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 7

It is time for LKH to have her main character meet new people. Anybody remember how hard it was for Anita Blake to get into Narcissus in Chains armed? Well, I hope you found that scene to be fucking riveting because we're about to get a replay. 

Remember: Merry is here to meet with Maeve Reed . The chapter opens with a description of Ethan Kane, a character who is manifestedly not Maeve Reed, who is one of her psychic bodyguards/PIs. Why would she hire more PIs when she already has Merry's major competition on retainer?

We will find out. And we will not be happy.

Ethan attempts to be imposing to the Fae men, who pretty much define imposing for the sake of this story. Although I do have to ask...how imposing is Christmas tinsel hair? Several members of my household watch WWE wrestling regularly (...my primary writing place is on the couch in front of the TV, and Mondays are my only real day off. So yes. I usually wind up watching the first and last thirty minutes. The other two hours though, I usually wind up playing Minecraft until a Creeper blows up my house), and the big thing for the past month has been watching the Rock call Paul Haymen "Twinkie Tits" and C.M. Punk "Cookie Puss". So kids? If your descriptions of your Bishe men makes me think of the Rock's kindergarten (if admittedly clever-ish) TV safe insults? YOU FAIL.

(For the record, I'd rather be watching Sherlock, but the roomies get the TV on Mondays. My retaliation has been episodes of Sherlock)

And my attempts at imagining this scene:

He frowned down at us from just outside Maeve Reed’s large double doors. We were all standing at the foot of the marble steps that led up to those doors.

Has me giggling madly. I see this huge, sweeping front staircase, with Merry and Co at the bottom and this dude in little dark glasses and a pressed suit staring down at them with his arms folded. Nobody's saying anything. They're just kind of standing there. And there are four other people standing between them and the door.

This is hilarious.

And then they start talking.

I'm going to be real honest with you guys. Dialogue is not LKH's strong suit. Dialogue exists to develop characters and convey information you would not normally get. Screaming is perfectly acceptable dialogue. Repeating very fucking obvious shit that you already covered in previous paragraphs? THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.

Ethan asks Merry what she's doing there. She says that Maeve Reed invited her. She asks what he's doing here. He says he's Maeve's bodyguards.

Right.

I really hope Merry didn't pay a lot for that PI badge of hers. (...and suddenly I'm hearing Joe Pecci saying "They fuck you they fuck you they fuck you with the cell phones" and I realize they both got their badges from the same place)

Merry says in her internal monologue that she is about to be blunt. Then she spends the next several paragraphs describing everything except what she should actually be doing, which is getting into Maeve's House so the plot can actually exist. 

"Blunt", Merry, is when you actually say the thing you're intending to say in as few words as possible.

...Oh, hey, what's Kitto doing?

He looked oddly out of place in his short-shorts, tank top, and child-size Nikes.

NO.

He’d put on black wraparound sunglasses, but aside from that he could have passed for someone’s nephew,

 

the kind that usually isn’t a nephew at all but a boy toy.

GOOD FUCKING GOD.  WHY? WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THIS? WHY WOULD ANY HUMAN BEING COMPARE A CHARACTER THEIR MAIN CHARACTER IS FUCKING TO A VICTIM OF MOLESTATION AND TRAFFICKING?  


Jesus. Jesus Christ. I need to go take medication for this.

Okay. I'm better now.

Merry's form of bluntness is to tell Ethan why he's being a dick--he is worried that Merry and the boys are about to replace him. Merry, I would not want to be within six feet of me with a gun becasue I would not be confident that she wouldn't have a sob attack or decide to get passive aggressive about getting a raise ("...yes I know your stalker killed your cat, but I am allergic to cats. Now give me a two thousand dollar raise so I can afford medication for my allergy to people")(Also: Not saying girls can't guard. I am saying that Merry shouldn't guard) but if I were Fae and the Queen of Crazy's royal guards were suddenly on the market? Fuck yes I'd hire them.

