tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post8859083058141097661..comments2024-01-09T18:40:53.465-08:00Comments on Ramblings of a Creative Double Dipper: Narcissus in Chains--chapter 20Christwriterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17590823821715820817noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-70236051759090098212014-12-26T00:13:06.910-08:002014-12-26T00:13:06.910-08:00"It’s legend among the leopards that you can ..."It’s legend among the leopards that you can find your perfect mate, and from the first moment you have sex you’re bound, more than marriage, more than law. We will always crave each other. Our souls will always call to each other." <br /><br />So...so it's like love at first sight then? But more powerful? More absolute? Like...gravity moves?<br /><br />Oh HELL no. Not this. Not this, of all the sexual fuckery in this book....fuck. <br /><br />This is shit, just so you know. Just from that one quote I'd have hated the book, even if I knew nothing else about it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-25927781817093818122012-12-24T12:44:18.400-08:002012-12-24T12:44:18.400-08:00Crunchy here!
A terrible, terrible past definitel...Crunchy here!<br /><br />A terrible, terrible past definitely isn't an excuse for being terrible in the present but it <i>could</i> be a compelling character motivation, especially since it holds true to life. (This is not to say that people who do terrible, terrible things all had a horrible past or ought to be excused for their current crimes/behavior if they had such a past.) Admittedly, the time that I saw this excuse used compellingly, it was used by a serial killer's defense attorney. Arguably, a defense attorney's entire job is to be compelling and make a truly unlikeable client at least somewhat sympathetic. (It worked too. I wanted the attorney's client to go to jail forever and never, ever see the possibility of parole but at the same time, I understood how the client had been ruined by his early life.)<br /><br />The thing is, LKH doesn't write JC's long, sad past even half as compellingly as that small town defense attorney wrote his client's short, sad past <i>in a few sparse sentences</i>. JC's speech doesn't make him sympathetic to the reader, especially since it left my teenage self with the impression that his incubus/succubus powers were a magical STI that he'd deliberately hidden from his sexual partner(s).<br /><br />But JC <i>could have been</i> a compelling if reprehensible character, despite the slut-shaming and general 'my life was harder' speech, just like Anita <i>could have</i> evolved into a likeable character. (Even as a teenager, I preferred the legions of secondary/tertiary characters to the main character. I just wanted Anita to go away.)<br /><br />But then, JC is billed as a cunning Machiavellian manipulator, especially after his debut in the first book, but if a reader truly considers his purpose in the plots, JC isn't any such thing. And the same thing holds true with Edward. Like JC and Anita herself, Edward doesn't live up to billing. Worse, like Anita herself, Edward appears in several plots/scenes that would've been stronger without him. (I've always liked Edward! It is a sad, sad thing when a fan of a character can say that entire scenes/books would've been better without him in them.) And, well, pacing has never really been a strong suit of the series. But these are all long-running narrative flaws that span the length of LKH's work.<br /><br />The reason that this book can't rise above them the way that previous books did, however, is that it doesn't have the same driving plot that the other books had. The plot is supposed to be that Anita gets a wonderful new boyfriend, falls in love with said boyfriend, and is betrayed by the new boyfriend who works for the secret big bad. Anita is supposed to kill the main villain, the boyfriend, and all the merry minions at the book's climax. (Overlook the fact that Anita was <i>never</i> supposed to have called the police in the original narrative structure. For a law bringer/enforcer character, she's crap at her purpose.)<br /><br />But LKH writes Micah.<br /><br />And then LKH can't/won't bring herself to follow the plot. She can't/won't let go of Richard and Jean-Claude. She can't/won't let Anita kill Micah. And she can't/won't let Anita farm Micah's death out to Edward, the one time that Anita's bringing Edward in to do something for her <i>would have made sense.</i><br /><br />So instead of an actual plot the reader gets several hundred pages of flailing, the nastiest STD in the history of trashy vampire novels, and a series of actions/reactions that make no sense because LKH is forcing her story out of the original narrative shape that she set down for it. But LKH refuses to scrap the novel and start over. And someone was apparently foolish enough to look at this manuscript and publish it as-is.<br /><br />I was right when I was seventeen. NiC is just one, long mistake... but not in the way that I thought it was.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-27294006849518114152012-12-24T10:00:33.698-08:002012-12-24T10:00:33.698-08:00Glad to have you.
