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.

The Harlequin--chapter 11

Oh god. I read ahead. OH GOD. WHY LAUREL. WHY.

So Anita goes back to the bedroom. It's Jean Claude's bed but he's not in it because Anita doesn't like sleeping with dead men. Nate is in the bed. The sheets are red and...sigh...silk.

I'm sorry, guys. I'm sure that silk sheets are wonderful, but I'm a fiber snob. You DO things in a bed, and silk is very, very, VERY easy to ruin. Every time I see "silk sheets" I think of the leigons of little baby moths that died so that Jean Claude could come on luxury.

We also find out that Jean Claude had the sheets changed because Anita looks best on red. Okay, the text says "The three of us" but we all know Nate and Micah don't matter a fart in a windstorm.

Micah shows up. We get several paragraphs about his kitty cat eyes. And how those eyes look. And how they got that way. And what various doctors have said about his eyes.

...I took my hand back and undid the robe’s sash. He lay back and watched me with that look a man can get— the look that is part sex, part possession, part just male. It’s not a look that has much to do with love, not the kind that includes hearts and flowers anyway, but it has everything to do with being together, being real. Edward was right. Micah was my lover. Not my boyfriend.

Translation: Micah objectifies Anita, which she's okay with, and she objectifies right back, while simultaneously withholding emotional intimacy because, you know, love's just icky.

 Anita thinks about when she and JC rolled Auggie. Hey, did ya'll know this is, like, ONE WEEK after Danse Macabre? It reads like it's months later but it's not. Anyhoo, Anita thinks about how she now knows her love for Nate and Micah is just vampire fuckery screwing with her mind, and she's okay with that:

When Micah had come to me, I’d needed a helpmate, someone to help me run the shapeshifter coalition that we’d just established.

And then he raped you within hours of meeting you. That's not how I'd define "helpmate". Sociopathic fuck, perhaps...

Nathaniel stirred in his sleep again. His face flexed, frowned. He made another small sound. It was his bad dream sound. He’d had more nightmares of late. His therapist said it was because he felt safe enough with us to explore his deeper pain.

Wait. WAIT. NATHANIAL HAS A THERAPIST?!?

Who the BLAZING BLUE FUCK would look at Nathanial's lifestyle and go "Yeah, this kid is fine where he's at?" Nathanial has a background of extremely horrible abuse, and of course, rape with extra rape, a side of rape and a supersized glass of rape to wash it all down. He should not be in this job with this boss or in this relationship with this girlfriend. Nate does not have the boundaries to keep himself safe at Guilty Pleasures. MAYBE he'd do well at a club that actively worked to keep its dancers safe, but Jean Claude blurs lines so frequently you'd think he was Robin Thicke. The ONLY thing keeping the dancers safe from Jean Claude's sexual proclivities is it'll get back to Anita and she'll dump him, and she's kind of his entire power base right now. Jean Claude rapes his entire customer base every single night. And Nathanial has no boundaries or survival instincts whatsoever. That is not a good thing. It is NOT good to look at a real abuser and think "sexy". Nate cannot separate play-acting from being abused. He plays without safewords for fuck's sake. I mean yeah, you can be turned on by your triggers but there's a difference between being turned on and consistantly placing yourself in dangerous situations because you literally cannot tell how dangerous it is! Nathanial being in this club, in this relationship with these people is like an alcoholic working bar when they've only got a month sobriety. Not only is it NOT a good idea, NO THERAPIST IN THE WORLD WOULD EVER CONSIDER IT SAFE.

 AND THEN RICHARD SHOWS UP.

I swear to fucking god I vomit a little every time he shows up. It's like when Anita says "When Micah came to me" when she actually means "When he raped me in the shower". Only it's from the POV of the rapist.

Richard looks at the bed full of Anita and her lovers and is...fine with that shit. Completely calm and cool and composed. And his hair has grown out just enough for LKH to give him a Christ-like golden halo, so we're going with "good" compliant Richard instead of Richard-who-wants-out-of-this-shit AKA the Realistic Portrayal of a Human Being.

He was as he had always been: six feet one inch of handsome masculinity. Perfect cheekbones and a nearly permanent tan showed that somewhere back in all that Dutch blood was something darker and less European. I’d always bet on American Indian, but they actually didn’t know. He was almost heartrendingly handsome. So why hadn’t my new vampire powers made us the perfect couple, too? Because for my abilities to work you had to know what you wanted, what you really wanted. Richard didn’t know that. He was too conflicted, too full of self-loathing, to know what his heart’s desire was.

Or, you know, you RAPED HIM and he's got the self-will and determination to dodge your powers because HELLO ANITA HE IS YOUR MOTHERFUCKING RAPE VICTIM, NOT YOUR EX-LOVER. Also: I love how not lusting after Anita means you don't know your heart's desire. Not wanting to sleep with an abusive rapist who happens to have a vagina instead of a penis seems like a perfectly reasonable desire to me.

Also-also: Europeans DO come in dark. I mean, I'm whiter than bedsheets, but we don't all come in perfect pearly princess.

Richard asks where everybody is, because he wants to sleep in a puppy pile tonight. (GAG ME). Jean Claude is with Asher, Jason is sleeping with his new girlfriend Perdita the Mermaid, a gift from Cape Cod AKA the Family of Potential Threatening Incest, and that means Richard has to sleep in a bed with Antia, Micah and Nathanial.

...and he's completely fine with that. NO. REALLY. HE'S COMPLETELY FINE WITH THAT.

 We must have looked surprised, though, because he said, “I’m a shapeshifter; we like big puppy piles for sleeping.”
 “Most of you guys do,” I said, “but you’ve never willingly slept with me and any of the other guys.” 
“This is who you are, Anita. This is who we both are.”

Alright, I kind of like that Richard isn't breaking things, but what the fucking shit, Laurel, one of Richard's main character traits is that he's monogamous, he doesn't like sharing, and he wants to be out of this bullshit relationship. I'll buy that he's come to terms with Anita's life choices (most of which suck) but WHY THE FUCKING SHIT is he getting in bed with them?

He asks everyone's permission to stay. Nathanial shows just how wonderful his therapist is:

“I’m not dominant to anyone in this room; I don’t get a vote.”

No. No no no no non o no NO NO. Dominance does not equal consent. DOMINANCE DOES NOT EQUAL CONSENT. It is ENTIRELY REASONABLE to ask permission to do something. And, for that matter, it's passive-aggressive as fuck to not give a yes/no answer to the question "Can I have intimate contact with you". Nathanial is not an inexperienced kid, and for him not to give a clear answer either means his boundaries are THAT fucked up, or he doesn't want Richard in bed with them and he doesn't want to get shit from Anita for telling Richard no.