But Merry is quick to assure Ethan that Maeve wants to see her, and only her, and I guess it is that obvious that Merry should never preform guard duty for anything, ever, because Ethan backs right the fuck down.

Hey, how respectful of Merry's person are her boyfriends?

“I can be very nice if people give me the chance, Ethan.” 

Max spoke low so that Ethan couldn’t hear him. “And how nice can you be?”

 Rhys answered, voice low, “Very, very nice.” 

The two of them shared one of those masculine laughs that women never seem to be able to participate in, but are always the subject of.

That's the most sexist thing I've read this year. There are layers of suck in that tiny paragraph. First of all, there's the fact that Merry's fucking bodyguards just told somebody they don't know from fuck all about how good Merry is in the sack. For all they know this dude could have a Merry Gentry shrine in his bedroom (Because remember, kids, Merry is more famous than Elvis) Second, there is how this passage doesn't demonize this at all. It's a comment on Merry's sexual prowness, not an example of what kind of men Merry surrounds herself with. It's trying to tell you how awesome she is. And thirdly, it implies that all men are like that. It takes the whole thing out of the relm of character development and shoves it into the land of gender typecasting. It's not people doing this, folks, it's men. it's not Merry being left out of the conversation re: her ladyparts. Nope. It's women. Here's the age-old divide that LKH swears she's trying to mend, and here's the shovel she's using to make the canyon just a little bit wider.

And I know that some guys do have this conversation, just as some women have it. They're assholes reguardless of gender. But even if we did have that conversation, most of us are smart enough to have it when the object of our genetalia's affection ISN'T FUCKING STANDING RIGHT IN EARSHOT.

And he's doing it in front of her competition. You know how Merry was going on about respect? This is a sign they don't respect her at all. Not that they don't obey her orders, or Rhys's freaking out over man-child goblin sex. It's the fact that Rhys is airing out her dirty laundry not just in public but in a business setting. And Merry doesn't turn around and reprimand him for it.

Gang, the basis for respect is healthy bounderies. If you establish and mantain them, people respect you. If you prove that you're willing to violate both yours and other people's? People lose respect for you. If you are willing to let your employees gab about your personal information? Eventually they're going to start taking cash out of the till. Merry has no bounderies, and neither does anyone else in this god-awful book.

And then we start playing the "We're not letting you in with your guns" part of the "LKH's Main Character meets new people" game. Jesus Christ, you'd think she'd come up with a new way to do this after twenty fucking books.

Anita solved this by talking in circles for hours. Merry solves it by shouting "Maeve Reed, Maeve Reed, come out to play!" at the top of her lungs until Maeve shows up.

I liked it better when Patrick Swayze did it:



Finally Maeve's secretary comes out and asks them to come in. Ethan insists on releaving Merry of her guns, it takes ten minutes for Maeve to threaten to fire Ethan and for Merry to step through the house's front door.

End of chapter.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 10

Business first: Sneak Peek of Planet Bob will be posted tonight, as soon as I get off work. BE THERE!

It's kind of interesting, how very much I did NOT want to do this chapter. This is the chapter that made me quit reading.

I did not get that the scene immediately prior to this was a traumatizing fuck-up that would leave any woman screaming in terror the first time I read it, because I was ninteen and thought that "rape" was that dramatic thing that gives a woman a Tragic Backstory. I did not understand what it really is: A dehumanizing act that leaves its victims feeling like somebody else's kleenex.

See, where no actual, onscreen penetration occurred in the previous chapter, there were a lot of hard, naked dongs, and Anita was naked too. And asleep around all those hard, naked dongs. This is the kind of thing that makes someone freak out. Which she did. And then her lover Jean Claude, a man she is supposed to trust mind raped her into feeding off of Micah. That is a violation of every single thing a lover is supposed to be about. And it doesn't help Anita at all. How do I know she had issues with this?

I’d cleaned off, scrubbed myself thoroughly, but I felt like Lady MacBeth screaming “out, out, damned spot!” Like I’d never really be clean again. I sat on the tiles under the hot, beating water, hugging my knees.

