Stroke of Midnight 16

What's this? Has a random countdown appeared? Yes. I am committing to a date, and that means lots of energy and work and all sorts of other wonderful things. 

Taking a brief break from Elsie to work on other projects, but I figured we might as well keep LKH going.

WE WAITED FOR THE POLICE TO RETURN TO US AFTER ESCORTING their befuddled colleague away.

We have yet to have a single law enforcement officer see the body of the dead human. We are sixteen chapters into this book.

Meanwhile, we've managed to have a full blown sex scene and a lot of making out. So at least we know where the author's priorities lie.

It was almost as if the chalice didn’t want to leave me alone to solve the murders. The cup pulsed so hard that it made me gasp.

So apparently the cup is a lot like a penis. It's tumescent and it keeps getting in the way of the plot. The cup keeps sending orgasmic little thrills through Merry, and the guards who didn't see the cup are all like "WTF IS WRONG WITH HER" and the ones who did are like "NOTHING TO SEE HERE MOVE ALONG"

Meanwhile, Random Boy Toy A has eyes that are...special.

His eyes were not the three rings of color common among the sidhe, but a spiral painted in lines of color, with his pupil at the heart of the design. As a child I’d once asked him how he could see out of them, and he had smiled and replied that he did not know.

The same way you can see out of a spiral contact lens. In fact, probably better. 'cause his iris can contract and a colored contact can't. Also, I swear to god the first time I read that I went "he has heart shaped pupils" and I threw up in my mouth a little.

Everybody smells apples, and Merry brings the chalice out where everyone can see it, just as if we hadn't spent the last several chapters discussing how ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT it is to keep the goddamn thing hidden. Everybody gasps. Ivy says that they should be making Merry queen and not "playing copper" even though I think he's about three hundred years too old for that slang to come casually. The cup pulsates again. Then this happens:

“You just want to fuck her ,” Dogmaela said, and she made it sound like a dirty thing. An unusual attitude among any fey.

LKH's special brand of slut shaming. It's slutty clothes, unless the main character is wearing them, or its dating multiple men, unless the main character is dating them, and generally any kind of sex at all, unless the main character is having it. It's less double standard and more "I have no self awareness whatsoever, pass the condoms".

I looked up at his face, so carefully arrogant. “Are you saying I should take time out of solving a double homicide to have sex?”

NO. NO YOU SHOULD NOT. SOLVE THE DOUBLE HOMICIDE PLEASE IT WOULD BE SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING.

Everyone talks about how much they want to have sex. And whose desire to have sex is strongest. It's like a philosophical dick measuring contest. Then Amatheon and a couple of the others start down-talking Merry's mortal heritage because Prejudice Allegory, which is now incredibly squicky for me because this series is set in fucking St. Louis. So Merry gives Amatheon a hug, aaaaand we're having sex now.

I stood in the middle of a huge, barren plain. Amatheon was still pressed to my waist, his head buried against my body. I wasn’t certain that he knew anything had changed.

One of the bizzare side-effects of LKH's unwillingness to use either "penis" or "vagina" in her writing is I have no idea if this is actual sex or not. Merry becomes the stand-in for the Goddess again, and starts telling Amatheon that she (the Goddess) has never left them--even though they're making out in the middle of a barren plain, which doesn't exactly scream "Divine Blessings."

I understood then that if one tear felt so good to the land, then other body fluids would feel even better.

You have no idea how much dread this one sentence filled me with. Then it became clear that Amatheon wants to give his blood to the land, and not his semen.

...Dude. The cops are RIGHT THERE. Okay, they're upstairs, but they are here on campus, they'll be back real soon, and you are offering to let your princess take your blood. THIS IS NOT A SMART THING.

And then the Goddess tries to talk Merry into killing Amatheon.

Her voice came from my lips again. “He will not die as men die, but as the corn dies. To rise again, and feed his people.”

He's not motherfucking John Barleycorn. This is a bad idea. This is a very, very, very bad idea.

“But this is not real death. This is vision and dream.

YOU GOT THE FUCKING CUP IN A DREAM DREAMS IN THIS UNIVERSE CAN BE VERY REAL. DO NOT DO THIS THING.

“Will you leave the land barren?” the voice said, out of my mouth.

The bizzare thing about LKH's writing is she keeps having scenes like this, where the heroine knows that there's something wrong with this shit. Merry knows that human sacrifice isn't the smartest thing to do right now. Anita knows it's a bad idea to screw London/Richard/All the wereswans ever because the consent is iffy and it'll probably be a rape. But some higher power--Jean Claude, the Goddess, the MOAD--then talks the main character into it because Laurel K. Hamilton wants this to happen and screw anybody who says "UH HELLO, THERE ARE COPS UPSTAIRS."

And then the Goddess begins chewing Merry out for trying to investigate the murders instead of having sex.

Laurel, this is YOUR PLOT. Do you know what you do when you do not like your plot? THROW IT OUT AND START OVER. YOU are the writer. YOU get to make the plot be what you want it to be. Oh, and by the way? Airing out your issues over your writing IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING BOOK is not a very smart thing to do. You hate plot. Great. Write porn. Admit that you like writing porn and write fucking porn. You will not die. Bolts of lightening will not rain down from heaven and incinerate you. You can be honest with yourself and your audience. It's not gonna hurt you.

But DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT promise us a murder investigation plot a la early Anita and then bitch your character out for trying to follow through with it. If I want a bait and switch I'll go to a mega church during fundraiser week.

“I do not mean Cromm Cruach’s true name, I mean these deaths. They will be reborn, Child. Why do you mourn them so? Even true death is not an ending. Others can find your murderers and clues, but there are duties that only you can perform, Meredith, only you..” “And what exactly would those duties be?” She motioned at Amatheon . “Make my land live.”

WE HAD A PLOT GODDAMN IT. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FUN. WHY ARE YOU TAKING THAT AWAY FROM US.

“He is a willing sacrifice, Meredith . There is no evil here.”

I'd draw connections with "you can't rape the willing" and how utterly fucking stupid both these statements are, but I think I'd get eviscerated.

And then the Goddess sighs happily, because it was all a dream test.

On the one hand, YAY THE POLICE PLOT IS BACK ON THE TABLE.

On the other hand

That means that all of this--the tree shit, the stuff with the cup, the conversation with Amatheon and the Goddess--is a motherfucking non-event, and LKH has, once again, wasted our time.

Meanwhile, it's time for our dose of quasi-pagan pretentiousness! Courtesy of 20+ Kindle Highlighters, here we go:

“I did not stop speaking to my people, they stopped listening to me, and after a time, they could no longer hear my voice. But I never stopped speaking to them. In dreams, or that moment between waking and sleep, there is my voice. In a song, the touch of another’s hand in theirs, I am there. I am Goddess, I am everywhere, and in everything. I cannot leave, nor can you lose me. But you can leave me, and you can turn your back on me.”

Yes, folks. Goddess doesn't leave you, you leave Goddess.

Either LKH is talking about the unnamed Wiccan Lady (which is Oathbound material and not something you can easily find, which shows how seriously Wiccans take their Oathbound shit) in which case DAMN the Wiccan Lady is an awful lot like Protestant Jesus, or she's talking about that general, quasi-Celtic-and-Greek-with-a-pinch-of-Native-Culture, all-encompassing Goddess figure that certain brands of paganism (coughfluffybunnycough) like to embrace. In which case WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. 

Even the Christian God "turns his face away", albeit from really awful bad shit. If you believe in religion than Deity is something that gets to decide shit. And your respective Gods are fully capable of deciding that you've screwed the pooch and they don't want to play anymore. In other words, this is dehumanizing Deity.  

And for the record, NO. "Goddess" is not an all-encompassing figure. Athena is not Diana is not Kali is not Pele is not the Virgin Mary. Grow up.

“Goddess,” he said. Her voice floated to us. “Yes, Child.” “Will I see you again?” Just her voice now, young and old at the same time. “In the face of every woman you meet.” And she was gone.

I need an "Even for Dummies" book because I have forgotten how to Even. I haven't been this flabberghasted since I accidentally watched the 700 Club.

This chapter is not done yet. Why is this chapter not done yet?

He smiled, a quick flash of real humor, that made his face less perfectly handsome, but more real, more precious to my sight. “My honor was never gone, because no one can take your honor from you, not without your letting it go. I was going to say that you have given me back my honor, but I understand now.” I smiled at him. “No one can take your honor, but you can give it away.” The smile wilted around the edges. “Yes. I let fear take my honor from me.”

Ah, because we have to get even more pretension out of the way. Okay. You did it. Can we get back to the plot now?

Right. More sex.

. “I want you to ride me, to press my naked body into the dirt. I want to watch your breasts dance above me. I want to feel your body slipped over mine like a sheath to a sword.

