to remember more, she finds the information blocked out. The person is still in this body and she is fighting as hard as she can to spare her loved ones from becoming prisoners in their own body.

Finally, Wanderer sits up, the Seeker welcomes her to Earth...and the chapter ends.

...yeah. LKH and S. Meyer get their advice from the same damn chapter-breaking book.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 60

So Anita heads back to Narcissus in Chains and is lead in by a nervious looking Ulysses. The other guards look nervious and scared too. Ulysses explains that their master has punished them.

Anita looks down on this. She treats it as a self-inflicted thing. Nobody who didn't want to be punished would stick around for it, after all. Because abuse is a thing you just leave cold turkey and have no other hang-ups with all the time, right?

Ulysses gets even more nervous and asks for Anita to leave her guns behind.

Anita says no.

Ulysses says please.

Anita says no.

Ulysses says Anita has no idea what will happen to them if they let her go inside with her guns.

Anita decides that Narcissus is being a really bad dom.

The readers, however, have picked up that Ulysses has said "my master" every time, and knows that something else is going on, and super-uber perceptive Anita, who can read subtle nuances into the mearest glance of most weres, is being written as EXCEPTIONALLY thick and insensative right now, and that means somebody else is in charge.

Ulysses begins to beg on his knees, saying that his master will kill the guard's lovers if Anita and Co. don't surrender their guns. And I just realized that other than Asher and Narcissus, these are the first gay dudes in the book. Asher was a prima donna, Narcissus was a psychotic sadist, and these guys are sniveling murderous cowards--or at least, they're being written that way.

Hey, you know what the difference between a gay guy and a normal guy is IRL? Absolutely nothing. They're the same person. They don't dress like June Cleaver (unless they want to) they don't flame on, and like everyone else on the planet, some of them can be VERY bad ass. Some of them can even manage to be bad ass while kicking no ass at all.  (No one else IRL has managed the sheer awesome badassery of Bayard Russtin. There were no truely awesome human beings before Bayard Rustin. There have been none since. Bayard Rustin handed Chuck Norris another fist, and Chuck threw them all down in disgust. Yes. I just said it. Bayard Rustin was more badass than Chuck Norris.)

But I guess in this universe if you are hardwired not to want to screw Anita, because you're a straight woman or a gay man, you must be evil. Or a coward.

I hate this book.

Anita decides all these poor abused men are broken little puppies and she must take them all and give them all sanctuary. Do not ask me how you can both demonize, cutisfy, dehumanize and rescue somebody all at the same time, but this book just managed it.

And then somebody shoots one of Anita's bodyguards, and she responds by putting her gun to Ulysses's head and threatening to pull the trigger. Because it's totally his fault.


So now they're all being held under gunpoint. Anita and the remaining bodyguard time a couple volleys of fire and kill a couple guards before the return fire pins them back behind cover again. (...just how fucking big is this club? And why do I keep imagining an medeval castle instead of a nightclub when I read this scene?) and then the wereheyenas rush Anita.

The text strongly implies that it's all of them. All five hundred plus.

HOW BIG IS THIS CLUB?

They escape the club being chased by a horde of half-shifted heyena men.

Boys and girls, we just spent two thirds of this book reading about disgusting, humiliating, probably-not-consensual sex, and the fallout from said disgusting, humiliating non-con sex. This has been lightly peppered with so much ugliness Westboro Babtist Church would say "Fuck. Even we can't top this shit" and go home.

 We could have been reading about silver gun battles and pissed off were-heyena car chases the entire time. 

You may rage incoherantly now. I'll wait.

The heyenas swarm the car. There is much firing of weapon and much exploding body parts, because Anita only packs the kind of rounds that explode when they go into a body. At one point she runs out of ammo and half decapitates a person (most of the head is still there, just...not the important parts). It's gross and brutal and totally the book we wanted, but sadly the slog it took to get here just wasn't worth it.

Anita pulls a random Uzi out of the floorboards of the car. It has a big clip, too. Triple ammo capacity, so it takes twelve seconds to empty at full auto instead of just four. (Mythbusters did it. Look it up)

At one point the bodyguard tells Nathanial to slow down, they don't want to be pulled over with bodies in the car. I think they should be more worried about the bodies on the car (one of them is dangling through the brand new sunroof) but that might just be me.