The thing I remember the most about the assault that happened to me was wanting to brush my teeth. I knew I couldn't. I spent the hour between when I called the police and when they finally showed up spitting into a disposable cup. I was not going to swallow again until after I'd brushed my teeth.

My point? You don't react like this to normal sex. You don't react like this when you do a favor for a lover. You react like this when you have been violated.

This is never addressed in the text. 

Anita has to be comforted by one of her wereleopards. There is a lot in the text about how this is a violation of the natural order of pard structure, and how neither one of them care about that right now. There is nothing about how Jean Claude just fucking broke her trust to get something he wanted out of her. How do I know that Laurell intends never to address her Main Character's emotional breakdown?

Because Micah walks in and Anita gets all flustered over the thought of having sex. 

Jean Claude is in jail for murdering Anita. Somebody saw him and her both covered in blood, she never shows up at a hospital, people put two and two together and come up with dead Anita. Meanwhile the wereleopards are all scared because Anita got cut by one of them during the fight, and that plus her sudden ability to heal like a madman, MIGHT have given her lycanthropy. Meanwhile, Micah, this total stranger she knows nothing about, now knows everything about her because he was involved with the talks with doctors that lead to an assumption of lycanthropy.

FYI, I hate it when customers know my name and use it. I hate it when people at my job ask about my personal life, and vice versa. I have told a grand total of two people at my job about my self publishing books, and that was because I knew they were the two least likely to care. My boss still does not know (mostly because you'll see the nuclear cloud from where you're sitting). I am a very personal human being. A lot of other people, including Anita, are too. And yet she does not melt down.

And now we get to what made me quit reading this series.

Understand, I spent nine books watching Anita deal with Richard and Jean Claude. I watched them slowly, carefully, and painfully dramatically, come to a situation where the three of them--two people who loved each other and a fuck crazy vampire--could have something approaching a life together. They had issues--Anita spent all of one book saying "I trust you, Richard," only to run straight to Jean Claude's bed when Richard shifted (...on top of her, which was gross, and he also promptly ate part of a dead man. She had excuses)--and it took another two books for them to kiss and make up. But the resolution was on the horision, and I wanted to see how that relationship would go.

But this...ugh, let's just sum up.

Richard realizes that Gregory may have turned Anita into a wereleopard (Spoiler: He didn't) and goes ape-shit. His pack decides that Anita can't be Lupa and a wereleopard (Why is never explained) and decides to punish Gregory for hurting Anita. The pack decides that Anita going wereleopard (which she won't) is some kind of metaphysical murder, and so he'll have to be killed, and Richard has gone batshit insane and has done something to the pack structure so that he rules them but he doesn't really rule them, and...yeah. I don't think I can make this make sense. So basically we've gone from having to rescue the wereleopards from the wereheyenas to having to rescue the wereleopards from the werewolves, and Anita could be a wereleopard now (She isn't.)

And then Micah starts putting the moves on Anita.

Now, in his defense, she seduced him a few moments ago. The problem is, that was Jean Claude doing some metaphysical mojo because he was hungry and she was there.And....gah, I'm not addressing this now.

she calls Richard, who says that 1. she isn't Lupa anymore (duh) 2. the pack won't let him date her if she's a kitty cat (She isn't) and 3. they want him to pick a werewolf lover right now, fuck the nine gazillion things his being with Anita has won the pack, fuck the fact that he is a human being and should have his own choice.

And he doesn't really care because if he stands up to the pack, he ruins everything that he's built with them re: making the pack a democratcy.

I am now LONGING for the kind of violent sanity I got out of Mercy Thompson.

Anita tells Richard the vote thing might be a power play within his pack. She then recommends he kill the most likely player, somebody she's never met, because of a might-be.

Richard lets Anita talk to the possible power-play dude. She threatens him. For about four pages. It runs a little like this:

Anita: I'll kill you

Dude: then you won't be lupa.

Anita:I don't care. I'll kill you.