Nate finally says it was Richard's bed first, and Richard says "Thanks for remembering that". I thought it was Jean Claude's bed? Richard did not do Jean Claude. Except under emotional duress from Anita and/or bad guys in the neighborhood.

They watch Richard unpack and then undress. It takes a paragraph to unpack, several paragraphs to undress. He gets into bed with Anita and Company and...oh god...they start making out.

On the one hand, we've waited until chapter eleven to have a sex scene. On the other hand, it's Richard, which means we're watching a rape victim make out with his abuser and HER abusers.

And then Richard and Nathanial start talking about Richard dating other women, which brings up Nathanial's request--that either Anita dominate him or he finds someone else who will, they just won't have sex. That leads to THIS:

 (Richard said) “I know. Raina talked about you a lot.” Raina had been the old lupa of the wolf pack. She’d taken Richard’s virginity and trained Nathaniel to be a good little pain slut.

good little pain slut.

  good little pain slut.

Nathanial is a slut because he likes pain. My issues with Nate's desire to be dominated has do with how he accepts all the pain, rather than restricting his activities to sex with people who are psychologically safe and who know how to use safewords. So thank you. Thank you, Anita, for finally being honest in your opinion of Nathanial's lifestyle. It's very gratifying. Also:

 The chapter of utterly horrible horribleness ends with everybody falling asleep.

I hate this book, I hate everyone involved in this book, I hate LKH for writing it and I hate Penguin for publishing it. In short:

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.

Danse Macabre--chapter 30

Guys, first off, brace yourselves. This is bad. There's no humor tonight, because there's nothing funny about what I just read. 

When I was thirteen, I read a book by Piers Anthony. My mother was pretty happy I was reading, and she didn't police my reading habits because, you know, that's not what cool moms do. Most of the time I'd agree with that 100%, but Piers Anthony is probably one of the most reprehensible human beings on planet earth. Most of his books involve some version of pedophilia, and that's the least awful thing he randomly includes. This particular series interested me because it involved world hopping, but it also exposed me to the concepts of gang rape, suicidal depression/ideation, pedophilia as a positive relationship and self-injury. It was, in fact, the first time I ever encountered the concept, and naturally every single thing about it was wrong. The protagonist is a fourteen year old girl who was abused as a small child, bullied in school and finally gang raped at a party at least a year before the book began, and is understandably depressed, and rather than having her parents realize that she's cutting herself in a tree and hiding the blood in the nastiest tin can on planet Earth and getting her much needed help, she gets whisked away on a romantic adventure by a twenty-five-year-old stranger who confirms her depression is utterly incurable and she's going to be that way for the rest of her life, and let's go magically relive all our trauma because it's not like we don't have flashbacks every fucking book. The bonus round, of course, was that when Mr. Anthony portrayed Self Injury he got every possible detail wrong. Protagonist cuts because she's too chicken-shit to be suicidal (This is what the text says) rather than because it offers a measure of relief (and because your subconscious is screaming HELP ME I CANNOT HANDLE MY SITUATION ANYMORE GET ME OUT AND GET ME HELP)

I refuse to give Anthony credit for my struggles with self injury, but I do have to admit that was the first seed ever planted. The things writers create speak to us on a level below conscious thought, simply because that's how storytelling works. You're holding the conscious interest with a shiny event, while you're shoving plot twists and character development under the brain's front door so the subconscious can process it. And a lot of other things get through. The writer's intent, their biases, and an awful lot of unintentional messages. A book is never responsible for an action, any more than a grain of sugar is responsible for fermentation. It doesn't trigger anything, but it contributes something to an individual's under-thought.

Laurell K. Hamilton's writing contributes the concept that abuse and forced consent are acceptable behaviors, and then it reenforces that concept over and over and over again. Not because unhealthy relationships are featured, but because these relationships are praised. And if someone is in an abusive relationship, and they see that relationship reflected in, say, Micah's rape of Anita in the shower, or Jean Claude's constant manipulation of Anita, and they read page after page of Anita praising those actions as love, love, true and unadulterated love, those pages have contributed to an abuse victim accepting their situation. 

Our brains are constantly processing information. One thing they constantly reprocess are comparisons. How does my life measure up to everyone else's? And it doesn't look at cars or houses, but rather histories. Is it normal for my husband to say this after I fail? Should my girlfriend be doing that? Is this normal? Is this acceptable? Am I doing okay, or do I need to change something? That's why having a gay character be a character and not a joke is important. That's why using rape as a joke is fucking wrong, and why having all the unlikable characters die in the slasher movie is the worst trend in movies ever. It's got nothing to do with being offended, and everything to do with the information being fed to the individuals who are still processing reality. And if you do get offended, it's probably not because you're personally insulted (unless you are). It's because on some level you understand how fucking damaging that attitude is to people who don't have defenses against that yet. It's why I find Prosperity Gospel and people like Hubbard and Warren Jeffs (Google it. Seriously. Start reading now and come back when the nausea gets overwhelming) to be pictures of fucking evil. LKH's target audience are women. Some of them will be married. Some of them will be married in abusive situations. Some of them will read about Anita's relationships and compare them to their own relationships and decide, based on that information, if how they are being treated is normal and healthy.

Think about that, and keep reading.

Anita is having a full on meltdown. This is the first positive thing I've found in the book so far. Emotional meltdowns aren't inherently bad. Frequently, if you're in an abusive relationship or you're struggling with addiction, they're good. They're the moment your subconscious finally kicks up the conclusion its been working on for months: This is not a good situation, nothing about this is good for us, and we need to get out. What we call an intervention is an artificial meltdown, a fake "bottom" to hit because the real "hitting bottom" could be fatal. I've had about three of these: Once when I realized my cutting had gotten out of hand, once when I understood that I'd gotten in a bad situation involving family, and once when I had a panic attack at my last job. These are not fun. Your entire worldview has been carefully built, either by yourself or, more likely, your abusive piece of shit significant other, to preclude exactly this revelation, and so that's the first thing to go. You lose all points of reference. You've been taught not to trust yourself, so you've just lost track of what's real. You feel guilt, you feel betrayed, usually by yourself, you feel a massive amount of pain and sorrow. Every time I went through this, I had the shakes anywhere from an hour to a couple of days. It's difficult to function physically, it's almost impossible to function mentally, and the one thing blazing through your mind is I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE.

 I heard a voice, a hysterical voice, saying, “Don’t want to do this… can’t do this. I can’t do this.” I realized it was me, and even realizing it, I couldn’t stop the babbling. “Can’t do a baby, tests, don’t want to do the ardeur anymore, no more, no more men, no more adding to my life.”

