Tag Archives: romance

Blood Noir

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I’ve had a revelation. It may not be a new revelation, but I can only read books in this series so often without my brain turning to cottage cheese, so forgive me if I’ve lost track of the various ones over the years. No, see, my revelation is about the true irritant of this series. It’s that every now and again, if I can manage to scrape enough of the crap off the pages, there’s something like a decent storyline buried in there. I mean, yes, she’s been padding things with the hypersexed “relationship” plots for a long time now, and that squeezes out all but about usually 30 pages of story. But okay, that’s the book she’s writing, and if it wasn’t for the sheer gall of the packaging, I think I’d have gotten bored and moved on a long time ago. So I can accept that for what it is, it’s not the crap I’m referring to.

Let me explain. So, here’s Anita, and her good friend Jason is having a family crisis, and needs help, which is to say, a visit home with a girlfriend so everyone will stop calling him gay (which would not be as bad as all that, except he isn’t, so it’s annoying that nobody believes him). And she agrees to go, except they get caught up in (for once) human politics, and things quickly blow out of proportion, and all of that is before the vampires get involved. And sure, you could write a whole book about that, but our author cannot because she has to leave room for the porn scenes[1] and the random friend and/or stranger (but always at least one stranger, and always at least two people) that Anita will accidentally bind to herself metaphysically[2] in this particular book.

And my point is… well, it’s this. I’m not trying to say that the actual pornography and the implausibly repetitive growth of “power” and were-menagerie via sex don’t grate on my nerves. I’m not saying that the constant mentions of things tightening low in her stomach and what just does or doesn’t do it for this or that person don’t also grate after a while, but if I’m being honest with myself, all long-form authors eventually have turns of phrase that get old. I’m saying, reluctantly, that the kernel of mystery still remaining in most of these books would be enough to keep me going in the series; well, that combined with certain intangible benefits that I get from complaining about them, volume after volume. Except, well, the writing is getting objectively worse, by leaps and bounds. It’s not enough for people that she’s been friends with for a long time to have the same thought processes as she does. Well, no, that’s not true. As written, it’s easily bad enough.

“He looked like he was thinking about ponies. ‘I’m thinking about ponies!’ he suddenly declared inexplicably for no obvious reason besides the fact that all of us have exactly the same brains and the same voices, and I wanted to be sure you noticed that by showing how my thoughts and his words match up, for some reason even less explicably than the last thing that happened earlier in this sentence. And then we talked about how ponies make me angry (if Richard was the person who was talking earlier) or about how much common love we share for ponies (if anyone else was talking earlier) or about how I’m not sure sure that ponies should be involved in my sexual life, but they flat did it for him, so I would keep an open mind (if Nathaniel was talking earlier).”

But now it’s happening with perfect strangers, because writing more than one voice is really, really hard. Unless it says things in French sometimes, I guess. There was a literal, real, I’m not making this up even a little bit moment, wherein over a span of three pages, Anita makes a metaphorical leap about the situation feeling like the Twilight Zone, then a random new chick character makes a similar metaphorical leap about an unrelated situation feeling like the Twilight Zone. (Hold on, I’m nowhere near done yet.) Neither of these situations was in any way actually creepy or inexplicable or even subtly twisted, it was just the way people talk about things outside their experience. So these two different people make the connection to the Twilight Zone from two completely different experiences, and then, in the same three pages I mentioned earlier, Anita thinks to hrself about how she and this other chick are of diametrically opposed types that could never understand each other in any way.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. It could be that when the series ends, we’ll learn that she’s been captured via vampire magnetism for a dozen years or more and that all of these adventures are things her subconscious mind came up with while it had nothing better to do. That would justify almost every ridiculous thing that has happened, you know? Except Auggie the ancient master vampire that everyone has a ton of respect for and also they call him Auggie. Nothing will ever excuse that.

[1] No, seriously, at this point you could only film these books with a porn script, with the expectation that people would need to fast forward through maybe 15 minutes of plot to watch all of the sex in the maybe 70 or 80 minute movie. Seriously.
[2] And by “metaphysically bind to herself ” I mean have a non-puritanically excessive amount of sex with, which by fiat means they are tied together forever, and that is a twisty maze of passages through LKH’s psyche, all alike, if ever I saw such a maze.