Dude: And then you won't be Lupa.

It's like Captive of Gor all over again.

Finally, she tells him that if he doesn't help her save Gregory, she'll kill him very dead, if he tries to hurt Richard, she'll kill him very dead, and if he challenges Richard before the next full moon, she will kill him extreamly dead. And the chapter ends.

And the one thing that I got out of it? Anita weren't never going to be with Richard again. I put the book down, walked away, and have not gotten any further since then.

And boy am I glad I did not, because the rapening? It happens again in the next chapter.

City of Bones chapter 5

I can see auras. And if it were the fun, mystical kind of aura, I'd be on cloud nine right now. Aura, however, doesn't just mean the neon neatness that happens when you drop acid. It also describes the bizzare visual phenominon your body sends out when a migrane is imminent. I went for a bike ride today and was ten minutes out when my vision began flashing red and blue with electric tingles, and just made it home before a large portion of my vision up and disappeared. The headache that followed, I am sorry to say, was spectacular.

My point? I'd rather still have the migrane and aura than be reviewing this chapter. Is it a Gor revisit? No. Is it Hubbard level logic fail? Not really. Is it Lakes Sex WTF? No. And I'd rather have it be one of those things because this chapter is boring. 

Clary overhears several conversations between Isabelle and Alec. While she's unconsious.

This is something I don't get. Being unfamiliar with Blue Laws? I can give somebody a pass for it. Unless you actually work for a restaurant in a state with Blue Laws (I just spelled that "Blew laws" which would be awesome.) you probably wouldn't know, for example, that it is illegal to sell booze, peroid, before 10am on Sundays (and even then you have to order food). Defining "all ages" as "Allows unsupervised 15 year olds into an alcohol-selling club"...you're an idiot, but I'll still cut you a pass because it wasn't something I thought about until I was threatened with possible arrest for serving a minor alcohol. But I see this trope crop up all the time. Whenever a writer has information they want one character to know about that the other characters would NEVER tell them, they have the character fall asleep and overhear the information while in a dream state.

Let me explain how stupid this is. How many of you have fallen asleep in front of the TV? How many of you remember more than a few minutes of the show after you closed your eyes? This is something that EVERYBODY does. The only way I'd give this stupid a pass is if the main character dreamed this conversation were happening between two dinosaurs. Because that would be awesome.

And Clary isn't just hearing this stuff while sleeping. She's been unconsious for three days. Do you know what unconsious means? It means not consious. And given that it's poison keeping her under, this sounds like a freaking coma.

So what is so important that the main character MUST overhear it while in a three day coma? 

“Yeah. I thought she was a pixie the first time we saw her. She’s not pretty enough to be a pixie, though.”

Seriously. She has to hear what the other characters think about her. Because we would be completely without meaning if we didn't know this, and there will never be circumstances where the other characters could express this otherwise.


Then Clary starts dreaming. And among such dreams as "Jace is an Angel" (GAG) and foreshadowing re: Simon, we get this little gem:

 Isabelle sitting naked with her whip curled around her like a net of gold rings,

One: Why? Why would a straight girl dream this?

Two: A whip...is like a net...of gold rings. You know, I knew in a kind of sub consious way that the descriptions in this book were bad, but this kind of blew my mind, hard. Let me illustrate the fail here. This:

when wrapped around Isabelle, looks like this:

Incidentally, if I ever become queen of the universe, chain mail neckties will become part of the uniform

That's what she's describing. A net of gold rings is fucking chain mail. Isabelle's whip turns into clothing. Freaking wow.

Then she wakes up in Hogwarts.

She saw clear blue sky above her, white puffy clouds and chubby angels with gilded ribbons trailing from their wrists. Am I dead? she wondered. Could heaven actually look like this? She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again: This time she realized that what she was staring at was an arched wooden ceiling, painted with a rococo motif of clouds and cherubs.

Yep. Hogwarts. Also, Clary, honey? I have read this book. No way are you getting a toe through the pearly gates.