If Anita had one real friend in that room, she'd be out of all of this in thirty seconds. This is not a momentary lapse in judgement. This is a physical breakdown.

But here's the thing: Abusers are terrified of this moment. Sometimes it's subconsious, but most of the time they consiously know damn well that if you actually break through the shaky part and even one person confirms what you just said, they've lost you. So while you're sobbing and screaming and trying to remember how to run, they're being nice and sedate and calm, and breaking out the guilt trips.

This is exactly what happens next:

“It (Anita leaving) will destroy your power base,” Asher’s voice, though I couldn’t make my eyes search the room for him.

 “So be it,” Jean-Claude said. I fought to see him clearly, watch him look to Richard. “Why the tragic face, Richard? You could be free of the triumvirate, Richard, free of me.”

Guilt trip the first: It'll destroy everything Jean Claude built, and it's all Anita's fault. She's the one that wants to leave. Everything else is going so well. In choosing to leave, she's just decided that her life is more important than Jean Claude's entire empire.

Anita just flat out said it: SHE WANTS OUT. She wants out of the relationships, she wants out of the baby, she wants out of the magic. And this is the nearest that Jean Claude et-al ever get to honesty: Anita can't be allowed to leave because that shatters everything they've built. NONE of which she benefits from.

YOU HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO LEAVE. Even if it destroys the world (and it won't. Abusers are amazingly resiliant monsters) you have every right to say "Fuck that" and walk out the door.

Jean-Claude’s face loomed into view. “Ma petite, drop your shields. Drop them just enough for me to sense you. Let me share energy with you. You are unwell.”

Hey, we're going to invalidate your thought process and accuse you of being ill. Just let us back in and everything will be alright. You're sick, that's all. You're not thinking right, and I am, and if you'll just trust me I'll make everything better.

I can't decide if I want to scream or vomit right now.

This is how cultists keep their membership. This is how absuers keep their victims. It's never the victim's choice to stay. EVER. You cannot make a choice when you are never allowed to even consider the alternative. The victim chooses to leave and then gets pounded back into staying. Anita did not choose this lifestyle. She's fought it tooth and nail every step of the way and now she's literally screaming I WANT OUT and it's a sudden dogpile of negativity, invalidation and death threats.

Oh, have I not brought that part up yet?

“Damian.” I opened my eyes, and found myself staring into a black blur of a face. Nathaniel moved back far enough for me to have a chance to focus on him. 
I repeated what he’d said. “Damian.” 

“Damian will die,” Nathaniel said.

In other words, "I'll die if you leave me."

Lemme back up a bit and address the part right before that:

I was trying to do a take-back, on a game that had played too far for a do-over. The front part of my brain knew it was too late, but it wasn’t the front part of my brain that was in charge. How do you argue with the subconscious? How do you argue with a part of your brain you don’t even know is there most of the time?

Your subconsious is smarter than you are. It doesn't kick this shit up to fuck with you. When you break down like this, your brain is telling you you need to get out. And it is never too late to get out. It doesn't matter if you're married or you've got kids or he's dying of cancer or she's suicidal. If you want out, GET OUT. If you've had one of these scream-cry moments, especially if it's recent, and you didn't listen to it? You were right then, and it's time to go.

 So Jean Claude repeats it several times: If Anita leaves, Damian dies and it'll be all her fault. Then Micah brings up that even if she runs, she'll still be pregnant and she'll still need to go see a doctor. Which is bullshit. Yes, she still needs to deal with the baby, but she can do that with Ronnie, and by making a different appointment (Because the men might meet her at the current one and do this again. In fact, if I were Ronnie and Anita said she wanted out, I'd have her make an appointment with a different doctor, and then make plans to leave the state) and she can decide to terminate the pregnancy. It'd make the running a lot easier.

Anita says that if she leaves, she'll be free of the Ardeur. Jean Claude, of course, has a reply:

“In truth, I do not know if the gifts and curses you gain through the vampire marks will vanish if the triumvirate breaks. It may leave you as I found you, alone and safe in your own skin, if that is what you truly desire. Or you may retain some abilities, but lose the aid of…” He hesitated, finally finishing with, “all of us, in your struggle with the ardeur.”

Translation: It might not go away, and if you've still got it when you've left, I won't help you.

Yeah, loyal readers: Your abuser will always have a reply. Always. Do not EVER EVER EVER try to reason with an abuser. Don't interact with them, don't discuss your choice. Make a plan to deal with their attempts to get you back (which ought to involve hanged-up phones, a new place to live, and as many friends between you and them as you can possibly get) and then LEAVE. If you let them start talking there's a good chance they'll talk you into staying, and this time staying might kill you.

I'm not exaggerating one iota. STAYING WITH ABUSERS IS FREQUENTLY A TERMINAL MISTAKE.

And finally, Jean Claude, Micah AND Richard all bring out the big gun: Leave, and you'll die.

“I simply do not know what will happen, because what I feel you doing is impossible. Only true death should be able to break you free of my marks. Since what you attempt has never been done, I do not know what the outcome will be.” His voice was utterly bland, empty, as if his words meant nothing.

Micah touched my face, turned me to look at him. I could see him clearly, finally. His kitty-cat eyes were so serious. “Nothing that is happening is worth dying over, Anita, please.”

Richard hugged me from behind, bending all that six-feet-plus of warmth and muscle around me. “Please, Anita, don’t do this.” His breath was so warm, almost hot, against my hair.

This is textbook. As in I can name about fifteen different situations where exactly this happened to people. Most of them are people who tried to escape a cult (IE Elissa Wall, Marc Headley, Carolyn Jessop, Jenna Miscavage-Hill) but I know a few where women tried to escape individual abusers and had to either run for their lives or find the nearest thing to a bunker to live in, just to get away.

And Anita gives in. This entire situation is treated like a loving intervention on Jean Claude, Richard, Micah and Nathanial's part, and not a classic case of an abusive system struggling to retain a key member. Their loving embraces and kisses and concerned faces are described in warm and glowing terms... Or to TL:DR everything up there:

LAURELL K HAMILTON JUST CONDONED MANIPULATING ABUSE VICTIMS INTO STAYING WITH THEIR ABUSERS AND PRAISED IT AS A LOVING ACT ON THE PART OF THE ABUSER.

I want you to take three seconds and imagine an abuse victim on the cusp of bottoming out and running, reading this. This isn't just the senario, kids. LKH IS WRITING VERBATUM WHAT ABUSERS SAY. This is exact. THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS. THIS IS HOW IT WORKS. And she's saying that it's a loving, concerned act on their part, because clearly the victim just went momentarily insane.