Love and Other Drugs

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The sad part of the whole story is that I really only went to see Love and Other Drugs because I’ve had a crush on Anne Hathaway since Ella Enchanted, and she was reported to be extremely hot in this film[1]. Instead of the romantic comedy I expected, I ended up watching a heartfelt, romantic struggle against the odds set against the backdrop of the late ’90s pharmaceutical boom. If it happened to be funny now and again, so is every movie and every real life situation, for that matter; this doesn’t make them comedies! Enough with the pigeonholing, Hollywood advertisers. But, anyway, where was I? Oh, right, the movie: Jake Gyllenhall plays a young rising star pharmaceutical representative, in the heady days of Prozac, Zoloft, and of course, Viagra. If you’ve ever seen one of these people out in the wild, you know they’re all sexy, driven young professionals who haves sales in their blood, and the only things that like more than money are alcohol and intercourse. So, he’s like that, and then he meets an early-onset Parkinson’s patient, Anne Hathaway, who sees right through him. They clash, and then they, um, clash, and then, you know, the romance part of the movie kicks off. And from there, all the characters worth paying attention to[2] evolve in relatable ways while telling a story that left me jealous, introspective, and a little moody, instead of riding on the high of naked Anne Hathaway. Which, seriously.

Probably, this is no more than I deserved.

[1] Well. That’s just not true. She’s extremely hot in every film, but she was reported to be naked in this one. Plus, the previews looked interesting; I mean, I have the internet if that was really my only goal.
[2] You might think I mean both of them, but I consistently enjoyed Hank Azaria and Oliver Platt, too. Good supporting cast, really!

Naamah’s Curse

Have I mentioned how frustrated I am by my inability to find the place on an Amazon product page where I can click that I own it and then rate it? It used to be invisible just from some browsers, but now it’s invisible from basically all of them[1] (unless it’s actually gone), and either way, I like them being able to take my ownership and tastes into account when recommending things, and how can they take them into account if they will not let me show said tastes and ownerships them?[2] Not, tragically, that I would be giving Naamah’s Curse a particularly high rating.

I mean, throughout the long life of the series, it has been exactly the kind of thing I go for. Travelogue fantasy in which the heroes go from place to place, exploring new cultures and solving new puzzles: I’ve been reading it since David Eddings first launched the quest for a blue rock, and despite intra-authorial repetitiveness and the increasingly rare inter-authorial ability to provide a unique new take on the genre, I’ve never not enjoyed myself. Which, lest you take me the wrong way, applies here too. It’s just getting harder to enjoy myself in this particular case when it feels less like travelogue fantasy and more like authorial insertion in order to decry the evils of fundamentalist Christianity and the Hindi caste system. Still, it’s not entirely bad by any means, and none of the bad parts were screed-like; the anvils were just a little too heavy as they landed upon my head, is all. Still, I think Moirin may go to America in the next book, and maybe that will be pretty cool?

[1] I have admittedly not checked Opera or, um, the text-based one whose name I forget.
[2] Oh LOL-cat constructed speech, why must you be so awkward to adapt to conversational English?

The Harlequin

Here is why The Harlequin was disappointing to me. It was neither tragically horrid (despite a fleeting mention of the worst-named vampire lord of all time, Auggie) nor blandly boring. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a complaint, big enough to fill a paragraph, and that’s enough for me to be satisfied that it wasn’t a complete waste of my time. But the thing is, it was actually kind of good. If Hamilton hadn’t done this to me once before, I might actually believe that the series could be in the midst of an upswing again. I mean, I did think the first several books were pretty okay. Still, I have good defenses now, and will not be tricked this time!