Hogwarts is also called "The Institute" (...=school=Hogwarts) and Isabelle is there to make Clary feel like a small and plain little flower. Clary has a stomach ache, so Isabelle gives her a magic potion to drink.

Allow me to lay out what has happened so far, mkay?

Clary either went to an alcohol-free club in a church basement, or snuck in using her mom's ID. She watched three kids her own age murder a fourth boy in cold blood, while the Murder Trio raged about demons and hunters and killing. No one else can see these people. The next day a member of the Murder Trio, Jace, stalks her to a poetry slam and tries to kidnap her, only to let her leave because her mother is in trouble. Mom is attacked by a demon, which Jace knows all about. She passes out and wakes up in a strange place, where another member of the Murder Trio gives her something strange to drink.

Clary Frey is too stupid to live. Sadly, she will.

Then we have Expository Conversation B, where Clary finds out all about Isabelle (Last name, Lightwood, brother Alec, absent parents) and Jace (Dad died when he was young, never met Mom. Hey, Clary never met her Dad! Look! They've got something in common!) Then Isabelle tells Clary she stinks and needs to go take a bath.

Riveting.

Something that bugs me is how old-fashioned everything is in the Institute. Everything here is like 1800s era. There are glass lamps that are either kerosine or gas, and Clary smells candle wax as she wanders around the hall. However, outside, there are cars speeding by. She's still in New York City. The house just isn't on a power grid.

I kind of got the whole "no modern tech" in Harry Potter, in that I understood why the Malfoys and Hogwarts might not have radios and computers (the story takes place in the late nineties, the Malfoys have their collective heads jammed up their racist asses, and Hogwarts has to accomodate students whose parents see muggle tech as the peanuts in the cafeteria of life) but I didn't get why Ron's family or Sirius's manor wasn't wired for sound, given that in the former's case, Daddy has a serious crush on muggle tech and the latter is square in the middle of London. It makes even less sense here, especially when technology is the great equalizer. There is very little a wizard could do that modern tech can't. Magic would have been a HUGE advantage in every other era, but in this one, whenever I imagine myself imagining magic in a real life setting, part of my brain goes "Hey, I just sent an e-mail to somebody in Japan in less than three seconds! Why are you still using an owl?"

So she wanders around this mint Victorian mansion and finds Jace playing a piano, expertly. And we get this:

Watching the quick, sure movements of his hands across the keys, Clary remembered how it had felt to be lifted up by those hands, his arms holding her up and the stars hurtling down around her head like a rain of silver tinsel.

One, they are totally going to be fucking by the end of this book, and two...that bolded part. What the fuck does it have to do with the price of tea in China?

IDK. He greets her with this:

Piano keys jangled as he got to his feet. “Our own Sleeping Beauty. Who finally kissed you awake?”

They go find Dumbledore Hodge. And continue through the Institute, which...oh, for fuck's sake. 

(The Institute looked) like it had been naturally hollowed out of rock by the passage of water and years.

No, it doesn't. It looks like a building because that's what it is. I get what she's saying. People added to the institute over the years until it looked something like the Winchester building. But a building doesn't get to look like a cave unless it has actual stretches of exposed rock. And on the way, they have Expository Conversation C, where Clary finds out no one is in the Institute, that it's where Shadowhunters go when the world gets too hot for her, and they have their own special little country, Idris, which is a small country between Germany and France. Clary responds thusly:

“But there isn’t anything between Germany and France. Except Switzerland.”

I googled this. I found a map:

...That is not what I'd call "Between". That's more "Stapled onto the join". And this one I won't let fly. Cassandra Clare is from the UK. This is like ME saying Navada is between California and Arizona. FRANCE AND GERMANY ARE TOUCHING. NOTHING IS BETWEEN THEM.

Fuck. I'm not even halfway through this chapter yet. And I am skipping SO MANY THINGS to try to make this breif as possible.

Then he takes her to the library, where the books are all bound with leather and velvet.

Leather. And Velvet.

