Chelsea Gaither's Blog, page 62
December 18, 2012
The Worst Thing I ever Did (On the internet)
Edit: This page was part of a massive cluster fuck on my part. To see how I reacted to the cluster fuck, please visit this page
I figure I need to get this off my chest. It's been on my mind for a while, and since things today have reminded me of it, I want to get it out there. If you hate me for it, fine. If not...you are a better person than I.
Three things happened when I was eighteen: I started a webcomic called Blue Skunk, now on permanent hiatus, my parents split up, and I began having issues with self injury. The latter two did not blend well. The comic, though, became my outlet. Not because of the comic itself, but because of the webcomic community: Keenspace/Comic Genesis forums.
And one day while I was on there I said a horrible thing.
I was raised borderline fundie, and one of the things I was told over and over was that it was Wrong To Be Gay. Somehow, while on the webcomic forums, gayness was never a subject that came up, so I never had to really look at what my beliefs towards homosexuality really were. I had never met an openly homosexual person, and by the time I had the webcomic I was desperate to please my family. I thought if I made everybody in my family happy, it would stay together. Then I thought if I made them all happy, I could make them get back together. I was more than a little fucked up at the time.
And then I said the horrible thing. I don't remember why I said it, only that it involved publishers. It was something along the lines of "I wouldn't want to work with someone who published GLBT material."
The rest of the thought, which I did not write, was "Because then my parents would see my work sitting beside work they don't agree with, and they would think of me as an even more horrible, terrible person, and I have to conform to what they think, otherwise they won't love me."
Everyone (correctly) promptly blew their shit at me. They were right to. I needed to have shit blown at me for saying that.
I am now deeply ashamed that I held that point of view. I do not anymore. Part of the reason why I don't is because everybody lost thier shit at me. It made me think about what my views really were. I discovered I didn't have any. I was parrotting what my parents said because I wanted their approval. I needed to get my own views before I could say anything else.
And my views are now...exactly the opposite of what they were then. There's nothing wrong with being gay, or straight, or transsexual, or asexual. You are who you are who you are, and you have to deal with your life the best you can. I don't get to know what your story is. I don't get to pass judgement on you, unless I'm willing to be judged in the same light.
I'd say "I'd go back in time and undo that moment, if I could", but I wouldn't. Because if I hadn't said that horrible thing, I would still be a horrible person. I would still be biased against a group of people who hadn't done anything to me, who have every right to be happy, to live how they want, love how they want, and worship how they want. If I had not been confronted with my own awful views, I would still hold them. And I do not any more.
This is not something I will ever be proud of. I said a horrible thing, I learned a valuable lesson, and I respect you guys enough not to continue shoving my horrible, terrible former self under the rug.
And don't tell me it's good to learn from my mistakes. I shouldn't have held those views in the first place.
I figure I need to get this off my chest. It's been on my mind for a while, and since things today have reminded me of it, I want to get it out there. If you hate me for it, fine. If not...you are a better person than I.
Three things happened when I was eighteen: I started a webcomic called Blue Skunk, now on permanent hiatus, my parents split up, and I began having issues with self injury. The latter two did not blend well. The comic, though, became my outlet. Not because of the comic itself, but because of the webcomic community: Keenspace/Comic Genesis forums.
And one day while I was on there I said a horrible thing.
I was raised borderline fundie, and one of the things I was told over and over was that it was Wrong To Be Gay. Somehow, while on the webcomic forums, gayness was never a subject that came up, so I never had to really look at what my beliefs towards homosexuality really were. I had never met an openly homosexual person, and by the time I had the webcomic I was desperate to please my family. I thought if I made everybody in my family happy, it would stay together. Then I thought if I made them all happy, I could make them get back together. I was more than a little fucked up at the time.
And then I said the horrible thing. I don't remember why I said it, only that it involved publishers. It was something along the lines of "I wouldn't want to work with someone who published GLBT material."
The rest of the thought, which I did not write, was "Because then my parents would see my work sitting beside work they don't agree with, and they would think of me as an even more horrible, terrible person, and I have to conform to what they think, otherwise they won't love me."
Everyone (correctly) promptly blew their shit at me. They were right to. I needed to have shit blown at me for saying that.
I am now deeply ashamed that I held that point of view. I do not anymore. Part of the reason why I don't is because everybody lost thier shit at me. It made me think about what my views really were. I discovered I didn't have any. I was parrotting what my parents said because I wanted their approval. I needed to get my own views before I could say anything else.
And my views are now...exactly the opposite of what they were then. There's nothing wrong with being gay, or straight, or transsexual, or asexual. You are who you are who you are, and you have to deal with your life the best you can. I don't get to know what your story is. I don't get to pass judgement on you, unless I'm willing to be judged in the same light.
I'd say "I'd go back in time and undo that moment, if I could", but I wouldn't. Because if I hadn't said that horrible thing, I would still be a horrible person. I would still be biased against a group of people who hadn't done anything to me, who have every right to be happy, to live how they want, love how they want, and worship how they want. If I had not been confronted with my own awful views, I would still hold them. And I do not any more.
This is not something I will ever be proud of. I said a horrible thing, I learned a valuable lesson, and I respect you guys enough not to continue shoving my horrible, terrible former self under the rug.
And don't tell me it's good to learn from my mistakes. I shouldn't have held those views in the first place.
In which CW defends herself, probably badly.
Edit: This page was part of a massive cluster fuck on my part. To find out how I reacted to the cluster fuck, please visit this page
Okay. Time to be a big girl.
I fucked up. I will study more. I expect people not to trigger me, I will learn now not to trigger other people.
I can admit when I was wrong. I hesitated before using the word "bitch" before I used it, which should have been my clue. I decided to use it anyway because I felt Anita Blake's fucked up lack of morality and the author's decision to make Anita's rape alright due to orgasm justified calling the character a dessicated waste of skin and moral fiber, and I felt that "bitch" was a good short hand for it.
I see now that was a mistake. I understand why it was wrong. I will try not to do it in the future.
It would have nice to have had this explained to me the first ninty times I used the word bitch, rather than having other people blow their shit at me, but apparently that is the only way for me to learn.
I am sorry for anyone I offended. I will learn not to do it in the future.
The rant from before is below, in tiny text.
Go Here. Read that.
Come back here. That is the page they're talking about.
First off, let me state that I don't think LKH was raped, because if she was, she wouldn't be writing this shit. I'm saying that she fantasizes about other people being raped. I want that out for the masses, because if somebody's going to call bullshit on me, I want it to be on the right bullshit. I didn't want to say it out loud because it is ugly, but here it is in plain english: She wrote a completely accurate rape scene and intended it to be sexually stimulating for the reader. You don't do that if you've been raped, because that would require imagining yourself back in the event. You imagine somebody else in that position. That way you get your sexy fun-times without having to deal with the nasty fallout.
Now, for the out of context shit. I posted this over on the other blog, but I have no way of knowing if that will show up. So I'm ruining all our fun and posting it here.
I called Anita a bitch because her response to someone trying to protect her from one of the two creatures that raped her less than an hour ago is to attack them verbally using the most damaging emotional ammunition she has. She flat out accuses the cop's wife of sleeping with a vampire so that Anita herself doesn't have to deal with the idea that maybe, just maybe, she's in an abusive relationship. Is it mysogynistic? They say yes. I say no. Anita is supposed to be this glorious empowered woman, and instead of realizing that one or more of her lovers is treating her as less than a worthy human being, she's pulling low blows so she doesn't have to face the idea that maybe she's in a bad relationship. I'm calling Anita out less on being a woman and more on being a terrible cacurature of a human being. And I'm calling her that because Anita is not real.
Anita is LKH's vehicle for the ultimate female. Anita is as much of a strawchick as John Norman's Elinor Brinton, and not in a polar opposite way. They are the same kind of stupid, just a little less magnified in Anita's case. Strawchick was a punching bag. Anita is LKH's Virgin Queen.
Huh? You say? Anita is no virgin. Right. But Queen Elizabeth was.
To be a monarch in England, Elizabeth had to be a virgin. She had to deny her femininity and sexuality and conform to male expectations of morality. She had to refuse to have any relationships at all because to do so would be to undermine her own power. She had to accept male definitions of value to avoid being devalued herself. She had to chose to be a Queen or to have a life as a human being, and because being a woman in her era sucked, she chose to be a Queen.
Anita, virginity aside, is the same damn thing. I criticise her clothing choice because she dresses like a hooker when she goes to crime scenes. This results in scenes where she gets her spike heels stuck in the chest of her opponant, and while doing the inadvertant splits, lets the whole room full of cops know that she isn't wearing underwear. That happened in Kiss the Dead, in a VERY early chapter. Women should get to dress however they want to, but I don't know any woman who would dress in a mini-skirt, midrift shirt and thigh-high boots when she's going into enemy territory to rescue a friend. It's not empowering. It's impractical. It makes Anita look stupid for not taking five minutes to put on new shoes, and maybe check the rest of her costume to make sure it's work approprete. And it happened because her author thought it would look good, not because Anita thought it would look good. Her author wanted a fight with heels, and didn't care that IRL that's a good way to break an ankle. Her author basically treats Anita like she's freaking Power Girl, and if you say the superheroine with the steadily inflating boobs is a respectful deception of costuming for women I will punch you, I swear to God. Anita gets into stupid pissing contests with male authority figures, trying to prove that she is just as good as them, even when the pissing context damages the cause she is fighting for, because surrendering the point would be denying that she's got a bigger penis. Anita constantly belittles blonds and "feminine" women because they are not masculine she-monsters like her and thus could not survive the terrible things that she's seen, when she has no clue what the blond bubble-head's true character is. For all she knows, the bubbly girl has just a big kill count as Anita does, has survived the same terrible history that Anita has, and is just secure enough in her person-hood to not assume the persona someone ELSE thinks she should have. Micah, the POS that raped Anita is viewed as a good guy because he gives her an orgasm, and he has a big penis. Dolph, the cop that Anita verbally abused, is a bad guy for telling Anita that she might be an abuse victim and MIGHT want to go get help. Because showcasing your masculinity is a good thing, and being soft and respectful towards others is bad in this bizzaro "men's world" Anita's author has created.
The problem I have with Anita dressing like a hooker, verbally abusing the people who try to help her and criticising other women is that it is re-enforcing male values, rather than trying to alter them. In effect, Anita has decided that she has to fit into a man's world, and that to fit into the man's world she has to both deny her femininity (something devalued by the male world) and showcase her sexuality (something valued by the male world) in order to prove that she is worthy of working a job that is steriotypically male. She has to prove she has value to men to do her job, rather than saying "Fuck that shit" and accepting that she has value without male approval, and going about her business.
That. is. WRONG.
I'm not saying that it's wrong for a sex worker to dress how she needs to dress to do their job. Nor am I saying that there is anything wrong with a sex worker DOING their job. You make more money than I do, you deserve respect for being a human being in an industry that chews human beings up and spits them out like bubble gum. What I am saying is why the fuck would anyone wear five inch heels and a mini skirt to a crime scene? No one would. So why is it okay for an author to objectify her characters in ways that are offensively stupid?
In short, when I called her a bitch, and said she was everything that men hate about women, I fucking meant it. A friend flat out told her that her relationship was abusive, and she responded by going for his jugular and accusing his wife of having an affair. That is not how a good person behaves. That is how a terrible waste of a human being behaves. She is every non-feminine character trait men have ever belittled, magnified to the extreme and showcased as something that women ought to become because it is "empowering". It is "Empowering" to display your sex appeal to men to earn their approval. It is "empowering" to belittle women who would rather have a designer dress than a Sig-Saur. It is "empowering" to ignore consent and have sex when you don't want to just because you'll have an orgasm at the end. Gag me. I'll be over here with my devalued "feminine" hobbies and my "feminine" love of clothes and makeup and my respect for other human beings, which is obviously another devalued "feminine" trait because it's one Anita doesn't fucking have.
Yes. I called Anita a bitch. Because "terrible, horrible waste of human skin" takes too many words, and it isn't half as funny. If using the word bitch offended you, I am sorry I used one of your trigger words. But I'm going to stand by it. Anita was a fantastic character for nine books, she turned into a horrible excuse for a human being in this one, and she stayed that way for the next ten plus novels because her author thinks Anita is exactly what a free, empowered woman should be like.
That thought alone should make you want to take a fucking shower.
Okay. Time to be a big girl.
I fucked up. I will study more. I expect people not to trigger me, I will learn now not to trigger other people.
I can admit when I was wrong. I hesitated before using the word "bitch" before I used it, which should have been my clue. I decided to use it anyway because I felt Anita Blake's fucked up lack of morality and the author's decision to make Anita's rape alright due to orgasm justified calling the character a dessicated waste of skin and moral fiber, and I felt that "bitch" was a good short hand for it.
I see now that was a mistake. I understand why it was wrong. I will try not to do it in the future.
It would have nice to have had this explained to me the first ninty times I used the word bitch, rather than having other people blow their shit at me, but apparently that is the only way for me to learn.
I am sorry for anyone I offended. I will learn not to do it in the future.
The rant from before is below, in tiny text.
Go Here. Read that.
Come back here. That is the page they're talking about.
First off, let me state that I don't think LKH was raped, because if she was, she wouldn't be writing this shit. I'm saying that she fantasizes about other people being raped. I want that out for the masses, because if somebody's going to call bullshit on me, I want it to be on the right bullshit. I didn't want to say it out loud because it is ugly, but here it is in plain english: She wrote a completely accurate rape scene and intended it to be sexually stimulating for the reader. You don't do that if you've been raped, because that would require imagining yourself back in the event. You imagine somebody else in that position. That way you get your sexy fun-times without having to deal with the nasty fallout.
Now, for the out of context shit. I posted this over on the other blog, but I have no way of knowing if that will show up. So I'm ruining all our fun and posting it here.
I called Anita a bitch because her response to someone trying to protect her from one of the two creatures that raped her less than an hour ago is to attack them verbally using the most damaging emotional ammunition she has. She flat out accuses the cop's wife of sleeping with a vampire so that Anita herself doesn't have to deal with the idea that maybe, just maybe, she's in an abusive relationship. Is it mysogynistic? They say yes. I say no. Anita is supposed to be this glorious empowered woman, and instead of realizing that one or more of her lovers is treating her as less than a worthy human being, she's pulling low blows so she doesn't have to face the idea that maybe she's in a bad relationship. I'm calling Anita out less on being a woman and more on being a terrible cacurature of a human being. And I'm calling her that because Anita is not real.
Anita is LKH's vehicle for the ultimate female. Anita is as much of a strawchick as John Norman's Elinor Brinton, and not in a polar opposite way. They are the same kind of stupid, just a little less magnified in Anita's case. Strawchick was a punching bag. Anita is LKH's Virgin Queen.
Huh? You say? Anita is no virgin. Right. But Queen Elizabeth was.
To be a monarch in England, Elizabeth had to be a virgin. She had to deny her femininity and sexuality and conform to male expectations of morality. She had to refuse to have any relationships at all because to do so would be to undermine her own power. She had to accept male definitions of value to avoid being devalued herself. She had to chose to be a Queen or to have a life as a human being, and because being a woman in her era sucked, she chose to be a Queen.
Anita, virginity aside, is the same damn thing. I criticise her clothing choice because she dresses like a hooker when she goes to crime scenes. This results in scenes where she gets her spike heels stuck in the chest of her opponant, and while doing the inadvertant splits, lets the whole room full of cops know that she isn't wearing underwear. That happened in Kiss the Dead, in a VERY early chapter. Women should get to dress however they want to, but I don't know any woman who would dress in a mini-skirt, midrift shirt and thigh-high boots when she's going into enemy territory to rescue a friend. It's not empowering. It's impractical. It makes Anita look stupid for not taking five minutes to put on new shoes, and maybe check the rest of her costume to make sure it's work approprete. And it happened because her author thought it would look good, not because Anita thought it would look good. Her author wanted a fight with heels, and didn't care that IRL that's a good way to break an ankle. Her author basically treats Anita like she's freaking Power Girl, and if you say the superheroine with the steadily inflating boobs is a respectful deception of costuming for women I will punch you, I swear to God. Anita gets into stupid pissing contests with male authority figures, trying to prove that she is just as good as them, even when the pissing context damages the cause she is fighting for, because surrendering the point would be denying that she's got a bigger penis. Anita constantly belittles blonds and "feminine" women because they are not masculine she-monsters like her and thus could not survive the terrible things that she's seen, when she has no clue what the blond bubble-head's true character is. For all she knows, the bubbly girl has just a big kill count as Anita does, has survived the same terrible history that Anita has, and is just secure enough in her person-hood to not assume the persona someone ELSE thinks she should have. Micah, the POS that raped Anita is viewed as a good guy because he gives her an orgasm, and he has a big penis. Dolph, the cop that Anita verbally abused, is a bad guy for telling Anita that she might be an abuse victim and MIGHT want to go get help. Because showcasing your masculinity is a good thing, and being soft and respectful towards others is bad in this bizzaro "men's world" Anita's author has created.