Then Anita realizes one of the bodies isn't dead, so she questions it. Finally she catches up to the rest of us and realizes that Narcissus isn't in charge of the gang anymore. Oh, dear, who is?

We find out later, because that's the end of the chapter.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 58+59

Anita wakes up naked outside of the hot tub covered in cold towels. Sorry, guys. No surprise penis this time. Though really, at this point I think the only reason why there isn't is because we are on "page" 379 of a 422 "page" ebook, and sex uses up what little room we have left.

Anita still has her arm around Damian. Asher and Nathanial are trying to cool Anita down.

Hey, folks! Fun fact: being unconsious is not a cool trope. It's an actual medical condition that is dangerous. There is a reason why anesthesologists make good money; drugs are bad, and the difference between "hey, I'm still kind of awake for this" and dead is really, really thin. If you get hit in the head and you're out cold, it is because your brain has been hurt, and the longer you're out the more severe it probably is. If it's more than five minutes, you have brain damage. If it's more than fifteen, congradulations, you have probably forgotten how to talk.

I passed out from heat exhaustion once. It was hot, I was wearing sweat pants in a garage for a tai-kwon-do lesson that was less "lesson" and more "boot camp" and I hadn't eaten properly. I leaned over to get water and woke up on the floor with my head between my knees. I was out for maybe a couple seconds. My parents made me go into the house and sit on the couch with ice on my neck. I got watermelon. Everybody else had to keep on kicking the damn bag.

The point? If you are unconsious due to heat, it is because your brain is cooking. It is a medical condition. It is not something that should be left to two psychotic vampires and the wereleopard that vacuums with pearls on. And if you're out long enough to be declothed and wrapped in slightly cool towels, you should also be in an ambulance on the way to a doctor supervised ice bath. Anita is INCREDIBLY lucky that she is not dead or in convulsions right now.

Hey, have LKH's descriptive powers suddenly improved?

 His eyes were clear, bright, alive again. His eyes were the color of emeralds, and it wasn’t caused by vampire powers, it was his natural eye color, as if his mother had fooled around with a cat to get him here. People just didn’t have that color of eyes.

God. Random bestiality just to describe someone's eye color. Jesus Christ, Laurel. It doesn't all have to be sex.


Damian says he knows Anita is his master. Anita goes off on a long ramble about how she doesn't think she could be a good ruler, and how she couldn't go quietly into that good night of servitude, and Damian is all calm and greatful and like "Thank you for mind-raping me into serving you in the first place" and he kisses her and then the chapter ends.

Guys, I'm not doubling up because I want to be done with this book. I mean, I DO want to be done with this book but running The Host at the same time almost makes it okay. I'm doubling up because nothing is fucking happening in these chapters. 

Anyway. Next chapter. The end game.

Micah calls. Apparently Anita left Cherry and Zane in his care and he's letting her know they'll be fine. Uh huh. Let's leave two characters this book has established as weaker beings in the care of your rapist, Anita. I'm sure this is going to end well. Anita is unnerved because she's "sleeping" with somebody she doesn't love. Right. Everything about your relationship with the shithead is totally consensual.

Gag me.

And then Anita goes to bed in the tiniest, most revealing nightclothes she has, because they're cool. Okay, fine, whatever. It's really hard for me not to critize how you dress, Anita, when you spend so much time both describing the most revealing outfits humanly possible and reassuring us that it's not actually revealing because you are just so short.

And then the phone rings.

 When this book began Anita was wearing something insanely tiny and it was late at night and there was a random phone call from the club Narcissus in Chains demanding Anita come rescue Nathanial.

At the halfway point, Anita had to go rescue Gregory

At the three-fourths mark, Anita had to go rescue Damian.

This time Anita is in bed wearing something insanely tiny, and it is late at night, and there is a random phone call from the club Narcissus in Chains demanding Anita come rescue the missing Alphas. YES. WE ARE DOING THIS AGAIN FOR THE FOURTH FUCKING TIME.


Anita talks to Narcissus's bodyguard, Ulysses, for a while. And it's just like the conversation with Gregory--inane and banal until you realize that somebody's got a gun to his head...or in Ulysses's case, to his lover's head. Anita hangs up the phone, puts her guns on, and heads out with her posse to go do the same damn thing she's done through this whole book.

Which I hate. Passionately.

