This is unique. South Texas gets rain when the weather changes, or when we get hit by a hurricane. And the drought so far this year has been bad enough for us to start side-eyeing anything smaller than a Cat 3 like a co-dependant bar fly. We know it'd be bad for us, but all that rain...but we've gotten two rather nice storms in two weeks.
The bad news is, we've already stressed this small town's power grid, so a storm means the power goes bye bye for hours. Hence, no blog post.
So where were we?
Chapter twenty. Ruben is going to go hunt himself a mountain lion. I guess he got sick of bob cat.
I'm also halfway through the book, and it has no plot. "Ruben finds a fuck buddy" and "Ruben eats wild animals instead of humans" are not plots. We technically did have a plot for the first third of the book: Ruben turns into werewolf, becomes superhero by killing people horribly, and then investigates and destroys kidnappers, rescuing children and (INSERT MAJOR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT HERE)" And it was technically a well-built plot, because mentions of the kids started cropping up immediately after Ruben came down with his case of werewolf.
Now? Fuck plot, it's much more interesting to watch Ruben eat protected species.
Oh, and the mountain lion is a mommy.
Ruben is still supposed to be the good guy. Now, in his defense (gag) he does have a reason for it: The lion ate Leroy's dog. So now he eats the lion and everything is okay? Maybe?
He kills the lion. And eats it. And...this happens.
Now, one of the fun parts of Kindle books is discovering what everybody else highlights. So far this book has been devoid of "EVERYBODY LOVES THIS PASSAGE" underlines. This is no longer true.
A flame burned in him, a faith that a comprehending Power existed, animating all this that it had created, and sustaining it with a love beyond anything that he, Reuben, could imagine.*Sigh* yeah. When I started doing this book several people told me "Oh, wasn't she a catholic for a little while? And she became un-catholic again?"
Re-read that passage. She's still a believer.
He prayed for this to be so. He wondered if, somehow, the whole forest was not praying for this, and it seemed to him then that all the biological world was alive with prayer, with reaching, with hope.Statements of faith are less powerful when you throw random sciency words in there. But there is one part I do like:
What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?In another book, with another author, and a character that wasn't a total ass, that'd be a good sentence. Ruben doesn't have a drive to survive, though. He's a very rich, very white, inexplicably popular and well respected asshole mascarading as a young man smashing his way through people, both of the bad type and of the female type, because he believes the fact that he has money and has this power justifies him doing whatever the fuck he wants.
Peter Parker lived in a shit apartment working shit jobs for shit pay because he believed doing the right thing was more important than his personal profit.
Peter Parker would beat Ruben's ass into the ground.
Anne Rice waxes poetic about the language of thought while Ruben watches the now orphaned mountain lion kittens look for their mommy. Who he just ate. He's kind though. He tells the mountain lion that she fought well and then dumps the body in front of the kittens.
Well, he's not boiling them in mommy's milk, so technically he hasn't violated anything Biblical. Except "Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder" "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery."
You know. The basics.
And then he hears Laura screaming and brandishing the axe that he brought into the house several chapters ago, and he runs to her rescue, and the chapter ends.
Yep, we're ass-pulling the next villian now, aren't we?
" Ruben watches the now orphaned mountain lion kittens look for their mommy. Who he just ate. He's kind though. He tells the mountain lion that she fought well and then dumps the body in front of the kittens."
ReplyDeleteCalled it. He's a C-list supervillain.
I think that'd be an upgrade. C-listers actually do things.
DeleteCouldn't he at least kill the kittens straight out instead of leaving them to starve and or be picked off by predators? If anything is innocent in this world, kittens (even mountain lion ones), have got to qualify.
ReplyDeleteI really would like to understand the mindset where "Good Guy Behavior"=KILLING A MOTHER WHATEVER IN FRONT OF HER INFANTS AND THEN DUMPING THE BODY RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM SO THEY CAN NUZZLE IT.
DeleteGoing off thinking "Oh, there's a Power of Love fueling the world and I am a part of it!" is just icing on the psychopath.
From what I know, Anne Rice still believes in God but not in the Catholic Church. Which is cool in itself. What's not cool is she's a heavy-handed ass about it in her writing and is selling Reuben of all people as good in any way and as a person whose perspective on faith and God and such would be worth listening to.
ReplyDeleteAlso, killing that mountain lion...aside from it just being cruel, the meat of carnivores isn't very good or good for you, from what I hear. That's why, I think, most people didn't (as far as I know) eat things like wolves and cougars even back in the day before they were protected (I think I remember reading something where they ate some bear, though?)
I think Bear is special because it's an omnivore, and it's more partial to nuts and fruit and berries than other things.
DeleteEmphasis on *think*. My full knowledge of bear-for eating comes from the scene in Prince Caspian (which did not, sadly, make it into the movie) where the kids and the dwarf kill a (NON TALKING!) bear and discover that it was the "good" kind of bear that only ate fruit and thus was good for eating, as opposed to the bad that ate a lot of other animals.
I think I could deal with the heavy-handed attempts at religious alligory if it were ANY OTHER MAIN CHARACTER. As it is, I just want him to die now.