The problem I have with Anita dressing like a hooker, verbally abusing the people who try to help her and criticising other women is that it is re-enforcing male values, rather than trying to alter them. In effect, Anita has decided that she has to fit into a man's world, and that to fit into the man's world she has to both deny her femininity (something devalued by the male world) and showcase her sexuality (something valued by the male world) in order to prove that she is worthy of working a job that is steriotypically male. She has to prove she has value to men to do her job, rather than saying "Fuck that shit" and accepting that she has value without male approval, and going about her business.
That. is. WRONG.
I'm not saying that it's wrong for a sex worker to dress how she needs to dress to do their job. Nor am I saying that there is anything wrong with a sex worker DOING their job. You make more money than I do, you deserve respect for being a human being in an industry that chews human beings up and spits them out like bubble gum. What I am saying is why the fuck would anyone wear five inch heels and a mini skirt to a crime scene? No one would. So why is it okay for an author to objectify her characters in ways that are offensively stupid?
In short, when I called her a bitch, and said she was everything that men hate about women, I fucking meant it. A friend flat out told her that her relationship was abusive, and she responded by going for his jugular and accusing his wife of having an affair. That is not how a good person behaves. That is how a terrible waste of a human being behaves. She is every non-feminine character trait men have ever belittled, magnified to the extreme and showcased as something that women ought to become because it is "empowering". It is "Empowering" to display your sex appeal to men to earn their approval. It is "empowering" to belittle women who would rather have a designer dress than a Sig-Saur. It is "empowering" to ignore consent and have sex when you don't want to just because you'll have an orgasm at the end. Gag me. I'll be over here with my devalued "feminine" hobbies and my "feminine" love of clothes and makeup and my respect for other human beings, which is obviously another devalued "feminine" trait because it's one Anita doesn't fucking have.
Yes. I called Anita a bitch. Because "terrible, horrible waste of human skin" takes too many words, and it isn't half as funny. If using the word bitch offended you, I am sorry I used one of your trigger words. But I'm going to stand by it. Anita was a fantastic character for nine books, she turned into a horrible excuse for a human being in this one, and she stayed that way for the next ten plus novels because her author thinks Anita is exactly what a free, empowered woman should be like.
That thought alone should make you want to take a fucking shower.
December 17, 2012
Free Book Day Tomorrow!
Rise of the Winterlord will be available for free all day tomorrow. It's also the first section of This Found Thing. You know, guys. Just an FYI.
Narcissus in Chains chapter 14 AKA the post about LKH's writing habits
Hey, my loyal blog readers! Ever tried writing a whole book? Wow, isn't that hard. Ever run out of steam for an idea? Or you know that you need X number of words before event Y happens? And you don't know what to do with the designated space? Are coming up with plots twists and events that generate actual character development too hard for you? Well, have I got a fix for you:
In the Anitaverse, this is synonymous with porn.Ah, but CW, I hear you saying! How do I create this wonderful stuff? Isn't that just as much work as actually coming up with a plot? I mean, it's not like I can cockblock my readers on having sex for an entire chapter, is it?
Yes, boys and girls. It is exactly that easy. Want me to tell you what happens in this chapter? It's easy.
Jason, Nathanial and Anita all get in bed together and spoon. Nobody has sex. There. That's the whole chapter. I am not kidding. This is all that happens. Let's ignore for a second that the plot for this book is basically this:
We've got the same set of circumstances, complicated by knowing who the kidnappers are. And what are we doing? Diddly squat. I'd say "fucking nothing" but they're not even fucking. yet. And you just know that they're going to delay on this until the next full moon, and LKH obviously has NO IDEA what to do with this plot, so we're probably going to do this a lot. So this is going to be a different kind of post, Ladies and Gents. I'm going to rant about something near and dear to my heart:
WRITING!
More specifically, how not to do it! See, I like overanalyzing things, especially things I think are fuck-all stupid. And LKH might write competently, but when she talks about writing...oh, dear JESUS do I want to shoot something.
One thing I have learned from the Great Self-Publishing Experiment is that you don't get to write what you want to and still be successful. You write what people want to read. If I were talking to a new author who wanted to self publish, I would say to write a lot, about every little thing that comes into your head, do the best job you can, and then see what people liked and what people didn't like. And then do a whole bunch more of that. If you have the kind of readers that talk back to you, that's even better. You can get direct feedback and turn that into something new and great. The two reviews I got on Starbleached told me what I really needed to focus on to make the sequel work. (Look. I'll get back to LKH in a minute. Bear with me) The sales told me that I need to stop focusing on the heart project and start focusing on the sci-fi book that I didn't even want to write in the first place, because that's what you want to read. And I'm okay with that. It hurts, but...hell, I got a lifetime of writing in front of me, I can wait a while.
My point is that feedback from peers is good, feedback from bosses is better, and feedback from customers is what you listen to. Even when it fucking sucks to hear. Why? Because if you continue to produce a product your customers want to purchase, you will continue to get paid.
Now, if you have one customer saying that the chicken at your restaurant sucks, or that character X is unlikable, you can blow their feedback off, after you weigh its validity. If this is the first bit of feedback you've gotten, you might need to attend to it. If this is a lone voice in the throng of people RAVING about chicken or Character X, he's probably just a lone weirdo. And if all of your customers are a little wary about the chicken? Fix the fucking chicken.
LKH is notorious for a lot of things, and the biggest one is not even interacting with her customers. Note what I said: customers. Not fans. They're the same damn thing, but fans has a kind of...brush off attitude. "Oh, they'll always be there". Customers are something you court and work to keep happy. If I want you to buy the heart project and Project Dragon, which is my goal (I'm up front about it) then I need to make you happy with Planet Bob, and the Exiles sequils and the Gray Prince books, and any other side projects I decide to bring in. And I need to pay attention to what you like so I can adjust all other projects accordingly.
Not only has LKH removed all possible methods of easy interaction with fans, she also stopped listening to editors a LONG time ago. Right around the time this book was being written. So anybody who could tell her "Having an orgy at this particular time might slow the plot down" has been gagged and shoved in a closet.
Also, and this might surprise you...but LKH doesn't really like action or violence.
Oh, she likes the aftermath of violence, and she likes sudden things to happen to side characters, but if you're in the primary cast you're pretty much safe. To me, this defeats the entire purpose of writing. The writers job is to fuck with the reader, not give themselves a handjob. I love True Blood for a great many reasons, not the least of which is to take you to the edge of the cliff and then cut to the credits right when you start to fall. The writers on that show fucking hate you and it is fucking brilliant because of it. Thus character deaths are a good thing. They trigger a strong emotional reaction in the reader, and if I've done that? I've won the game.
Or let's put it this way: If you do not throw the third-fourth books in one of my series across the room while screaming "FUCK YOU" at the top of your lungs, and then immediately go to the "publishing schedule" page to find out when the next book comes out? I have failed as a writer. I do absolutely want to be your favorite writer, but I also want you to hate my fucking guts for that cliffhanger.
LKH? Does not feel this way. She just posted a big long skreed about how killing characters hurts and she just threw out all this writing because it "ruined her characters lives". It is a very special kind of crazy, and near the end I was screaming "Fuck you" in the bad way, because the hints she was dropping were pretty much exactly what I and a lot of long term fans wanted her to do with the series. There is another blog entry I can't be arsed to find where she says there isn't another Merry Gentry book (the series I actually like now that AB sucks beans) because any new plot would destroy the sweet fluffy cotton she's entombed Mary and her stable in. I read something like that, and I stare in incomprehension. Conflict is not an icky nasty thing in book writing. Conflict is the fucking jet engine that sends your book into orbit. A book without conflict is either a stack of blank paper or what you go for when you run out of TP. I love my characters as things I can use to make a good story. I don't love my characters as people, because I know they aren't. LKH seems to have lost this distinction somewhere between Guilty Pleasures and present day.
Kill your Darlings, dear. Or preferably, kill Anita's darlings.
In the Anitaverse, this is synonymous with porn.Ah, but CW, I hear you saying! How do I create this wonderful stuff? Isn't that just as much work as actually coming up with a plot? I mean, it's not like I can cockblock my readers on having sex for an entire chapter, is it?Yes, boys and girls. It is exactly that easy. Want me to tell you what happens in this chapter? It's easy.
Jason, Nathanial and Anita all get in bed together and spoon. Nobody has sex. There. That's the whole chapter. I am not kidding. This is all that happens. Let's ignore for a second that the plot for this book is basically this:
We've got the same set of circumstances, complicated by knowing who the kidnappers are. And what are we doing? Diddly squat. I'd say "fucking nothing" but they're not even fucking. yet. And you just know that they're going to delay on this until the next full moon, and LKH obviously has NO IDEA what to do with this plot, so we're probably going to do this a lot. So this is going to be a different kind of post, Ladies and Gents. I'm going to rant about something near and dear to my heart:
WRITING!
More specifically, how not to do it! See, I like overanalyzing things, especially things I think are fuck-all stupid. And LKH might write competently, but when she talks about writing...oh, dear JESUS do I want to shoot something.One thing I have learned from the Great Self-Publishing Experiment is that you don't get to write what you want to and still be successful. You write what people want to read. If I were talking to a new author who wanted to self publish, I would say to write a lot, about every little thing that comes into your head, do the best job you can, and then see what people liked and what people didn't like. And then do a whole bunch more of that. If you have the kind of readers that talk back to you, that's even better. You can get direct feedback and turn that into something new and great. The two reviews I got on Starbleached told me what I really needed to focus on to make the sequel work. (Look. I'll get back to LKH in a minute. Bear with me) The sales told me that I need to stop focusing on the heart project and start focusing on the sci-fi book that I didn't even want to write in the first place, because that's what you want to read. And I'm okay with that. It hurts, but...hell, I got a lifetime of writing in front of me, I can wait a while.
My point is that feedback from peers is good, feedback from bosses is better, and feedback from customers is what you listen to. Even when it fucking sucks to hear. Why? Because if you continue to produce a product your customers want to purchase, you will continue to get paid.
Now, if you have one customer saying that the chicken at your restaurant sucks, or that character X is unlikable, you can blow their feedback off, after you weigh its validity. If this is the first bit of feedback you've gotten, you might need to attend to it. If this is a lone voice in the throng of people RAVING about chicken or Character X, he's probably just a lone weirdo. And if all of your customers are a little wary about the chicken? Fix the fucking chicken.
LKH is notorious for a lot of things, and the biggest one is not even interacting with her customers. Note what I said: customers. Not fans. They're the same damn thing, but fans has a kind of...brush off attitude. "Oh, they'll always be there". Customers are something you court and work to keep happy. If I want you to buy the heart project and Project Dragon, which is my goal (I'm up front about it) then I need to make you happy with Planet Bob, and the Exiles sequils and the Gray Prince books, and any other side projects I decide to bring in. And I need to pay attention to what you like so I can adjust all other projects accordingly.
Not only has LKH removed all possible methods of easy interaction with fans, she also stopped listening to editors a LONG time ago. Right around the time this book was being written. So anybody who could tell her "Having an orgy at this particular time might slow the plot down" has been gagged and shoved in a closet.
Also, and this might surprise you...but LKH doesn't really like action or violence.
Oh, she likes the aftermath of violence, and she likes sudden things to happen to side characters, but if you're in the primary cast you're pretty much safe. To me, this defeats the entire purpose of writing. The writers job is to fuck with the reader, not give themselves a handjob. I love True Blood for a great many reasons, not the least of which is to take you to the edge of the cliff and then cut to the credits right when you start to fall. The writers on that show fucking hate you and it is fucking brilliant because of it. Thus character deaths are a good thing. They trigger a strong emotional reaction in the reader, and if I've done that? I've won the game.
Or let's put it this way: If you do not throw the third-fourth books in one of my series across the room while screaming "FUCK YOU" at the top of your lungs, and then immediately go to the "publishing schedule" page to find out when the next book comes out? I have failed as a writer. I do absolutely want to be your favorite writer, but I also want you to hate my fucking guts for that cliffhanger.
LKH? Does not feel this way. She just posted a big long skreed about how killing characters hurts and she just threw out all this writing because it "ruined her characters lives". It is a very special kind of crazy, and near the end I was screaming "Fuck you" in the bad way, because the hints she was dropping were pretty much exactly what I and a lot of long term fans wanted her to do with the series. There is another blog entry I can't be arsed to find where she says there isn't another Merry Gentry book (the series I actually like now that AB sucks beans) because any new plot would destroy the sweet fluffy cotton she's entombed Mary and her stable in. I read something like that, and I stare in incomprehension. Conflict is not an icky nasty thing in book writing. Conflict is the fucking jet engine that sends your book into orbit. A book without conflict is either a stack of blank paper or what you go for when you run out of TP. I love my characters as things I can use to make a good story. I don't love my characters as people, because I know they aren't. LKH seems to have lost this distinction somewhere between Guilty Pleasures and present day.
Kill your Darlings, dear. Or preferably, kill Anita's darlings.
Narcissus in Chains--chapter 13
There are a handful of things that make me go up in flames. This is one of them. I do not promise that ANY of today's post will be fun.
The torturous thing about recovering with rape is, you're never sure that rape's what it actually is. The human brain is wired to assume responsibility for the events that happen in its lifetime. This is because we can only change our own behavior. If it is our fault we were struck by a parent, well, we can change our behavior to avoid being struck in the future. Alternatively, if we go to jail, we can change our behavior to avoid going to jail in the future. The problem with this is one, it lets us off the hook and two, we do it socially. I have ranted many, many, many times on how monster movies=victim blaming, and I'm probably going to do it again. But what happens next is so fucking textbook it...me...I...
Let's just get this over with.
Nathanial is driving Anita and Jean Claude home. She starts shaking in his arms. Hard. Again: This is not the way you react to normal sex, and given the number of times she's been scratched by shapeshifters and shrugged it off, this is not the way she reacts to getting nicked by a kitty cat. Jean Claude tells her it's okay, she's safe. She decides that she has to tell him what's happened in the last few days:
No. The fact is, Anita baby, you spent the entire sexual encounter stiff as a board, telling the son of a bitch "No, don't, stop," Coming up with excuse after excuse and remaining numb and frozen both physically and emotionally the entire time. You only got "into it" because he knew enough about female anatomy to stimulate you into orgasm. And given what Jean Claude is about to explain, I think we could argue that even that part is bullshit and happened without your consent. You did not have sex with Micah. You were raped by Micah. And now you're blaming yourself because that's what strong people do.
Now. It's time for Jean Claude to explain everything I just said, tell her that it's okay, and have Nathanial turn the car back around so she can repeat this all to the cops and they can go gear up and fry Micah's ass. Right?
Preferably Mercy Thompson. She was raped "consensually" too, and she killed her rapist with a tire iron.
First of all, Anita doesn't have the emotional capacity to deal with the ardeur (more on that later) because she's been fucking raped by a fucking stranger who gave her a fucking orgasm in the process. Also by you, Mr. Self Indulgance, immediately before that. But let's say for a moment that she had actually said yes at some point in that horrible mess. You're implying the ONLY reason she would have done so was because of the ardeur, something you gave her without her concent. So this woman who previously was willing to wait until she and Richard got hitched to have sex has just been turned into something who can feed off sex BY YOU, and is very, very, VERY clearly freaked out as all hell about it. She's not feeling guilty, you asshole. I've seen Anita feeling guilty. She gets very weepy, turns into a drama queen, and then goes out and kills something. This is Anita being fucking broken. In short:
Moving on.