The point of the book, anyhow, is that vampire enforcers so secret and scary that big, powerful vampires like the ones Anita Blake hangs out with (and let’s not forget ’causes to be as powerful as they are’, by virtue of being a special necromancer with multiple strains of lycanthropy (none inconveniently active, though, as that would cause actual difficulties in her life, due to the many prejudices that abound) and also inexplicable vampiric powers that really don’t seem to benefit her much, just to act as an excuse for the author to throw lots of sex into the story without Anita feeling bad about herself (which I’ve probably already said any number of times by now in previous reviews) while giving the big, powerful vampires some of their power, which I believe is where we came into this parenthetical) are afraid to even mention that they exist have come to town to investigate a local vampire church that is not following the rules of how vampires work. Which is not a legal issue, just a traditional one; they have no lord to whom they all owe allegiance and whatnot, they are their own people. It’s a very American kind of thing, in its way. And of course, while these unnameable Harlequin are in town, they’ll want to see what’s up with the weird necromantic[1] lycanthropic vampiric entanglements that exist here in St. Louis but nowhere else. And that, of course, leads directly to the kind of danger that Anita Blake and her friends are uniquely qualified to shoot and/or (at least, more recently) fuck their way out of.

Except, you see, the sex is actually toned way back, both literally (which, whatever; I am neither particularly pro- nor anti- it for itself) as well as in terms of its plot relevance. Which is step one of how I am impressed with the upswing of the plot. It’s been… yeah, I don’t really know how many, nor do I care to go back and check at this point, but it’s been some number of books in which nothing happened except that Anita learned to control the way needing sex to keep herself alive (yes, literally) affects everything and everyone around her, during which twenty pages of an unrelated plot took place in the background. And that number was too high. So, definitely a nice change of pace, here. There’s still lots of relationshippy stuff, and not all of it of the romantic variety, but I’ve always been pretty okay with how Hamilton portrays her characters, so that’s alright. …although technically I’ve just perjured myself there. But let me catch up.

Decent plot, decent characters, improved percentage of sex fluff. Where, then, are my complaints? They are here! The lesser of them is that, Jesus, there are too many characters to keep track of! Maybe one of these times a ginormous and heretofore never mentioned threat, as seems to show up in more of these books than not, could handily kill off maybe a half- or a dozen characters that do not have speaking lines in more chapters than not? Just so random people can not walk-on soliloquize, and then vanish for another book or two. And I mean, even that wouldn’t be so bad[2], except that there Anita is, all first-person remembering who the person is, when she last had sex with him, and why she continues to care that he is alive. So I can’t even just pretend they’re random new people every time, like I might otherwise try to do. So, yeah, they need to die now, a lot of them. It is okay for her to go back to not knowing the names and penis sizes of her bodyguards now. All I’m saying.

But the bigger complaint was… okay, I’m going to delve into spoilers here. I don’t care enough to make a cut, but in the unlikely event that you do, I’m probably not going to make any further points from here, so you can stop reading now. Okay? Okay. So there’s this werewolf on-again off-again boyfriend of hers, Richard. And he’s been pissy for a good long time because she keeps having sex with more and more people and gaining more and more inexplicable powers, whereas all he ever wanted to be was a normal happy human. And he’s grown gradually more emotionally abusive toward her, which at first didn’t bother me because it started out as genuine confusion, not abuse, but the willful disregarding of anything she’s ever said to explain, which honestly may just be a symptom of how repetitive of an author Hamilton is but I will choose in this instance to take as evidence that he either started out abusive after all and it wasn’t obvious to me or else he got that way as he realized that there were never any consequences for it, has removed my small sympathy for his position. And now, he’s moved on to physically abusive, and I can’t tell if I should be crediting Hamilton with a subtle transition instead of the misogyny I’m seeing, but Anita again tells him it’s okay, more or less. I think you’d have to read the chapter or two to understand why it’s a fine line and I can’t actually be sure which is going on, but it looks more like physical abuse than sexual kicks to me. Anyway. He then piles on more emotional abuse, and eventually, at the climax of the confrontation with the Harlequin, the state of their relationship is a key component of the outcome of that battle.[3]