I think JC's angsty info-du...Glad to have you.<br /><br />I think JC's angsty info-dump is still there, I just didn't want to touch it. Having a terrible past is a terrible thing, but it's not an excuse for passing your old misery on to others. And that's what JC does there. My bullshit endurance died about the time he started using Anita's OWN RAPE to slut-shame her into using condoms. I couldn't handle his "but it happened to me worse than you!" speech. <br /><br />I've yet to find any entertainment value in this book. At all. And I don't mean that the rape shit turns me off. I mean that the STRUCTURE of this book is wrong. No pacing, no plot, the cast is ballooning by the minute, long established facts are retconned beyond recognition. This is all why I quit reading the first time, I think. <br /><br />And I don't want Edward in the narrative. Then the nasty spooge flying around would hit him, too. :(Christwriterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17590823821715820817noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-66982776102370189392012-12-24T03:07:12.802-08:002012-12-24T03:07:12.802-08:00Okay, so I stumbled across your book-floggery via ...Okay, so I stumbled across your book-floggery via the LKH_Lashouts page and then read all of your NiC posts in very quick order. ^_^ And, since LJ/OpenID sign-in is being hateful, I'll be Anonymous. But call me Crunchy.<br /><br />So, here's the thing: I read the original hardcover of this book in the bookstore. I actually stopped reading the series during a scene in the next book where Asher is clawing at the bedroom door and begging not to be sexed up by Anita.<br /><br />This book creeped me the fuck out, even when I was a teenager. At the time, though, I labelled NiC as a mistake, a hole that Anita would have to dig herself out of, and possibly a transition book.<br /><br />(Then I promptly gave the series up as lost halfway through the next book, during the Asher-gets-raped scene. JC told Anita that he wanted to take Asher as his other long-term lover and Anita could either accept it or break up with him, because Asher was a non-negotiable to JC. Naturally, Anita chose the third option: to flip out at JC and rape Asher (who very emphatically didn't want to have sex with Anita.) Anita frames raping Asher as <i>being romantic and <b>done for Asher's own good.</b> And the out-of-town vampires might be mean to him! And it doesn't <b>really</b> count as rape since Asher ends up participating and orgasming. And it's not <b>really</b> sex since there was no penile-penetration!</i><br /><br />...Take a moment to retch and seethe. Then note that the seeds for Asher's rape are all in this book, in the last few chapters.)<br /><br />The problem with this entire series is that LKH has many good idea-germs but her execution always leaves something to be desired.<br /><br />Jean-Claude, for instance, could be a compelling (NOT moral or good) character in this novel if his blase-ness toward rape/sexpiring and general 'what the hell is your problem, Anita?' attitude were portrayed as either:<br /><br />1.) Cunning Machavellian scheming designed to break Anita and make her his tool, or<br /><br />2.) He's <i>really</i> screwed up and not yet dealing with the events of his, uh, life. (Un-life? Sexual slavery? All of the above?) Centuries of abuse would warp anyone. (And, since this is the LKH universe, there was probably a lot of it.)<br /><br />But the problem with that second option is that it sounds like the version that you're reading excised JC's info-dump about the misery of being an incubus. (Ideally, this info would have been threaded throughout the previous books as ominous bits of info about JC but I'll take what I can get.)<br /><br />But, since JC seems to have no driving force of his own, he's left being unsympathetic and reprehensible.<br /><br />And then there's poor Elizabeth who I liked for not automatically falling in line with the Anita-parade. Also, I liked her because she seemed to dislike ALL of the other leopards, save the old boss-leopard. And she didn't even seem to always like him.<br /><br />Anita was always a rude bully and a psychopath but in this novel she actually finds a line to cross so that she can become just as awful as the things she gets paid to kill.<br /><br />...Where's Edward when you actually want him in the narrative?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-4037892157759508662012-12-23T18:19:15.884-08:002012-12-23T18:19:15.884-08:00Quoted for truth:
"Staring down at her, I r...<br /><br />Quoted for truth: <br /><br />"Staring down at her, I realized something I hadn’t before. Elizabeth wanted me to kill her. She wanted me to send her to wherever Gabriel was. She probably didn’t realize that’s what she wanted, but if it wasn’t a death wish, it was close enough."<br /><br />Right there in black and white: justification for murder. They really, really wanted it. Christwriterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17590823821715820817noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-40016025169154165712012-12-23T18:04:46.279-08:002012-12-23T18:04:46.279-08:00Anita is more powerful than *any* supernatural cre...Anita is more powerful than *any* supernatural creature she's faced so far, IMHO. Every time she goes up against a bad guy she gains yet another power that makes her victory easy. And then she does stupid bullshit that creates half of her own problems. Stupidity is not empowering. <br /><br />I think that's what pisses me off the most about LKH. She has access to editors and resources most <i>published</i> authors can't get, and she's refused to use them. Somebody tells her no, she simply jumps publishers from one that (obviously) cares about what it publishes to one that doesn't.