Jean Claude explains that for the next few weeks, Anita will probably want to jump every single male she's ever had feelings for, ever.
Jean Claude promises to help her through it.
...I'm going to hate every single chapter after this, aren't I?
Reguardless, they pull up to the Circus of the Damned. *sporfle* and everybody piles out of the car. She runs into Jason, who says that there's a bed Anita can sleep in, that it isn't used much, and when it is used it is by women who want to sleep with "Jean Claude's pet werewolf." who is Jason.
....
And then he tells her the only reason she "hates the monsters" (Vampires, werewolves, ect) is because they are "different".
You know what I miss from the Mercyverse the most? The people who are normal. We had a werewolf who was a doctor, a vampire who was nuts about Scooby Doo, scary strong faerie who doubled as kindergarden teachers and bankers, and I think my favorite was the gay werewolf cowboy. (Warren. Warren wins all the things) There was always an undercurrent of "I don't want to fuck your life up" whenever Mercy had to ask someone for a favor, or vice versa.Sure, there were some interactions that were fucked up, but there were also quite a few that were normal, every day things that never went any further than that.
Why do I bring this up?
We have not had one interaction with the supernatural in this book that has not gone fucking sideways. Richard has gone batshit and is threatening to kill someone for reasons nobody understands, Jean Claude mind raped Anita, Narcissus is David Parker Ray in a dress, and a strange wereleopard just raped Anita in the shower. In the Mercyverse, I'd buy that arguement because...well, it passes as logical. Some of the supers were just people trying to get along, and most of the wolves were people who had been savagely attacked by another wolf, who did not want to be wolves, who wanted nothing to do with being a wolf, and who were re-learning how to live their massively changed life in a framework that made that life safe for them and other people. (Which is why the packs wouldn't tolerate lone wolves unless said lone wolf paid the local Alpha a visit, and I need to get back to Anita, don't I?)
In the Anitaverse? The monsters are moral monsters. Want to bang everyone? You're posessed by a demon. Want to kill someone? It's justifiable because of x bullshit rule. Someone else's Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness? Secondary to our bullshit pack dynamic politics. NOBODY on the preternatural side of the fence is a good person. Anita doesn't (or didn't) hunt the monsters because they were "different". She hunted the monsters because the monsters were doing bad things on a consistant basis. And up until this book, she still had the moral high ground. Some of the monsters, like Dead Dave the bartender and Richard the werewolf teacher, were alright. Some, like Jean Claude, were scary bad but could be tolerated as a better option, and the great majority (Nikolaus, the would-be Mayan god from Obsidian Butterfly, the idiots behind Rawhead Bloody Bones, the former Alpha of Richard's Pack) were marked for death, which they eventually got one way or another. Not because they were monsters, but because they were murderers.
So no, Jace. No, Anita. No, Laurell. You don't get a pass on this one.
Then we get mired down in pack politics again. Bullshit pack politics, because there's no way Richard would have held onto the pack this long if he were so weak, Anita threatening to kill another member undermines his authority. You don't keep the pack by talking. You keep the pack by fighting, and people don't challenge you if they don't want to die. Under those circumstances, it doesn't matter if it's a democratsy or what. Has Richard been badly hurt lately? No? Then Jacob shouldn't have a prayer.
The chapter ends with Jason saying "Nobody's better at dirty work than you are, Anita" and Anita wandering off being all hurt about this.
Next chapter: Absolutely nothing happens.
The torturous thing about recovering with rape is, you're never sure that rape's what it actually is. The human brain is wired to assume responsibility for the events that happen in its lifetime. This is because we can only change our own behavior. If it is our fault we were struck by a parent, well, we can change our behavior to avoid being struck in the future. Alternatively, if we go to jail, we can change our behavior to avoid going to jail in the future. The problem with this is one, it lets us off the hook and two, we do it socially. I have ranted many, many, many times on how monster movies=victim blaming, and I'm probably going to do it again. But what happens next is so fucking textbook it...me...I...
Let's just get this over with.
Nathanial is driving Anita and Jean Claude home. She starts shaking in his arms. Hard. Again: This is not the way you react to normal sex, and given the number of times she's been scratched by shapeshifters and shrugged it off, this is not the way she reacts to getting nicked by a kitty cat. Jean Claude tells her it's okay, she's safe. She decides that she has to tell him what's happened in the last few days:
“I had sex with Micah.”
“I had sex with Micah.”
“I had sex with Micah.”
“I had sex with Micah.”
No. The fact is, Anita baby, you spent the entire sexual encounter stiff as a board, telling the son of a bitch "No, don't, stop," Coming up with excuse after excuse and remaining numb and frozen both physically and emotionally the entire time. You only got "into it" because he knew enough about female anatomy to stimulate you into orgasm. And given what Jean Claude is about to explain, I think we could argue that even that part is bullshit and happened without your consent. You did not have sex with Micah. You were raped by Micah. And now you're blaming yourself because that's what strong people do.Now. It's time for Jean Claude to explain everything I just said, tell her that it's okay, and have Nathanial turn the car back around so she can repeat this all to the cops and they can go gear up and fry Micah's ass. Right?
“You are like a vampire newly risen. Even those of us who will be masters cannot fight our hunger the first night, or the first few nights. It is overwhelming. It is why many vampires feed on their nearest kin when they first rise. It is who they are thinking of in their hearts, and they are drawn to them. It is only with the aid of a master vampire that the hunger can be directed elsewhere.”
“You’re not angry?” I asked.
He laughed and hugged me. “I thought you would be angry with me for giving you the ardeur, the fire, the burning hunger.”
Preferably Mercy Thompson. She was raped "consensually" too, and she killed her rapist with a tire iron.First of all, Anita doesn't have the emotional capacity to deal with the ardeur (more on that later) because she's been fucking raped by a fucking stranger who gave her a fucking orgasm in the process. Also by you, Mr. Self Indulgance, immediately before that. But let's say for a moment that she had actually said yes at some point in that horrible mess. You're implying the ONLY reason she would have done so was because of the ardeur, something you gave her without her concent. So this woman who previously was willing to wait until she and Richard got hitched to have sex has just been turned into something who can feed off sex BY YOU, and is very, very, VERY clearly freaked out as all hell about it. She's not feeling guilty, you asshole. I've seen Anita feeling guilty. She gets very weepy, turns into a drama queen, and then goes out and kills something. This is Anita being fucking broken. In short:
Moving on.Jean Claude explains that for the next few weeks, Anita will probably want to jump every single male she's ever had feelings for, ever.
Jean Claude promises to help her through it....I'm going to hate every single chapter after this, aren't I?
Reguardless, they pull up to the Circus of the Damned. *sporfle* and everybody piles out of the car. She runs into Jason, who says that there's a bed Anita can sleep in, that it isn't used much, and when it is used it is by women who want to sleep with "Jean Claude's pet werewolf." who is Jason.
....
And then he tells her the only reason she "hates the monsters" (Vampires, werewolves, ect) is because they are "different".You know what I miss from the Mercyverse the most? The people who are normal. We had a werewolf who was a doctor, a vampire who was nuts about Scooby Doo, scary strong faerie who doubled as kindergarden teachers and bankers, and I think my favorite was the gay werewolf cowboy. (Warren. Warren wins all the things) There was always an undercurrent of "I don't want to fuck your life up" whenever Mercy had to ask someone for a favor, or vice versa.Sure, there were some interactions that were fucked up, but there were also quite a few that were normal, every day things that never went any further than that.
Why do I bring this up?
We have not had one interaction with the supernatural in this book that has not gone fucking sideways. Richard has gone batshit and is threatening to kill someone for reasons nobody understands, Jean Claude mind raped Anita, Narcissus is David Parker Ray in a dress, and a strange wereleopard just raped Anita in the shower. In the Mercyverse, I'd buy that arguement because...well, it passes as logical. Some of the supers were just people trying to get along, and most of the wolves were people who had been savagely attacked by another wolf, who did not want to be wolves, who wanted nothing to do with being a wolf, and who were re-learning how to live their massively changed life in a framework that made that life safe for them and other people. (Which is why the packs wouldn't tolerate lone wolves unless said lone wolf paid the local Alpha a visit, and I need to get back to Anita, don't I?)
In the Anitaverse? The monsters are moral monsters. Want to bang everyone? You're posessed by a demon. Want to kill someone? It's justifiable because of x bullshit rule. Someone else's Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness? Secondary to our bullshit pack dynamic politics. NOBODY on the preternatural side of the fence is a good person. Anita doesn't (or didn't) hunt the monsters because they were "different". She hunted the monsters because the monsters were doing bad things on a consistant basis. And up until this book, she still had the moral high ground. Some of the monsters, like Dead Dave the bartender and Richard the werewolf teacher, were alright. Some, like Jean Claude, were scary bad but could be tolerated as a better option, and the great majority (Nikolaus, the would-be Mayan god from Obsidian Butterfly, the idiots behind Rawhead Bloody Bones, the former Alpha of Richard's Pack) were marked for death, which they eventually got one way or another. Not because they were monsters, but because they were murderers.
So no, Jace. No, Anita. No, Laurell. You don't get a pass on this one.
Then we get mired down in pack politics again. Bullshit pack politics, because there's no way Richard would have held onto the pack this long if he were so weak, Anita threatening to kill another member undermines his authority. You don't keep the pack by talking. You keep the pack by fighting, and people don't challenge you if they don't want to die. Under those circumstances, it doesn't matter if it's a democratsy or what. Has Richard been badly hurt lately? No? Then Jacob shouldn't have a prayer.
The chapter ends with Jason saying "Nobody's better at dirty work than you are, Anita" and Anita wandering off being all hurt about this.
Next chapter: Absolutely nothing happens.
December 16, 2012
If Anita Blake were a PG Western
My roomates are watching this right now.
I made it as far as the primary love interest being introduced as Wyatt Eerp. Then my brain imploded.
...we're having a love triangle between Wyatt Eerp, "Hannah" and Doc Holiday. I am watching a sixteen-year-old girl's Tombstone fan fiction. Also: FAIL on using Val Kilmer's Doc and DOUBLE FAIL for having him be anything other than lecherous gambler. I can't stop watching. This is a train wreck of BIBLICAL proportions.
Narcissus in Chains--Chapter 12
So Nathanial drives Anita home after the mess with Micah. Nobody's talking. He's not playing music, which he usually likes to do, and Anita is focusing on her guns and weapons, and finding out that Nathanial is the one that put her gun in her robe pocket back at the club.
And then this happens:
Anita goes to the police department to prove she isn't dead. This ought to be an easy task. Show up, flash ID, say hi to your buddies, arrange for your undead mind-raping lover to be picked up (preferably by a body disposal service, but Anita isn't that smart) and then tell the police that a friend of yours has been kidnapped and held hostage for ransom. Seriously. Fuck the dominance shit, get these idiots into the habit of calling the cops, everyone's lives will be a whole lot better.
Does it work out this way? Well...
First she re-introduces herself to the leader of RPIT, an acronym I do not want to explain right now (read as preternatural cops and leave it at that) who is all like, "Did you die?" which is apparently a good question to ask of someone who raises the dead for a living. And it is a pretty good question, seeing as how the bad guy in the first book was a necromancer who had come back to life and had to do some pretty gnarly things to stay that way. Ah, the days when Anita and her boy-toy refused to sleep together until they were married. Back to the point, undead Anita could probably cause almost as much damage as still-living Anita, with the added cool points of being a Zombie. After verbally reassuring a cop who, for some reason, doesn't ask to verify Anita's current posistion as the current president of the Being Alive Club (/Awesome GlaDOS), Anita wanders into the station and everybody freaks out.
Also, the plot breaks. It's a minor break, and I'm sure we can fix it with tape.
See, Anita's been unconsious for four days, and the boys in blue have been holding Jean Claude in prison all that time. One, this breaks the universe because if the cops can keep Jean Claude in jail any leingth of time they damn well ought to have guns that could knock him out, too. Anyway, they're basing holding Jean Claude for "questioning" on a few photographs of Anita covered in blood.
Anita has been seen covered in blood since the first book. Some of it is usually hers. Most of it is usually someone else's. The police have frequently gone with her on trips that leave her covered in someone else's blood. Ergo no police officer who knows Anita personally should be all that worried about a photograph of Anita covered in blood unless they have DNA evidence that it is all Anita's blood...and that Anita has bled enough to endanger her life. Blood on fabric? Spreads out. A lot. And nobody is talking about massive bloodstains inside of Narcissus in Chains or how the DNA results came back showing that Anita is also the daughter of a criminal syndacate or some shit (...I ODed on CSI the other night) so I still have to assume that all this is because somebody got a shot of Anita covered in a lot of red stuff.
Fuck. For all they knew it could have been ketchup.
So one cop tells Anita that another cop will want to question her. Why? Well...this is not explained. And then Cop says the most awesome line I have read in a while:
I am now imagining somebody attempting to pawn Vlad Tepes during one of those Discovery Channel "Reality" shows. It is Fred Saberhagen's Dracula. He is not happy.
Dolph, yet another cop, tells Anita he's glad he's alive. Hey, we haven't slaughtered any commas in a while:
One day the humble comma will go the way of the passenger pidgeon. We shall all be weeping
Dolph's primary interest is in finding out who hurt Anita, and then hurting them back. This is played off as being annoying and overly paternal and a pain in the ass, all at the same time. Anita shrugs him off. Dolph then demands to see all her scars. Most of them require Anita removing her shirt, so she removes her shirt. Dolph is amazed and disgusted, and wow, so am I! I'll bet this outfit gets slapped with one harrassment suit a year.
Hey, Anita? You have a very large number of very large men who are very, very, very angry and obviously more than willing to "forget" their badges for at least a few minutes. Why not bring some of them with you?
And then Anita accuses Dolph of being so upset only becasue he didn't get to kill Jean Claude.
One: Jean Claude fucking raped you. Stop being responsible for his undead ass.
Two: Dolph loves you. Every cop in the entire department clearly loves you. Every single one of them just put their jobs on the line to "lose" the guy they thought had killed you. If they wanted to kill Jean Claude they would have strapped him into a suntan bed and flicked the "on" switch. They lost him because he hurt you. They clearly still believe that he hurt you, that you are protecting him because that is what battered Significant Others do, and that continuing to "lose" him is the best thing they can do for the world in general. And they are absolutely right on all counts.
Three: You are a bitch. And not the good, awesome, Sigorney Weaver kind of bitch, either. You are everything that people hate about women.
Anita then discerns that Dolph hates Jean Claude because a woman in his life is sleeping with a vampire, and she calls him on it. LKH might be going for "ball-buster" here, but it just comes off as "heartless bitch." Sunshine, you don't go for the low blow with your father figures. You just don't.
Dolph tells Anita to get out, with trimmings. Anita walks past Dolph carefully, because literally every other man in her life would have hit her after getting that angry, so naturally Dolph, the upstanding police officer, would do that too. Welcome to Battered Wife symptom number two: Overreaction to the emotions of others. Anita, you and Bella Swan go stand in that corner over there and come back when you're in touch with your inner selves again.
Anita figures it's Dolph's wife having an affair with a vampire. She doesn't want to ask many questions. Hey, sunshine? How about not bringing that shit up in the first place.
Speaking of which, I think there's something in vampire saliva that makes you forget all concept of bounderies. Because fuck me...
And then Anita finds out they hired a bounty hunter to help them convict Jean Claude of Anita's murder.
*deep breath*
BOUNTY HUNTERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.
I'm better now.
The dude's name is Orlando King. Orlando. I am now imagining Lando Calurissian in Crocodile Dundee's getup. Orlando even flirts with Anita in record time. He doesn't say "What have we here?" but it comes pretty damn close. Anita wonders if he's flirting (He called you pretty. He is) and decides she's not that pretty, she doesn't get it, and she's probably paranoid.
...I need to develop a Mary Sue drinking game, don't I?
Anita retrieves Nathanial, who has all the lady cops drooling over his stripperific ways (Yeah. No.) and heads off to get Jean Claude.
You know, I'll bet every cop in that department has a packet of domestic abuse cards with Anita's name on it, and none of them have the guts to do it. They're not slipping Nathaniel their number because they wanna sleep with him, 'Nita. They're trying to get you into some form of halfway decent therapy.