Next chapter(s): We find out what kind of book we COULD have been reading, if LKH had not totally utterly and completely lost her fucking mind.

The Host--Chapter Two

Time to meet our main character.

And I have to say it. Trust me. I don't like saying it. S. Meyer does a good job showing the "soul" adapt to her new body. The as-yet-unnamed soul slowly aquires memory and sensory imput from the body she is now inhabiting, and it is VERY well done.

Of course, this wouldn't be a Stephenie Meyer novel without a significant amount of self hate and a bias towards white America, and since Souls are oh, so perfect this translates into that anti-humanity stuff I was talking about last post:

The language I found myself using was odd, but it made sense. Choppy, boxy, blind, and linear. Impossibly crippled in comparison to many I’d used, yet still it managed to find fluidity and expression.

Also, you've got a fucking wonderful example of S. Meyer's bias. This is English, folks, but it's never identified and the existance of other languages is NEVER brought up. The existence of any continent other than the grand old US of A is never brought up either. So either Meyer forgot that anything other than American English Speaking People exist, the aliens have canceled world travel, or the host body never heard another language spoken. Because the souls are heavily influienced by the body they are in.

As in they basically become the person that owned the body before they got their shiny little tenticles on it.

The woman the soul now inhabits was a member of the human resistance. She was caught, she failed, she fought back--and violence is a totally alien concept to these things--and then she decided that since she'd rather die than have her body stolen from her, the girl threw herself out a window.

This is the peaceful, perfect soul's first experiance of humanity: battle and suicide.

On one hand, I find that to be a particularly offensive judgement on the part of S. Meyer, and I'm pretty sure she did it on purpose. On the other hand, I fucking love this unnamed human girl, because folks, I'd be right behind her. It's a powerful introduction to a character that is going to be very influiental in what is to come. This girl says, basically, "I would rather die and deny you monsters victory than surrender and be something worse than your slave."

But given S. Meyer's worship of self-sacrifice, liking it makes me feel more than a little dirty.

This is also the first time an e-book has been an improvement over the hard copy. In the paperback version I have, the human memories are indicated by a change in font--from a nice, readable serif font to a slightly larger, slightly smoother sans-serif font that reads like a migrane. In the e-book, they just change the size and shrink the paragraphs. Yay!


The elevator shaft the girl threw herself down wasn't high enough, and the Seekers were able to save her life and patch her back up. The soul--still no name for either soul or body yet--starts screaming at the memory, and the body explains what's going on. Which freaks the soul out further because the body isn't supposed to talk. The body doesn't say anything else and the remembering continues.

And now it's time to have the other defining trait of a S. Meyer novel: life revolves around guys. Specifically, one guy. The soul sees the face, the body says mine, and there is much waxing poetic about how pretty this remembered guy is. And I know that I am not one to talk, given that my main character in my primary novel series cannot get over her ex-husband, but folks? Guys define Stephenie Meyer's females.

And then voices interrupt the soul's new thoughts. And we don't get to find out if it is nurses, doctors, or the main character's body's schizophrenia, because the chapter ends.

Next Chapter: Raise your hand if you remember that fucking tent scene from Eclipse, because we're about to get a replay.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 56+57

So Anita is now on her own for saving Damian. She elects to be his first meal, everyone else calls bullshit and decides Zane will do it, because Anita would probably die. Anita is a little miffed at this, but she understands. Then she realizes that Zane and Cherry love each other. She feels guilty.

Damian, of course, freaks the fuck out immediately. He eats a large portion of Zane's throat, then moves on to Merle, and then jumps Anita. Only when he touches Anita he snaps out of it and asks her what's going on.

Uh...I'm guessing "You're trying to kill everybody in the room" is not an acceptable reply.

The magical connection between them comes to life, Anita kisses Damian, and the chapter ends.

Next chapter, Damian is in Anita's hot tub, with Anita. Apparently Jean Claude only has one hot bathtub, and the systemic shock vamps go into when they come out of the coffin apparenlty doesn't kick in for a couple hours. Damian has to say in contact with Anita, however, because he goes into convulsions and starts vomiting blood in case she tries to leave.

You know what I'm not thinking? I'm not thinking this chapter would be better if Anita has a medical crisis bigger than Damian's. I'm pretty certain you're not, either. But you know who is? Yeah, Anita gets heat stroke from sitting in the hot tub. They have to cut her clothes off. While she's still in the hot tub.