<br /><br />And anybody who could value the bullshit in this book is a legitimately terrible person. Termites in their smile level awful. <br /><br />Re: the books...thanks. :D I hope it does too. I am SO self conscious about it, OBVIOUSLY. So far the trip has been...ah...bizzare and fun to say the least. We'll see what happens next year.Christwriterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17590823821715820817noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-65243238383451211852012-12-23T15:24:50.678-08:002012-12-23T15:24:50.678-08:00This book makes me scream with rage inside wheneve...This book makes me scream with rage inside whenever someone tries to make the argument that Anita just has to be so tough because she's a human dealing with a group of paranormal creatures much stronger, faster, etc than herself. No she doesn't. She's a sociopath who gets off on bullying others. Shooting Elizabeth was a terrible solution. She created an enemy and left her at her back all for the sake of the satisfaction of creating a grandiose gesture. This is an example that LKH has no concept how teamwork and leadership really works.<br /><br />This book is infamous in certain circles for how LKH came to leave her original agent and publishers around the time of its publication. Many people say her original publishers flat out refused to publish it and LKH severed her relationship with them and signed with Penguin only with the promise that they would publish NiC as she had written it. The attitudes about rape, sex, violence, women, relationships and politics are obviously something that were very important to her. The fact that she gained a lot of new readers that appeared to relish the supposed erotic content seemed to fuel her sence that she was on a mission. Of course, many of her older readers were appalled, as were others that quickly saw with each succeeding book that she keep adding more and more preposterous levels of sexual content and pseudo gender/sexual politics that degenerated to little more than pissing contests with any one that disagreed with her that she had lost the plot and possibly her mind.<br /><br />I couldn't find an email tab any where on your site I am just throwing this on the bottom. I read Starbleached last night and Blue Ghosts this afternoon. I think you do yourself a disservice by saying that you don't write on the level of some of the authors that you mentioned when you began this adventure in dissecting NiC. You caught my attention well enough that I bought the rest of the catalogue that you have for sale on Amazon. I didn't notice that Tales of a Winterlord was in Silver Bullet so now I am the proud owner of two copies of that title on my iPad. You certainly have a voice and a genuine talent for storytelling. Hope 2013 brings you continued success.julainehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05645546396765308756noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3350096535937978369.post-70637735942843933792012-12-23T14:53:31.951-08:002012-12-23T14:53:31.951-08:00"For a vampire hunter with a kill count longe..."For a vampire hunter with a kill count longer than most rap sheets, Anita sure doesn't do much."<br /><br />For real. She brings up sooo much in Skin Trade what a stone-cold executioner she is, how she's an assassin, how many kills she has...and then she kills a total of NOBODY in the book. She doesn't even make a wound on anyone.<br /><br />"If Anita were a man, everybody would be screaming "chauvinist" at her."<br /><br />I scream "chauvinist!" at her all the damn time anyway. She's misogynistic as fuck, and this extends to traits seen as feminine being seen as lesser, femininity equated with weakness, and so on--hence how Nathaniel, who is submissive and weak, must therefore be 'feminine' and ends up making biscuits and cleaning house and wearing pearls and being Anita's 'wife'. Likewise, she mindwipes/rapes a guy in Flirt and he becomes her 'Bride', another feminine term. Because being owned by someone is for women, so these men are referred to in feminine terms when they are made into objects. It's so fucking creepy. I mean, the being made into objects is creepy enough, but then there's the extra gender-stuff creepiness for good measure.<br /><br />"We’d shared a bed so often that it felt odd when he wasn’t beside me. But I still didn’t see him as a grown-up."<br /><br />...well, she ends up fucking a teenager who is still in high school by the most recent book, with their first time being when he's sixteen, so I'm not surprised by this.<br /><br />Yup, it was Kiss the Dead that she showed up in that outfit in. Because I guess she can't even dress herself anymore. How does she even keep holding a job?! Also, if other women dress like that, they are evil slutty awful people. When Anita does it, it is sexy but not her fault.<br /><br />"Oh, but Anita murdering Elizabeth is alright, because Elizabeth has an unconsious death wish and really, really wants to die. She just doesn't know it. What. The. Fucking. Hell."<br /><br />Whaaaa?<br /><br />she was unarmed. she was doing nothing. nothing makes that okay. ever. at all. good gravy.<br /><br />I CAN'T.RFhttp://a-sporking-rat.livejournal.com/noreply@blogger.com