The vomit bucket is over there.

And of course Anita decides to stay for Damian's sake. Jean Claude says that they must "reawaken" Anita's powers because she shut everything down in her aborted escape attempt. He demands she drop her sheilds and her cross and submit to him completely. Which is standard fare: Abusers will require their victims to preform an act of contrition for the "sin" of trying to leave them. It's a pretty key stage in psychological manipulation; your victim has decided that all the holds you've got on them aren't enough to keep them from running, so you have to get another hold on them before they try to run again. Surrender has a kind of indebtedness to it...it's very difficult to admit you were wrong about someone after you abase yourself in front of them. Your pride would rather have you continue to be at risk than deal with being ashamed...and that's not intended as a condemnation of pride, just a descrption of mental function. Pride is not evil. Shame is painful. Even if you are not at fault for the circumstances you are in, you will still feel responsible and ashamed for being there. Feeling shame is not an admission of guilt. It's something hard wired into our psyche and we don't get a choice about whether or not we feel it. An abuser knows this and will deliberately manipulate their victim into circumstances that are shameful so that the victim has to choose between their freedom and debilitating psychological agony. If the victim tries to run, that just means the abuser hasn't found something shameful enough, and they need to step up their game.  The next time the act of contrition will be bigger, the fallout more painful, and escape will become that much harder.

In other words, blog-readers: The shame isn't yours. There's no reason to feel it. You'll still feel it, but it is alright to let it blow through you without owning it. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF.

I admitted to myself in that one moment why I’d stopped wearing a cross most of the time. Oh, I kept one in my vampire-hunting bag, but I didn’t wear one much. To bed, but, oh, hell. I kept waiting for the cross to glow when I did something. I kept waiting for the cross to glow because of some vampiric ability that I’d inherited from Jean-Claude. I kept waiting for it to glow against me.

Abusers also use religion as a way to manipulate their victims. "You're so bad, God will never love you" is a pretty common theme, usually followed by "Unless you do every little thing I tell you." That's another reason to continually force victims into activities the victim finds shameful: Going back means admitting you did those things for nothing. That is a very difficult hurdle to overcome, and it is one that abusers deliberately invoke over and over again. Having to face your peers and/or your religious beliefs after abandoning them is an extraordinarly painful experiance. Having to say "I'm sorry" to your friends and family. Having to repair broken credit, or return to your religion after doing things you know were abhorrant to it. One of those "acts of contrition" I mentioned earlier, that Abusers will frequently make victims preform is further rejection of their old families and support systems, another step of alienation that makes it that much more unlikely for the old support system to reach out to the victim, or for the victim to reach out to the support system. Their goal is to make you feel so bad about yourself, you feel that you aren't worth helping. And they will continually push you further and further into that belief system.

This is one reason, dear readers, why it is VERY important that you never judge someone in an abuse situation. People in abusive systems frequently become abusive themselves, (See Anita) precisely because nothing alienates a healthy individual from a sick one as fast as abusive behavior. This means the victim may be just as dangerous as the abuser. You may have to take steps to protect yourself from the individual, but if you care for that person, it's very important that you not allow their behavior to alienate you too far. Don't get involved in their life (it's dangerous for you AND for them) but make sure they know that when they're ready to run, you'll be there. And take the time to study the literature on their situation so that you can take the steps necessary to protect yourself and them when they finally make a break for it.

Basically, keep your distance, keep yourself safe, but let them know you're still there. You could save their lives.

Everybody else clears out of the room and Asher and Jean Claude drown Anita in a memory-flood that seems to be every sexual experience they've had together, ever. Anita freaks out a little bit because she's overwhelmed, Richard gets some of it, a couple other people get knocked on their ass because of it, and Jean Claude makes absolutely sure that Anita knows it is all her fault:

“I would have preferred other memories to share, ma petite, but when you breached your unnatural shields, I did not dare restrict your access to me. I did not dare shut the marks down again.”

Nathanial then disappears, and it turns out he went to go spoon-feed Damian his energy until Anita was "ready" to support them both again, and Jean Claude tells her that if she doesn't get back with the program, they'll both die. End of chapter.

This chapter was very difficult for me to do without breaking something. This scenario isn't a hypothetical to me. I've seen it happen to people I love over and over and over and over again. I've had to give the "Distance yourself, but let them know you'll be there when they're ready" speech to a couple other friends of mine within the last four months. I had a relative I love marry a verbally abusive alcoholic who spent years playing this exact cycle out, over and over and over again, until he got tired of it. Each time she ran, he started this intensive campaign of alternating threats and affection until he convinced her she'd be safer with him than running from him. It wasn't over until he decided he was ready to move on. And the next woman he moved on to? Yeah. He beat her.

When a woman winds up in a cycle like this, it is not her fault. It is not her fault she's in it, it's not her fault she stays. I've seen it often enough to say that it's not her choice she stays, because the punishment cycle is so brutally manipulative, unless you make a clean break you don't get enough time to choose what you do next. You're not weak because you went back. You were manipulated and abused and assaulted. No human being is perfect. All of us will eventually collapse if enough pressure is applied. People in abusive systems are often convinced they are still safer in the system than they would be trying to escape...and they are frequently right.

Abuse cycles are all predictable, unless you're inside them. You think it'll be different because that's what he's telling you, and he's not giving you enough time to think deliberately. He's breaking you down because he knows goddamn well the second you believe in yourself, you're gone. But the one thing you need to realize, hypothetical blog-reader, is that no matter how bad it is now, it will get worse. It will ALWAYS get worse. You CANNOT stay in that relationship. Your best case scenario is that he will lose interest and leave you. The alternative is that it will continue, and continue to escalate, until you're dead. You CANNOT bargain with him. You CANNOT rescue him. You have no responsibility for what is happening to you, which means you have no way of preventing it or changing him. When you are in an abusive relationship, the only thing you can do is leave. Don't talk to him. Don't bargain. Don't reason. RUN.

But also understand: The most dangerous time in your relationship will be after you run, while they are trying to get you back. And they will ALWAYS try to get you back. Don't tell them that you plan to run. Don't give them warning. DO NOT HINT THAT YOU PLAN TO LEAVE. It will get worse. Don't let them know where you're going. Don't go to your mother's house. Don't go somewhere predictable. The absolute best thing you can do is leave the city/county/state, or if possible ,the country, and go somewhere he's never been before. Instruct all your friends not to even talk to him. Cut contact with his friends and the mutual friends. The first thing your abuser will do is try to seduce you into going back. The second thing he will try to do is destroy you. If there is even a chance that your abuser will turn violent, this is when he'll try to kill you. If you're not in immediate danger, take time to plan a clean break. Document what's happening. Find out what the legal steps you need to take are and TAKE those steps. Contact those friends and family he made you drop. Save up as much money as you can. Go get a pre-paid cell phone and hide it (or get a prepaid SIM card that will fit the cell phone model you already have. It'll be easier to hide) so that you can make plans without having so-and-so's name show up in your call logs or phone bills. If you can, get an emergancy-only credit card and hide that with the cell phone. The odds of any of this being completely necessary are very small, but those small odds aren't something you want to fuck around with. The only thing more dangerous than being in an abusive relationship is trying to get out.

