Cerulean Sins--chapter 22

YAY I HAVE SURVIVED ANOTHER WEEK. I am alive. I can take a nap as soon as this review is done!

...that means this book is standing between me and my post-sunday brunch nap.

I hate this book.

So Anita wakes up in a hot tub, again, surrounded by men. Somebody brought up a few days ago that the blood pressure drop that occurs when you leave a hot tub is not a joke, so technically these books should be short one over-sexed steriotyped heroine. But it is not. Because the first thing you want to do after you've passed out from blood loss and co worker stupidity is have sex in a hot tub.

Also, in addition to having startlingly lime green eyes, Micah has apparently graduated to the Mood Ring category, which is probably up there with naval lint and grease traps on my list of "least favorite things ever". (I had to clean a grease trap out at work once. We all agreed never to speak of it again)

Look. I get that eyes are important. I am an artist. They are the single most important part of any picture. But there is "the eyes are important" and then there is what LKH writes. The only thing you need to do to eyes in a picture is 1. make sure they look wet and 2. never use red. Unless you are painting Satan. And we don't remember eye color as well as we think we do, and while I can tell the difference between the Blood Orange and Prickley Pear purees at work and nobody else can (One is purple, one is red. WHY IS THIS SO HARD) I cannot for the life of me tell green eyes from blue eyes from violet. The best description of blue eyes I ever got was "Faded denim" from Dark Tower re: Roland Deschain's eyes.

"HIS EYES CHANGE COLOR TO FIT HIS MOOD" is less "getting the description right" and more "SHOVING HEAD UP OWN ASS". You need one adjective for eyes, and this is a color. The simpler the better. We have many many many more interesting things to read about than we do the exact shade of emerald chartruse verte greeny green Micah's eyes happen to be when he pairs them with that particular shirt.

Those eyes sat in a face that was beautiful in the way a woman’s face was beautiful. Delicate. There was a line to the jaw, a chin that was male, but gently so. His mouth was wide, with the bottom lip thicker than his upper, giving him a permanent pout.

Yeah. No. I get what she's saying and I kind of like the picture, sort of, as long as I don't actually read the things being written here. But underneath that varnish of "oooh pretty" it's just creepy. First...why is "beauty" feminine? The first time I realized a guy was pretty was Captain Dallas (I think) from Alien, and the prettiest male I ever saw in my life was (and still is) Randy Orton (...DO NOT JUDGE ME. The alternative to WWE RAW is spending three fucking hours of my one night off a week camped out in my room playing minecraft...and yeah, Randy is pretty.) Viggo Mortessen as Aragorn still gives him a run for his money. Anyhoo, you could describe Micah as pretty without dipping into gender here. And then that second sentence. "A line to the jaw and a chin that was male". I think what she means is he had a male jaw-line, but Jesus Christ is that garbled. I get that she's got a no-edit clause on her contracts, but--

--she sent in the first draft of Affliction in and it went straight to copy-edits. Nevermind.

 He was my Nimir-Raj, and from the moment we had been together it had been deeper than marriage, more permanent than anything words or paper could bind.

Isn't the standing anti-fan theory that Micah is the stand-in for her current hubby?

Moving on.

If I have to read the words "my beast" as a stand in for "I wanted to have sex with him" or "I wanted to rip his clothes off" one more time I think I'm going to punch something. Preferably Micah. LKH is using Anita's latent shapeshifting...stuff (really, was it necessary to break your entire universe to give Anita all the things?) as a filter for actual feeling and actual sexuality, so that Anita herself is still purified purely pure and pure. And it is getting old.

And then...yeah, I read ahead a few days back, so I've been like doing this all week:

So even though Anita has been passing out due to blood loss all day, and has only just woken up, she and Micah have sex. And instead of taking whatever migrane/headache type issues Anita might have and turning them up past 9000, it lets Anita into the magical metaphysical world. And in the MMW, there is a shadow-thing feeding off Jean Claude, and Jean Claude's "failsafes" AKA his innate dickishness, kicked in and instead of feeding off Jean Claude the shadow-thing has been feeding off Anita and, she assumes, Richard all day. Which is why Anita has been all fainty.