Every time she does this I keep thinking of that (albeit problematic) scene in American Gods where the Indian goddess-figure swallows a man with her vagina. THERE IS A REASON WE HAVE THE WORD PENIS.

I put my finger on his lips and stopped him. “Let’s make the grass grow.”

It's not quite "Ride the Storm" but it'll do.

I sat up and pressed my most intimate parts against his most intimate parts, and even through all our clothes, the sensation was amazing.

What? Did you suddenly forget how a thesaurus works? Did it die? It died, didn't it. You used the poor thing so much that when you finally needed it, it had shriveled up and died. Also, am I the only one having My Immortal-esque flashbacks? "He put his thing into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time."

The chapter ends with them taking off their clothes.

Seduced by Moonlight--chapter 4

Just a reminder, my lovely book-readers, that Starbleached: Legacy is live, and that if you go to Smashwords you can get the first Starbleached free and the rest of the series for half price (Coupons here) until June 11th.

Also: Apparently Nook Press has decided it doesn't want to work at all. I may look at my books but I may not load in new ones. So if you want an e-pub copy either go to Smashwords or wait a week, it'll be up at Barnes and Noble by then (via Smashwords. Where it's half off until June.)

Also a heads up to my blog-readers who are also writers and/or interested in Self Publishing: Publish America, a truly toxic outfit for writers, has just rebranded itself. It's still the same shitty outfit. It still does shit like call itself a traditional, advance offering publisher--which offers a dollar advance on a seven year, self renewing contract--frequently "loses" the letters from authors notifying them that they've got no desire to renew the contract, saying that they'll show your book to everybody from the BEA expo to Hollywood Producers to J.K. Rowling (Actually that entire episode was amusing as fuck. Note to would be shitheads: DO NOT FUCK WITH MS. ROWLING HER LAWYERS WILL HURT YOU) and publishes books with no editing and/or minimal editing (Literally clicking "change all" on MSWord spellcheck, clip art covers with frequently recycled art, and a rotating tredmill of hard-sell e-mails begging authors to buy their own books at horrifically inflated prices. The Absolute Write crew sum it up as Published Author: The Role Playing Game.

They are now America Star Books

Inform your friends.

And yes. YES. I am stalling. Merry is going to make out with Kitto, and I don't want to read this, my dear blog readers.

Merry and Kitto start pawing each other. Fortunately, LKH is going out of her way not to point out that this creature is the size and shape of a small child. Unfortunately, she went out of her way to do just that in the last two books, so the image is still there. Kitto gets into it until Creeda starts shouting "Make him glow!" eagerly. I'm now imagining this chick as the little giggling muppet from Return of the Jedi. You know, the one that sat on Jabba's lap? Kitto, meanwhile, forgets all about this "having sex" thing and huddles into Merry for comfort.

Merry accuses Creeda of raping Kitto. Two sentences later, she makes the most nonsensical statement I ever read in an LKH book, and that's saying a lot.

• "Goblins will rape an enemy, or a prisoner, but they do not rape each other." (Merry) said.

It must be so nice to be clueless in LKH's world. Seriously, you expect a culture that allows for unregulated gang rape to balk at doing it to each other? And instead of addressing that maybe, kind of, sort of, everything about this is fucked up, Kurag starts needling Rhys about his own rape.

Rhys then tops the previous quote of unregulated stupidity by apologizing to his rapist for not doing enough to defend himself.

• "I know I was a fool, Kurag. The princess has told me I could have spared myself a great deal of pain, if I had known what to ask for."

It's very sad that I've hit "I can't even" stage on the fourth fucking chapter of this book, but I am like...what the actual fuck. WHAT. THE ACTUAL. FUCK.

I know that LKH is trying desperately to write non-human standards of behavior, but...yeah. Well, maybe she won't manage to top that any time--

• Kurag's leer faded into a frown. "A Sidhe admitting he is a fool, it's a miracle."
• I glanced back just enough to catch Rhys's nod. "We are an arrogant race, but some of us can learn from our mistakes."

He was raped. That was his "mistake".

...See, this is why asexual alien life forms should not be allowed to write books. They don't have the proper cultural context for the rules and boundaries of actual human interaction, and their working approximations just freaking suck.

Guys, it's the only explination that makes sense.

I shouldn't have to spell this out, you know? It's basic fucking logic. Rhys was captured by the goblins as a POW, I think, and was tortured and gang raped. HE BEARS NO RESPONSABILITY FOR BEING RAPED OR TORTURED AND ANYONE WHO THINKS HE DOES IS A WASTE OF PERFECTLY GOOD RESOURCES.

But there really is no possible way for LKH to make this any worse. I mean, what on earth could she possibly--

• "Kurag, I know your laws...you do not rape your own people..."
• "There is one exception to that rule, Merry...But if one of us sells his body for safety and shelter, then he gives up his right to refuse his body to anyone. Only his protector can dictate who can touch him and who cannot."

This is one of the worst things ever written by a human.

Guys, this is supposed to be the "Good" series. And literally every other paragraph in this chapter is something utterly rage inducing. Also: HOW IS SELLING YOURSELF INTO SEXUAL SLAVERY "SAFETY AND SHELTER". IT FUCKING IS NOT YOU FUCKING MORON. FUCK.

LKH, via Merry, dismisses this as "prostitution".

Prostitution is when you trade money for a consensual sex act. Even when you are paid for sex, you have the right to set limits, like the use of condoms or how far a customer is allowed to go. And just like any other retailer, a prostitute has the right to refuse service to a customer for any reason. Her own safety, health, and the well-being of her colleagues and other clients has priority over the needs of the individual purchaser. (And for the record, raping a prostitute is rape, not theft. You're paying for a consensual sex act, not a non-consensual one.)

SEXUAL SLAVERY is when you lose the right to refuse service. Even if you receive beneficial items from the rape, like money or shelter, you are still being forced to have non-consensual acts, and you have no ability to run or leave.

Kurag then introduces Merry to the only two half-sidhe goblins not reduced to sexual slavery, Holly and Ash. Like everyone else, they're pretty. Holly makes it clear he has no desire whatsoever to sleep with Merry. Given that he's probably fought tooth and nail not to be somebody's special party favor, I do not blame him one iota. But Kurag takes offence to this and beats him bloody in front of Merry.

Ash, meanwhile, really wants to get some magic out of Merry's Great Vag of Holding, and he starts trying to talk his brother into sleeping with Merry. His brother starts almost weeping because, you know, he doesn't want to. Ash assumes it's because he thinks that Merry, or someone else in the Unseelie court, are the ones that abandoned them to the goblins, and he points out that nobody in the mirror could possibly be their mother. Thus missing the entire fact that his brother doesn't want to have sex.

 Holly announces that he does not believe in the Great Vag of Holding, so Kurag demands that Merry make Kitto glow. Merry demands that Kitto be safe from the rest of the goblins, because as soon as he goes back to Goblintown--I really can't finish that sentence. Kurag says no, because if you let one sex slave go all the rest will make a try for it. NO REALLY, YOU THINK? Merry then tries to make herself Kitto's protector. Kurag and her bodyguards refuse to let her do this because she isn't strong enough to protect Kitto from the entire Goblin race.

So, in a movement that could have been really fucking cool if I weren't already pissed off past the point of feeling any emotion whatsoever, Rhys steps in and declares himself Kitto's protector, even though he hates Goblins, and has hated Kitto, since the first book. Doyle then declares that Kitto is Sidhe, and Merry senses that this has either kicked off or advanced a prophesy that changes the fates of all, or some shit. Gee, it'd be real nice if we were focusing on fate changing prophesy instead of INSTITUTED SEXUAL SLAVERY.

And then Kurag lets Merry know that not all the half-sidhe they've got are male, which means one of her bodyguards, like Rhys, will have to be a participant in whatever orgy they're planning.

And then he brings Rhys's primary rapist into the room.

End of chapter.

Danse Macabre--chapter 47-48

So now we're stuck in the Mother of all Darkness's head? And Anita is panicking? And this is somehow effecting the guys back at the ballet but Anita has no idea how?

I have no idea. Whatever potential plot we had is gone now, and I'm just scratching my head going whoza what now?

Oh, yeah, her. So why was I inside the head of the man she was about to eat? Why wasn’t I inside her body?

Congrats. You managed to top yourself. THAT is as phallic as it gets.

A wolf appeared between me and it. A white wolf with a dark saddle and head. Me, my wolf. This was a dream, which meant I was unconscious. Weird.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? One second we were on the verge of Ballroom Blitz involving toe shoes, and now we're in a prehistoric cave involving cats and ghost wolves and dreams and I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.