I'm sorry for usurping the blog for a domestic violence rant, but this is one subject I can't let fly.  If this series were realistic, it would end either with Anita dead or running for her life with Edward as backup. NOTHING about this is nearly okay. And the subtext of "THIS IS WHAT TRUE LOVE LOOKS LIKE" is irresponsible, sickening, wrong-headed and utterly reprehensible. Every word you write contributes to someone else's thought process. Once again, Laurell K. Hamilton has written something that can contribute to getting someone killed. This is not love. This is not safe, and this is not even a matter of choice. This is a textbook example of life-threatening abuse and if this resembles any relationship you currently have, blog readers? GET. THE FUCK. OUT.

Edited to add: I was very quickly made aware that some of my language puts the responsibility of escape on the victim's shoulders. It's not your responsibility to escape. If you can, and you have the chance, TAKE IT. If you don't, or can't, that doesn't make you complicit in what is happening to you. 

Being disabled makes it a lot harder to get away. I've spent a few minutes researching options for disabled victims of abuse. So far I've just found hotlines. I do not know how effective they are. One thing that, at first glance, looks amazing is Freedom House in NYC . From what I've read so far, they cater to disabled victims of abuse. The sad thing is that they're not nationwide. However, you don't have to be a resident of New York City or even New York State to access some of their services.

If anybody here is aware of resources for disabled victims of domestic violence, PLEASE post in the links so I can add those options to this post. It's not just for this blog. Most of my family is involved in some form of social services, and I'm definitely going to pass as much information as I can to them and to people in my job.

Edit the second: I've managed to locate the resource sheet of disability services for my state.  Most of that is there for allies, but there are services that a disabled person may be able to use. I've also found/cobbled together some advice. It's probably not the best advice, but if you are disabled and in an abusive situation, I hope it'll be a place for you to start.

If you are disabled and an abuse victim and you're reading this, you've got access to a computer. If you cannot run, you can still contact your state and/or government services via e-mail and social media. You can also contact local advocacy groups. Corpus Christi, for example, has The Deaf and Hard of Hearing Center, Lighthouse for the Blind, and a few other services I remember but cannot find at the moment. Both of these services have e-mail addresses and social media connections, which means both centers can be contacted covertly. It may be possible to connect with an advocate without your abuser discovering. Make the attempt, though I'd advice you to make it ONLY if you believe you can make contact without being discovered. If your abuser discovers that you are using your internet connection to reach out for help, they WILL shut it down. Make it a habit to clear your browsing history. If possible, create disposable social media accounts and contact any outside people--family, friends, pastors--that you can trust, but ONLY if you believe that they can keep your new contact information secret and ONLY if they can be trusted not to alert your abuser that you've managed to contact people outside of their field of control. Also, if you receive regular visits from a social worker, a counselor, a doctor, or a police officer that you trust who is NOT connected to your abuser, tell them what is going on. ALL of those people HAVE to report what you tell them to the appropriate agencies, even if they do not believe you, and those agencies HAVE to look into what is going on. And most of these people are actively watching for exactly what you are going through, because that is why they have their jobs. The odds are that they absolutely WILL believe what you say. If it's possible for you, I would also recommend documenting everything you can safely document and keeping that record someplace accessible to you, but hidden from your abuser. If that means creating a fake e-mail account and e-mailing yourself a diary, start doing it tonight. If you have access to something like a kindle or an ipad, take pictures of physical abuse and investigate recording the verbal aspects, and again, store any pictures and recordings you can make someplace secure and accessible, like an e-mail account. DON'T post them anywhere public, because that can alert your abuser. DO NOT keep this documentation on the device. If it is at all possible, if and when your abuser is confronted have somebody with you that you can trust. Ideally, it should be an advocate intimately familiar with your disability who can assist the authorities in understanding your circumstances and can defuse any attempt by your abuser to silence you. The single most important thing you can do is refuse to be isolated.

It is not your responsibility to escape this, because you should not be in that position in the first place. But if you do want to get out, there are at least a few resources you can use to make the attempt. You don't have to accept that just because someone else is in a position of power over you, they get to hurt you. You should EVER have to endure abuse. You have every right to try to get away from it. You have the right to live safe, unmolested, unmanipulated and unabused, no matter what. You are not someone's "burden", their abuse is NEVER justified. You are NOT responsible for anything about your circumstances. YOU HAVE EVERY RIGHT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR SITUATION.

Danse Macabre--chapter 13

Something else annoying that LKH does is ruin point out her own logical holes and then not fix them. Example? Example. She points out that Jean Claude's underground lair is lit with electric lights, but the hallway is lit with torches and the combination of the two is kinda weird. You know what? It IS weird. Why would you run wires through the rock hallways (given that it'd be easier than drilling new holes in the fucking rock to run your wires) and then NOT USE THE WIRES. WHY in the name of FUCK would anyone want torches if they have access to electric light? It made kind of sort of sense with Nikolaus but Jean Claude likes his toys. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS.

Asher's introductory paragraph is...special.

Asher glided toward us, and it was almost as if his feet didn’t touch the ground, as if he were floating. He was always graceful, but not like that. He was one of the best at levitating that I’d ever seen, so that he could do what the legends say: Asher could fly.

I am not the best at grammar in the whole wide world, and I try not to make statements if I am not sure, so fucking trust me. COLONS. DO NOT. WORK. THAT. WAY. 

A colon is an equals sign. Everything on this side=everything on this side. One rule: Make them fucking balance. And even if it kind of sort of works if you squint at it sideways, it's ugly.

Tonight it was as if he could barely force himself to walk when he knew he had wings and longed to use them. He was like some earthbound angel waiting to fling himself skyward.

His clothes helped the angelic illusion. He was all in white with gold and copper thread worked through the frock coat, and along a pair of silk pants that ended at his knees, where white hose took up, and ended in white high heels with golden buckles. The shoes reminded me that the original high heel was meant for men.

I swear to god every time LKH walks into a Joann's it must be fucking embarrassing. I'm a fiber-phile and even I don't go that ape-shit over clothes.