 So Anita and Micah send their "beasts" to attack the shadow thing. And because my mind is perverted, instead of imagining a pair of beautiful leopards I imagined a pair of boobs and a penis. That's your image for today. You're welcome. The Beasts shred the shadow-thing, thus hand-waving away the hand-waving (...shouldn't that be like, divide by zero kind of impossible?) and Anita follows it--psychically, again--to Musette's room.

You'd think a thousand year old madame of the undead would know how to sheild properly, but I guess not. Anyhoo Shadow-thing goes directly to Musette, thus pointing out its mistress and giving Anita a big fat honking NO SHIT clue as to who is responsible. So she comes out of the psychic orgasm Micah gave her, grabs her cell phone and has one of the staff at the Circus hang crosses on everybody's door.

It's the first time ANYBODY has done something practical, and I half expected her to go racing off with cedar stakes and a bucket of holy water instead of doing the one damn thing she could have done nine million times prior to now.

Having saved herself from psychic vampirism, Anita then moves on to discussing how her sexual vampirism is sucking the life out of Nathanial. Apparently he collapsed at his club while dancing.This conversation gets REALLY creepy when Anita admits that she wouldn't be sleeping with any of these men if she didn't have to feed the arduer. Ardeur. However the fuck you spell it. And she's avoiding getting more men because she doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings if the ardeur ever goes away and she can finally close down the amusement park. Which is her vagina.

I don't know for sure WHY I find that so creepy, but oh holy God I do.

And then we move on to "Would you sleep with Richard again?"

“Micah, I still have feelings for Richard, but he dumped me. He dumped me because I’m more comfortable with the monsters than he is. He dumped me because I’m too blood-thirsty for him. He dumped me because I’m not the person he wants me to be.

HE DUMPED YOU BECAUSE YOU RAPED HIM. YOU RAPED HIM. HE TOLD YOU FLAT OUT HE DIDN'T WANT YOU TO FEED ON HIM AND YOU JUMPED HIM ANYWAY. YOU. RAPED. RICHARD. You proved to him that you have no self control, that you cannot be trusted to respect his bounderies or physical, mental and emotional safety and that you value your promises about as much as I value disposable gloves at work. OF COURSE HE FUCKING DUMPED YOU.

Richard wanted, more than anything else, to be human. He didn’t want to be a monster. He wanted to be a junior high science teacher, marry a nice girl, settle down, have 2.5 children, and maybe a dog. He was a science teacher, but the rest  .  .  . Richard was like me, he would never have a normal life. I had accepted that, but he was still fighting. Fighting to be human, fighting to be ordinary, fighting not to love me. He’d succeeded on that last.

See, that's why I love stories like what this used to be. That fight right there. The struggle to define humanity and personhood and Self when those bounderies get shaken down. A measure of surrender would be required to cope--to quote the serenity prayer "accept the things I cannot change"--but never surrender to the point where other valuable human lives are put at risk because of your behavior. In the first books that was Anita's fight AND Richard's fight. To figure out what they couldn't change and then smash the everloving shit out of the rest of it. But Anita hasn't just accepted to the point of healthy coping. She's wallowing in being a real live, honest to god physical danger to the people around her and she's doing absolutely nothing to protect the people she has in her life from the nasty side effects of who and what she's become.

There's a long paragraph about how "the world is what the world is and you need to accept that" and I call bullshit. The world is a terrible awful nasty place, and the job of good human beings is to try to make it a better one. You don't give up and wallow in the mud just because you can't get out of the muck. You keep on walking.

LKH seems dead set on condemning any attempt at improving the world, and I have no idea why.

There are two fundamental issues in Anita and Richard's relationship. Richard is naturally monogamous--he can't sleep with other people, and he can't share--While Anita is naturally poly, and HELLO MCFLY, Anita raped Richard.

The healthy answer is MOVE THE FUCK ON. Which Anita will never do because apparently she's also got a grade A certification in STALKING.

Like I said before: I hate this book.