Anita yanks herself out of the vampire dream by burning herself badly on her own cross. Everyone gathers around to watch Richard slowly peel her fingers off the cross, and apparently "peel" is the right word because bits of Anita have cooked to the cross and it's very painful.

And then they send for Dr. Lillian. They do not, mind, get Anita out of the as-yet-unseen Merlin's range. Nope. They just drag up their best were-doc because who cares about putting non-combatants in the line of fire. The reason you keep your doctors and leaders away from the front lines, kids? SO THEY CAN STILL LEAD AND FIX YOU WHEN YOU GET SHOT. Losing a couple of the guys would be sad. Losing Lillian would be very bad because there's no way to get another doctor who won't report all of them to the nearest health board and/or cop.

Anita has a phobia about needles. Oh, she needs to be sheltered from the nasty needle. Oh oh oh oh please no needles.

 Richard heads back to his date. Which he abandoned because his ex-girlfriend got hurt.

They're all terrible people. End of chapter.

Next chapter.

They drag Anita to the restaurant to do first aid on one of the fancy tables. Given that first aid involves yanking cooked in metal from Anita's hand? I am cringing for the staff when they get back. That's literally a has-mat job. First, because it's blood, and second, because it's shape shifter blood. Anita isn't a shifter, but she's established as a carrier and she ought to be contageous. So that blood spilling all over the floor, and the tablecloths, and the tables, plates, cups, silverware, candles, candle sticks and god knows what else could potentially pass therianthropy on to whoever has to clean that shit up. And possibly to a diner. I don't remember how long it can remain viable outside the body, if this were ever established, but if you can get aids from blood soaked day old needles (you can) at least one person ought to sweat the fact that a lycanthropy carrier is bleeding all over surfaces where non-infected people are going to eat.

There is no reason this could not have been done in a bathroom...other than because we want to have this done on a table with Nathanial straddling Anita's body and kissing her while they pull the cross out. SPECIFICALLY to stifle her screams.

Yes. Nate's job is to gag a screaming woman in severe pain by kissing her. This is supposed to be romantic.

They take a moment to establish that the tablecloths are being bundled up. No mention is made of bleach buckets, mops, rags, though Anita does wonder how they will explain the fresh blood. I wonder if they're going to bother informing the cleaning crew that the blood could probably infect them with wolf, lion, leopard or Who The Fuck Knows, It's Just Special, but that's just me being silly and worrying about the welfare of other human beings.

They start worrying about the MOAD. What about Merlin? The guy that Jean Claude was stressing over? The guy you powered up the kitties for? WHAT ABOUT

oh please tell me you're not seriously going to pretend that was just Anita enjoying the show. YOU WERE GEARING UP FOR BATTLE THERE. THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE BEEN LEADING UP TO YOU--

--they're leaving the theater. THEY. ARE LEAVING. THE THEATER. HOPE YOU DIDN'T WANT A DANCE PLOT BOYS AND GIRLS BECAUSE THAT WAS IT.

However, Lillian still thinks that the Dance Plot can be resuscitated and asks Anita to clear the morphene out of her system by...

oh fuck me gently with a buzzsaw she's summoning the goddamned munin.

 She smiled, and patted my cheek. “Once you are healed, your beasts may rise, so I will leave you with people who can take your beast, if they must.”
 “I don’t understand.” 
“But I think we should start with someone that Raina never touched. I knew her, you see; she always loved new conquests.” 

I shook my head, gently. “Don’t understand.”

And this is going to be different from the rest of the book HOW? Other than it being Rania the Friendly Sadist and not Anita the reluctant one? WE HAD A PLOT. IT WAS RIGHT THERE. WE WERE ALL LOOKING AT IT. WHY ARE WE NOT DOING THE DANCE PLOT?

ARE YOU ALLERGIC, LARUELL? IS THAT IT? ARE YOU JUST PLAIN ALLERGIC TO HAVING PLOTS NOW? IS THAT WHAT THE PROBLEM IS? WHAT THE FUCK, IT WAS RIGHT THERE. I WAS LOOKING AT IT. YOU HAD A PLOT AND THEN YOU DERAILED IT SO WE CAN WATCH RANIA TORTURE-FUCK SOMEBODY NEW.

I DONT EVEN I CAN'T THERE IS NO EVEN THERE IS NOTHING THERE IS ONLY FUCK.

So yeah, they kick Lillian out of the car, and she drops plot points to try to keep us entertained but Anita is too busy getting Jason to help her out of her glittery corset to bother. We get a run-down of Rania's history which basically boils down to "Murderer who died horribly who should be fucking dead and out of this goddamn book."

And the one person here Anita hasn't fed on, who would "Count" to Rania for some reason (I DON'T EVEN FUCKING KNOW) Is Noel. The cute little boy that Anita now dismisses as just a baby. Mercifully, they kick him out of the car because Requiem is wounded enough to "count" to Rania.

Finally Requiem locks eyes with Anita and they gaze into each other's souls and THANK YOU FUCKING GOD that is the end of the chapter.

Caress of Twilight--chapter 30

And we hit the halfway point for the next Exiles book. I'm going to see if I can't hammer out another K or two of words (4k so far today). But even better news is...THE FIRE. IS. ON.

Good writing always makes me feel this awesome. And sexy.

Yes, folks. I am finally excited about what I'm writing at the halfway point. This is usually a signal that the editing job is going to be an ungodly mess but I do not care, it is heating up and thus will be done soon. Ish. And then we get to start editing the next Starbleached book and/or the next Gray Prince book too.

All in all...I have accomplished Things today, my loyal blog readers. Things.

...

And now I'm telling myself "It can't get any worse. It can't get any worse. She's already fucked Kitto." Because I don't remember this part of the book very well. And then...oh, fuck I can't remember if she screws sage or not, and...and the sooner I read a couple chapters, the sooner I can get the next part of the story done. Right.

ON THE FIRST DAY OF MY BEING RESTRICTED TO THE APARTMENT,

Wait. WHAT? When did THIS happen? When...no. No. It is not worth my time and energy to re-read this thing and try to figure out if LKH fucked up or if my reading comprehension is that bad. But I don't remember anybody saying "Merry has to stay home indefinately".

And she's hiding behind her wards.

Folks, one of the sad truths to western writing (IDK about other cultures) is heroes are by their very nature reactive. Something has to happen to make your good guy character move. If your character is active, as in they move first, they are at best an anti-hero. At worst, they're a villian protaagonist, which is always fun when intentional (Jaqueline Cary's Banewrecker does such a fantastic job of villian protagonists; she basically turns Sauron et al into misunderstood, sympathetic characters. She also turns Gandalf into an ass, but that's not all that hard to do. It's like making Sherlock a misogynist. It's right there in the text.)

(And speaking of Mr. Holmes, Mary Russel, anyone? Also that squee sound you heard about midnight? That was me realizing there is a Mary Russel novel that I haven't gotten to read yet. SQUEE!)

Laurel K. Hamilton is at no risk of making her protagonists into villian characters. Oh yes, they are horrible, horrible people, but they are not constructed that way. BOTH Merry Gentry and Antia Blake are constructed to appear as heroines. They react to what somebody else does. Often to the point of being the last person on earth to react at all. The fact that their behavior has no chance of living up to the title doesn't change it. Laurel is trying desperately to convince you that Anita and Merry are the good guys. And because their behavior can't live up to it and LKH for whatever reason is not willing to curtail the rape, sexism, bigotry and not-child fucking (Kitto is unforgivable) that makes her protagonists into terrible wastes of tree (...whole forests have died for Merry Gentry. FORESTS.) she's falling back on the psychological cues to convince us.

Which is why Merry Gentry never does jack shit. 

Seriously. In a better novel Merry would be trying to track the Nameless, or the Elder Gods ghosts, or trying to fix it so that Maeve Reed can have her child safely. What is she doing instead? Hiding behind her fucking wards. Because heroes don't act, they react, and to make up for Merry being a horrible person in every imaginable way, LKH only has her react when the bad guy is literally on her fucking doorstep. 

In short? LKH's attempt at psychological manipulation re: active/reactive characters? It's not working.

So instead of us getting an actual account of actual events, we get an account of what Merry Gentry did when her boyfriends confined her to the house.

Somehow this does not involve fucking.

Instead, Merry gets another invite from the important Seelie secretary, which she also declines because the Unseelie court is having a ball on the same night. Oh, don't you just hate that. Hey, wasn't there a murder going on a few pages back?

Jeremy had been pissed enough [About the Gray agency being barred from the crime scene--CW]that he told Teresa not to tell them what she’d seen, but Teresa is all about helping her fellow man. She went dutifully from the hospital to the police station and finally found a detective who would take her report.

And that puts Jeremy on my shit-list too. Mass murder in the double digits kind of makes any personal grudges you happen to hold petty and irrelivant. Just saying. I also like how Theresa is kind of shit on in this passage for doing the right thing and talking to the cops.