 The Drunk-Krunk descriptions continue for a minute, and then Asher reveals that he's gotten new powers too. So apparently the level up evolved all the pokemon, and not just Anita and her tri-whatevers. HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT you know what, I'm not even going to bother. Fine. She's leveled up all her friends and none of her enemies. Moving on.

So the first thing Cape Cod dude (I am not writing Master of Cape Cod. Fewest possible words, my lovelies) does is apologize for his wife causing Anita's little episode. Anita pounces on that like white on rice. It's all somebody else's fault. Lady, unless he's got Sleez's mind-control rape stick, you did it all on your own. Own your fucking shit, Anita. Own your shit.

 Also, apparently Anita inspired Thea. That is one scary lady Cape Cod is married to.

Samuel finished for him. “Thea is other, and she reasons in ways that do not always make much sense to those of us who began life as human beings.” He didn’t sound entirely happy about it, but he stated it as truth.

On the one hand, I like that concept a lot, and I really enjoy playing with the concept of non-human sentience and how that might work. On the other hand, the whole "other=non human" thing is kind of icky for reasons I can't really articulate right now, and also that is the biggest fucking copout oh my fucking god. Just say that the woman is ruthless and stick with it. She wants her powerbase to be very big, and that means making her sons big mojo. There. There you go. It's not that hard.

And again, Samuel threatens to shatter one of the few established rules of this universe: Vampires can't reproduce biologically unless they are REALLY young and go through a lot of work to make it happen. There's no open confirmation on the biology of Thea's kids, but it's strongly implied that's he's the biological dad.

Samuel and his kid, Sampson, both point out that Anita is enslaving everyone she fucks. She's like "What? I don't do that." And everyone else is like YES YOU FUCKING DO and isn't this a book about dancing? Do you think maybe we could get to the dancing parts? This is getting boring. No?

Then Jean Claude risks shattering the known universe by asking Samuel for advice. It's reguarding Anita and her growing powers. Because treating her like a side of beef is how you solve issues in this universe.

And then oh my god, my lovelies. We're about to wander off into the deep end of the suck. Because just when I thought I was desensitized to all the awful, we go leaping into whole new realms. And I am not kidding here. The fun, oooh-look-how-awful element of the snark? It's about to go away. I can't even point and laugh after this point. All I can do is try not to hurl.

He shook his head. “No, I am master, and father, and I will do it.” He looked back at Jean-Claude. “Thea tried to bring Sampson into his powers as a siren.”

\
“Thea tried to bring Sampson into his powers as a siren.”

Well, okay, now maybe it's not that bad. They're both consenting adults, they could be into it mutually. Maybe--

He nodded. “Sampson came to me, and I told her, in no uncertain terms, that if she ever tried to do it again I would kill her. When the twins began to exhibit faint signs of power, I gave her the talk again.”

“In my mother’s defense,” Sampson said, “when I said no, she took no for an answer. She didn’t have to. I’m her son, but I’m not a siren yet; if she’d pushed her powers, then I wouldn’t have had a choice. She stopped when she realized I was horrified. She didn’t understand why it bothered me, but she accepted it.”

Yeah. You don't threaten to kill a family member over consensual sex. And "stopped" implies that something had started when Sampson finally talked his mother into stopping her assault. So I'm going to let you work through all the squick inherent in this. It'll take a while. There's lots of awful layers.

Samuel, it turns out, is pushing his kids onto Anita because he's trying to save them from their mother.

And Sam's reasoning isn't any better. He's not trying to save them because their mother is a sexual predator, this is morally wrong and the therapy bills. Nope. He wants the power and he's willing to let Thea do it, but he's worried it might "break their sanity". Please explain what that word means in this context, dude. Also, very nice, implying that incest victims are insane. Get fucked, please.

I do not wish to be forced to either imprison or kill my own child, Jean-Claude, and that is what we might have to do.”

Your wife is a sexual predator, then. If she can't keep herself from raping her own fucking children then she is a sexual predator and you need to not be married and/or reproducing with her anymore. Also, OH MY FUCKING MOTHERFUCKING GOD. HE MIGHT HAVE TO KILL HIS CHILD BECAUSE HIS WIFE RAPED THEM. HEY, CAN WE TALK ABOUT VICTIM BLAMING FOR A MINUTE, BECAAUSE HOIHO:IHIOFOJKHA:OKDLkhs;lkfs;lkjf;awlekj;oi I'm sorry, I think I just rage-broke my brain.

THIS IS THE ONLY SANE REACTION. DISCOVER PARTNER IS BAD PERSON: GET AWAY FROM BAD PERSON. ANYTHING ELSE IS COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE AND WRONG.

 Richard then takes issue with the fact that Anita is even considering this.

Of course it is because Richard is jealous and confused--perfectly understandable, given that Anita is an abusive fucking rapist that will NOT let him just cut ties and disappear, I'd be confused too--and not because, you know, IT'S FUCKING WRONG. But I really can't see how this could get any wors--

“God help me, but you and your brothers are actually in a more perverted sexual mess than we are. If I say no, and the worst happens…”

So if Thea rapes her sons, it's Richard's fault.

There is only one sane response to this.

Then there's a big long speel about how Anita is saving Samuel's family from destruction and I have to stop that bullshit before it gets started. Anita is not saving shit. Anita is in no way responsible for Thea's behavior or misbehavior.

Samuel had accepted that someday the worst would happen, and suddenly he was saved.

Yeah. That's squick inducing nonsensical bullshit. NO. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT ABUSE WILL HAPPEN EVER. NOT TO YOU and sure as FUCKING FUCK you do not have to accept that abuse will happen to your children. If you think there's even a CHANCE of shit going down like this? GET OUT. RUN. RUN AS FUCKING FAR AS YOU FUCKING CAN. NOTHING IS WORTH LETTING THAT LEVEL OF HARM HAPPEN TO YOUR CHILDREN. And if one of your children come to you and say the other parent did something? Fucking evaporate. And if you can't do that, start making phone calls and send the kids someplace safe as often as you can. NEVER EVER EVER LEAVE THEM IN THE ROOM ALONE WITH THE DANGEROUS INDIVIDUAL. EVER. DO NOT EVER LEAVE A CHILD IN A DANGEROUS SITUATION. YOU ARE A GROWN ADULT. YOU MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO PROTECT THEM COMPLETELY BUT YOU CAN GIVE YOURSELF A HERNIA TRYING.

I still wasn’t sure how I felt about adding to my men, but it was nice, for a change, to be someone’s salvation instead of their doom. Yeah, being the savior instead of the executioner, that sounded pretty damn good.

