The Wolf Gift chapter 6 and WTF IS THIS AMAZON

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

AMAZON IS GOING TO START SELLING FANFIC

And my loyalties are divided.

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

Thoughts, my lovelies?

Now. For the book.

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

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

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

Ruben needs to go die.

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody in this book is an asshole.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oopsie.

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

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

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

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

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

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