Now, it's time for me to admit that I garbled the spelling of a cop's name a couple reviews back, because I am not perfect and I am usually writing these things after work and/or after a couple of beers or a mixed drink (...I like booze, and it's hard to maintain not drinking when my boss has a habit of shoving liquor in my face. As a side note, if you ever get a chance to try jalapino-laced tequila, do it, it is the best thing ever.). I transcribed "Peterson's" name as "Pearson". (Also note: The font in this e-book more than sucks)

Now, with my fuck-up admitted, let's see how well he comes off this time:

Peterson had come in about then and thrown the report in the trash can in front of Teresa. Usually the police wait until someone’s left the room before doing that.

You know, there's always this thin veneer of "Cops are so awesome" in most of these books. I'm not getting that here. This "Peterson is an idiot" thing is getting old.

Meanwhile, we get an accounting of Galen and Sage being sterotypical male, and I mean that male-ness that doesn't actually exist outside of reality TV. At one point Galen almost causally kills Sage, and there is a confrontation that doesn't go anywhere.

This is like reading about somebody being home sick with the flu. Only it's not like that because I've read a lot of books that make confinement to quarters actually work. Anybody here read Catching Fire? Anybody remember the couple of chapters after Katniss broke her ankle? Confined to bedrest? Remember how Collins not only made that interesting, but also relivant to the plot (because that's when she figures out about Important Plot Point that I'm not spoiling for those of you who HAVEN'T read Hunger Games, AND WHY HAVEN'T YOU?!?)? This isn't even Merry being out of comission because she's hurt. It's her being confined to quarters because something might try to hurt her.  IT WOULD NOT BE HARD TO MAKE THIS INTERESTING.

He smiled, obviously happy. “Since you asked nicely.” He grabbed his tiny crotch through the filmy skirt he wore. “The cure is trapped here, where Queen Niceven laid it.”

That's not what I meant.

And yes. Merry acts all shocked and shamed, as if this were not explicitly stated last chapter.

And then we get a debate about if a blow job counts as intercourse. I think. It's not really clear.

Merry calls Niceven via the mirror (...do mirrors come with a good long distance deal? If you break the contract to go to a better carrier does it come with seven years bad luck?) and rouses her out of bed. She demands a cure for Galen that doesn't involve having sex with a barbie doll. Niceven says why, he's a wonderful lover, and Merry is all like "Sex with ME is a privelage".

He means all the words, Laurel. All of them

And then, probably because that "hotdog down a hallway" metaphore would be literal for Sage, Sage turns into a real, full sized man, and Merry objects because he could get her with child and could become king, and I STILL do not understand why nobody understands the concept of condoms in this universe. Spermicidal lube, at least. It's like we're allowed cars and planes and forensic science, but not reproductive medicine. THIS ENTIRE PLOT COULD BE RESOLVED BY PATIENCE AND A PETRI DISH. 

Finally, and you have no idea how long it takes for them to agree, Sage and Merry agree on a kiss. Which they do, and Sage's lips are like, you guessed it, eating fruit.

It's too much to hope for lip gloss, isn't it?

Also? the word "Heat" no longer looks like a word. No. You don't want to know.

 Merry has the cure and she kisses Galen, and oh my fucking god, here we go again:

Our lips touched and it was as if the heat were hungry for him. Our lips sealed together, so that no drop of heat would be lost. Lips, tongue, even teeth fed at each other’s mouths. The heat filled my mouth almost like liquid. I could feel the warm, sweet thickness of it like warm honey, warm syrup that filled my mouth and spilled into Galen. He drank at my mouth, drank the magic down.

I swear to god LKH writes by throwing a cookbook, a thesaurs and a list of synonyms for genitals into a blender and pushing "stiff whip". It's the only possible explination for this. Either that, or all of her novels are being ghost written by Pat Monahan.

If I see the words "hefty bag" in any of these books, I have only one recommendation: 

It's not that I hate Train. I just have a low tolerance for whiny bullshit.

Niceven assures Merry that Galen will be healed, Merry and Galen are all kids in a candy store over the looming return of the penis, and Frost is staring on in envy because he loves Merry and wants her all to himself.

Remind me again why these circumstances are supposed to be romantic?

And then the chapter ends.

Caress of Twilight--chapter 25

Oh God, guys. Oh God. This is not good.

KITTO LAY AGAINST THE DARK BURGUNDY SHEETS LIKE A GHOST. His black curls made him seem paler. His eyes kept fluttering open, flashing blue, then shutting, leaving his blue eyes like gleaming bruises behind the thin skin of his closed lids.

At no point should the word "bruises" be a part of a sexy description.

What the hell am I saying? At no point should a fake twelve year old be part of a sexy description.

Rhys stood at the foot of the bed and stared down at the goblin. “He’s not up to sex, no pun intended.”

Fuck you. Fuck you for making that pun. Fuck you for writing this scene.

Merry decides she needs to get Kitto to bite her. So she takes her shirt off and shows off her pretty lace bra and the scent of her skin. Meanwhile, Kitto is pretty much out of it. Like...like drugged out of it. Like he can't understand that he's sick, he can't understand that he needs to bite her to save his own life, he can't understand anything. And Merry says this in response:

I touched his face, turned his eyes back to me. “Does it matter, does anything matter except the scent of my skin?” I put my wrist next to his face, then slid my arm slowly, just above his lips, so that our bodies touched here and there.

I don't care how old you claim he is, you describe him as a hairless, small bodied and child-like figure, and that makes this the creepiest thing I've read all year. THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT SHOULD EXIST.

He bites her. The description varies between dog and snake terminology. When Merry decides he's draining enough she blows in his face like a small animal. She specifically uses the word "pet" to describe the action. And while Kitto is lying in the bed "basking in the afterglow" (gag) the mirror rings. Somebody's trying to get through and they smell like flowers.

Oh, thank you God. thank you God.  Thank you thank you thank you we're going to have fake show and not active sex with Kitto.

Merry and Doyle decide that it's Niceven, and Merry asks if her bleeding arm is enough of a show, and Doyle says it will be if she doesn't show pain while the wound is being dressed. Everybody dolls themselves up quickly and Doyle answers the mirror. Only it's Taranis's secretary instead of Niceven, and this probably translates to "We're so fucked", which in this book means "Absolutely fucking nothing will happen" because this book sucks.

That was the closest call we've had so far. I cannot remember if she ever actively has sex with Kitto or not, so let's keep our fingers crossed and pray that LKH mantains some brand of sanity through all of this.

Please God. Please, oh please oh please.

Caress of Twilight--chapter 18 NSFW

*sighs*

When I was eight years old, I walked into my grandmother's library. There was a burl wood table that had been there since before I was born. It was a very nice table. I'd looked at it every three to six months since I was old enough to crawl. But on this particular day I looked at the table and realized that the wood patterns were hiding the face of Satan.

I didn't go into that room for two years. I knew I was being silly, I knew it was just a wood pattern, but it was the face of Satan. 

That's what this book is. I said it was the "OK" series. I said it was the fun series. I said it was the series to go to if you wanted the fun of LKH's narrative voice and you wanted to stay away from the awfulness of Anita Blake's non-con. But I was wrong. The awfulness is there. In fact, the awfulness is worse. Much, much, MUCH worse. It's just casual, and as long as you don't look at it too close, you don't realize that it's the face of Satan. But it is. This book is officially a Hellmouth, and it's all because of this chapter.

And...Look. I know. I know. I know. I've tried, okay? I've tried. I've tried to keep from commenting on the racial aspects here because I know goddamn well I don't have the street cred to do it right, but it's gotten to the point where it'd be even more wrong for me not to comment on it. IT'S THAT BAD. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry for anything I get wrong, I'm sorry for anything I get right, I'm sorry this book even exists. This entire chapter should owe reparations to everyone, everywhere, forever.  That's how wrong it is.

I started this chapter being funny, there are funny moments in it, but this is not a good thing. This is not even something I should be joking about. I don't want to recommend that anybody not read my blog post, but you really might not want to read it today. I'm serious. Here are a bunch of pictures of cats being cute. Look at the pictures of the cats being cute, fill yourself with the adorability (...it's a word. IT IS A NEW WORD THAT I HAVE JUST MADE GODDAMN IT) of the kittens, and be VERY glad that your head isn't going to be filled with the shitstorm that is about to follow. This is worse than Kitto and the dog bed. This is worse than Kitto period. This chapter is so wrong that to ignore its existence and what it says about the attitudes of its author is almost as bad as trying to ignore the Holocaust.