And at this climax, her magic sex power is turning into magic love power, which is again a nice thing; but Richard, in his role as stand-in for the audience, is justifiably paranoid that as soon as he gets involved, letting his guard down and all you see, it will turn back into sex magic, and there he’ll be, trapped in the middle of yet another deus ex orgica. And she gets all pissed off because he doesn’t trust her to know what her magic is like, even though she actually hasn’t for books on end and also never got mad about any of the abuse, but apparently this is where the line is. So, anyway, still in his stand-in for the audience role, she lets him have it for not being willing to accept her for who she is, multiple live-in boyfriends, powerful sex magic and all. And the so-thinly veiled goal of this is to say, look audience-as-Richard, Anita has done nothing wrong and she’s a good person and you should maybe stop judging her so harshly now that I’ve done my part by at least remembering that the plot should exist as more than atrophied connective tissue for my sex magic scenes. So, give a working girl a break, huh? And at first I was pissed off in the way that people get when they’re going to be ashamed but they’re not ready to embrace that yet. Except, no, wait, I realized: I was never annoyed with Anita for being immoral, the way Richard-not-quite-as-audience-like-as-he-thought would have me believe of myself. I always would have been more okay with her if she had embraced her sex magic right off the bat instead of being so negative about it herself for so long. No, what bothered me was that the writing was so clearly designed to justify her shift from mystery-solving necromancer to… well, whatever she is now, when the fact is, it shouldn’t have needed justification in the first place. So for Anita-as-author to justify it to Richard-as-audience now, and try to excuse hundreds of pages of truly awful prose in the same gesture?

I guess I had a little bit more than one paragraph’s worth of anger after all! Which, in a mistaken way that I simultaneously acknowledge and disregard, makes me feel better about the book after all.

[1] A pun that, I assure you, I never grow tired of.
[2] Seriously, who am I really fooling here? This must be what Stockholm Syndrome feels like.
[3] Which should also be a thing in my complaints list all by itself[4], but I’ve pretty much just accepted that metaphysical confrontation is Hamilton’s shorthand for mixing relationship drama with plot drama and moved on, because at least it’s better than all the sex-as-plot that had previously been going on.
[4] While I’m speaking of stuff I forgot to complain about, Jesus, the repetition. I mean, yeah, plot repetition too, and I know I’ve said this in previous reviews, but how can you write, again and again and again, ‘He was wondering why I did that.’ “You’re wondering why I did that, aren’t you?” He looked ashamed, but nodded. “I was wondering why, actually.” “Here’s why I did that:” …and so on. And, okay, as offended as I am by my question above, a better question is, how can you fail to edit that out, again and again and again? Jesus!

Naamah’s Kiss

Jacqueline Carey returns to the world of Terre d’Ange in Naamah’s Kiss, set a century after the events of her previous books. The magically modified historical Europe has progressed into the 16th Century, with tales of a new world away west across the sea, but not-France seems content to rest upon her laurels as a center of love and decadence. Into this more superficial version of a country already obsessed with beauty and fame is thrust Moirin, a half-Alban[1] girl with a capital-d Destiny, descended from the same magical small folk that gave Prince Imriel such trouble during the previous trilogy. Of course, as the other half of her descent is a d’Angeline priest of Naamah, the goddess of Love, it can be no surprise that her parentage and uncivilized mien make her an instant success. Unfortunately, she spends the first two thirds of the book on that, laying groundwork for events in future unwritten books before actually engaging in the plot of this one.

On the bright side, once that plot gets a move on, it’s really quite pleasant, racing to the far corner of the world to rescue a not-Chinese princess from a demon. If you can leave aside the iffy pacing, the book has a lot of things to like. A circle of demon-summoners, ancient Ch’in wisdom, cliff-diving, an implausible amount of lipstick lesbianism, chases, escapes, true love… y’know. Stuff a sick kid would want his grandfather to read to him. But, okay, even if it’s clearly not that funny, it did feel like something out of a storybook. If that sounds ridiculous, take it as me having accepted the characters that thoroughly, by the end. Pacing issues or not, I care about these characters and want to know what happens to them next.

[1] not-England, don’t you know

The Wayfarer Redemption

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Imagine you are a teenager, maybe just starting college. And you’ve been raised in the traditional American Christian mindset, the one that is so generic and ubiquitous that if you tried to imagine a painting of it, we’d have more or less the same painting in mind. But you’re at college now, away from your old life and on your own for really the first time. And your roommate is a Wiccan, and after you get over the exotic amusement, you start talking a lot, and damned if the Wiccan isn’t saying a lot of stuff you’re interested in. A few minutes later[1], bam, you have a full-blown conversion experience, you love Mother Gaia, you worship in the moonlight in the center of the quad, and you’re certainly naked when you do it. You hug trees, not to conform to a filthy hippy stereotype so much as because you genuinely feel connected to each and every one of them. This is for reals the best experience of your life, and it’s aggravating how people are rolling their eyes at you and trying to get you to chill out with all the “We are one” talk, and even your Wiccan roommate feels like you’ve gone overboard.