And then we get "Fuck you" retcon number ninty nine. Anita wraps herself around Jean Claude, exactly the way battered women snuzzle their abusers, and Cop One says this:
I will not make this review any longer by pointing out the ten zillion reasons why this is bullshit. I will just point out that, one, Jean Claude mind-raped Anita less than twelve hours ago, and two, that contradicts every character interaction in the last nine books so heard I think the book just strained something.
And then the characters talk about how Anita's experiances have "mellowed" her.
There is an attempt at humor, it doesn't work, and the chapter ends with everybody heading home.
There are sixty-five chapters in this book. And an epilogue.
This really is going to suck, isn't it?
Next chapter: I just read ahead a few pages, and I am going to have a fucking meltdown. You will be here to watch it. This might just be worse than Captive of Gor.
And then this happens:
“How are you doing?” His voice was very careful when he asked it, quiet in the rushing silence of the car.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.”I think this is supposed to be about her potential lycanthropy. But lycanthropy hasn't been mentioned in a chapter, and she was just fucking raped in the shower by a total stranger. So it sounds as if they're talking about that.
Anita goes to the police department to prove she isn't dead. This ought to be an easy task. Show up, flash ID, say hi to your buddies, arrange for your undead mind-raping lover to be picked up (preferably by a body disposal service, but Anita isn't that smart) and then tell the police that a friend of yours has been kidnapped and held hostage for ransom. Seriously. Fuck the dominance shit, get these idiots into the habit of calling the cops, everyone's lives will be a whole lot better.
Does it work out this way? Well...
First she re-introduces herself to the leader of RPIT, an acronym I do not want to explain right now (read as preternatural cops and leave it at that) who is all like, "Did you die?" which is apparently a good question to ask of someone who raises the dead for a living. And it is a pretty good question, seeing as how the bad guy in the first book was a necromancer who had come back to life and had to do some pretty gnarly things to stay that way. Ah, the days when Anita and her boy-toy refused to sleep together until they were married. Back to the point, undead Anita could probably cause almost as much damage as still-living Anita, with the added cool points of being a Zombie. After verbally reassuring a cop who, for some reason, doesn't ask to verify Anita's current posistion as the current president of the Being Alive Club (/Awesome GlaDOS), Anita wanders into the station and everybody freaks out.
Also, the plot breaks. It's a minor break, and I'm sure we can fix it with tape.
See, Anita's been unconsious for four days, and the boys in blue have been holding Jean Claude in prison all that time. One, this breaks the universe because if the cops can keep Jean Claude in jail any leingth of time they damn well ought to have guns that could knock him out, too. Anyway, they're basing holding Jean Claude for "questioning" on a few photographs of Anita covered in blood.
Anita has been seen covered in blood since the first book. Some of it is usually hers. Most of it is usually someone else's. The police have frequently gone with her on trips that leave her covered in someone else's blood. Ergo no police officer who knows Anita personally should be all that worried about a photograph of Anita covered in blood unless they have DNA evidence that it is all Anita's blood...and that Anita has bled enough to endanger her life. Blood on fabric? Spreads out. A lot. And nobody is talking about massive bloodstains inside of Narcissus in Chains or how the DNA results came back showing that Anita is also the daughter of a criminal syndacate or some shit (...I ODed on CSI the other night) so I still have to assume that all this is because somebody got a shot of Anita covered in a lot of red stuff.
Fuck. For all they knew it could have been ketchup.
So one cop tells Anita that another cop will want to question her. Why? Well...this is not explained. And then Cop says the most awesome line I have read in a while:
That seemed to surprise him, because he blinked and dropped his hand. “I’ll get Count Dracula out of hock, you go talk to Dolph.”
I am now imagining somebody attempting to pawn Vlad Tepes during one of those Discovery Channel "Reality" shows. It is Fred Saberhagen's Dracula. He is not happy.
Dolph, yet another cop, tells Anita he's glad he's alive. Hey, we haven't slaughtered any commas in a while:
"Thanks, me, too."
One day the humble comma will go the way of the passenger pidgeon. We shall all be weeping
Dolph's primary interest is in finding out who hurt Anita, and then hurting them back. This is played off as being annoying and overly paternal and a pain in the ass, all at the same time. Anita shrugs him off. Dolph then demands to see all her scars. Most of them require Anita removing her shirt, so she removes her shirt. Dolph is amazed and disgusted, and wow, so am I! I'll bet this outfit gets slapped with one harrassment suit a year.
Hey, Anita? You have a very large number of very large men who are very, very, very angry and obviously more than willing to "forget" their badges for at least a few minutes. Why not bring some of them with you?
And then Anita accuses Dolph of being so upset only becasue he didn't get to kill Jean Claude.
One: Jean Claude fucking raped you. Stop being responsible for his undead ass.Two: Dolph loves you. Every cop in the entire department clearly loves you. Every single one of them just put their jobs on the line to "lose" the guy they thought had killed you. If they wanted to kill Jean Claude they would have strapped him into a suntan bed and flicked the "on" switch. They lost him because he hurt you. They clearly still believe that he hurt you, that you are protecting him because that is what battered Significant Others do, and that continuing to "lose" him is the best thing they can do for the world in general. And they are absolutely right on all counts.
Three: You are a bitch. And not the good, awesome, Sigorney Weaver kind of bitch, either. You are everything that people hate about women.
Anita then discerns that Dolph hates Jean Claude because a woman in his life is sleeping with a vampire, and she calls him on it. LKH might be going for "ball-buster" here, but it just comes off as "heartless bitch." Sunshine, you don't go for the low blow with your father figures. You just don't.
Dolph tells Anita to get out, with trimmings. Anita walks past Dolph carefully, because literally every other man in her life would have hit her after getting that angry, so naturally Dolph, the upstanding police officer, would do that too. Welcome to Battered Wife symptom number two: Overreaction to the emotions of others. Anita, you and Bella Swan go stand in that corner over there and come back when you're in touch with your inner selves again.
Anita figures it's Dolph's wife having an affair with a vampire. She doesn't want to ask many questions. Hey, sunshine? How about not bringing that shit up in the first place.
Speaking of which, I think there's something in vampire saliva that makes you forget all concept of bounderies. Because fuck me...
And then Anita finds out they hired a bounty hunter to help them convict Jean Claude of Anita's murder.
*deep breath*
BOUNTY HUNTERS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.
I'm better now.
The dude's name is Orlando King. Orlando. I am now imagining Lando Calurissian in Crocodile Dundee's getup. Orlando even flirts with Anita in record time. He doesn't say "What have we here?" but it comes pretty damn close. Anita wonders if he's flirting (He called you pretty. He is) and decides she's not that pretty, she doesn't get it, and she's probably paranoid.
...I need to develop a Mary Sue drinking game, don't I?
Anita retrieves Nathanial, who has all the lady cops drooling over his stripperific ways (Yeah. No.) and heads off to get Jean Claude.
You know, I'll bet every cop in that department has a packet of domestic abuse cards with Anita's name on it, and none of them have the guts to do it. They're not slipping Nathaniel their number because they wanna sleep with him, 'Nita. They're trying to get you into some form of halfway decent therapy.
And then we get "Fuck you" retcon number ninty nine. Anita wraps herself around Jean Claude, exactly the way battered women snuzzle their abusers, and Cop One says this:
“I’ve never seen you be that . . . soft with anyone before.” It startled me.
“You’ve seen me kiss Richard before.”
He nodded. “That was lust. This is . . .” He shook his head, glancing up at Jean-Claude, then back to me. “He makes you feel safe.”
I will not make this review any longer by pointing out the ten zillion reasons why this is bullshit. I will just point out that, one, Jean Claude mind-raped Anita less than twelve hours ago, and two, that contradicts every character interaction in the last nine books so heard I think the book just strained something.
And then the characters talk about how Anita's experiances have "mellowed" her.
There is an attempt at humor, it doesn't work, and the chapter ends with everybody heading home.There are sixty-five chapters in this book. And an epilogue.
This really is going to suck, isn't it?
Next chapter: I just read ahead a few pages, and I am going to have a fucking meltdown. You will be here to watch it. This might just be worse than Captive of Gor.
December 15, 2012
Narcissus in Chains--chapter 11
Let's be up front about this: This is chapter is about a terrible thing. It's awful. You might want to look away now. I do not know if I can make it entertaining. I will try.
Anita was on the phone last chapter while everyone else clears out. She hangs up, and now she's alone in the shower with Micah, the naked wereleopard dude she woke up with. He begins saying things about how nice she is, and how he's never felt this way with another woman. Okay. He says Nimir-Ra, but the world's most overused line is still the world's most overused line. And then Anita sees the big mark she made from when Jean Claude used her to feed.
Again: that was rape. Metaphysical and mental, but she was still forced to do something she would not normally do, and the dude doing the forcing did not ask her permission, nor did he bother to stick around and make sure he had not damaged her. Which he did do. You don't huddle in the shower, whimpering, just because you got sweaty during the metaphysical orgy.
Anita apologizes for making the bite. Micah says don't worry, "It's a love bite".
No one, and I mean no one has brought up the concept of Anita wanting to have the sexy-sexy with anybody in the room. PERIOD. Micah is the first to broach the subject. He says that he enjoyed what they did, and that they could do great things for each other's pack together. And Anita is not saying anything. Not. One. Word.
This is out of character for normal, "healthy" Anita.
Finally she says "Let's take it slow." If you have never dated before, this is girl for "I do not want to have sex with you." Most guys who are interested in having a relationship with a woman read this correctly and back off.
Micah does not.
Anita watches him soap up.
The scariest thing about this chapter is how Laurell is writing it. Laurel wants Anita and Micah to get it down, and get it down hard. In the future books they are an item. One of several. So this scene should be all sunshine and roses and porn music. Only it is not. Anita is not screaming, scratching and shooting her gun, but she is shut down emotionally. Completely. And Micah will not shut up. Anita goes to the door and Micah dangles the bait of "We'll help you when you go face down Richard", which is something Anita badly needs, so she doesn't leave.
And then this happens:
And then Laurell tries to have Anita's own body give permission when her mouth is clearly screaming NO. Problem is...
Then Anita does start to want it. She contacts Jean Claude telepathically, and he tells her that she now has his primary power, the ability to feed off of sex the way he feeds off of blood. This, too, happened without Anita's permission, but it's all okay because he didn't know it would happen to her. This power is what's making Anita want to sex up Micah. So she tells him stop. he says "I know you want me."
This happens:
I'm going to leave this here. Otherwise, we'll be focusing on this part of this terrible, terrible scene all night long.
And after hitting something that made Anita feel pleasure, even though she never once said okay, Micah...yeah. I can't even write it. I'm not quoting it, either. You can't make me. The one part I will say is, soap is involved.
Anita does not respond to him at all. Even the book says this is out of character. Meanwhile, Micah is bumping her cervix. It says so in the text.
And then her brand new power kicks in and she starts feeding off the lust...but even the text says she doesn't want sex.
And then she starts to enjoy it and everything is okay again...until after Anita orgasms and turns back into a sobbing, whimpering mess on the bathroom floor.
Excuse me for a moment. I need to vent.
And the truly scary part? This is the sanitized version. This is the version where LKH went back and made this scene less rapey. I knew that this scene existed, but I thought it was the scene in the bedroom before Anita crashed in the shower, which was what I had to check up on a couple days ago. I read about the so-called "rape scene" and thought "Dang, I don't remember any actual penetration in the bedroom, I guess she really did tone it down"
It's sad when a female writer makes John Norman look good.
Anita was on the phone last chapter while everyone else clears out. She hangs up, and now she's alone in the shower with Micah, the naked wereleopard dude she woke up with. He begins saying things about how nice she is, and how he's never felt this way with another woman. Okay. He says Nimir-Ra, but the world's most overused line is still the world's most overused line. And then Anita sees the big mark she made from when Jean Claude used her to feed.
Again: that was rape. Metaphysical and mental, but she was still forced to do something she would not normally do, and the dude doing the forcing did not ask her permission, nor did he bother to stick around and make sure he had not damaged her. Which he did do. You don't huddle in the shower, whimpering, just because you got sweaty during the metaphysical orgy.
Anita apologizes for making the bite. Micah says don't worry, "It's a love bite".
No one, and I mean no one has brought up the concept of Anita wanting to have the sexy-sexy with anybody in the room. PERIOD. Micah is the first to broach the subject. He says that he enjoyed what they did, and that they could do great things for each other's pack together. And Anita is not saying anything. Not. One. Word.
This is out of character for normal, "healthy" Anita.
Finally she says "Let's take it slow." If you have never dated before, this is girl for "I do not want to have sex with you." Most guys who are interested in having a relationship with a woman read this correctly and back off.
Micah does not.
Anita watches him soap up.
The scariest thing about this chapter is how Laurell is writing it. Laurel wants Anita and Micah to get it down, and get it down hard. In the future books they are an item. One of several. So this scene should be all sunshine and roses and porn music. Only it is not. Anita is not screaming, scratching and shooting her gun, but she is shut down emotionally. Completely. And Micah will not shut up. Anita goes to the door and Micah dangles the bait of "We'll help you when you go face down Richard", which is something Anita badly needs, so she doesn't leave.
“Anita,” he said. I stopped in the doorway, but this time I didn’t turn around.
“What?” I sounded grumpy.
“It’s alright to be attracted to me. You can’t help yourself.”
That made me laugh, a good normal laugh. “Oh, you don’t have a high opinion of yourself, do you?” But I stayed facing away from him.Yeah. We're still not in safe territory. See, I remember all of this. This is how it went down, exactly. Only it was a truck and not a shower, and it stopped before it went too far. Everything about this, her physical reactions, his continued talking-talking-talking, is very very very NOT OKAY.
And then this happens:
“No,” I said, my voice strangled, but I repeated it. “No.”
He stepped into me, pressing the slick hardness of him against my lower hand and arm. He tried to uncurl my fingers from the towel, and I held on for dear life. “Touch me, Anita, cup me in your hands.”
“No.”This is the moment when everything should have stopped. A sane, contientious human being worth sleeping with should have shut down here. For Christ's Sake, the woman was weeping on the bathroom floor the last time they got it on. Her saying "NO" should have been all the clue he needed. Does he stop? No.
And then Laurell tries to have Anita's own body give permission when her mouth is clearly screaming NO. Problem is...I shivered and wanted to step back, but it was like I was frozen in place. I couldn’t move.That's not permission. That's freaking shutting down. I read somewhere (I think it was Reasoning with Vampires) that your emotions can shut down kind of like an opossum playing dead, that it's a protective mechanism within your own body to keep you alive. I do not know if it is a real thing. I do know that that passage, up there? Was exactly how I felt.
Then Anita does start to want it. She contacts Jean Claude telepathically, and he tells her that she now has his primary power, the ability to feed off of sex the way he feeds off of blood. This, too, happened without Anita's permission, but it's all okay because he didn't know it would happen to her. This power is what's making Anita want to sex up Micah. So she tells him stop. he says "I know you want me."
This happens:
“Please, Micah, I’m not on birth control.” A clear thought at last.
He bit softly at the back of my neck. “I had myself fixed two years ago. You’re safe with me, Anita.”Then stop trying to have sex with her. She tells him no again and he hits some erogenous zone that makes Anita whimper. See, she's experiancing pleasure. That must mean she wants it.
I'm going to leave this here. Otherwise, we'll be focusing on this part of this terrible, terrible scene all night long.
And after hitting something that made Anita feel pleasure, even though she never once said okay, Micah...yeah. I can't even write it. I'm not quoting it, either. You can't make me. The one part I will say is, soap is involved.
Anita does not respond to him at all. Even the book says this is out of character. Meanwhile, Micah is bumping her cervix. It says so in the text.
And then her brand new power kicks in and she starts feeding off the lust...but even the text says she doesn't want sex.
And then she starts to enjoy it and everything is okay again...until after Anita orgasms and turns back into a sobbing, whimpering mess on the bathroom floor.
Excuse me for a moment. I need to vent.