Seriously. Velvet is a book binding material here. I've owned several velvet-bound novelty books and let me tell you, they do NOT age well. It's something you put on Baby's First Journal. it's not something you use to record the Deep Secret of the Universe.

And then Alec appears and is revealed to be a total ass, Clary calls her uncle and finds out that he is a total ass, Hodge shows he'll be the Gandalf for this book, and I'm speeding through this chapter suddenly because I'm having a HUGE bout of religious rage and I have to vent about it.

A frequently occuring motif here is angels. Angels and demons, angels and demons, and...okay, I have to address this. I was going to wait until it got worse, but it's getting fucking annoying and I need to get it over with. Every book of magic draws on some kind of mythology. I'm trying to draw on modified Celtic/British with a seasoning of Greek, which is what C.S. Lewis and Rowling drew on. Tolkien did European mythos.

Cassandra Clare is drawing on Christian mythology for this novel.

My faith, in other words.

The problem with writing in any mythology is you tend to treat it like a buffet. You take what you like and you leave the rest. Thus, it is a lot safer to draw upon a more or less "dead" faith than it is to draw on one that's still alive. First, because you piss fewer people off. Second, because the odds of running into somebody who actually understands the theology you're working with are relatively small.

Cassandra Clare? Has managed to pull full research fail on the biggest religion in the world. 

See, the Shadowhunters, that hunt demons, are the Nephilium. She gets exactly one part right: The Nephilum were the offspring of humans and Angels. Yes, boys and girls. The Bible does say that humans and angels got it on and had a whole bunch of kids. And then Clare basically says "But the bible got it wrong, and Shadowhunters were really created by people drinking angel blood out of the Mortal Cup."

No.

Nephilum were the product of angels getting it on with human women. Something that God disliked so much that he freaking drowned the human race. The Nephilum are one of the reasons for the biblical flood. Noah's ark is a thing due to the Nephilum. And they were considered very, very evil in the Bible. One of the fun theological debates you could have is if Goliath, as in David and Goliath, was a Nephilum or just a very big man.

It is possible to take Christian theology and fuse it to magical elements. C.S. Lewis did it beautifully, a couple of other Christian writers did it, and Neil Gaiman fucking nailed it. But there's one thing all those writers have in common: They respected the source material. Even if they didn't believe in it, they took the time to research the things they're drawing on and present them in a manner that stands up to casual theological scrutiany. (See Good Omens) 

Cassandra Clare grabbed all the shiny objects and left the rest of it sitting in the box. The biggest sign that this is so? There are a lot of angels, and a lot of demons, but nobody ever brings up God. And I don't mean goes "this is the One True God of Cosmos, fall on your knees in respect and love" I mean nobody mentions the posibility of deity. In a book about angels and demons. Written by an author who did enough research to find something as awesome as the Nephilum.

There's a factual connection between Christianity and the other elements Clare employs, but there isn't a spiritual one. At no point does Clare take time to connect the dots between the pixies, the Shadowhunters, and the Christian theology. And I know this isn't a bullshit thing. American Gods has a deep spiritual/emotional connection between the gods of every pagan religion ever and America itself. It's a story about a battle between Odin and the spirit of talk shows. And it WORKS.

City of Bones does not work. It's all fluff and bubblegum, and its drawing upon sources that are deep and pretty damn dark at times.

To sum up the rest of the chapter, we find out that Valentine has all the same goals as Voldemort, and that Clary is going back to her house to get clothes and see if maybe her Mom came back. Hodge writes a letter. The rest of us go to sleep.

End of chapter.  

Captive of Gor chapter seventeen

Two chapters left. Come on, it's almost over with...

Strawchick assures us that this past weeks have been THE BEST WEEKS OF HER LIFE, right as we're reading about Rask selling her. I guess Rask just didn't like having girlfriend hanging around.

No, actually he sold her because he was getting too attached, and being attached to a woman is like, tres bad or something.

And John Norman continues to fail at everything.