Okay. Got it?

That person, I think, is who wrote The Wayfarer Redemption. About a thousand years ago, humans got proselytized into cutting down all the trees and plowing the world into flat and perfect order, because the people who hang out in the trees with little horns on their heads and the ones who hang out in the mountains with wings are evil and in fact Forbidden and need to be kept away from humans, and cutting down all their trees is a good way to go about it. Except now there are frozen ghost dudes and a monster-guy named Gorgrael leading them, and there’s a prophecy that says a lot of people have to do a lot of things, like throwing off the shackles of their oppressive religion and teaming up with the Forbiddens, learning to love trees and talk to stags and embrace the Mother[2] and also find each other terribly attractive and fall in love on pretty much that basis alone. It’s fairly generic fantasy pulp that is mostly saved by the bad guys being somewhat cool. On the downside, the writing is iffy and feels like a first book, in that there’s way too much telling about peoples’ motivations instead of showing. Both plot and writing improved as the story progressed, though I’m not sure it got enough better to carry a trilogy.[3] I most likely would not have finished it, except it was recommended to me and I felt the obligation. Still, it was getting better instead of worse, so there’s every chance I’ll read the next one.

[1] Or maybe a few weeks? Things change fast in college, it could be either one.
[2] Sadly, not a euphemism.
[3] P.S. This is the first book of a trilogy.

Lost and Delirious

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MV5BMjYzMDk0NDEzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzQzNTcxMTE@._V1__SX1217_SY887_My latest Netflix movie is Lost and Delirious. And I’ve watched it, which was a positive experience. Yet I have been staring at this mostly blank screen for the majority of the day. I think it’s that my opinions are too many and too contradictory. In short, the chick from The O.C. is sent to an all-female boarding school, where she becomes roommate with a pair of seniors, one hard-nosed and feminist, the other vivaciously popular. At first, it looks like one of those coming-out-of-the-shell stories in which Mischa Barton would have been the main character embarking on her journey toward personhood. Then, at the end of the first act, it veers sharply into one of those obsession thrillers in which our purported main character mostly serves as the audience’s window on the action when it is revealed that her roommates are engaged in a sexual relationship.

And I think it could have made a fine obsession thriller too, except that it couldn’t make up its mind to commit to that. For every scene in which a new boyfriend is about to die in a sword fight and simply isn’t taking it seriously enough yet, there are three in which someone screams and runs out of a room / across the school lawn. And it’s not like that’s unrealistic high school obsessive behavior; it’s that the swords and the pet falcon are, and after it was hinted that I might get that movie, it became the one I wanted. Still, what was left behind was good stuff. Surprisingly good acting from a variety of very young actresses, modernly relevant sociosexual politics, not terribly many overwrought or thematically pushy scenes. And, y’know, sword fights.

Kushiel’s Mercy

51f-tlefrqLIt’s those books where alternate-history Renaissance France is full of beautiful people who have the very best sex in all of alternate-history Europe, while traveling the world in search of adventures and things! At its best, Carey’s Terre d’Ange series takes the Eddingsian exploratory motif and tosses it with liberally applied political intrigue and a dash of romance, to the general good. (Plus, some light and occasionally not-so-light bondage wanders across the page. Y’know.) At its worst, you have Kushiel’s Mercy, which is really not that bad of a worst, if I didn’t have five other books to compare it to.

The political and (increasingly more frequent) magical plots are pretty great; unfortunately, the less spoiled about them, the better[1], so I can’t really elaborate. But where I would normally expect to see yet more exploration of alternate Europe and environs, most of first-person narrator Imriel’s focus is on the survival of his relationship with Princess Sidonie. Which is really just too many reflections about how dire things are and how certain he is to overcome them nevertheless, especially when you consider that he’s still traveling to three new locations over the course of the book. On a more subjective note, I had a problem with a mid-book twist in which the consistent first-person narration was broken via the introduction of a new-to-the-series character. Upon reflection, I should ought to be glad to have let Imriel’s focus take a rest, but it was just too jarring of a shift.