I am very sorry this is here. I am willing to continue reviewing this book chapter by chapter, if only because I started it, damn it, and I finish what I stared, but if, after this, mentioning this book makes anybody feel uncomfortable, I will drop it and do something less wrong. Like Save the Pearls or The Caterpillar's Question.

This chapter is worse than Save the Pearls.

This chapter is worse than that entire book.

I am dead serious.

Caress of Twilight--Chapter 5

So the only sensible thing Merry does is take Rhys's gun away. He uses his coat to cover the desk. Merry persists in not understanding that Rhys was freaking traumatized by goblins and rambles on about this being Rhys's second chance. She calls this an irrational phobia with a basis in reality and decides that Rhys has to do it for his own good, and if she backs down she'll look weak.

And then the first unforgivable thing of this book happens. Merry negotiates with Kitto for what they do next, and Kitto decides on foreplay. This is not the unforgivable thing. The unforgivable thing is that Merry then goes out of her way to point out that Rhys could have negotiated too. 

Yes. Let's point out to a fucking rape victim that he could have barganed his way out of rape, or at least out of losing an eye.

Ah, but it's HIS fault because he was too bigoted to learn about another culture. If he'd been more educated the goblins would not have disfigured him.  RIGHT. Because rapists always listen when you tell them not to do things.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: Male rape exists. And victim blaming in a rape is no more attractive when the victim is male than when they are female.

And then Merry kisses him and tells him he's still pretty, and this makes everything okay. Because it's not the rape and torture that is the problem. It's the fact that Rhys is missing an eye. And when she kisses him Kitto's arm is trapped between them, but it's alright because Rhys doesn't actively scream. 

She kisses all his scars. He flinches and panics and almost starts crying, but she keeps going because this is good for him.

And then, in the middle of the makeout session, Rhys realizes that Kitto is still, like, right there, and he panics again, and then he's all like "Well, get this shit finished" and Kitto is all like "Nope, I'm good." There's ramble about how Kitto doesn't want Merry to lose her guard, and Kitto goes on about how weak he is and how great Rhys is for being in the running to be the King one day, and how he is, yep, a natural born victem. Merry thinks about how awful it is to be born weak, and the chapter ends.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 38

I will have you guys know I am ONLY doing this because I promised. And because if I do it now I don't have to do it in the morning. (Read as: next Starbleached book is going good all of a sudden).

(Also I have sold a MINIMUM of two books a day every day this week I am HAPPY CW)

Okay. Sucky book.  This shouldn't be too painful, right? Right? It's post sex fluff. Right?

This is going to hurt, isn't it?

So Anita wakes up snuggling with Richard after having sex. In the morning.

Boys and girls, I have worked nightshifts for two years. I have stayed up all fucking night just because I can multiple times. I FREQUENTLY stay up until three AM because waitressing FTW and I can tell you very plainly that unless you have the alarm clock from hell? You do NOT wake up at anything RESEMBLING morning after pulling an all nighter. I woke up today at 12 pm having stayed up until three last night, and my first thought was OH FUCK I WILL GET NO WRITING DONE.

By this logic, given that AT MINIMUM Richard and Anita passed out five minutes after starting sex, they fell asleep at six AM. This is a 2-3PM wakeup time. In other words, Laurel:

HUMAN SLEEP RYTHEMS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.

And of course, they immediately start having sex again. Don't they need coffee? I would need coffee. My first things in the morning are PHONE>snuggle cat>Caffineated beverage. I would definately need coffee before I had sex.

And then the ardeur wakes up.



I have a major character in one of my books who has severe vampire-ish tendancies. A lot of the next book in this series is dedicated to him balancing his desire to be with people against his biological requirement to eat them. (He's a fun character. Lots of fun moral questions to explore). A lot of vampire books also dedicate quite a few pages to vampire protagonists trying to find the same balance. I guess the meat of the question, if you'll pardon the pun, is how do you live if the only thing you can eat are sentient cows? Which one of you has a better right to live? I think this is one of the reasons I heart vampire fiction as much as I do. Add in the fact that vampirism is a metaphore for both power and sex in relationships, and things get really interesting. Because the answer time and again is not about absolutes, but about compromise and balance, and about finding sanity, and of COURSE LKH ignores all of that, and doesn't have Anita bother trying to resist the ardeur at all.

Richard has already established that he will not be food. Ever. It is, to borrow a term first encountered in a horrible waste of tree, a hard limit. (My copy of Fifty Shades of Gray was an ebook, but a lot of trees still died for it) I have hard limits too. There are things that I will not do, ever, for anyone, because those things awake issues and make me feel not loving thoughts about other people. And when you love someone, my dear blog readers, you put their own good above yours.

So in a normal (read as: good) vamp fic, Anita would be screaming "Run away!" and Richard would attempt to comfort her. And given the context, he would be comforting her with his penis, and the drama about this moment would be a kind of "Gift of the Magi" only with sex and more sex, rather than hair and a pocket watch. But the point of this chapter is to dispose of Richard, and so Anita breaks the trust she has with Richard, and tries to force herself on him.

Protip, Anita: If your lover is running away from you, it usually indicates that he is not interested in sex.

And if you need me to be giving you protips, you have FUCKING FAILED at having sex.

I had a flash of what it felt like to taste him like so much meat, to feel his body respond, not just to the sex but to the hunger, and I knew for the first time why shapeshifters spoke of the hunger like it should be in all capital letters.

Alright. What the FUCK is it with LKH, sex, and food? WHY CAN SHE NOT SEPARATE THESE TWO THINGS? I DO NOT WANT TO GET PENIS IN MY PASTA, IS WHAT I AM SAYING HERE. VAGINA VONGOLE SHOULD NOT BE A THING.

Richard maintains a good distance between himself and Anita, and the description of her ardeur-attack is abysmal, boys and girls. Oh, the writing itself is passable, but the amoral nature of it is nauseating. Over and over, the fact that Richard is backing the fuck out of the room is mentioned, but it is never acknowleged. It's less "He's leaving" and more "he's five feet further away from the bed."  then they touch, their beasts do something, somehow Rania is involved, and Richard stumbles into her, and it is pretty much over.

There is a paragraph where Anita, using some kind of quasi psychic thing (AKA the author cheating at narration) percieves that Richard has a choice. To mantain control of this situation he must close the marks between himself and Anita, prevent himself from shape-shifting (Which would probably end in Dead Anita) and mantain his own psychic sheilds to keep her from feeding on him. WTF the marks have to do with this, IDK, but he decides the best thing he can do is stop fighting her, lock her out of the marks, and keep his beast reined in. And so in choosing to protect his psyche rather than his body, Richard creates an opening and Anita feeds on him without his consent.

Boys and girls, sports fans of all ages, ANITA HAS JUST RAPED RICHARD.

I'm going to go out on a very ugly limb politically, but I feel it must be done. It must be done because if we wish to have any value as human beings, we need to start treating each other like human beings. And that means this "oh, you can't be damaged by (x) becasue you have (privelage y)" bullshit needs to stop. If a bad thing happens to a person that bad thing damages a person, and as long as we keep that person from talking about that bad thing, the odds of that bad thing happening over and over and over will continue.

Here is what I am going to say: MEN GET RAPED TOO. By women, even. And just as it is not okay for women to be raped, it is not okay for men to be raped. It is not okay for genderless individuals to be raped. IT IS NOT OKAY FOR ANYONE TO HAVE ANYTHING HAPPEN TO THEM WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

And Richard has just done what some rape victims do: Withdraw, shut down everything not vital to preservation of sense of self, and endure.

We get a description of Anita's orgasm. We get a description of Richard's orgasm, as felt through Anita's quasi-unacknowleged psychic connection thing. We get many implicatons that Richard having an orgasm fully justifies Anita feeding upon him without his consent.

I have already ranted on the fact that rape victims can and frequently do experiance orgasm during rape. I am not going to do it again. I am, however, going to tell everyone remotely connected to publishing this piece of garbage to go get fucked.

Richard gets away from her as fast as he possibly can. He tells Anita she had no right to do that.

“You never said no.” I rolled onto my side, but didn’t try and sit up yet.

 He nodded. “I know that. I’m not blaming you.”

YES YOU DID. YOU FUCKING DID SAY NO. MULTIPLE TIMES. OVER. AND OVER. AND OVER. You did not say no right then, but Anita knew damn fucking well you did not want to be fed upon, ever, and you trusted her to respect your bounderies. SHE RAPED YOU.

Anita whines about how he won't be coming back. Richard says she had the same rule, he can't do it, he's not going to do it, it's not something he is or will ever be comfortable with, and all Anita can do is whine about who she can share the arduer with.