And the truly scary part? This is the sanitized version. This is the version where LKH went back and made this scene less rapey. I knew that this scene existed, but I thought it was the scene in the bedroom before Anita crashed in the shower, which was what I had to check up on a couple days ago. I read about the so-called "rape scene" and thought "Dang, I don't remember any actual penetration in the bedroom, I guess she really did tone it down"
It's sad when a female writer makes John Norman look good.
Planet Bob--BOOK SAMPLE
Okay, so I lied. :D
Don't forget to grab the first part
Planet Bob sequel to Starbleached
Bullets punctured the bulkhead to Bob’s right, and almost immediately the holes began to suck. Nah, he thought, chambering the next set of rounds. This whole thing began to suck ages ago. Gun loaded, he watched the holes slowly extrude carapace and heal over. On a human ship, those holes would have been fatal. Overseer ships were damned good at keeping their occupants alive. It’s why their mind-wiped slaves were allowed to run around with full-caliber projectile weapons. Which were currently pointed at Bob Harris and his team.Damn it, he thought, as another salvo cut through his cover. Everything on these damn boats was dark. The hallway behind him was dim as hell’s outhouse; the hallway in front of him pulsed with just enough orange and blue light for the pale heads of slaves to stand out like beacons. And they could most definitely see him. He braced himself, ducked around the cover and fired. His bullet sent one slave spinning into the dark, finally dead.Poor saps, he thought, chambering another round. The slaves did their best to turn his cover into lace. You poor, damned bastards. Being in an Overseer pen usually meant you were dead. That was the better outcome. If you were particularly unlucky, you got drained of everything. Memory, the color of your hair and skin, even the color of your eyes. Fifteen blank slates sat crouched behind Overseer boxes and crates, each one of them will-less, each under the total control of their terrifying masters. They moaned, footsteps shuffling, mouths drooling…and their aim was impeccable.Count on the cannibal aliens to create zombies with guns. He took seven shots, dropping six slaves. That cut the remaining opposition to twelve.Three of them had been members of Bob’s team. He thought. It was kind of hard to tell.
There was a sudden rustle among the slaves. Four taller, paler creatures stepped into the light. Seven feet of pure muscle and ugly hate, four eyes, shark teeth bared in a nasty snarl. Their armor was square-ish, like the costume of a berserk hockey player in solid black. The guns they held wrapped around their hands, some bits even digging into flesh so that dark alien blood dripped onto the floor. Bob looked down the sight of his gun, lined up one baleful eye, and pulled the trigger. Dark liquid splattered the bulkhead and the monster was down. Bullets riddled his cover as the slaves reacted. Their weaponry wasn’t hooked directly into their nervous system, but it still looked like the extruded remains of someone else’s nightmare. Bob was more concerned that they hadn’t stopped shooting. Damn. He hadn’t gotten the leader. They didn’t know much about Overseer society, but Holton Fleet knew there was a division between the shock troops and the real bad boys. Nail the shock troops, the slaves would keep shooting. Kill the leader, and the poor saps would stop dead in their tracks. I guess your boss is happy to let you soak up the bullets, he thought, and turned another Overseer into so much mangled meat. “Where’s our backup?” he muttered. He’d started this push with twelve men, and had managed to secure a quarter of the Overseer’s Hellcat. Now he was so overextended he couldn’t go any further. He was even depending on people who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the front line. Glancing left, he frowned at the girl with the radio. Case in blasting point, right there. Adrienne Parker had insisted on going into the field as soon as her probationary period ended. He’d have been glad to have her on any other mission. She was the best battlefield doctor he knew. But she’d already proven less than solid around Overseers, a massive liability. Still, when things had gone sideways, Adrienne had risked her neck and grabbed the radio.Corporal Lewiston had taken four Overseer bullets to the torso during the first strike. Bob had deployed cover while she patched him up…only she hadn’t. Instead, he’d watched her shoot Lewiston up with a dose of the enzyme that would keep him from becoming dinner. Then she put a popper full of concentrated morphine into his mouth. In ancient times the drug had been used as a pain killer; with better, modern options, these days it was used to make dying easier.“I’ll give you as long as I can,” he whispered. Blood spurted between his lips and down his chest. The wheeze of a punctured lung was almost inaudible under the gunfire. Almost. We can’t get him out, Bob realized. Adrienne had assessed Private Lewiston’s condition with a cold, brown gaze, and her assessment had been far worse than his own. Lewiston handed her the radio. “Make it count,” He had whispered, and he clenched Adrienne’s hands tightly in the dark. I’ll make it count, alright, Bob thought, teeth clenched. The enemy kept coming, but they also kept going down.Adrienne worked the radio dials, listened for a few moments, then shook her head. Chin length brown hair bounced slightly as gravity blipped. The Indy, he thought, must be giving the aliens hell. “Indiana says they can’t get close enough to punch the hull a second time. The Hellcat’s deployed Fangs and Spiders. They—” a shudder rippled through the gigantic ship, slinging all the humans hard against bulkhead walls. The Overseers didn’t even shudder. One of them almost took out Sergeant Jean Haskill, Bob’s second-in-command. Adrienne cursed and pulled herself upright, then unsnapped her gun. Adry Parker carried a fifty-cal, the smallest caliber that could still carry explosive rounds. She braced against her cover, aimed, and with surgical precision placed bullets neatly in the monster’s torsos. With standard ammo those shots would not have been fatal. That’s why the Space Force issued explosive rounds. The Overseer’s hearts went splot “They can’t get through the mess out there,” Adry continued, as if all she’d done was swat a fly. “Alpha Team still has control of this hallway. We can make it back to the shuttle if we try. It’s getting undocked that’s the problem. If we go now--” Gunfire cut her off.Bob fired, dropping the slaves that had almost nailed Adrienne. Then his gut winged. Two of the slaves had begun to…eat…portions of the third. Zombies with Guns.“Sir, we need to go back to the shuttle.” Jean Haskill said. Bob shook his head. “We came here to blow the ship and we’re gonna blow her. We got to get closer to the ship’s main drives.” He braced himself on the ship and aimed down his rifle once more.A Polycarbonate Rifle Type 3 wasn’t as flamboyant as a PCR 9. A three made smaller holes, it couldn’t empty a hundred round clip in two seconds, and the explosive charge it could fire wouldn’t penetrate a spaceship’s inner hull. No good for vacuum or ground war, but the threes were perfect for ship-to-ship warfare. Overseer guns were different. The firing mechanisms were organic, heavy on the methane and sulfur. A firefight could become overwhelming just based on smell alone. The bullets themselves were lozenge shaped, with awful aerodynamic barbs at the ends like some kind of seed. If they weren’t removed from the human body quickly, they would decay into a flesh-eating soup of acids and bacteria. Gangrene could follow in a matter of hours. So the sooner he got rid of the guys with the big toys, the better. He aimed his shots for the alien’s heads and fired. Direct hits. The noise was deafening. The sight, even with the dim shipboard lighting, was the stuff nightmares are made of. A piece of black-glazed skull spun slowly on the ground between the two forces. Even the slaves stared at the mess.“I’m sure that was completely necessary,” Adry muttered, her skin gone faintly green.“Yep,” Bob said, and chambered another round. Bob and Adrienne had come to Golden Dragon on a tip. A lone Overseer had been seen in the district capital’s main market. Not too unusual. Golden Dragon had a history of cooperation with Overseers, treating outlaying villages as buffets and turning Space Force personnel over if they needed a bargaining chip or three. But the hyper-militant race of aliens did not travel alone. It was strange. Bob had to check it out. Golden Dragon had given them a warm welcome and offers of assistance. With the Landry Enzyme, Bryan Landry’s last creation before his subsumation, Golden Dragon finally had a defense against the alien horde on their doorstep. Of course the Space Force could come investigate their planet. Holton fleet had full access and co-operation….right up until Golden Dragon turned their transport and half their mission team over to a cloaked Hellcat, the Overseer version of a battleship. Landry Enzyme or not, Golden Dragon was still straddling the fence.The worst part, Bob thought, as he sighted down the barrel of his gun, was that they’d come to Golden Dragon looking for Bryan Landry himself. Holton Fleet had certainly never given known collaborators the enzyme. Landry had to have given it to Golden Dragon, and that meant he had to still be there. Perhaps even on this ship. Much as humans in the Rim worlds wanted the enzyme, the Overseers wanted it more. Humans were, after all, Overseers food. The enzyme could increase their supply exponentially. It’d end the slave supply, though, and take subsumation off the table. He aimed and took out two of the faceless slaves. Some of them, the brightest and most durable, might have regained the ability to speak. Maybe. Most of them were known for abandoning their weapons and coming at you with their teeth. If that damn drug only poisoned the sons of bitches, we’d be three for three. Another shot, another dead subhuman. But if Landry could create the enzyme in the first place, he could also negate its benefits to humanity. And that would be very bad. Nothing said the good doctor was still on humanity’s side.Adrienne made a whimpering sound. “Don’t shoot them if you don’t have to.”Zombie slaves kept coming, even when their guts were riddled with holes. Dead white, faces like melted candles, eyes like boiled eggs, each slave was consumed with hate for anything human, driven by undying loyalty to their alien masters. Bob had to shoot them. He had a powerful need nothing else could satisfy.And if Landry shows his ugly face around here, I’ll develop a need to shoot him, too. He tightened his grip on the rifle.Bryan Landry had been Bob’s best friend. That was the problem with Overseers, he thought, as he finished another slave off. You never knew if the thing you were killing was truly alien. The slaves were obviously human, just drained into an animal state by the ravenous monsters they served. But some of the aliens themselves had once been human. Somehow the aliens could remake you that completely. The brains of Holton Fleet called the process subsumation, and the only protection against both it and their goddamned feeding process was the Landry Enzyme. Bryan had made it. Adry had refined it after Bryan was subsumed. Every report said the former humans remembered nothing of their old lives, but that must have been bullshit. Bryan had made a B-line for Adry and the enzyme, snatching both off a transport Bob had been flying. He and Bob had been face to faceplate in the back of the ship. Bob hadn’t recognized him. And Bryan, apparently, hadn’t recognized Bob either. Except possibly as dinner. Bob could still remember the prickle of alien teeth on his neck. Bryan, as a tall, handsome human, had told him they were like overgrown jellyfish stingers. And once you came that kissing-close to death, you didn’t forget it fast.According to Adrienne, he’d protected her and an entire village, had half starved himself to avoid feeding on the humans. She had survived nearly a month in Overseer custody. It was bound to make her a little loopy. Adrienne had known Bryan’s work inside and out. He might not have remembered enough to recreate it on his own, but Bryan must have worked out just enough to maneuver Adrienne into betraying the human race. Bob didn’t think that would be all that difficult. She was a doctor. A healer by nature. He could probably turn her coat with a ten-year-old kid and a pop gun. He looked sideways. Adrienne had her gun braced against the crate top. Black carapace did not regrow when it was used as casing, apparently. Fluffy white insides and bits of circuitry were spilling out of the cracks. She should have traded her perch for better cover, but her eyes showed no hint of fear. Or of anything, really. Another alien had arrived to ride herd on the handful of surviving slaves. She took it out with a single shot to the cranium. Pieces flew everywhere, and the zombie-like once-humans descended on the corpse en masse. Alright. A six year old kid and a pop gun.Besides, she’d been Bryan Landry’s fiancée. Of course she’d get unbalanced around alien him. Bob reloaded his gun.The Overseers had the USS Phoebe Balboa. Feeble, they’d nicknamed her. She wasn’t very big, but she was a primary contact ship. Now that Holton Station was gone, the fleet that it had supported was on its own. Without repair bays, manufacturing facilities and a full company of bored researchers happy to help refit warships like King, Garrison and Tejas, they’d elected to limit inter-system contact to the smaller Admiral-class battleships. Addys were tough birds, most of the time, but if they had to lose one, he was pretty glad it was Feeble. But Feeble’s computers had passwords and a full catalogue of Holton Fleet’s subspace drives. If the Overseers’ main body got hold of that intel, they could blow Holton Fleet out of the sky. We’d have to retrofit every subspace drive and change their frequencies. And we don’t have the manpower or the supplies to pull that off. Holton station had been their primary support. If they could have pulled the ships back to Old Earth, they would have, but friction between humanity’s oldest star systems had resulted in a blockade. Communications couldn’t be stopped, but only one supply ship in ten made it out to the Rim these days. Holton Fleet was on its own. Losing even one ship was a disaster. Feeble’s commander had ordered them to sit tight and wait for General Shawn Miller to decide what to do.Bob had been halfway to the Hellcat when the order went out. That close to the ship, well, you might as well finish things. And dropping Adrienne off at Golden Dragon would have been too much trouble.The Overseers could not be allowed to keep Feeble. Bob’s strike team had thirty pounds of Explosive Compound Influx 9, which was enough to turn a ship the size of Feeble into loosely connected molecules of compound steel. It’d blow a very generous hole in the Hellcat’s hull, but then Bob was in a very generous mood right now. He’d magnanimously taken out the Hellcat’s com system. All that was left was finding Feeble and turning her, and large sections of the Hellcat, into very, very tiny pieces. Of course, that was the plan before they ran into three quarters of the Overseer crew and most of their slaves en route. With the first plan knocked out, things moved on to something more dangerous. One could almost call it suicidal. Overseer ships blew up when they took too much battle damage to operate…even when there were no aliens aboard. It seemed an automatic function of their atomic reactors. Bob figured, strap enough ECI to the main reactor coils, they could make more than the Feeble evaporate. There was just one major problem with that plan.The reactors were right down this hall, behind two carapace doors and this apparently endless flood of slaves. Every time, Bob thought, as he fired his gun, I think I’ve seen—blam—how bad these sons of bitches can get—blam, blam, blam—I find myself realizing it can get worse. Oh, God, it can get worse. Bang, bang, bang, and he was out of ammo again. What’d they do? Raid a village?He sighted down the PCR 3 and fired, dropping the next to last slave to the ground. He’d lined up the final shot when the doors slowly sectioned open. Five more aliens stepped through, and another ten slaves. White hair, wide, double thumbed hands, a four-eyed face mostly hidden by the extruded mask. Black blast armor.Here we go again.“Damn,” Adrienne’s clear voice echoed in the suddenly quiet hall. “I’m out.” The lead Overseer gestured, and the gunplay began again. The slaves advanced quickly; Adry wasn’t the only one out of ammo. Bob’s reserves were running dry. Soon, he’d have to sound the retreat, and—Kzzzzit!A blue halo of electrical discharge engulfed two Overseers. The radiant voltage zipped into their limbs, locking muscles in place as their nervous systems were overloaded. A second blast took out the other two with a hiss of ozone took. Shock round discharge. Something that could only be fired by a PCR 9.Goddamn it! Bob thought. Hellcat layouts were one of the few ships maps Holton Fleet had. Bob had it memorized. Whoever was firing off the rounds had no cover at all. He grabbed the radio from Adrienne, ignoring the hail of slave-fired bullets winging past. “Hold your fire! Whoever is on the left flank, hold your fucking fire, you’re too goddamned exposed.” After a few moments of confused babble, the radio crackled to life. “It’s not us, sir. All personnel accounted for.”Another shock round blasted from the unseen rifle. Overseers were hard, almost impossible to kill. They healed rapidly. Short of disconnecting the head from the body or julienning the heart all in one go, your options were very limited. Bryan Landry had developed shock rounds as well, long before the enzyme was even a possibility. But the manufacturing process had been lost with Bryan and Holton Station. They were too valuable to throw away on a mission like this. No one else should have them.This, Bob thought, is not good.A young, blond man emerged from behind the hallway pillars. Blond, blue eyed, chiseled features, was a solid looking kid. Not one of theirs, though. He didn’t have the heft to hold a PCR 9, either. Then the boy’s vest swung open and Bob got a good look at a young, manly chest with a well-healed feeding mark just to the left of center. Right over the heart.This is either bad, Bob thought, or incredibly fucking bad. The slaves responded slowly, wheeling as if in a dream. The kid, on the other hand, had a souped up AK-103. Russian, Bob thought, as the kid drilled the slaves full of holes. This is not going to be my day. Another Overseer ran up, weapon still drilling itself into its skin, and the blue corona of the shock round dropped it cold before it even got close to firing. The kid followed this up with a volley of gunfire that sent both Adry and Bob back behind their cover. Nobody’s taught this idiot about quality of fire over quantity. Gimme two seconds and a decent full-auto, and I’ll educate the moron. The kid had to reload eventually, and Bob took this pause to duck back around the box. He came up to a rifle staring right at his head. The kid shouted something in Russian. And an Overseer voice answered. Incredibly fucking bad it is. Well, shit. “Hey, kid,” Bob shouted.“Da?” the boy shouted. He was blond and a little on the cute side. Bob Harris, name aside, was three-quarters Latino. He’d never quite gotten that whole blond-and-blue thing, especially not when the gringo got out in the sun too long and began to peel. Don’t feed them after midnight, he’d always thought. “Why don’t you and your buddy come out and—”Adrienne’s shout was all the warning he got. Something grabbed the back of his neck. Something with the familiar prickle of nematocyst teeth.Oh, hell no. he thought, how’d it get around. His combat knife was out and moving before that oh-so-delicate prickle had time to register. It hit flesh, glancing off bone, and the Overseer behind him grunted in displeasure. Adry screamed, a combative howl that ended with the thunk of sharps hitting flesh. Bob twisted, using the knife as a pivot point, and got his gun under the thing’s chin. He pulled the trigger. In the heartbeat it took for the gun to fire, the monster had pulled back, and the shot only cut through cheek and faceplate. Blue black blood coursed down white skin and pattered on the deck below. Adrienne clubbed it hard with the butt end of a dropped PCR 3. Dark liquid splattered up one cheek. She looked like unspeakably fierce. The thing dropped for a second, and two bullets went through its knees. Adrienne was a damn good shot, as surgical with a gun as she was with a knife. It was a damn shame the goddamn monster was going to heal. She stepped around, keeping her gun level with the creature’s temple. “Take off the face plate.” The creature hesitated. “Take it off.” She barked. The monster brought a double-thumbed hand up to its faceplate. Her hands began to shake. Bob’s gut fell like a stone and then rose with relief when the face revealed was inhuman as starlight. Adrienne’s sigh was even louder than his own. But this one was different. The brutish features were more refined. Four slitted nostrils flexed with a trickle of blackish blood. The pale eyes glittered with fine intelligence. It was shaved bald, save for a neat braid, and it didn’t smell like rancid blood or an open sewer. It studied all humans, breathing heavily. “Submit.” Mobile lips exposed a double row of shark teeth, a glowing blue tongue. Four white eyes observed this potential victim. “You will live unharmed. We could use your…talents for our own.”Okay, Bob thought. This is new. The Russian stopped beside Adry, pointing his gun in its ugly face. “Where is little ship?” the boy said. His accent was heavy. Far heavier than most of the survivors from Dorofey. “Where is captured cruiser?”The alien eyes flickered to the Russian. “Tell us where the renegade is, and you will survive.”“You get nothing, four eyes,” Bob said, tilting his gun down further. The alien studied the barrel for a moment, and then surged back to its feet. With a heavy backhand it threw Adrienne into the wall, then stood between her and the other humans, blocking her from escape or rescue. A massive hand snapped Bob’s gun into two pieces. It grabbed the Russian by his neck. The boy began to scream. Bob caught a glimpse of white nematocyst teeth penetrating flesh like small, questing worms, emanating from an organ in the monster’s palm. It was going to feed. Bob caught his combat knife off the ground and wheeled to face the alien. He was USMC and human. He’d save the universe or else die trying. That was his job. It was what he was made for. “Hey, bastard, why not—”And then the monster’s head exploded.