And then she vomits and passes out. Because nobody can be babied if Anita can't be babied, I guess.

I really hate this book.

The Host--Overview and Chapter One

So I've decided, since we're so close to the end of NIC and ANYTHING, frankly, is a good pallate clenser at this point, that we're going to start doing The Host now.

I decided not to do Twilight on this blog, ever, because everything that I could possibly say about it has already been said, by people who are much better at it than I am. But The Host has not been bashed as thoroughly as Twilight because it's actually a good novel. For the most part.

The last little bit, though, makes everything worth it.

Stephenie Meyer and talent should never be mentioned in the same sentence. Stephen King has famously commented that the difference between S. Meyer and J.K. Rowling is "Rowling can write." He is not wrong. S. Meyer is the Micheal Bay of books. She has a good grasp of storytelling rules. No, no, don't roll your eyes. If she didn't understand what she was doing on an instinctive level you would not be able to finish the books. The problem is that her grasp IS entirely instinctive. Just like Micheal Bay, S. Meyer doesn't have a good filter on her brain. Her books are like the abstract artwork that sometimes shows up at local art shows. It's kind of interesting, but compared to somebody who actually knows how to paint it really is low-level garbage. She doesn't consider story theme, character development, or people who may not agree with her POV. In Twilight, marrige and sex are for life, choice is not a thing, gay people don't exist--it's not that she protests against them. They don't exist at all.--and brown people become white. This is not expressed in the movies, but it's definately there in the books. People want to call it a statement, but while I may not be the right person to go to for a perspective on People of Color or non-normative sexuality, I think I know what goes on in the mind of the privelaged white chick. S. Meyer doesn't discuss under-privelaged people in her work because under-privelaged people don't exist in her universe. She literally does not think about them at all.

Which is why The Host is very perplexing. There is a fucking gorgeous theme in it that I do not think Meyer intended to write at all, any more than she intended to make Twilight into Mormon propaganda. I've read it twice, and both times I found myself liking 75% of it. When Meyer sticks to her sci-fi universe, it's a good book. When she dips into gender roles, everything goes off the rails. I don't remember any gay people, which makes no sense for reasons that will soon become clear, but there are moments where the book becomes actively thoughtful and thought provoking and good.

But it all gets fucked over by the end of it. And don't worry. The text is often a trudge through uninspired paragraphs of pretty nasty human hate. S. Meyer calls herself an avowed "anti-humanist" writer and oh, dear GOD is that ever clear in her intentional writing. It makes me absolutely sure that the positive in this book is entirely unintentional, like discovering swill has turned into champagne.

This is also a bit of a branching out for me, to see if I can keep things entertaining when I'm not indulging in nerd rage. So. Shall we dive in?

We are immediately introduced to a Healer named Fords Deep Waters. And by "Immediately" I mean his name is the first sentence. That's how the names are in this book. You have "Gee, this is not a human" names like Fords Deep Waters, Wanderer, Petals Open to the Sky, and you have human names like Bob, Jane and Kate. It gets confusing, sometimes.

Fords is a "soul". Hey, you want to know how long it takes for S. Meyer to trigger Applebloom's gag reflex? This is half of the second sentence in the book:

by nature he was all things good: compassionate, patient, honest, virtuous, and full of love.

Gee, Stephenie, subtle much?Fords is doing an "insertion" in front of a whole room full of medical students. He is irritated because he's in a human body and these emotion things are just SO HARD for a soul to deal with. The medical students are here because they're doing an insertion on a "wild human".

...please tell me S. Meyer's reading habits are better than I think they are. Please, oh please, oh, please don't hurt my childhood. Please...

The text calls "Wild humans" soulless. At no point does the text discuss WHY souls are calling themselves souls. And let me get this out of the way: I fucking love this concept. The antagonist force of the novel are creatures we would identify as morally good. The ONLY evil thing they do through the whole book is deny human beings a choice in things. It brings up many questions about the nature of choice, morality, and good and evil. Souls are world conquering pacifists, utterly against murder and yet capable of commiting mass xenocide. All because they deny the other creatures in space the right to choose their own fate.

This is written by Stephenie Meyer. I do not understand.