In the end, it’s as I said before. I was looking for a fantasy travelogue with a little romance, and I got a romance novel with a bit of travel thrown in. It was still a good book, just not quite as good as what I wanted. Mostly, it has made me want to pick up one of my unread Dave Duncan serieses.

[1] But check this out: the jacket didn’t spoil it either, which is awesome both for itself and for the unusualness of the event.

Låt den rätte komma in

This weekend, it has been all about the subtitles. After rolling out of work a little early on Wednesday, I fought traffic and a driving blizzard to get to the Angelika in time for Let the Right One In. Plausibly, there was no snow of any kind until the movie started; it’s hard to remember? In any event, there was plenty of snow to be had from the moment the credits rolled. And not just because the movie was set in Sweden, which presumedly is not locked in winter ice twelve months of the year.

Oskar is a bullied 12 year old boy and child of divorce, alone in his apartment most of the time, wishing for the courage to stop his oppressors, and already visibly embittering at his inability to do it. Into that unchanging snowscape arrives a man and a young girl, Eli, who have moved in next door. While Eli and Oskar begin to learn about each other and fumble toward friendship, the man is wandering the woods with his serial-killing kit, draining blood from his victims. Oskar’s new friend will turn out to be far more than she seems, and Oskar’s wishes may not be the boons he had always assumed they would. But then again, maybe they’ll be exactly what he wanted.

It was a very quiet movie, light on dialogue in most of the scenes, and I almost think that the ubiquitous snow and cold were characters in their own rights. Symbolically, I mean, as emblems of that quiet, and of the inner coldness of so many of the characters. There was a lot of beauty in that austere trackless white and cold, and, despite everything, in Eli as well. I said to Nicole that the movie was beautiful and tragic, and it was tragic; but it strikes me that it could have been merely tawdry and pitiful without that abundance of austere beauty. I think this marks the first time that I could see why someone would actively buy into that whole vampire obsession that’s so solidly in vogue these days. I’m not sure if it was the cinematography, the acting, or the script, but Eli was downright magnetic in every frame of film, no matter how innocent or brutal the scene.

It’s hard to really explain why I’m still so drawn in by the memory of the movie without going spoiler all over the place. But my estimation of it has only gone upward in the subsequent days, and I’d run off to watch it again upon pretty much anyone’s request. I really am impressed.

Kushiel’s Justice

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Something more than a year went by after I read Kushiel’s Scion, mostly because I read it so close to publication and that’s the approximate schedule for these books, before I found Kushiel’s Justice in the used bookstore. It had no cover, which has been a constant source of annoyance since; and in fact, if I’d known I would wait this damn long to actually read it, I would have left that copy sitting on the shelf. In further fact, while reading this one I learned that a friend was slightly further into the third one than I was into the second. Which was a little bit embarrassing, but I at least avoided big-huge spoilers, so yay! Anyway, though, I actually did read it, so you may be expecting a review?

Now that he’s home from college, Imriel is forced to face the truth that sent him fleeing to alternate-Italy in the first place: he’s in love with the heir to Terre d’Ange’s throne. Which doesn’t sound so bad, as he’s a prince of the realm himself, and in any event the only law laid down by their god, Elua, is “Love as thou wilt.” Things are always a little more complicated than that for Carey’s characters, though: Imriel’s birth parents (one of whom yet lives in hidden exile) hatched a plot before he was born to steal the throne for him outright. So naturally, there are a number of people who would not look kindly on his winning it through marriage.

So he and Princess Sidonie keep their infatuation secret and do their best to quell it, now that Imriel has been promised in a political marriage to an Alban princess (alternate-England, that is). This seems like the right thing to do, except that in being sensible, are they violating that self-same lone law to which they should be bound? The rest of the book is an examination of the repercussions of love, future foreknowledge, and bloody revenge, with more focus on Alba than has been provided in previous books, as well as new travels across northern alternate-Europe. It runs slow at the beginning, but I devoured the second half of the book around work in two short days: the moment past which stopping is impossible came barely halfway in, which is a pretty neat trick.

One spoiler after the cut. Continue reading →