Then:Being a kid on Foster kind of sucked. Especially if you were the youngest in your class. It helped that Bob wasn’t a wimp. He looked puny enough, but the first kid to try to take his lunch money had gone to the nurse with a bloody nose and a beatific black eye. Bob was never a major target, but he’d never been a major helper, either. The Landry boys, now, they were targets. The girls flirted with Bryan, which didn’t help matters, and the older boys made it a habit to pummel the ever-loving shit out of tiny little Michel. The problem with standing up for targets was that it made you one, and Bob had never had much truck with the Landrys anyway. He wasn’t happy about breaking that record. But it was either help Bryan, or fail school this year. There’d been a little dirty card on the school bulletin board. No name, but there didn’t need to be. It was handwritten, and everything Bryan Landry did was neat and precise. As if he thought making all his letters and numbers mathematically perfect could somehow mitigate what was happening at home.The kids all knew. It was one of the things that made Bryan such a target. Bob had wondered about this. He’d seen Bryan fight at the compulsory bouts at Space Force sponsored rec, and he’d decided long, long ago he didn’t want to tangle with the kid. Bob was pretty sure he’d win, but he wasn’t sure it’d be a bloodless victory. But Bryan never fought back outside of the ring. And he’d certainly never fought back against his father. Well…you love your parents, Bob thought, and even when you don’t if you’re a good kid you protect them. An arrest would be bad. If people found out what Hatch was doing and he wound up in jail, he could get hurt. Maybe even dead.But why would Landry post a notice on the physical board? Especially with such a sweet honey pot. Five hundred credits and permanent help with homework. Raise a full grade av, promise! Bob was failing writing comp, lit and math, and it was five hundred credits! Whatever Landry wanted, Bob was pretty sure he could pull it off. The meeting point was in the old grain silo, a leftover from the colony days before Old Earth sold Foster the new storage/shipping containers. It was tall and echoy. The old plas-alloy sides hadn’t rusted in two hundred years. Plenty of birds nested up in the roofing. They were Aaron’s Swallow, or just Aarons. They built nests of hardened spit. It made a pretty good soup if you boiled it, but you really had to boil it. Almost a full day of hot, stinky steam. The nutritional value was super, though, and if you were poor, or broke, or your da spent most of the child allotment on his own booze, Aarons-nest soup and watergreen root would at least put food in your stomach.Bryan Landry hung from the rafters, his legs clenched tight around one of the upper girders. In his right hand was an Aaron, blue-blush feathers with a round, cute face. They were closer to Earth mammals than birds, bearing live young and nursing them in the safe hollows of their oval-shaped nests. They had beaks, though, and talons, and they’d make ribbons of your hands if you weren’t careful. Bryan worked a thin knife through the nest with his left, and like any good harvester he left just enough nest to put the avian back into. Only an asshole took the whole nest. Otherwise the bird would leave and not come back, and you’d be out a nest next week. “Landry.” Bob said. His voice echoed through the old silo.He got a quick wave of the knife in response. That, Bob decided, was one thing he hated about Landry. He had an o-tech knife. It was not illegal to own Overseer tech, though most people would choose not to. Why keep nightmarish stuff around if you couldn’t even use it? But Overseer knives were really killer. Sharp as blazes, almost parting molecules and they never needed sharpening. Between when you put it up and when you used it again, the blade resharpened itself. Bursting wicked.Landry took two more nests, dropped his harvest bucket, then managed a quick somersault down to the ground. He was, Bob thought, the second best gymnast in school.Bob was the first.“How ya doin’, Harris?” Bryan asked. Black haired, blue eyed, dusky colored skin. He was sixteen, all legs and shoulders and elbows, and because he was so good at harvesting edibles from the wild he and his brother weren’t stunted at all. Some of the other kids in class had parents just as bad as Hatch, but they looked it. Bryan and Mich weren’t like that. Sure, their clothes were the synth fiber that came with Child Allotment, but even Bob had worn that for a little while, when he was growing out of everything and good clothes weren’t that cheap. Bryan wore the featureless black shirt and pants with pizzazz. Bob decided that small talk was out. “What’s this about five hundred cred, Landry? What you want me to do, kill your da?”There was a brief flicker in Bryan’s eyes. Bob grinned. Bryan had thought about it. He weren’t no slouch, then. If it were Bob’s dad…he shied away from the thought. His dad was a good man. Captain-leader of his squad in the Space Force, one year away from earning his Honorary Citizenship, something that would give him and his family a straight shot back to Earth, if it ever came to that.It won’t ever come to that, Bob thought. Dad’s gonna stop the suckers before they get within sixteen light-years of Foster. You’ll see. Bryan sheathed his knife. “Nah, I wouldn’t need help with that, you know? Hatch is a waste of ammo. No. I want you to help me and Mich run away.”Bob hesitated. He could definitely get behind that cause…but it’d be a major felony if he got caught. If you had a felony the Space Force wouldn’t take you, and that was Bob’s great goal in life. But they also wouldn’t take you if your grades sucked. Rocks and hard places. That was life in the Rim, for sure. “You said you’d help me get my averages up.” “Well, we can’t go right away. I got to get a solid grade av this year, A neg or better.” Now he got a bag open and began running a peeler over watergreen roots. The soft bark gave way to shockingly green flesh. High source of proteins and trace nutrients, those were. Also poor food.Something in Bryan’s tone gave part of the game away. “You cheated.”“I did not.” Bryan dropped the peeler.“Yes, you did. You hacked the recommends. You know who’s going to get the Jordan College ‘ship…and it’s gonna be you.”“Christ. Keep your voice down, will you?” Bob modulated his tone. Not that it was a surprise. “Why’d you do that?”“I’ve been hacking the goddamned recs since we were both thirteen.” Bryan said.“Why?”“Because I needed to make sure I didn’t get it. Otherwise I’d be leaving Mich home. Alone.” A significant pause. “With Hatch.”Birdsong echoed. Sunlight gleamed off a pile of broken plas and glass in the doorway. Bob’s shoulders slumped. “I heard what Marian Liester said he did,” He said, sitting beside Bryan and picked up a watergreen root. His own pocket knife was standard Marine issue. The Space Force were, like, the absolute greatest. Whatever you wanted to do, you could do it when you were in. Why would anybody want to be out? He cut a big chunk off the root and stuck it in one cheek. The flavor was sweet and a little hot, and chewy as all hell. Better than gum, even. “I’d think you’d want to get out of there fast as you can.”“Yeah, but when Dad’s lit he likes to hit things. Usually it’s just me. He thinks it’s funny.” Pause. “If I leave Dad will probably kill Mich. And I’ve been up for the Jordan since I was thirteen. But you have to be really good to get it, you know? A negs or better. So if I saw that I was in line, I’d drop to B pluses long enough to pull my name off the recommends.” “So what’s changed your mind?” Bob asked.Bryan smiled, like someone getting out of prison. “You can take family members with you, now. I think they changed it because of Peredita.” Peredita Chan was the girl who won the Jordan last year. She’d given birth while the recs were still on and had turned it down so she could stay with her kid. She wound up going anyway, when they changed the rules last year.“I could take Mich with me if he were my dependant. He’s young enough. And they got that Space Force training facility right up against the College. Once he’s sixteen I could get him in. We’d be set for life…and away from Dad.”Bob thought for a second. “Won’t the Peds catch you on your way to space port?” Peds, or PDs, meant the police department. Old timers called them the cops, too, though nobody really knew why. It had something to do with copper. Bryan nodded. “That’s why I need help. I got a plan.”“You need more than a plan, dude.” Bob said, thoughtfully. “You wanna run far enough, you’re gonna need a spaceship.”“Yeah.” And a big grin, enough to see why the girls chattered about Bryan, even with the rumors about him running through school. “I got one of those, too.”
Find out what happens next January 1st, 2013! And don't forget to get a copy of Starbleached, if you haven't already, so you can be up to speed.
Don't forget to grab the first part Planet Bob sequel to Starbleached
Bullets punctured the bulkhead to Bob’s right, and almost immediately the holes began to suck. Nah, he thought, chambering the next set of rounds. This whole thing began to suck ages ago. Gun loaded, he watched the holes slowly extrude carapace and heal over. On a human ship, those holes would have been fatal. Overseer ships were damned good at keeping their occupants alive. It’s why their mind-wiped slaves were allowed to run around with full-caliber projectile weapons. Which were currently pointed at Bob Harris and his team.Damn it, he thought, as another salvo cut through his cover. Everything on these damn boats was dark. The hallway behind him was dim as hell’s outhouse; the hallway in front of him pulsed with just enough orange and blue light for the pale heads of slaves to stand out like beacons. And they could most definitely see him. He braced himself, ducked around the cover and fired. His bullet sent one slave spinning into the dark, finally dead.Poor saps, he thought, chambering another round. The slaves did their best to turn his cover into lace. You poor, damned bastards. Being in an Overseer pen usually meant you were dead. That was the better outcome. If you were particularly unlucky, you got drained of everything. Memory, the color of your hair and skin, even the color of your eyes. Fifteen blank slates sat crouched behind Overseer boxes and crates, each one of them will-less, each under the total control of their terrifying masters. They moaned, footsteps shuffling, mouths drooling…and their aim was impeccable.Count on the cannibal aliens to create zombies with guns. He took seven shots, dropping six slaves. That cut the remaining opposition to twelve.Three of them had been members of Bob’s team. He thought. It was kind of hard to tell.