The girl was damaged somehow. Fords has healed her, and they are going to implant an exceptional soul in her body. Only now they refer to the body as the soul's body, not the host's. The soul has apparently traveled on almost every world the Souls have invaded. Fords hears the students gossiping about this and tells them all to shut up, and then he brings the soul out...and it's a glittery silver centipide, and I am going to just leave this here:

This was my childhood. Right here.
Fords spends time thinking about how he regrets what he's doing--apparently cutting open the neck to insert the soul "creates an injury" and he can't stand doing that. Folks, these guys must faint at the sight of blood--and how the "horror of this girl's end" will be the first thing the soul remembers.  He calls the new soul "wanderer", wishes her good luck, and the chapter ends.

Next chapter: We meet our main character, and we find out how xenocidal pacifists can actually be a thing.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 54+55

There is one thing that has gotten the worst of it in this novel. It's not Anita's men, though they've been treated rather savegely. It's not other women. It's not Richard. It's not Jean Claude or his many lovers.

Nope. It's the humble and gentle comma.

Unlike John Norman, who eventually understood that wholesale slaughter would drive the comma into extenction and moved on to the simi-colon, Laurel K Hamilton has continued a wholesale passenger-pidgeon level genocide through every page of this book. And it's never been more obvious than at the start of this chapter:

Jason would be the appetizer, oh, sorry, Gretchen’s first feeding.

"Jason would be Gretchen's first feeding." Or "Jason would be Gretchen's appetizer." Look at how nice and simple and not comma-killing those two examples are.

And yes. They're getting Gretchen out of her box first, because the best thing Anita can do is waste all our time.

Oh, and folks? I read ahead. I finished the book. You will be RAGING when we get to the ending. I know I am. But I have kind of sort of almost figured out the bullshit about morals and why LKH is pounding "COMPROMISE ON YOUR ETHICS" into the ground the way she is.

anyhoo, Jean Claude, who is very experianced in this stuff, tells them all where to stand. Also, he fed on Gretchen's life energy, and Anita is offended by this. Badly. Anita watched Obsidian Butterfly and her ilk do the same thing in the previous book--drain via long distance, and return what they took--and was horrified then. She's horrified now that Jean Claude would suck another vampire down into skin and bones, because somehow this is worse than being locked in a box to starve for years and years.

Isn't that a nice summery? It took me three read throughs of Anita's long, convoluted metaphysical remembering to understand what the FUCK I was reading. I am proud of being able to boil it down to a couple sentences. 

Jean Claude decides it's time to vent his rage, and in the process shed his thin veneer of good guy. Because he had no choice but to abuse his powers and position. Anita and Richard have "hemmed him in with rules" so that he can't feed his hungers properly or consolidate his power base. They are forcing him to be a monster:

And now because you and he had your moral high ground to keep you pure, you have forced me to be more practical than I have ever wanted to be.”

Oh BULL FUCKING SHIT, Laurel. I'm not pissed at Jean Claude for saying this because now I've got your end-game with this book, and it sucks like shit, and I know that he's a non-existant character you've lobotomized because you've got a precious cute little point you want to make.

First of all, nobody forces you to do anything. Your choices are yours. Jean Claude could have held out and found another work-around. He could have done the sane thing, understood that Anita didn't want him, and found another Servant. He could have done the halfway sane thing and contacted Anita when he started having problems. The problem is not that Richard and Anita put too many rules on him. It's that he wanted to do this, and he didn't care enough to find a better solution. And no. I don't buy that there wasn't one. This is fiction, and it's written by an author with a long history of breaking her rules to suit herself. Jean Claude does what he wants to do. Now he's been caught, and like any cheating husband or abusive piece of shit caught with their hands dirty, he's blaming everybody but himself. His wife won't have sex with him, so he has to go elsewhere. Spare the Rod, Spoil the Housewife. "You've put too many rules on me!"

Gag me.

But the bigger problem here is, this moral compromise thing. It's now totally obvious to me that, as much as I wanted to deny it, this book is about Hamilton's private issues. It's about her private issues because it sure as bloody fuck isn't about anything else. And this moral nonsense is woven through every thread. "You need to compromise on your morals to get things done!"