This is passive aggressive fuckery, folks. She KNOWS that Richard hates sharing her, she KNOWS he is naturally monogamous, he has asked her to be monogamous and has compensated for when she can't be, she knows that her sleeping around hurts his feelings, and she is trying to blackmail him into letting her do things he does not like. Folks, if you switched the genders and changed "feeding" into something like "anal sex" this would in NO FUCKING WAY be acceptable. Or hell, let's not change genders. Let's say she wants to repeat the scene in Myra Breckenridge where Myra "rides" Rusty. That's an even closer psychological parallel. THIS. IS NOT. ACCEPTABLE.

Then she tries to switch things around and ask him why he shut down the marks and his beast and not her feeding. The answer, boys and girls, is that in abusive situations you protect your sense of self first because if that breaks, you're fucked. But Anita wants to show that it means he loves her and really does want to let her feed on him. No. What it means is that he wanted to protect himself from you, and he knew the only way to do it was let you have your way for now, and then get away from you as fast as he possibly could.

And of course, his leaving breaks Anita's heart.

You know, I am sure that abusive men think they love their women just as hard as Anita thinks she loves Richard, but the truth is, if she loved him she would have respected his bounderies. Abusive men are broken when their wives leave them too. But it's not because they loved them. It's because having this person was part of what defined them. He had her as a wife. Anita had the Ulfric as her lover. She was lupa. She was somebody. She was desirable. And now Richard has left and her own sense of self is challenged, and the obvious answer (IT IS BECAUSE YOU BROKE HIS TRUST, YOU ABUSIVE WASTE OF SKIN) only damages that sense of self more. The only way to repair it is to either reaquire the person, or dehumanize them and demonize them and then, eventually, remove them.

And that is not love. That is how murder looks when you stop it mid-process.

And then the leopards find her and curl around her and make her feel all special.

Jesus. This makes me think of SEVERAL true crime books I've got scattered around here. If You Really Loved Me, Perfect Husband, Stranger Beside Me, et all, but the one it makes me think of most is Prophet of Death. You want to see what Anita Blake would look like IRL and Male? His name was Jeffery Lundgren and he was way, way, way beyond vile.

Anita whines about having to play a game she can't win, and the text COMPLETELY IGNORES the fact that she just RAPED RICHARD, and that's why he left. End chapter.

You know, I honestly thought this part wouldn't piss me off. Boy was I wrong. It's not so much what happens as it is the way that the wrongness is never even allowed to exist in the text, and you have to imagine yourself in that situation to understand just why this is WAY into Bad Touch territory. Anita just broke the trust of the guy she loves, and can't understand that the reason why he just booked is because she just proved she can't be trusted. If I were with a guy, and I told him "never hit me" and he hit me? I'm gone. (actually, "never hit me" is implied in any relationship. Guys, you are all wonderful, but you need to know better than that)

Fuck. This. Book. Fuck it. Fuck it with a frozen Edward Cullen sparkle dildo. I can't say I'm done, because I promised I'd read this whole book, but I can say there will not be another one of these until sometime Sunday afternoon. Come back tomorrow kids! For now, CW is out of steam.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 37

Richard and Anita are now going to have sex. Unless a particular part about the screwing catches my eye, I'm probably not going to say a lot about that. Sex is sex.

Instead, we're going to talk about love and terrible people, and look in at the pair to see how long this is going to take.

I think part of the reason the sex scenes in Anita Blake, Merry Gentry et all fall so flat is because we, the readers, do not give one flying fuck about the characters. Merry is still (passably) an okay character. This is less because she's better written and more because she's not human and was not raised in a human enviroment, so her psycopathic tendancies are more understandable. She's a fairy princess from the days when they would eat your children. We don't expect human behavior from her, and we're not pissed when we don't get it.

Same thing goes with weres. We don't expect completely human behavior, and we let a lot of things float that we'd call bullshit on if the character were human, as long as the non-human behavior is in character for the animals. (Remember, sports fans: Leopards eat people too).

But Anita is human, and she doesn't get the same excuses other characters do. She's not fighting a beast inside of her. She never shape shifts. She does not get the excuse of instincts, heightened aggression, or full moon blues. She's held to a normal standard of behavior.

And normal people do not leave other people out on their back porch to die just because they don't want to get the carpet dirty.

He half-walked, half-staggered to the bed, laying me on it, going to his knees beside it. He was laughing as he crawled onto the bed beside me. He lay beside me, his knees hanging over the side of the bed,

There are about four words in that paragraph that no longer look like words to me.

Anyway, Anita's basic failure as a human being makes her unlikable, and that gives readers a problem. Readers don't like to see bad people rewarded. Anita gets rewarded all the fucking time with powers and sex and more sex and more powers, and more powers that come from sex, and pretty hot guys who, apparently, never heard about scissors. And that makes us angry because Anita does nothing in the books to deserve hot guys and sex and magic.

You know District 9? One of my all-time favorite movies? The story only worked because Wikus was a racist piece of shit at the beginning, and he stopped being one in the end. Because an awful, awful lot of bad things happen to him, and he earned every single one of them in the first thirty minutes of the movie. If he'd been a nice guy with no objectionable character traits, we probably would have hated the movie completely.

“I want to run my beast through you, Anita.”

Oh, so THAT'S what they're calling it now. I thought we settled on Mr. Winky.

Richard is also horrible. He's horrible not because he fails at basic human morality, but because he fails at leadership. He is doing a terrible job with the wolves, he has no control over his emotions, he allows himself to be set up as his author's strawman for her arguements against conventional morality, and he lets Anita screw with him. He's a ball of aggression and teeth without a backbone to support it.

And now we're supposed to be aroused by watching them have sex.

And now their beasts are touching.

That's probably my biggest issue with LKH's sex scenes, beyond watching two horrible fake human beings get it on: The metaphysical shit. I can relate to most of the mechanics of normal sex, but how the fuck am I supposed to relate to this:

My beast rose as if from a great, warm, wet depth, up, up to meet the warm, burning rush of Richard’s energy. He pushed his beast through me, and I could feel it, impossibly huge, the brush of fur so deep inside me that I cried out. I felt his beast as if it had crawled inside me and was caressing things from the inside that his hands would never have touched. My power seemed less certain than his, less solid. But it rose around the hard, muscled fur like velvet mist, swirling through his power, through my own body.

I don't have visions of deep forests and dark places here. I think that Richard's beast is pawing Anita's kidneys and lower intestine. That is not romantic.

Ugh, and more talk about how big Anita's men are and how they have to be careful of her. I'm suddenly reminded of Mae West. "Forget about the six feet, let's talk about the seven inches." Aren't guys, like, you know, mostly the same size?

And good fucking GOD, people, don't ever use the words "Wet Hammering" in connection to lovemaking. It'd be a good band name, but I don't think "Oh!" when I see that, folks. I think OW.

The thing about books, kids, is we want our characters to earn their happiness. We want to see them do great things and then get a shiny reward. If the reward doesn't match the actions preformed, too big or too small, we become unsatisfied with the story. If Wikus had gotten to go home at the end of District 9 we would all have been unhappy. But the fact that he keeps paying for being a racist shithead long after the movie itself is over (Given that Blomkamp has NO PLANS to do the fucking sequel yet, goddamn it, we must assume it is forever) we are sated. Not happy, maybe, but sated. With Anita getting to bang Richard after making Gregory wait god knows how long for decent medical attention, we're just as unsatisfied. All Anita has done is whine, get hurt and have sex.

I'm not minimizing the rape, here. It was a horrible thing, and she'd be fully justified taking time off to recover  from it.

But stories aren't interesting when a character licks their wounds onscreen. They are interesting when a character says "fuck it" and starts taking an active hand in their life. And Anita, for all her posturing and grandstanding and tough-girl attitude, is passive as fuck in this whole story.

...given what they're doing in the background, that MIGHT have been a poor choice of words.

Punishment/reward is a real dynamic in storytelling. It's one of those things that the consious mind doesn't see, but that the unconsious latches onto like a limpet. We want Cinderella to become the princess every time, and also for her stepsisters and stepmom to be punished.


Anita Blake stopped being Cinderella a long, LONG time ago.

YAY! The chapter's done! I'm now going to go wash my eyes out with bleach, and the rest of you are welcome to join me.

Narcissus in Chains--chapter 17

I'm going to say something that will probably be controversial and easy to take out of context, but I'm going to say it anyway. And no, it's not that Anita is a--

--whatever. Bear with me for a couple seconds, okay?

The Gor novels are better than this series.


That is not a compliment.

The Gor books are terrible. They are a waste of space. Trees died so those books could exist, and that means everyone involved in their publication should be brought up on some kind of crime against the plant kingdom. But John Norman, sick and twisted as he was, did want to make humanity better. His basic thesis was so wrong it was a literal hate crime, but his goal, in his own sick, twisted way, wasn't all that different from, say, Ayn Rand. He identified that something was "wrong" with the world and tried to fix it through his writing. He should be shot into space without oxygen, but he's a better writer in every possible category than Laurell K. Hamilton.