There was a sudden rustle among the slaves. Four taller, paler creatures stepped into the light. Seven feet of pure muscle and ugly hate, four eyes, shark teeth bared in a nasty snarl. Their armor was square-ish, like the costume of a berserk hockey player in solid black. The guns they held wrapped around their hands, some bits even digging into flesh so that dark alien blood dripped onto the floor. Bob looked down the sight of his gun, lined up one baleful eye, and pulled the trigger. Dark liquid splattered the bulkhead and the monster was down. Bullets riddled his cover as the slaves reacted. Their weaponry wasn’t hooked directly into their nervous system, but it still looked like the extruded remains of someone else’s nightmare. Bob was more concerned that they hadn’t stopped shooting. Damn. He hadn’t gotten the leader. They didn’t know much about Overseer society, but Holton Fleet knew there was a division between the shock troops and the real bad boys. Nail the shock troops, the slaves would keep shooting. Kill the leader, and the poor saps would stop dead in their tracks. I guess your boss is happy to let you soak up the bullets, he thought, and turned another Overseer into so much mangled meat. “Where’s our backup?” he muttered. He’d started this push with twelve men, and had managed to secure a quarter of the Overseer’s Hellcat. Now he was so overextended he couldn’t go any further. He was even depending on people who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the front line. Glancing left, he frowned at the girl with the radio. Case in blasting point, right there. Adrienne Parker had insisted on going into the field as soon as her probationary period ended. He’d have been glad to have her on any other mission. She was the best battlefield doctor he knew. But she’d already proven less than solid around Overseers, a massive liability. Still, when things had gone sideways, Adrienne had risked her neck and grabbed the radio.Corporal Lewiston had taken four Overseer bullets to the torso during the first strike. Bob had deployed cover while she patched him up…only she hadn’t. Instead, he’d watched her shoot Lewiston up with a dose of the enzyme that would keep him from becoming dinner. Then she put a popper full of concentrated morphine into his mouth. In ancient times the drug had been used as a pain killer; with better, modern options, these days it was used to make dying easier.“I’ll give you as long as I can,” he whispered. Blood spurted between his lips and down his chest. The wheeze of a punctured lung was almost inaudible under the gunfire. Almost. We can’t get him out, Bob realized. Adrienne had assessed Private Lewiston’s condition with a cold, brown gaze, and her assessment had been far worse than his own. Lewiston handed her the radio. “Make it count,” He had whispered, and he clenched Adrienne’s hands tightly in the dark. I’ll make it count, alright, Bob thought, teeth clenched. The enemy kept coming, but they also kept going down.Adrienne worked the radio dials, listened for a few moments, then shook her head. Chin length brown hair bounced slightly as gravity blipped. The Indy, he thought, must be giving the aliens hell. “Indiana says they can’t get close enough to punch the hull a second time. The Hellcat’s deployed Fangs and Spiders. They—” a shudder rippled through the gigantic ship, slinging all the humans hard against bulkhead walls. The Overseers didn’t even shudder. One of them almost took out Sergeant Jean Haskill, Bob’s second-in-command. Adrienne cursed and pulled herself upright, then unsnapped her gun. Adry Parker carried a fifty-cal, the smallest caliber that could still carry explosive rounds. She braced against her cover, aimed, and with surgical precision placed bullets neatly in the monster’s torsos. With standard ammo those shots would not have been fatal. That’s why the Space Force issued explosive rounds. The Overseer’s hearts went splot “They can’t get through the mess out there,” Adry continued, as if all she’d done was swat a fly. “Alpha Team still has control of this hallway. We can make it back to the shuttle if we try. It’s getting undocked that’s the problem. If we go now--” Gunfire cut her off.Bob fired, dropping the slaves that had almost nailed Adrienne. Then his gut winged. Two of the slaves had begun to…eat…portions of the third. Zombies with Guns.“Sir, we need to go back to the shuttle.” Jean Haskill said. Bob shook his head. “We came here to blow the ship and we’re gonna blow her. We got to get closer to the ship’s main drives.” He braced himself on the ship and aimed down his rifle once more.A Polycarbonate Rifle Type 3 wasn’t as flamboyant as a PCR 9. A three made smaller holes, it couldn’t empty a hundred round clip in two seconds, and the explosive charge it could fire wouldn’t penetrate a spaceship’s inner hull. No good for vacuum or ground war, but the threes were perfect for ship-to-ship warfare. Overseer guns were different. The firing mechanisms were organic, heavy on the methane and sulfur. A firefight could become overwhelming just based on smell alone. The bullets themselves were lozenge shaped, with awful aerodynamic barbs at the ends like some kind of seed. If they weren’t removed from the human body quickly, they would decay into a flesh-eating soup of acids and bacteria. Gangrene could follow in a matter of hours. So the sooner he got rid of the guys with the big toys, the better. He aimed his shots for the alien’s heads and fired. Direct hits. The noise was deafening. The sight, even with the dim shipboard lighting, was the stuff nightmares are made of. A piece of black-glazed skull spun slowly on the ground between the two forces. Even the slaves stared at the mess.“I’m sure that was completely necessary,” Adry muttered, her skin gone faintly green.“Yep,” Bob said, and chambered another round. Bob and Adrienne had come to Golden Dragon on a tip. A lone Overseer had been seen in the district capital’s main market. Not too unusual. Golden Dragon had a history of cooperation with Overseers, treating outlaying villages as buffets and turning Space Force personnel over if they needed a bargaining chip or three. But the hyper-militant race of aliens did not travel alone. It was strange. Bob had to check it out. Golden Dragon had given them a warm welcome and offers of assistance. With the Landry Enzyme, Bryan Landry’s last creation before his subsumation, Golden Dragon finally had a defense against the alien horde on their doorstep. Of course the Space Force could come investigate their planet. Holton fleet had full access and co-operation….right up until Golden Dragon turned their transport and half their mission team over to a cloaked Hellcat, the Overseer version of a battleship. Landry Enzyme or not, Golden Dragon was still straddling the fence.The worst part, Bob thought, as he sighted down the barrel of his gun, was that they’d come to Golden Dragon looking for Bryan Landry himself. Holton Fleet had certainly never given known collaborators the enzyme. Landry had to have given it to Golden Dragon, and that meant he had to still be there. Perhaps even on this ship. Much as humans in the Rim worlds wanted the enzyme, the Overseers wanted it more. Humans were, after all, Overseers food. The enzyme could increase their supply exponentially. It’d end the slave supply, though, and take subsumation off the table. He aimed and took out two of the faceless slaves. Some of them, the brightest and most durable, might have regained the ability to speak. Maybe. Most of them were known for abandoning their weapons and coming at you with their teeth. If that damn drug only poisoned the sons of bitches, we’d be three for three. Another shot, another dead subhuman. But if Landry could create the enzyme in the first place, he could also negate its benefits to humanity. And that would be very bad. Nothing said the good doctor was still on humanity’s side.Adrienne made a whimpering sound. “Don’t shoot them if you don’t have to.”Zombie slaves kept coming, even when their guts were riddled with holes. Dead white, faces like melted candles, eyes like boiled eggs, each slave was consumed with hate for anything human, driven by undying loyalty to their alien masters. Bob had to shoot them. He had a powerful need nothing else could satisfy.And if Landry shows his ugly face around here, I’ll develop a need to shoot him, too. He tightened his grip on the rifle.Bryan Landry had been Bob’s best friend. That was the problem with Overseers, he thought, as he finished another slave off. You never knew if the thing you were killing was truly alien. The slaves were obviously human, just drained into an animal state by the ravenous monsters they served. But some of the aliens themselves had once been human. Somehow the aliens could remake you that completely. The brains of Holton Fleet called the process subsumation, and the only protection against both it and their goddamned feeding process was the Landry Enzyme. Bryan had made it. Adry had refined it after Bryan was subsumed. Every report said the former humans remembered nothing of their old lives, but that must have been bullshit. Bryan had made a B-line for Adry and the enzyme, snatching both off a transport Bob had been flying. He and Bob had been face to faceplate in the back of the ship. Bob hadn’t recognized him. And Bryan, apparently, hadn’t recognized Bob either. Except possibly as dinner. Bob could still remember the prickle of alien teeth on his neck. Bryan, as a tall, handsome human, had told him they were like overgrown jellyfish stingers. And once you came that kissing-close to death, you didn’t forget it fast.According to Adrienne, he’d protected her and an entire village, had half starved himself to avoid feeding on the humans. She had survived nearly a month in Overseer custody. It was bound to make her a little loopy. Adrienne had known Bryan’s work inside and out. He might not have remembered enough to recreate it on his own, but Bryan must have worked out just enough to maneuver Adrienne into betraying the human race. Bob didn’t think that would be all that difficult. She was a doctor. A healer by nature. He could probably turn her coat with a ten-year-old kid and a pop gun. He looked sideways. Adrienne had her gun braced against the crate top. Black carapace did not regrow when it was used as casing, apparently. Fluffy white insides and bits of circuitry were spilling out of the cracks. She should have traded her perch for better cover, but her eyes showed no hint of fear. Or of anything, really. Another alien had arrived to ride herd on the handful of surviving slaves. She took it out with a single shot to the cranium. Pieces flew everywhere, and the zombie-like once-humans descended on the corpse en masse. Alright. A six year old kid and a pop gun.Besides, she’d been Bryan Landry’s fiancée. Of course she’d get unbalanced around alien him. Bob reloaded his gun.The Overseers had the USS Phoebe Balboa. Feeble, they’d nicknamed her. She wasn’t very big, but she was a primary contact ship. Now that Holton Station was gone, the fleet that it had supported was on its own. Without repair bays, manufacturing facilities and a full company of bored researchers happy to help refit warships like King, Garrison and Tejas, they’d elected to limit inter-system contact to the smaller Admiral-class battleships. Addys were tough birds, most of the time, but if they had to lose one, he was pretty glad it was Feeble. But Feeble’s computers had passwords and a full catalogue of Holton Fleet’s subspace drives. If the Overseers’ main body got hold of that intel, they could blow Holton Fleet out of the sky. We’d have to retrofit every subspace drive and change their frequencies. And we don’t have the manpower or the supplies to pull that off. Holton station had been their primary support. If they could have pulled the ships back to Old Earth, they would have, but friction between humanity’s oldest star systems had resulted in a blockade. Communications couldn’t be stopped, but only one supply ship in ten made it out to the Rim these days. Holton Fleet was on its own. Losing even one ship was a disaster. Feeble’s commander had ordered them to sit tight and wait for General Shawn Miller to decide what to do.Bob had been halfway to the Hellcat when the order went out. That close to the ship, well, you might as well finish things. And dropping Adrienne off at Golden Dragon would have been too much trouble.The Overseers could not be allowed to keep Feeble. Bob’s strike team had thirty pounds of Explosive Compound Influx 9, which was enough to turn a ship the size of Feeble into loosely connected molecules of compound steel. It’d blow a very generous hole in the Hellcat’s hull, but then Bob was in a very generous mood right now. He’d magnanimously taken out the Hellcat’s com system. All that was left was finding Feeble and turning her, and large sections of the Hellcat, into very, very tiny pieces. Of course, that was the plan before they ran into three quarters of the Overseer crew and most of their slaves en route. With the first plan knocked out, things moved on to something more dangerous. One could almost call it suicidal. Overseer ships blew up when they took too much battle damage to operate…even when there were no aliens aboard. It seemed an automatic function of their atomic reactors. Bob figured, strap enough ECI to the main reactor coils, they could make more than the Feeble evaporate. There was just one major problem with that plan.The reactors were right down this hall, behind two carapace doors and this apparently endless flood of slaves. Every time, Bob thought, as he fired his gun, I think I’ve seen—blam—how bad these sons of bitches can get—blam, blam, blam—I find myself realizing it can get worse. Oh, God, it can get worse. Bang, bang, bang, and he was out of ammo again. What’d they do? Raid a village?He sighted down the PCR 3 and fired, dropping the next to last slave to the ground. He’d lined up the final shot when the doors slowly sectioned open. Five more aliens stepped through, and another ten slaves. White hair, wide, double thumbed hands, a four-eyed face mostly hidden by the extruded mask. Black blast armor.Here we go again.“Damn,” Adrienne’s clear voice echoed in the suddenly quiet hall. “I’m out.” The lead Overseer gestured, and the gunplay began again. The slaves advanced quickly; Adry wasn’t the only one out of ammo. Bob’s reserves were running dry. Soon, he’d have to sound the retreat, and—Kzzzzit!A blue halo of electrical discharge engulfed two Overseers. The radiant voltage zipped into their limbs, locking muscles in place as their nervous systems were overloaded. A second blast took out the other two with a hiss of ozone took. Shock round discharge. Something that could only be fired by a PCR 9.Goddamn it! Bob thought. Hellcat layouts were one of the few ships maps Holton Fleet had. Bob had it memorized. Whoever was firing off the rounds had no cover at all. He grabbed the radio from Adrienne, ignoring the hail of slave-fired bullets winging past. “Hold your fire! Whoever is on the left flank, hold your fucking fire, you’re too goddamned exposed.” After a few moments of confused babble, the radio crackled to life. “It’s not us, sir. All personnel accounted for.”Another shock round blasted from the unseen rifle. Overseers were hard, almost impossible to kill. They healed rapidly. Short of disconnecting the head from the body or julienning the heart all in one go, your options were very limited. Bryan Landry had developed shock rounds as well, long before the enzyme was even a possibility. But the manufacturing process had been lost with Bryan and Holton Station. They were too valuable to throw away on a mission like this. No one else should have them.This, Bob thought, is not good.A young, blond man emerged from behind the hallway pillars. Blond, blue eyed, chiseled features, was a solid looking kid. Not one of theirs, though. He didn’t have the heft to hold a PCR 9, either. Then the boy’s vest swung open and Bob got a good look at a young, manly chest with a well-healed feeding mark just to the left of center. Right over the heart.This is either bad, Bob thought, or incredibly fucking bad. The slaves responded slowly, wheeling as if in a dream. The kid, on the other hand, had a souped up AK-103. Russian, Bob thought, as the kid drilled the slaves full of holes. This is not going to be my day. Another Overseer ran up, weapon still drilling itself into its skin, and the blue corona of the shock round dropped it cold before it even got close to firing. The kid followed this up with a volley of gunfire that sent both Adry and Bob back behind their cover. Nobody’s taught this idiot about quality of fire over quantity. Gimme two seconds and a decent full-auto, and I’ll educate the moron. The kid had to reload eventually, and Bob took this pause to duck back around the box. He came up to a rifle staring right at his head. The kid shouted something in Russian. And an Overseer voice answered. Incredibly fucking bad it is. Well, shit. “Hey, kid,” Bob shouted.“Da?” the boy shouted. He was blond and a little on the cute side. Bob Harris, name aside, was three-quarters Latino. He’d never quite gotten that whole blond-and-blue thing, especially not when the gringo got out in the sun too long and began to peel. Don’t feed them after midnight, he’d always thought. “Why don’t you and your buddy come out and—”Adrienne’s shout was all the warning he got. Something grabbed the back of his neck. Something with the familiar prickle of nematocyst teeth.Oh, hell no. he thought, how’d it get around. His combat knife was out and moving before that oh-so-delicate prickle had time to register. It hit flesh, glancing off bone, and the Overseer behind him grunted in displeasure. Adry screamed, a combative howl that ended with the thunk of sharps hitting flesh. Bob twisted, using the knife as a pivot point, and got his gun under the thing’s chin. He pulled the trigger. In the heartbeat it took for the gun to fire, the monster had pulled back, and the shot only cut through cheek and faceplate. Blue black blood coursed down white skin and pattered on the deck below. Adrienne clubbed it hard with the butt end of a dropped PCR 3. Dark liquid splattered up one cheek. She looked like unspeakably fierce. The thing dropped for a second, and two bullets went through its knees. Adrienne was a damn good shot, as surgical with a gun as she was with a knife. It was a damn shame the goddamn monster was going to heal. She stepped around, keeping her gun level with the creature’s temple. “Take off the face plate.” The creature hesitated. “Take it off.” She barked. The monster brought a double-thumbed hand up to its faceplate. Her hands began to shake. Bob’s gut fell like a stone and then rose with relief when the face revealed was inhuman as starlight. Adrienne’s sigh was even louder than his own. But this one was different. The brutish features were more refined. Four slitted nostrils flexed with a trickle of blackish blood. The pale eyes glittered with fine intelligence. It was shaved bald, save for a neat braid, and it didn’t smell like rancid blood or an open sewer. It studied all humans, breathing heavily. “Submit.” Mobile lips exposed a double row of shark teeth, a glowing blue tongue. Four white eyes observed this potential victim. “You will live unharmed. We could use your…talents for our own.”Okay, Bob thought. This is new. The Russian stopped beside Adry, pointing his gun in its ugly face. “Where is little ship?” the boy said. His accent was heavy. Far heavier than most of the survivors from Dorofey. “Where is captured cruiser?”The alien eyes flickered to the Russian. “Tell us where the renegade is, and you will survive.”“You get nothing, four eyes,” Bob said, tilting his gun down further. The alien studied the barrel for a moment, and then surged back to its feet. With a heavy backhand it threw Adrienne into the wall, then stood between her and the other humans, blocking her from escape or rescue. A massive hand snapped Bob’s gun into two pieces. It grabbed the Russian by his neck. The boy began to scream. Bob caught a glimpse of white nematocyst teeth penetrating flesh like small, questing worms, emanating from an organ in the monster’s palm. It was going to feed. Bob caught his combat knife off the ground and wheeled to face the alien. He was USMC and human. He’d save the universe or else die trying. That was his job. It was what he was made for. “Hey, bastard, why not—”And then the monster’s head exploded.