In the beginning, following my total conquest by Rask of Treve, I had been summoned night after night to his tent. I had served him in a delicious variety of ways, to our mutual pleasure, for I had been well trained.

Yeah. Because if a woman doesn't enjoy the sex, it's her fault.

Inge and Rena were not in the basket with me. They had been given to the huntsmen, Raf and Pron. In the fashion of Gorean huntsmen, both girls had then been freed and given a head start of four Ahn, that they might escape, if it were in their power. After four Ahn, Raf and Pron, running lightly, carrying snare rope, left the camp. The next morning they had returned, leading Inge and Rena. The thighs of both girls had been bloodied.

I found I was now the victim, the prisoner, of “slave needs.” I now understood how girls could weep and scratch at the walls of their kennels, how they could squirm, moaning, shackled in their pens, how they could press their face and flesh against the cruel bars that confined them in their tiny cages, moistening the obdurate, grasped steel with their tears. How can a free woman even understand this?

It's called Stockholm Syndrome, and if you get the right medications and therapy, we can clear that all right up.

On Earth millions of women live empty, unrewarding lives. They are sexually deprived, denied their femininity’s right to be so powerfully desired, so lusted for, that they are taken in hand and made slaves.

This, this right here, is the part that is just fucking disgusting about these books. My life is empty and unrewarding, not because I work in a shit job, but because I don't have slave-sex in it. Hell, let's be more specific: because I haven't been raped. My life is "unrewarding" because men don't lust after my boobs and coochie enough to violate my rights as an individual and take my freedom of choice away. No. I must be "taken in hand" like I'm fucking six years old and disobediant.


This makes it sound like I'm a prisoner of my boobs and sex drive. And it's all projection. Because he wants to rape me, he assumes I want to be rape. He is unable to even concieve that somebody might not want the same things he does. This is the single most offensive thing in the whole boat, and I now want to go wash my brain out with soap.

But Strawchick does one thing right:

I had asked one thing of Rask of Treve, before, stripped, I had entered the tarn basket. “Free Ute,” I had asked him.

SHE GETS OUT OF THIS BOOK! THE ONE GOOD CHARACTER SO FAR GETS TO LEAVE THIS STINKING BOOK!

So Strawchick gets sold and works at a tavern. What kind of work does she do?

The men I served, Targo’s men, and others, who might have me for the price of a cup of paga, I gave much pleasure, and from them, too, I received much pleasure.

Did you expect anything better?

Then the creepy guy with the talking monster buys her, drags her to a warehouse, and demands that she serve him. She refuses, bravely, and then there is a great reveal!

The man lifted his head, and shook it, clearing his vision. “El-in-or?” he said. “Master!” I wept. I pressed myself to him. He regarded them. Then he said to me, “I am of Treve. Do not stain my honor.” By the hair I was dragged from the presence of Rask of Treve, and his head, again, fell forward on his chest.

Oh, noes! What will they have Strawchick do?

Well, do you remember pages back when they revealed the dastardly purpose for which she'd been brought from Earth? No? Well, they want her to assassinate Tarl Cabot! AKA Bosk of Port Kar!

...you have no idea who that is? You are so lucky.

So she gets to the point where she is about to give Tarl the poison, and then decides that she'd be better off telling the truth she wouldn't dare smear Rask's precious honor. She tells Tarl that she was ordered to poison him at the last possible second, and they go haring off to punish the evil doers and rescue Rask, only to discover he escaped! OH NOES!

Oh, and Rask only came to Port Kar to find her! But sadly, Tarl will only sell her for twenty gold pieces and Rask never buys his women. Strawchick and her One True Wub Master will be parted forever! Even though she now has reason to believe he loves her too!

And then...ugh.

but I was content in the knowledge that he, whom I loved, lived.

That, right there? Is my personal definition of unconditional love. Love is something you feel outside of yourself. You'd rather see your loved one happy than own them. Think the Rose and the Nightengale. 

Norman needs to get his nasty paws off genuine feeling.

