-Another LKH book of some sort.
-...I could start the Left Behind series over from scratch and chapter-by-chapter it. And explain in detail why Jerry B Jenkins and Tim LaHaye's theology sucks eggs from a Christian perspective (Seriously. JBJ and TLH are to Christianity what homoeopathy is to real medicine. There are no words for how very, very deeply I hate that series).
-That Hideous Streingth. On the one side, this is one of my favorite books of all time. On the other side, it is apparently one of the most hated science fiction books of all time, and as I mentioned earlier the only homosexual in the entire novel is a sadistic nazi-esque lesbian, whose sole contribution to the entire book is the torture of a housewife. So it is problematic to say the least. I will have to explain why I like it without defending the creation of Fairy Hardcastle. The other downside is that it really is dryer than stale toast.
-Eternal Prey--Again. It's a novel about vampires and the Mayan prophesy-that-wasn't, and it involves shapeshifters who are really men posessed by the ghosts of dead dinosaurs. The male lead is an oversized veloceraptor. It also has a Bella Swan clone in it.
OR: Your recommendations. Come, my loyal blog readers. Let us discuss this in great detail.
Right. On to the shitty book.
O'Brien AKA Natural Punk Cop has to be my favorite character in the book so far. She's got a spine, she's female, she's not sexualized and she told Anita Blake to go fuck herself. So naturally this chapter is going to tear her down into itty bitty pieces.
Namely, she doesn't want to let Zerbowski and Anita interrogate the Aryan Terrorist. His name is Hienrick, but I don't want to use that because it's a brand of halfway decent gin.
Anita smiles and tells O'Brien that now that Heinrick is a suspect in a supernatural crime, he belongs to Anita now, so there.
O'Brien pretends to be obtuse about this. In the process she points out to Zerbowski that they could probably figure out how many people are in the tub by counting body parts. It might not reduce the potential number but if you've got more than one head and three or four pinky toes, having just one victim is kind of off the table.
O'Brien gets pissed because it's her case and Anita is taking it over. Blatantly:
“Actually, O’Brien, it’s everybody’s case now. Mine, because federal law gives me the jurisdiction. Zerbrowski, because it’s a preternatural case, and that means it belongs to the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team. Truthfully, you have no jurisdiction on the murders. They didn’t happen on your turf, and you wouldn’t even have known that Heinrick was involved if we hadn’t shared information so freely with you.”
And then she loses all her coolness by revealing that all she cares about is whose name is in the papers. Because OF COURSE SHE DOES. Having a cool character who is not (a. Anita and (b. a moral vacuum without even a trace of restraint, yeah, that's WAY too hard to write.
Then Zerbowski shows her the photos of the crime scene, and O'Brien has to fight vicious nausea. And in the hands of a better writer this would be a good scene. It would be an asshole realizing that they're being an asshole over the ripped up bodies of several dead people. But because this is LKH, this scene is all about breaking and devaluing, hell, I'd go as far as to say de-empowering, a character who has proven in her only other scene to be much fucking better than Anita. It's not about doing the right thing. It's about a dominance play. It's about proving that Anita has a bigger imaginary penis.
Also, somehow we've figured out that the rapist is a man named Van Anders. Apparently Bradly Bradford slipped Anita a really big file or something. Nice of him to solve the case for her.
Oh, and because I haven't done this in a while:
Empowered female character. Requires male bad-ass to solve entire case for her in the space of one conversation.
Chapter ends with Anita walking into the interrogation room. Because it was MUCH more important to break the other strong female castmates than it was to, you know, actually solve the fucking case.
I hate this book.
Left Behind - Already being shredded in detail by Fred Clark (Slacktivist) and a few other bloggers. Don't get me wrong, the Left behind series deserves all the shredding it gets, but yours might get lost in the crowd.
ReplyDeleteThat Hideous Strength - Maybe. It sounds interesting, but for some reason the idea of sporking this one just leaves me kind of cold. Maybe it's because even by the standards of his time Lewis was already out of touch with a lot of the world, and sporking his stuff just seems like picking on someone's senile great-grandfather.
Eternal Prey - Wha... This... May have promise?
Back to LKH:
How do they know there are bodies in the crime scene? No, really. There's blood splashed everywhere over the main room, which means the victims were pretty much drained of blood. And there isn't really a lot of blood in the human body. The bathtub is overflowing with gore, splashing out onto the floor deep enough to create a flooding problem (And WHY are they walking in it!? How stupid are these people!?), which means the bodies had to have been completely pulped, bones and all. This mess is not recognizable as human corpses without a chemical analysis. It's a tub full of gritty pinkish-grey pulp with hair floating in it and broken teeth at the bottom.
It really is one of the craziest books I ever read.
DeleteOH BUT I FORGOT! My stepfather actually paid money for an Ann Rice werewolf book.
It's bad. It's really bad. It's like HOW IS THIS WOMAN STILL PUB...right she and LKH make the same baskets of money. And they have the same no-editing clause in their contracts because Ego. So let's put that on the list too.
Is it The Wolf Gift? I actually checked that out from the library just out of curiosity but I haven't read it yet. Either way, I vote for that! And if not that, another LKH one is my second choice, my third choice being DUDES POSSESSED BY DINOSAUR GHOSTS.
DeleteYep. It's the Wolf Gift. I've been opening it to random places and the sentences make me cringe. IDK how good the plot itself is--from what I've skimmed, it's basically every super hero origin story ever, only it's werewolves and not radioactive whatsis--but the sentences are like WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK how is this a pro book.
DeleteOf course, it's the woman who wrote this lovely rant which I read whenever I need to feel better about my writing skills. I might not be pro, but at least my head isn't so far up my own ass re: my writing skills that they have to truck light in.
More LKH!
ReplyDelete