Then:Being a kid on Foster kind of sucked. Especially if you were the youngest in your class. It helped that Bob wasn’t a wimp. He looked puny enough, but the first kid to try to take his lunch money had gone to the nurse with a bloody nose and a beatific black eye. Bob was never a major target, but he’d never been a major helper, either. The Landry boys, now, they were targets. The girls flirted with Bryan, which didn’t help matters, and the older boys made it a habit to pummel the ever-loving shit out of tiny little Michel. The problem with standing up for targets was that it made you one, and Bob had never had much truck with the Landrys anyway. He wasn’t happy about breaking that record. But it was either help Bryan, or fail school this year. There’d been a little dirty card on the school bulletin board. No name, but there didn’t need to be. It was handwritten, and everything Bryan Landry did was neat and precise. As if he thought making all his letters and numbers mathematically perfect could somehow mitigate what was happening at home.The kids all knew. It was one of the things that made Bryan such a target. Bob had wondered about this. He’d seen Bryan fight at the compulsory bouts at Space Force sponsored rec, and he’d decided long, long ago he didn’t want to tangle with the kid. Bob was pretty sure he’d win, but he wasn’t sure it’d be a bloodless victory. But Bryan never fought back outside of the ring. And he’d certainly never fought back against his father. Well…you love your parents, Bob thought, and even when you don’t if you’re a good kid you protect them. An arrest would be bad. If people found out what Hatch was doing and he wound up in jail, he could get hurt. Maybe even dead.But why would Landry post a notice on the physical board? Especially with such a sweet honey pot. Five hundred credits and permanent help with homework. Raise a full grade av, promise! Bob was failing writing comp, lit and math, and it was five hundred credits! Whatever Landry wanted, Bob was pretty sure he could pull it off. The meeting point was in the old grain silo, a leftover from the colony days before Old Earth sold Foster the new storage/shipping containers. It was tall and echoy. The old plas-alloy sides hadn’t rusted in two hundred years. Plenty of birds nested up in the roofing. They were Aaron’s Swallow, or just Aarons. They built nests of hardened spit. It made a pretty good soup if you boiled it, but you really had to boil it. Almost a full day of hot, stinky steam. The nutritional value was super, though, and if you were poor, or broke, or your da spent most of the child allotment on his own booze, Aarons-nest soup and watergreen root would at least put food in your stomach.Bryan Landry hung from the rafters, his legs clenched tight around one of the upper girders. In his right hand was an Aaron, blue-blush feathers with a round, cute face. They were closer to Earth mammals than birds, bearing live young and nursing them in the safe hollows of their oval-shaped nests. They had beaks, though, and talons, and they’d make ribbons of your hands if you weren’t careful. Bryan worked a thin knife through the nest with his left, and like any good harvester he left just enough nest to put the avian back into. Only an asshole took the whole nest. Otherwise the bird would leave and not come back, and you’d be out a nest next week. “Landry.” Bob said. His voice echoed through the old silo.He got a quick wave of the knife in response. That, Bob decided, was one thing he hated about Landry. He had an o-tech knife. It was not illegal to own Overseer tech, though most people would choose not to. Why keep nightmarish stuff around if you couldn’t even use it? But Overseer knives were really killer. Sharp as blazes, almost parting molecules and they never needed sharpening. Between when you put it up and when you used it again, the blade resharpened itself. Bursting wicked.Landry took two more nests, dropped his harvest bucket, then managed a quick somersault down to the ground. He was, Bob thought, the second best gymnast in school.Bob was the first.“How ya doin’, Harris?” Bryan asked. Black haired, blue eyed, dusky colored skin. He was sixteen, all legs and shoulders and elbows, and because he was so good at harvesting edibles from the wild he and his brother weren’t stunted at all. Some of the other kids in class had parents just as bad as Hatch, but they looked it. Bryan and Mich weren’t like that. Sure, their clothes were the synth fiber that came with Child Allotment, but even Bob had worn that for a little while, when he was growing out of everything and good clothes weren’t that cheap. Bryan wore the featureless black shirt and pants with pizzazz. Bob decided that small talk was out. “What’s this about five hundred cred, Landry? What you want me to do, kill your da?”There was a brief flicker in Bryan’s eyes. Bob grinned. Bryan had thought about it. He weren’t no slouch, then. If it were Bob’s dad…he shied away from the thought. His dad was a good man. Captain-leader of his squad in the Space Force, one year away from earning his Honorary Citizenship, something that would give him and his family a straight shot back to Earth, if it ever came to that.It won’t ever come to that, Bob thought. Dad’s gonna stop the suckers before they get within sixteen light-years of Foster. You’ll see. Bryan sheathed his knife. “Nah, I wouldn’t need help with that, you know? Hatch is a waste of ammo. No. I want you to help me and Mich run away.”Bob hesitated. He could definitely get behind that cause…but it’d be a major felony if he got caught. If you had a felony the Space Force wouldn’t take you, and that was Bob’s great goal in life. But they also wouldn’t take you if your grades sucked. Rocks and hard places. That was life in the Rim, for sure. “You said you’d help me get my averages up.” “Well, we can’t go right away. I got to get a solid grade av this year, A neg or better.” Now he got a bag open and began running a peeler over watergreen roots. The soft bark gave way to shockingly green flesh. High source of proteins and trace nutrients, those were. Also poor food.Something in Bryan’s tone gave part of the game away. “You cheated.”“I did not.” Bryan dropped the peeler.“Yes, you did. You hacked the recommends. You know who’s going to get the Jordan College ‘ship…and it’s gonna be you.”“Christ. Keep your voice down, will you?” Bob modulated his tone. Not that it was a surprise. “Why’d you do that?”“I’ve been hacking the goddamned recs since we were both thirteen.” Bryan said.“Why?”“Because I needed to make sure I didn’t get it. Otherwise I’d be leaving Mich home. Alone.” A significant pause. “With Hatch.”Birdsong echoed. Sunlight gleamed off a pile of broken plas and glass in the doorway. Bob’s shoulders slumped. “I heard what Marian Liester said he did,” He said, sitting beside Bryan and picked up a watergreen root. His own pocket knife was standard Marine issue. The Space Force were, like, the absolute greatest. Whatever you wanted to do, you could do it when you were in. Why would anybody want to be out? He cut a big chunk off the root and stuck it in one cheek. The flavor was sweet and a little hot, and chewy as all hell. Better than gum, even. “I’d think you’d want to get out of there fast as you can.”“Yeah, but when Dad’s lit he likes to hit things. Usually it’s just me. He thinks it’s funny.” Pause. “If I leave Dad will probably kill Mich. And I’ve been up for the Jordan since I was thirteen. But you have to be really good to get it, you know? A negs or better. So if I saw that I was in line, I’d drop to B pluses long enough to pull my name off the recommends.” “So what’s changed your mind?” Bob asked.Bryan smiled, like someone getting out of prison. “You can take family members with you, now. I think they changed it because of Peredita.” Peredita Chan was the girl who won the Jordan last year. She’d given birth while the recs were still on and had turned it down so she could stay with her kid. She wound up going anyway, when they changed the rules last year.“I could take Mich with me if he were my dependant. He’s young enough. And they got that Space Force training facility right up against the College. Once he’s sixteen I could get him in. We’d be set for life…and away from Dad.”Bob thought for a second. “Won’t the Peds catch you on your way to space port?” Peds, or PDs, meant the police department. Old timers called them the cops, too, though nobody really knew why. It had something to do with copper. Bryan nodded. “That’s why I need help. I got a plan.”“You need more than a plan, dude.” Bob said, thoughtfully. “You wanna run far enough, you’re gonna need a spaceship.”“Yeah.” And a big grin, enough to see why the girls chattered about Bryan, even with the rumors about him running through school. “I got one of those, too.”
Find out what happens next January 1st, 2013! And don't forget to get a copy of Starbleached, if you haven't already, so you can be up to speed.
Narcissus in Chains chapter 10
Business first: Sneak Peek of Planet Bob will be posted tonight, as soon as I get off work. BE THERE!
It's kind of interesting, how very much I did NOT want to do this chapter. This is the chapter that made me quit reading.
I did not get that the scene immediately prior to this was a traumatizing fuck-up that would leave any woman screaming in terror the first time I read it, because I was ninteen and thought that "rape" was that dramatic thing that gives a woman a Tragic Backstory. I did not understand what it really is: A dehumanizing act that leaves its victims feeling like somebody else's kleenex.
See, where no actual, onscreen penetration occurred in the previous chapter, there were a lot of hard, naked dongs, and Anita was naked too. And asleep around all those hard, naked dongs. This is the kind of thing that makes someone freak out. Which she did. And then her lover Jean Claude, a man she is supposed to trust mind raped her into feeding off of Micah. That is a violation of every single thing a lover is supposed to be about. And it doesn't help Anita at all. How do I know she had issues with this?
My point? You don't react like this to normal sex. You don't react like this when you do a favor for a lover. You react like this when you have been violated.
This is never addressed in the text.
Anita has to be comforted by one of her wereleopards. There is a lot in the text about how this is a violation of the natural order of pard structure, and how neither one of them care about that right now. There is nothing about how Jean Claude just fucking broke her trust to get something he wanted out of her. How do I know that Laurell intends never to address her Main Character's emotional breakdown?
Because Micah walks in and Anita gets all flustered over the thought of having sex.
Jean Claude is in jail for murdering Anita. Somebody saw him and her both covered in blood, she never shows up at a hospital, people put two and two together and come up with dead Anita. Meanwhile the wereleopards are all scared because Anita got cut by one of them during the fight, and that plus her sudden ability to heal like a madman, MIGHT have given her lycanthropy. Meanwhile, Micah, this total stranger she knows nothing about, now knows everything about her because he was involved with the talks with doctors that lead to an assumption of lycanthropy.
FYI, I hate it when customers know my name and use it. I hate it when people at my job ask about my personal life, and vice versa. I have told a grand total of two people at my job about my self publishing books, and that was because I knew they were the two least likely to care. My boss still does not know (mostly because you'll see the nuclear cloud from where you're sitting). I am a very personal human being. A lot of other people, including Anita, are too. And yet she does not melt down.
And now we get to what made me quit reading this series.
Understand, I spent nine books watching Anita deal with Richard and Jean Claude. I watched them slowly, carefully, and painfully dramatically, come to a situation where the three of them--two people who loved each other and a fuck crazy vampire--could have something approaching a life together. They had issues--Anita spent all of one book saying "I trust you, Richard," only to run straight to Jean Claude's bed when Richard shifted (...on top of her, which was gross, and he also promptly ate part of a dead man. She had excuses)--and it took another two books for them to kiss and make up. But the resolution was on the horision, and I wanted to see how that relationship would go.
But this...ugh, let's just sum up.
Richard realizes that Gregory may have turned Anita into a wereleopard (Spoiler: He didn't) and goes ape-shit. His pack decides that Anita can't be Lupa and a wereleopard (Why is never explained) and decides to punish Gregory for hurting Anita. The pack decides that Anita going wereleopard (which she won't) is some kind of metaphysical murder, and so he'll have to be killed, and Richard has gone batshit insane and has done something to the pack structure so that he rules them but he doesn't really rule them, and...yeah. I don't think I can make this make sense. So basically we've gone from having to rescue the wereleopards from the wereheyenas to having to rescue the wereleopards from the werewolves, and Anita could be a wereleopard now (She isn't.)
And then Micah starts putting the moves on Anita.
Now, in his defense, she seduced him a few moments ago. The problem is, that was Jean Claude doing some metaphysical mojo because he was hungry and she was there.And....gah, I'm not addressing this now.
she calls Richard, who says that 1. she isn't Lupa anymore (duh) 2. the pack won't let him date her if she's a kitty cat (She isn't) and 3. they want him to pick a werewolf lover right now, fuck the nine gazillion things his being with Anita has won the pack, fuck the fact that he is a human being and should have his own choice.
And he doesn't really care because if he stands up to the pack, he ruins everything that he's built with them re: making the pack a democratcy.
I am now LONGING for the kind of violent sanity I got out of Mercy Thompson.
Anita tells Richard the vote thing might be a power play within his pack. She then recommends he kill the most likely player, somebody she's never met, because of a might-be.
Richard lets Anita talk to the possible power-play dude. She threatens him. For about four pages. It runs a little like this:
Anita: I'll kill you
Dude: then you won't be lupa.
Anita:I don't care. I'll kill you.
Dude: And then you won't be Lupa.
It's like Captive of Gor all over again.
Finally, she tells him that if he doesn't help her save Gregory, she'll kill him very dead, if he tries to hurt Richard, she'll kill him very dead, and if he challenges Richard before the next full moon, she will kill him extreamly dead. And the chapter ends.
And the one thing that I got out of it? Anita weren't never going to be with Richard again. I put the book down, walked away, and have not gotten any further since then.
And boy am I glad I did not, because the rapening? It happens again in the next chapter.
It's kind of interesting, how very much I did NOT want to do this chapter. This is the chapter that made me quit reading.
I did not get that the scene immediately prior to this was a traumatizing fuck-up that would leave any woman screaming in terror the first time I read it, because I was ninteen and thought that "rape" was that dramatic thing that gives a woman a Tragic Backstory. I did not understand what it really is: A dehumanizing act that leaves its victims feeling like somebody else's kleenex.
See, where no actual, onscreen penetration occurred in the previous chapter, there were a lot of hard, naked dongs, and Anita was naked too. And asleep around all those hard, naked dongs. This is the kind of thing that makes someone freak out. Which she did. And then her lover Jean Claude, a man she is supposed to trust mind raped her into feeding off of Micah. That is a violation of every single thing a lover is supposed to be about. And it doesn't help Anita at all. How do I know she had issues with this?
I’d cleaned off, scrubbed myself thoroughly, but I felt like Lady MacBeth screaming “out, out, damned spot!” Like I’d never really be clean again. I sat on the tiles under the hot, beating water, hugging my knees.The thing I remember the most about the assault that happened to me was wanting to brush my teeth. I knew I couldn't. I spent the hour between when I called the police and when they finally showed up spitting into a disposable cup. I was not going to swallow again until after I'd brushed my teeth.
My point? You don't react like this to normal sex. You don't react like this when you do a favor for a lover. You react like this when you have been violated.
This is never addressed in the text.
Anita has to be comforted by one of her wereleopards. There is a lot in the text about how this is a violation of the natural order of pard structure, and how neither one of them care about that right now. There is nothing about how Jean Claude just fucking broke her trust to get something he wanted out of her. How do I know that Laurell intends never to address her Main Character's emotional breakdown?
Because Micah walks in and Anita gets all flustered over the thought of having sex.
Jean Claude is in jail for murdering Anita. Somebody saw him and her both covered in blood, she never shows up at a hospital, people put two and two together and come up with dead Anita. Meanwhile the wereleopards are all scared because Anita got cut by one of them during the fight, and that plus her sudden ability to heal like a madman, MIGHT have given her lycanthropy. Meanwhile, Micah, this total stranger she knows nothing about, now knows everything about her because he was involved with the talks with doctors that lead to an assumption of lycanthropy.
FYI, I hate it when customers know my name and use it. I hate it when people at my job ask about my personal life, and vice versa. I have told a grand total of two people at my job about my self publishing books, and that was because I knew they were the two least likely to care. My boss still does not know (mostly because you'll see the nuclear cloud from where you're sitting). I am a very personal human being. A lot of other people, including Anita, are too. And yet she does not melt down.
And now we get to what made me quit reading this series.
Understand, I spent nine books watching Anita deal with Richard and Jean Claude. I watched them slowly, carefully, and painfully dramatically, come to a situation where the three of them--two people who loved each other and a fuck crazy vampire--could have something approaching a life together. They had issues--Anita spent all of one book saying "I trust you, Richard," only to run straight to Jean Claude's bed when Richard shifted (...on top of her, which was gross, and he also promptly ate part of a dead man. She had excuses)--and it took another two books for them to kiss and make up. But the resolution was on the horision, and I wanted to see how that relationship would go.
But this...ugh, let's just sum up.
Richard realizes that Gregory may have turned Anita into a wereleopard (Spoiler: He didn't) and goes ape-shit. His pack decides that Anita can't be Lupa and a wereleopard (Why is never explained) and decides to punish Gregory for hurting Anita. The pack decides that Anita going wereleopard (which she won't) is some kind of metaphysical murder, and so he'll have to be killed, and Richard has gone batshit insane and has done something to the pack structure so that he rules them but he doesn't really rule them, and...yeah. I don't think I can make this make sense. So basically we've gone from having to rescue the wereleopards from the wereheyenas to having to rescue the wereleopards from the werewolves, and Anita could be a wereleopard now (She isn't.)
And then Micah starts putting the moves on Anita.
Now, in his defense, she seduced him a few moments ago. The problem is, that was Jean Claude doing some metaphysical mojo because he was hungry and she was there.And....gah, I'm not addressing this now.
she calls Richard, who says that 1. she isn't Lupa anymore (duh) 2. the pack won't let him date her if she's a kitty cat (She isn't) and 3. they want him to pick a werewolf lover right now, fuck the nine gazillion things his being with Anita has won the pack, fuck the fact that he is a human being and should have his own choice.
And he doesn't really care because if he stands up to the pack, he ruins everything that he's built with them re: making the pack a democratcy.
I am now LONGING for the kind of violent sanity I got out of Mercy Thompson.
Anita tells Richard the vote thing might be a power play within his pack. She then recommends he kill the most likely player, somebody she's never met, because of a might-be.
Richard lets Anita talk to the possible power-play dude. She threatens him. For about four pages. It runs a little like this:
Anita: I'll kill you
Dude: then you won't be lupa.
Anita:I don't care. I'll kill you.
Dude: And then you won't be Lupa.
It's like Captive of Gor all over again.
Finally, she tells him that if he doesn't help her save Gregory, she'll kill him very dead, if he tries to hurt Richard, she'll kill him very dead, and if he challenges Richard before the next full moon, she will kill him extreamly dead. And the chapter ends.
And the one thing that I got out of it? Anita weren't never going to be with Richard again. I put the book down, walked away, and have not gotten any further since then.
And boy am I glad I did not, because the rapening? It happens again in the next chapter.