I am deep inside the brain pan of a rapist. I am making no judgements on the author--actually, yes I fucking am but I'm not sharing them because that's not what this blog is for, let's please not do that mkay?--but as far as Anita's thought processes, this is how they work. This is how they think. You ever want to know what a sexual predator's thinking looks like? Read this chapter and focus on that last paragraph. I do not see how any sane, rational, well-meaning human being can look at that situation and go "HEY, HAVING SEX WITH CHILDREN TO SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM INCEST IS THE BEST MOVE". A sane human being would call Child Services first (the two boys are still underage and the father has ADMITTED there is a chance Mom could molest them, and that Mom has molested other kids. An intervention of some kind should damn well be a given) and then, when that failed, would call the armed assassins they have for buddies because you don't solve this shit by saying "at least Mommy isn't the one hurting you". You solve it by making sure the shit stops, and that sex is involved in the solving approximately never. The thought of Edward and Guilty Pleasures era Anita going sawed-off-shotgun on Thea and Current Anita's asses right now is the only thing keeping me from foaming at the fucking mouth. THEY ARE ACTIVELY CONTEMPLATING THIS. FUCK. THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THE NEXT FEW CHAPTERS.  I am at the point where I really don't want to sort through this to find the words to explain this judgement call to anybody, because nothing about this shit is okay. NOTHING. This chapter is over and I can go scrub off and get clean and that's exactly what I'm going to go do.

This is awful. This is so incredibly bad.

Micah Chapter 12

Anita wakes up in the hospital.

Salvia the child murderer-assisting lawyer asshole who tried to kill Anita? He's dead. Killed offscreen by the zombie Anita raised.

The killer zombie? Oh, Larry Kirkland--you know, the dude whose wife is in the hospital with premature labor? yeah. That guy. He flew down and put the zombie back in the ground. And the text seems to imply that he came with Tammy. I cannot get concrete confirmation on this, but that would mean that they put a woman with a history of premature labor on an airplane.

I can excuse a lot of bullshit, but for fuck's sake, Laurel travels. FREQUENTLY. HOW CAN YOU STUFF SO MUCH FAIL INTO SOMETHING YOU DO MULTIPLE TIMES A YEAR AS PART OF YOUR JOB. I have traveled on an airplane eight times. Counting the round trips. I knew exactly what I could take on a plane before I got on for the first time (Mostly because I wanted to make sure you could take spindles--yes--and knitting needles--not the metal kind, which is what I used at the time. :(--on a plane.

Oh, and it turns out that Micah moving Anita into a fancier hotel saved her life, because the salesman who checked into that hotel room that night got killed very very dead. So it looks like Salvia framed the soon-to-be-zombie for a child molestation and murder that one of his boss's sons did, and the zombie died because of the trauma and he blamed his murderer and Salvia was worried that the zombie would testify about the molestation (and not nine million other mob related things) so he decided to assassinate the animator who would raise the zombie and when Micah changed Anita's room it kind of killed that plan and Salvia had to go to a really shitty plan B that got shot in the ass when Killer Zombie blamed him for his murder and I AM SO GLAD WE FOCUSED ON ANITA HAVING SEX IN A FUCKING HOTEL ROOM AND NOT ON THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN AWESOME PLOT AREN'T YOU.

SERIOUSLY. THE CHAPTER ENDS WITH THE NURSES GIGGLING OVER ANITA CANOODLING WITH MICAH AND NATHANIAL--BECAUSE THE SMARTEST THING TO DO WHEN THE MOTHERFUCKING MOB IS TRYING TO KILL YOU IS FLY YOUR (ACCORDING TO THE TEXT) HELPLESS SUBMISSIVE LOVER IN TO CANOODLE AT YOUR HOSPITAL BEDSIDE--AND THIS IS THE END OF THE STORY. 

THIS BOOK. IS SERIOUSLY. ALL. ABOUT. SEX. 

They wake up in bed. They fly to philly. They check into a hotel room and fuck. THAT IS  LITERALLY FIFTY TWO PERCENT OF THIS BOOK. Kindle provides you with a percent-of-book thingy at the bottom. I CHECKED.

WHAT. THE ACTUAL. FUCK. 

I kind of breezed by the truely, revoltingly awful things in this book because A. I've already touched on the anatomical stupidity, the awful sex, the bad characterization and the abso-fucking-lutely-senseless character assassination of everybody that isn't a sex partner for Anita Blake (and some that are) because silly me, I thought there'd be more of a book. In terms of awful content this is actually pretty damn mild compared to using molestation victims to give your main character somebody to comfort, or wearing a mini-skirt, thong and stilettos to an active crime scene, but THIS IS ALL WE GET. 

AND THE PLOT IS ENTIRELY RESOLVED OFFSCREEN WHILE THE MAIN CHARACTER IS UNCONSCIOUS. 

I do not pirate the books I review on this blog, kiddies. I pay for the privelage of ripping this shit to shreds. This book cost six dollars. I WILL NOT GET THIS MONEY BACK.


WHY DOES THIS BOOK EXIST.

 In short, I have only one response to this.

I am probably going to take tomorrow off (because the next two days are busy at work and I need to get paid before I give Laurel K. Hamilton any more of my money) but I will continue on this sausage train because THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH SUCK.

Good night.

Cerulean Sins--chapter 22

YAY I HAVE SURVIVED ANOTHER WEEK. I am alive. I can take a nap as soon as this review is done!

...that means this book is standing between me and my post-sunday brunch nap.

I hate this book.

So Anita wakes up in a hot tub, again, surrounded by men. Somebody brought up a few days ago that the blood pressure drop that occurs when you leave a hot tub is not a joke, so technically these books should be short one over-sexed steriotyped heroine. But it is not. Because the first thing you want to do after you've passed out from blood loss and co worker stupidity is have sex in a hot tub.

Also, in addition to having startlingly lime green eyes, Micah has apparently graduated to the Mood Ring category, which is probably up there with naval lint and grease traps on my list of "least favorite things ever". (I had to clean a grease trap out at work once. We all agreed never to speak of it again)

Look. I get that eyes are important. I am an artist. They are the single most important part of any picture. But there is "the eyes are important" and then there is what LKH writes. The only thing you need to do to eyes in a picture is 1. make sure they look wet and 2. never use red. Unless you are painting Satan. And we don't remember eye color as well as we think we do, and while I can tell the difference between the Blood Orange and Prickley Pear purees at work and nobody else can (One is purple, one is red. WHY IS THIS SO HARD) I cannot for the life of me tell green eyes from blue eyes from violet. The best description of blue eyes I ever got was "Faded denim" from Dark Tower re: Roland Deschain's eyes.