Yes. I just said that. See, I read ahead last night, and I have never been so throughly pissed off at a chapter in a book as I am right now. I said yesterday this book has surpassed all our abilities to feel shock and horror. I was fucking wrong.

I really hope the words "fuck you" don't irritate anybody, because you're going to be hearing them a lot. In the back of my head I expected the section to be one big, long, rolling, nasty sex scene. It is not. It takes literally FOREVER for us to get to the sex. And what happens between now and the sex is just...

In fairness, this whole book would make Applebloom puke

So lets just dive in, shall we?

When we last left our (gag) "heroes" they had all decided to feed Anita's lust demon by having JC feed on Jason and Asher feed on Nathanial and Anita feed on everybody, because apparently being bitten by vampires feels really good. I'm not criticizing that last little bit, by the way. That's legit lore. At least they're not sparkling. So now they all pile into bed, and a freaking miracle happens, boys and girls:

Somebody asks somebody else for their consent.

“Do you want Asher to feed from you?” 

“Oh, yes,” Nathaniel said,

Wow. Somebody in this book finally commits an act of human decency. I'm starting to get im--

My voice sounded as breathless as his when I said, “I’m not on birth control.”
 
Everyone froze. Jean-Claude peered over Jason’s shoulder. “What did you say, ma petite?”

 “I stopped taking the pill six months ago. I’ve only been on it for two weeks. No guarantee for another two to four weeks.”

 “You made love to the Nimir-Raj.”

 “He’s been fixed.” 

Asher said, “She did what?”

That's the rape scene he's referencing there. Now, to get it out of my system: 

There really aren't any words that aren't on macros that I can use right now. She did not make love to him, she did everything she could to get out of the situation, she didn't want it to happen in the first place, and now, boys and girls, the people she loves are shoving her face back into it at the drop of a hat. And the rape scene was still less than twenty-four hours ago.

Fuck you, Jean Claude.

So now we get an unbearably long scene in which everybody talks about how careless Anita is for not being on birth control and how awful it would be if there were surprise penis during this thing and she were to get preggers with an unwanted baby.

Because birth control is totally all about avoiding getting pregnant, and there is no other reason a woman would get on it, ever.

I can't speak for other women, but when I was on birth control I had no intention of having sex with anybody. I was on it because I read that it alleviated menstrual cramps. At the time, mine were fucking debilitating. There is pain, there is pain so big you cannot function, and then there is pain so big you pass out on the floor of a public bathroom. I've had infected teeth that haven't hurt that bad. And the pill worked.

And you know what else I "Love?" How it's totally the woman's job to take care of icky reproductive issues. What happened to keeping a rubber in your wallet, guys? 

And it's Anita who whines the whole time--and you have no idea how much I would like to not be using that word, but that's the only thing that fits--about how they said no sex and condoms just complicate things and she doesn't want her boys using condoms...and then the worst thing I have ever read commences. 

Jean Claude decides that everybody needs to wear condoms. And this is how he talks her into it.

“I think I can keep from fucking them.” I sounded angry, but it wasn’t anger that I felt, it was a seed of doubt. That hesitation made the anger worse. I always hid behind anger when I could.

 “And before this morning, you would have sworn even more strongly that you would not fuck a strange man you had just met.”

 The blush was so hot, it almost hurt. “I didn’t mean to.” That sounded weak even to me. “I couldn’t  .  .  .” 

“You could not control yourself, ma petite, I know. But if you lose control again, would you not rather be safe?”

And now they are using her rape to manipulate her. Oh god, she's so wonton. Oh, god, she loses control around people. Oh, god, we have to remind her of this to keep her horrible uncontrolable female sex drive from making our lives miserable with an unwanted pregnancy.

Let me go turn off Robot Cyborg Susan for a second. This part isn't going to be funny.

This bullshit is why I called Anita a bitch earlier. And while I'll admit that it's wrong to use a gendered word as shorthand for "terrible waste of human skin" I stand by the underlying meaning of what I said: If you do this, you are a terrible waste of human skin. You do not identify the weakest point in someone's psyche and then use it to manipulate the other person and get what you want. It's like Jean Claude decided to tickle Anita's third degree burns to get her to lie down and be a sport about things. This shit is not okay. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not three million years from now. Not ever. If you are aware that someone else has a deep emotional wound, like from being cheated on OR BEING RAPED LESS THAN A DAY AGO, you do not use that wound as leverage to get what you want out of the other person.

And even if it's not rape--it totally is, but let's play devil's advocate here--it's still fucking wrong. She's upset that she made a mistake with a stranger, she's doubting herself, she's very fucked up inside. YOU DON'T USE SOMEONE ELSE'S PAIN AGAINST THEM. EVER.

In short, Fuck you, Jean Claude. Fuck you, Micah, and FUCK YOU Laurell K. Hamilton for passing this psychological fuckery off as something morally acceptable in ANY relationship.

Okay. Turning Susan back on.

Jean Claude does it again less than two paragraphs later. So he's brought up her lack of control twice, her "sex with a stranger" twice, AND SHE WAS FUCKING RAPED WHEN IT HAPPENED.

How could no one see what was wrong with this?

Finally, though, Anita agrees with everything Jean Claude said, because she can't argue with him.

 The problem with battling a manipulator is that they are convincing. They know how to twist your words and actions against you in ways you cannot easily fight. They're wrong, they know they're wrong, YOU know they're wrong, but they know how to make it look like they're right, and with a manipulator, the appearance is the only thing that matters. The result of arguing with a manipulator is usually you either storming off, voiceless and angry, or you agreeing even though every cell in your body is screaming they're wrong, simply because you can't think your way out of what they just said.  

You cannot argue with a manipulator, kids. You can only disengage, and then distance yourself from them. And if you have to confront them, have witnesses. 

Now can we just have disgusting five-way sex and get this scene over with?

No, we can't. Because we have to make this even worse. Anita says "Well, I can go to the lupanar anyway," And Jean Claude replies with the following:

He tried not to meet my gaze. His shields were back in place, and I couldn’t tell what he was feeling. “You would be attracted to all the men. You would  .  .  . I cannot guarantee what you would do, ma petite, or who you would do it with.”

There really aren't words anymore. Not only is Jean Claude slut-shaming, he's slut-shaming a rape victim.

But CW! I hear you saying. He might not know that it's a rape! LKH intended the rape scene to be loving intercourse. She herself never considered it to be a rape scene. How do we know that unfair manipulation and slut shaming are what Jean Claude is really doing? How do we know CW isn't interpreting this the wrong way?

Because this happens two paragraphs later:

“Let me spare you such degradation, ma petite. You are not as I was. You have never given yourself freely. I fear what you would do, or think of yourself, if you did these things. I do not think your sense of yourself would survive intact.”

In other words, my dear blog-readers,

HE FUCKING KNOWS SHE WAS RAPED.
  He knows, and so does LKH. It's right there in the text. The bolded part.

Jean Claude then goes on about how he was able to learn how to feed the ardeur from a distance, but it took him five years and he had to learn control all on his lonesome, and Anita is getting more and more horrified as she realizes she's going to have to live with uncontrollable lust for lust for the rest of her life (and no, that's not a typo) and then Jean Claude does it again: 

“If you had withstood the Nimir-Raj’s advances, then I would say that your strength of will might conquer it.

She was raped, you undead piece of shit. She did resist his advances. She just didn't try to claw his eyes out.

And then Jean Claude tells her that if she doesn't feed the ardeur, she'll start literally eating her friends.

And then Anita says "fine, but everybody needs to be wearing pants. I'll go get my underwear."

And then Jean Claude says "yes, but you might order them to take it all off, because you'll lose control of your mouth, too."

The chapter ends with Anita thinking that maybe just throwing in the towel and becoming a psychopath isn't such a bad idea after all.

This chapter was the worst part of the book that I've read...so far. And I know it will probably get worse. I just don't want to think about what "worse" might mean for now. I'm going to go play a video game for an hour, and then paint until I have to go to work. Not noble, but shiny pretty video games should get the taste out of my mouth.

Narcissus in Chains--chapter 15

Business first:

Starbleached will be free on Amazon all day tomorrow. Snag a copy and be ready for the sequel, Planet Bob, coming out January 1st.

In other words, ladies and gents:

Back to our regularly scheduled bi--

...that one was directed at me. You can't--

Fine. FINE! Sheesh, give a robot authority figure an inch, they take a mile. So anyway, back to this terrible, terrible book.

Anita is awakened from spooning in bed with two formerly minor characters by Rafael, the wererat king. This is apparently something like the werewolf Alpha. Because rats have that.

