Oh, just random violence seasoned by grammatical what the fuck:
MOUNTAIN VIEW CEMETERY, Oakland: giant trees, scattered graves great and small, under the slow relentless rain. In the distance, the ghostly glitter of downtown.
A boy screaming in agony as two others tormented him with knives. Ringleader: just out of prison, wiry, naked arms covered in tattoos, T-shirt wet, transparent, body shivering, drugged up, choked with anger, savoring revenge now on the one who betrayed him, delivering up now to the gods of violence his enemy’s only son.Guys, I like sentence fragments. Fragments are my friend. Fragments give you that nice, compact descriptive swing. When "The knife flashed in the sunlight as he brought it down" ruins the flow of the paragraph (GOD IT HAPPENS) you do something like "The flash of light off steel. The knife came down" or something like it.
BUT THAT IS TWO MOTHERFUCKING PARAGRAPHS OF TEXT WITHOUT A SUBJECT VERBING TO BE FOUND. THE GHOSTLY GLITTER OF DOWNTOWN WHAT? WHAT DID DOWNTOWN DO? Second sentence COULD have had a subject-verb agreement if it weren't for that little "as" in there. And HOLY RUN-ON BATMAN, how do you have a string of words that fucking long and forget to stick a verb or two in there?
Sentence structure is very simple: He did. I do. Or to use the most awesome sentence in Stephen King's back catalogue, "Plums deify!" You may abuse this at your lesure, but if you abuse it too much you wind up with two paragraphs where LITERALLY no one is doing anything.
Not one goddamn sentence in those two paragraphs have one fucking thing to do with each other and please for the love of God take colons away from Anne Rice forever.
And OF COURSE it is a setup so that Ruben has justifiable victims to eat. This is literally like the slasher movies casting that hot promiscuious blond as the first to die so that you don't feel icky about it. RUBEN IS LITERALLY HUNTING AND KILLING PEOPLE IN HORRIBLE WAYS AND THIS BOOK EXPECTS YOU NOT TO CARE.
Next up: he discovers a woman who attempted suicide, drags her off to the nearest nightclub so that she can be rescued, and runs off.
And then he goes back to Laura and the bloodlust goes away, and the writing here actually gets pretty good. There are freeways that vibrate like bowstrings and sunlight and he starts sexing up Laura and OH GOOD HOLY FUCKING GOD ANNE RICE WHY? WHHHHHHYYYYYYY?
In the icy light, he slowly peeled off her tight jeans, secret hair, hair like the hair that covers me, and folded back the flimsy blue fabric of her blouse.
HE JUST COMPARED HIS WOLFY FUR COAT TO HUMAN PUBIC HAIR.
RUBEN'S FUR=PUBIC HAIR.
ANNE RICE JUST TOLD US HER VERY SPECIAL WEREWOLF HAS A PELT OF HUMAN PUBIC HAIR.
He strips her naked and starts licking her all over. I am not even remotely kidding. Note: SHE DOES NOT WAKE UP. Laura is literally an object in this scene. The chapter ends a few sentences later:
Voice of the beast rattling deep in his chest. To have and to have not. Mothers’ milk.
I once read excerpts from a letter written by a crazy woman. She believed that aliens existed (this does not make you crazy) that her boyfriend was a 10,000 year old Atlantian (this does, but he had manipulated her into the idea) that her boyfriend's ex-wife was a shapeshifting reptilian alien queen, that she herself was another one, and that she and the ex-wife had to fight to the death for the fate of humanity. She was in jail for killing the poor woman. Those chunks of her letters? Yeah, they made more sense than this chapter.
And yeah, I'm not going to pretend that this chapter didn't actually end when Ruben compared his fur to pubic hair.
I am sorry, my dears. I'm sorry. I'm so very, very sorry.
PUBIC HAIR. WHY??????
"This is literally like the slasher movies casting that hot promiscuious blond as the first to die so that you don't feel icky about it."
ReplyDeleteWhich as a societal concept deserves its own essay :/
I'm just going to relax and enjoy the nice picture of Hicks there and...snerkRubenthePubeWolfasgkgfHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I think I've got that essay lying around here somewhere as an unpublished post. If nothing else I've got the notes for it sitting on my harddrive somewhere.
DeleteVictim blaming so as to blunt the effect of onscreen deaths on the audience is a favorite pet peeve of mine. It's a storytelling construction thing that is so deeply ingrained in movie making and horror culture, telling a Friday the 13th type story without using social undesirables as the first set of victims is almost impossible. You have to be a GOOD writer interested in telling a GOOD story, and most of the writers who pick by-the-numbers slasher films as a project are lazy as fuck.
Of course the alternative (having good, easy to like cannon fodder) is hard on both the writers and the audience. It's hard on the writers because we don't like writing violence, and using an unlikable character is one way a writer copes with having to work on something nasty (Shitty writing is another. Filter words like "seemed" and the favorite "He saw/looked/turned to see" construction kill active flow and give a writer one more barrier between themselves and what they're working on) If the writer manages to park their own self-protective instinct long enough to get an actual good scene down, the impact on the audience will be devastating. So by "Good writer" I mean one who knows how to balance humor so that the moral reality of what is onscreen isn't blunted, but so that enough emotional pressure gets released so the audience doesn't walk out.
The only thing "better" is making the unlikable villain by-the-numbers evil. Evil doesn't wear a black hat all the time, and when it does, it's that socially acceptable top hat for the black tie party. It gives us the impression that we'll recognize evil the first time we meet it. In reality you're more likely to meet active social dangers (what we usually mean by evil) in a church than a dark alley. So not only do by-the-numbers-slasher films give us a distorted view of victims, they give us a distorted view of killers.
So yeah: favorite pet peeve. One day I'm posting that goddamned essay.
Next up: he discovers a woman who attempted suicide, drags her off to the nearest nightclub so that she can be rescued, and runs off.
ReplyDeleteA nightclub? Manwolf!Reuben ran through the streets, a suicidal woman in tow, until he found a nightclub? So somewhere on YouTube there is shaky smartphone-video of a dude in a bloodstained werewolf costume cutting in line at a nightclub and pushing a terrified woman at the bouncer?
Awesome.
Voice of the beast rattling deep in his chest. To have and to have not. Mothers’ milk.
Not awesome.