"HIS EYES CHANGE COLOR TO FIT HIS MOOD" is less "getting the description right" and more "SHOVING HEAD UP OWN ASS". You need one adjective for eyes, and this is a color. The simpler the better. We have many many many more interesting things to read about than we do the exact shade of emerald chartruse verte greeny green Micah's eyes happen to be when he pairs them with that particular shirt.

Those eyes sat in a face that was beautiful in the way a woman’s face was beautiful. Delicate. There was a line to the jaw, a chin that was male, but gently so. His mouth was wide, with the bottom lip thicker than his upper, giving him a permanent pout.

Yeah. No. I get what she's saying and I kind of like the picture, sort of, as long as I don't actually read the things being written here. But underneath that varnish of "oooh pretty" it's just creepy. First...why is "beauty" feminine? The first time I realized a guy was pretty was Captain Dallas (I think) from Alien, and the prettiest male I ever saw in my life was (and still is) Randy Orton (...DO NOT JUDGE ME. The alternative to WWE RAW is spending three fucking hours of my one night off a week camped out in my room playing minecraft...and yeah, Randy is pretty.) Viggo Mortessen as Aragorn still gives him a run for his money. Anyhoo, you could describe Micah as pretty without dipping into gender here. And then that second sentence. "A line to the jaw and a chin that was male". I think what she means is he had a male jaw-line, but Jesus Christ is that garbled. I get that she's got a no-edit clause on her contracts, but--

--she sent in the first draft of Affliction in and it went straight to copy-edits. Nevermind.

 He was my Nimir-Raj, and from the moment we had been together it had been deeper than marriage, more permanent than anything words or paper could bind.

Isn't the standing anti-fan theory that Micah is the stand-in for her current hubby?

Moving on.

If I have to read the words "my beast" as a stand in for "I wanted to have sex with him" or "I wanted to rip his clothes off" one more time I think I'm going to punch something. Preferably Micah. LKH is using Anita's latent shapeshifting...stuff (really, was it necessary to break your entire universe to give Anita all the things?) as a filter for actual feeling and actual sexuality, so that Anita herself is still purified purely pure and pure. And it is getting old.

And then...yeah, I read ahead a few days back, so I've been like doing this all week:

So even though Anita has been passing out due to blood loss all day, and has only just woken up, she and Micah have sex. And instead of taking whatever migrane/headache type issues Anita might have and turning them up past 9000, it lets Anita into the magical metaphysical world. And in the MMW, there is a shadow-thing feeding off Jean Claude, and Jean Claude's "failsafes" AKA his innate dickishness, kicked in and instead of feeding off Jean Claude the shadow-thing has been feeding off Anita and, she assumes, Richard all day. Which is why Anita has been all fainty.

 So Anita and Micah send their "beasts" to attack the shadow thing. And because my mind is perverted, instead of imagining a pair of beautiful leopards I imagined a pair of boobs and a penis. That's your image for today. You're welcome. The Beasts shred the shadow-thing, thus hand-waving away the hand-waving (...shouldn't that be like, divide by zero kind of impossible?) and Anita follows it--psychically, again--to Musette's room.

You'd think a thousand year old madame of the undead would know how to sheild properly, but I guess not. Anyhoo Shadow-thing goes directly to Musette, thus pointing out its mistress and giving Anita a big fat honking NO SHIT clue as to who is responsible. So she comes out of the psychic orgasm Micah gave her, grabs her cell phone and has one of the staff at the Circus hang crosses on everybody's door.

It's the first time ANYBODY has done something practical, and I half expected her to go racing off with cedar stakes and a bucket of holy water instead of doing the one damn thing she could have done nine million times prior to now.

Having saved herself from psychic vampirism, Anita then moves on to discussing how her sexual vampirism is sucking the life out of Nathanial. Apparently he collapsed at his club while dancing.This conversation gets REALLY creepy when Anita admits that she wouldn't be sleeping with any of these men if she didn't have to feed the arduer. Ardeur. However the fuck you spell it. And she's avoiding getting more men because she doesn't want to hurt anybody's feelings if the ardeur ever goes away and she can finally close down the amusement park. Which is her vagina.

I don't know for sure WHY I find that so creepy, but oh holy God I do.

And then we move on to "Would you sleep with Richard again?"

“Micah, I still have feelings for Richard, but he dumped me. He dumped me because I’m more comfortable with the monsters than he is. He dumped me because I’m too blood-thirsty for him. He dumped me because I’m not the person he wants me to be.

HE DUMPED YOU BECAUSE YOU RAPED HIM. YOU RAPED HIM. HE TOLD YOU FLAT OUT HE DIDN'T WANT YOU TO FEED ON HIM AND YOU JUMPED HIM ANYWAY. YOU. RAPED. RICHARD. You proved to him that you have no self control, that you cannot be trusted to respect his bounderies or physical, mental and emotional safety and that you value your promises about as much as I value disposable gloves at work. OF COURSE HE FUCKING DUMPED YOU.

Richard wanted, more than anything else, to be human. He didn’t want to be a monster. He wanted to be a junior high science teacher, marry a nice girl, settle down, have 2.5 children, and maybe a dog. He was a science teacher, but the rest  .  .  . Richard was like me, he would never have a normal life. I had accepted that, but he was still fighting. Fighting to be human, fighting to be ordinary, fighting not to love me. He’d succeeded on that last.

See, that's why I love stories like what this used to be. That fight right there. The struggle to define humanity and personhood and Self when those bounderies get shaken down. A measure of surrender would be required to cope--to quote the serenity prayer "accept the things I cannot change"--but never surrender to the point where other valuable human lives are put at risk because of your behavior. In the first books that was Anita's fight AND Richard's fight. To figure out what they couldn't change and then smash the everloving shit out of the rest of it. But Anita hasn't just accepted to the point of healthy coping. She's wallowing in being a real live, honest to god physical danger to the people around her and she's doing absolutely nothing to protect the people she has in her life from the nasty side effects of who and what she's become.

There's a long paragraph about how "the world is what the world is and you need to accept that" and I call bullshit. The world is a terrible awful nasty place, and the job of good human beings is to try to make it a better one. You don't give up and wallow in the mud just because you can't get out of the muck. You keep on walking.

LKH seems dead set on condemning any attempt at improving the world, and I have no idea why.

There are two fundamental issues in Anita and Richard's relationship. Richard is naturally monogamous--he can't sleep with other people, and he can't share--While Anita is naturally poly, and HELLO MCFLY, Anita raped Richard.

The healthy answer is MOVE THE FUCK ON. Which Anita will never do because apparently she's also got a grade A certification in STALKING.

Like I said before: I hate this book.

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.