Somebody pointed out to me the other day, correctly, that wolves don't actually have this pack system. That info was due to a study carried out on a large number of wolves in a small, enclosed area. Wolf packs are actually family groups. Mom. Dad. Kids. There are no alphas. There are no omegas. The "pack" is an artifically created construct due to too many beings in too small an area. It's the wolf version of Universe 25 (Google it. Humanity is doomed)

In short...WHY DO OTHER THINGS THAT NEVER WERE PACK CREATURES HAVE A PACK? Leopards are loners. Lions have a pride, I'd buy that. Tigers...oh god, thank God there are no weretigers in this book. That happens in another book. The fuckery in those books apparently outweigh this one.

So it turns out Anita must go rescue the other Wereleopard tonight. I do not remember this being mentioned, but it's better than screwing around until the full moon, which...is not established as being X number of days away. Maybe it is tonight.

Anyway, Rafael the were-rat king jumps through political hoops until he agrees to be Anita's backup when she rescues the wereleopard. Rafael has a treaty with Richard, the pack assumes the treaty is with all of them, and Rafael wants to send the message that he only has a treaty with Richard. Meaning if Richard is killed, the wererats go bye bye.

This was the fun part of the Anita Blake series, IMHO. And this would be more interesting if the wererats had EVER had to come to the rescue of the werewolves or vice versa. I'm kind of realizing this as I type, but there are never any conflicts with outside groups in this. Which might be part of the problem with the internal politics. No outside threat=everybody inside the group gets grabby. The only group that has to deal with outsiders on a regular basis are the vampires, and the vamps are the least fractionalized group in St. Louis.

What I'm saying is...Anita Blake? Needs a war. Stat. Conflict makes for interesting stories. Were-whatevers coming in force against St. Louis? That would make for a damn interesting story. Especially if the author used it to teach Anita that she doesn't need violent bravado to be accepted as a cop and a warrior, that other people's bounderies have value, and that her first answer to everything needn't be a gun.

Of course, this is Anita Blake and LKH we're talking about. That will never happen.

In fact, I've just realized what I find so obnoxious about this series. You know how the end of Breaking Dawn was everyone standing around talking? When there was all this lovely cannon fodder Stephenie Meyer had taken time to get you sort of attached to? AND THERE WAS NO CLIMAX? Yeah, the entire Anita Blake series is kind of like that, but everything after Obsidian Butterfly is nothing but that, peppered with sex scenes that are about as sexually stimulating as a weed whacker.

And then Anita and Rafael decide to keep this a secret from Richard because:

“Sometimes you have to keep things from Richard to help him.”

NO 

I've been very lucky in relationships. I've never been directly involved with an abuser or a control freak. I've watched it happen with my nearest and dearest, though, and that statement right there? Is textbook.

No. It is not okay to keep secrets from your significant other "to help them". You can hide birthday parties. You can hide Christmas presents. You can hide something that you want to reveal later because it will make them happy. But you don't hide relationship breakers. You don't hide the hole you've dug financially, or the way you're being treated at work, or the fact that you've been fired. If you are in a relationship where you have to hide big, major, huge things from your SO because you're afraid of how they'll react? Either you're vastly underestimating them as people, or they are horrible, dangerous human beings and you need to leave.


Anita isn't proposing they hide Richard's surprise party from him. She's about to make a move that will potentially put his life in danger. She's going in to his political adversaries with one of his few major allies at her side, not his. Richard will have to spin it so that it is clear the rats are with him and not the pack. The wolves might react badly. The whole situation might go up in flames if all three of them do not have a plan in place for spin. Hell, if Richard knew about it ahead of time he could use this as leverage for more control over the pack.

Every time Anita makes a political call, all I can hear is GlaDOS: YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON. IT SAYS SO. RIGHT HERE. A HORRIBLE PERSON. WE WEREN'T EVEN TESTING FOR THAT.

And then Anita hangs up the phone, snuggles down under the covers and realizes *gasp* there are naked men here! And then...*reads ahead*

Sorry. That's my automatic reaction to any A/B sex scene now.

So Anita sees a mostly naked Nathanial and the "ardeur" kicks in. She wants to sex up Nathanial. Jason tells her that Jean Claude stuck him in the room so that Anita wouldn't "feed" off Nathanial, so suddenly she wants to sex up Jason. Nathanial snuggles her, the ardeur gives her some magical insight into their hearts, about how "pure" they are, and to her credit she tells both of them to leave. Nathanial says he doesn't want to go, so I guess it's all okay when Anita picks him up by his hair.

And then the book blows my mind.

If someone can’t tell you no, it’s rape, or something like it.

If someone can’t tell you no, it’s rape, or something like it.

If someone can’t tell you no, it’s rape, or something like it.

To me (and I know I'm the last person who should talk about this) the worst part of any sexual assault is accepting said assault as your fault. It's your fault that the person did whatever it was to you because you were out late. It's your fault that you were hurt because you were dressed like that. It's your fault, because you did something nice that they interpreted as being a come on. None of this is true, but your brain is so desperate to regain some kind of control over your body and your life that you take on responsibility for what you cannot and will never be responsible for: The reactions of others.

It's a very hard habit to break.

Anita was raped twice, less than twenty  four hours ago. Once by Jean Claude, and once by Micah. She took on responsibility for both rapes when they were not her fault. She allowed one of her rapists to reenforce this bullshit on the drive home. And now she is redefining rape as "taking advantage of someone so willing, they'll never tell you no."

Great. So what about the five or six times you told Micah no? The two times you made it clear you wanted to leave? The way you hugged the door until he dragged you out into the shower? Why is what you want to do to Nathanial wrong, but what actually happened to you perfectly right?

I'm not angry at Anita here, because Anita is not a real person. Anita does, thinks and says whatever her author wants her to. I am angry, because I went through this bullshit. I got fed the wrong information by someone who meant very well, and I called it "the incident" and never talked about it again, until I mentioned it to a friend in a discussion on triggers, and he responded with "You were raped". And then repeated it until I understood, and that was when I really began to start to heal. I am angry because somebody dealing with a rape of their own would be easily influenced by this book. "Oh, it's not rape because Anita had an orgasm. I had an orgasm, ergo I was not raped either, and I'm being silly for pressing charges against that very nice man who forced me to have an orgasm against my will. Therapy is just a waste of my time." When you're casting around for control over your life due to some asshole's actions, you'll grab any twig that will give you the illusion you're not about to fall. LKH has provided rape victims with a big, dangerous, termite riddled branch.

Ugh, I just need to move on.

 Hands on me, holding me down. I opened my eyes to find Nathaniel and Jason holding me down. They each had a hand on one wrist and one leg. They could bench press small elephants, but as my body writhed against the bed, I raised them up, made them struggle to hold me. 

“Anita, you’re hurting yourself,” Jason said.

 I looked down my body and found bloody scratches on my arms and legs. I had to have done it, but I didn’t remember doing it. The sight of those bloody scratches calmed me, made me lie still under their hands.

Hey. LKH wrote about Self Injury! That's my own special brand of crazy! Wow! For those of you who don't know, I have issues with S/I. I've managed to go a year without an episode, but the temptation can be STRONG. I'm getting my chosen cutting place tattooed as both a celebration and a deterrent. I am...very surprised to find this here. LKH even got the stuff before an "episode" right too. The swirling blackness, the absolute desire to do anything to get relief. I am sure that LKH will now have the other characters react in a gentle and understa--

“I’m going to get something to tie you down with just until Jean-Claude rises,” Jason said.

Things you should never do to a person with S/I issues:

-inspections
-restraints
-confrontations
-going through their room to find the S/Iers implement of choice.
-tie them down because you think they have gone crazy.

Episodes occur during transitory states of strong emotion that, for one reason or another, the cutter can't vent in a safe manner. The first episode--ie, this one--is usually bad. I remember actually blacking out for a couple seconds immediately prior to the first time I cut. Once you've broken that barrier and drawn blood, it gets frightfully easy to justify damaging yourself. People do not harm themselves because they have gone crazy. People harm themselves because they feel cornered by their emotions and don't know where else to go. And if a cutter feels cornered by you? They will never go to you for help. Ever.

The way to react to an episode of self-injury is to, very calmly, get the person to talk about why they did it, and when they're done crying on your shoulder, ask them if they would like to get help. All the inspections and restraints in the universe won't do half as much for a cutter as a solid, trustworthy shoulder to cry on will.

And of course, Jason has to go get ropes to tie her down with, leaving Nathan straddling her body so he can hold onto her wrists.

Boys and girls, this was self injury as a convoluted excuse to force two major characters to have sex. Which they do in excruciating detail.

And then Jean Claude wakes up, and mercifully, the chapter ends.

I am not touching this book again until tomorrow.