No. You don't. You don't compromise on your morals because when you do, you're a hypocrite. You don't compromise on your principles because then you might as well not have any. And when you and a partner set up bounderies, you don't break the bounderies. And if this includes cheating outside the relationship, don't fucking cheat. If you break the rules and your loving friends and family tell you you're being a hypocritical shit, it's not because they don't understand. It's not because they are insensitive to your needs and refuse to compromise on the moral ground. It's because you took a moral stand, and you abandoned that stand the second it got difficult.


Okay. Moving on.

So Jean Claude feeds Gretchen, it takes pages, and nothing bad happens. Damn. Now it's Damian's turn. Jean Claude leaves Anita so that he can go baby the vampire that tried to kill his favorite person ever. This is called passive-agressively punishing Anita for not blithely going along with his locking people in boxes. Now Anita has to handle Damian on her own. She faces the coffin and...yep, the chapter ends.

I hate this book.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 53

So. We are almost done with this book. So far, three people (Nathanial, Gregory, Damian) have been kidnapped and/or held in prison by a supernatural group's leader (Narcissus, Richard, Jean Claude) and Anita has had to have sex and/or preform a task to get her person back. Basically, this book is a nymphomaniac's D&D campaign.

In Gregory's case, Anita had to magically sense where Gregory was being kept via scent, something she failed at catastrophically.

In Damian's case, she goes down into the vampire prison and finds two coffins. And because she's supposed to be Damian's master, she has to magically sense which coffin has her boy in it. Only it's not Jean Claude requiring this. It's one of her body guards.

I can kind of understand repeating your plot twice in the same book, but this is the third time Anita has had to do this. 

She does it within a page, and discovers that, big surprise, Damian is monumantally fucked up. Folks, if vampires, who are not known for being members of PETA, decide that you are too homicidal for their company, you probably have issues. And Anita decides she wants to have mercy on whomever is locked up in the other coffin. Because she likes all of Jean Claude's vamps, and she doesn't any of them to get hurt.

This says one of two things:

-Either Jean Claude has a history of punishing people who haven't done anything wrong with the most atrocious punishments imaginable, thus totally negating Anita's trust in him as a person, but totally validating her desire to be kind to whomever is chained up in a coffin to hunger for all eternity.

OR

-Anita is an idiot.

Seriously. IF Jean Claude is a good leader, whoever is locked in the coffin fucking deserves to be there. If Jean Claude is not a good leader and this dude doesn't deserve to be in there, YOU SHOULD NOT BE FUCKING JEAN CLAUDE. And what kind of person decides she wants to negate punishment on somebody just because she likes them? People LOVED Ted Bundy, and he didn't give a fuck. Jesus Christ, Anita, you are dating your own rapist. Your judgement of people SUCKS.

LEAVE. THE COFFIN. ALONE.

Jean Claude comes down before Anita can break the seal on the worst tupperware container, ever, and she grills him on who it might be. He says "Gretchen." Who is, apparently, a vampire that tried to kill Anita because she wanted Jean Claude all to herself.

She did this three fucking years ago, and she's been in the coffin ever sense.

We are all supposed to know who this is. Seriously. This is ten books into the series, I am assuming that "Gretchen" was a major character in a book five or six books back. Guys, this opens a very large, very nasty can of moral worms.

First off, it proves that Anita is an idiot. Somebody who tired to kill her is in the coffin. Do not have mercy on random coffins.

Second: Jean Claude is a bad leader too. He is not punishing Gretchen because she tried to kill A person, he's punishing her because she tried to kill his person. Anita. This is viewed as justifiable by the book, but I'm not buying. Jean Claude pitched a fit and locked this woman up in a coffin so she could starve and thirst for all eternity.

Folks, I know that we have *issues* with capitol punishment, but if you have somebody so bad the only punishment you can justify is locking them up to suffer for years on end, just kill the person. Fast kill is better than torment for all eternity.

Anita still wants to let Gretchen out of the coffin. She won't leave Damian in there any longer, either. She issues ultimatums to a dude who locks people up into coffins for years on end just because they nearly wiped out his fun.

I don't like any of these people anymore.

Anita demands that Jean Claude revive Gretchen, and then lend her Asher to revive Damian. And then she grills Jean Claude for pages and pages about whether or not Jean Claude and Asher would be lovers again if she got out of the way.

I think the answer is a big fat YES.

And then the chapter ends without resolving one fucking thing. BIG surprise, I know. I know. But there you have it.

Gag. Me .With. A. Spork.