Now the sad, sad narrative is winding down and Strawchick is whining and whinging about how much she misses Rask

And then, the last chapter! WE'RE GOING TO FINISH THIS BOOK TODAY! YAY!

Tarl/Bosk is now our narrator. NO MORE WOMAN FAIL GUYS! And Strawchick has told him that Talena is alive and in Verna's hands! WHY SHOULD WE CARE? And he watches her wander his halls mooning over her lost love-love-love, and then...

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my sad duty to inform you that, beneath my bitch-craft exterior, I am a sopping romantic. My favorite movies include Pride and Prejudice, Kate and Leopold, and there is even a place in my cold, withered heart for Breaking Dawn. I've also been watching My Little Pony and enjoying it. I mention this because I want you to understand. It takes a lot of cutsie to make me upchuck. And the ending of this book? Man the vomit buckets. It's gonna get bad.

The tarn strike was sudden. I had been waiting for days for it to happen.

Gee, I wonder what woman raping warrior of Treve this could be?

The tarn’s talons struck the delta wall, and, wings beating, it clung there, and put back its head and screamed. I saw, for one moment, the helmet of the warrior, and his hand extended downward. I heard the girl cry out and run to the saddle, and seize the hand. “No!” I said to Thurnock, putting my hand on the arrow, thrusting it to one side. He looked at me wildly. “No!” I said, sternly.

Because Tarl Cabbot can never stand between a chick stealing rapist True Love

Thurnock fetched it, and brought it to me. It was heavy, and leather. It was a purse, and it was filled with gold. In the light of a torch I counted the coins. There were a hundred of them, and they were of gold. Each bore the sign of the city of Treve.

See? Get it? Get it? Rask, who never paid for a woman before, has paid for this one. He really, truely loves Strawchick! HE LOVES HER! HE LOVES HER!

How do I feel about this ending?

But the good news is...it's DONE. I do not have to read this awful awful book anymore. NO MORE GOR! NO MORE GOR! YAY!

...but now I have to pick a new, terrible book, don't I? What was the list for the last one?

2. City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare
3. Eternal Prey, Nina Bangs (Yes, indeed it is a blissful vacation of stupid)
4. Mission Earth: Black Genesis.

Yeah, there we go.

I'll be accepting imput all week, and we'll start up the next book on Sunday!

Captive of Gor chapter 14

Okay, so after my rage yesterday, today should be easier, right? Right?
 
In a word? NO.

This was now my second day in the secret war camp of Rask of Treve. When his tarn had dropped, wings beating, into the clearing among the tents, they ringed with a palisade of sharpened logs, some twelve feet high, there had been much shouting, much welcome.

So either Strawchick has spent two days tied to Rask's tarn, or John fails at chronology.

He drops her off with his headwoman, which is (gasp!) so progressive! and then goes off to do whatever. She's going to have to go through a wedding collaring ceremony, so she's fed, and dressed, and how she'll be introduced to the crowd, and then allowed to wander around freely because everybody knows she won't escape.

Does she try to escape?

Do Tarns shit in the sky? (BTW WHAT DOES TARN SHIT LOOK LIKE?)

This isn't effective, though, and she begins to complain that she hates men, they make her work. 

I hated men. They made us work! Why did they not do their own cooking, and polish their own leather, and go to the stream or the washing shed and wash their own clothes?

Evil. I would, however, point out that the traditional division of labor is not "Women are useless, go work in the kitchen". Oh it is NOW, because "women's work" was devalued for one reason or another, but the work that women do in this era, historically, is work that needs to get done. And I don't think they were all that big on washing their own clothes.

Also? What warrior worth his own sword is going to let somebody else prep his armor and weapons for him?

So after wandering around the camp, Strawchick goes back to the tent, cries, and gets a slavery pep talk from the headmistress. The existance of penalty brands is established, for lying and stealing, and gee, I wonder who is going to wind up with a couple of those. And then we get another massive description of the fucking camisk again.

Seriously. We have already established the fucking clothing. The description is effectively, "This is a tunic. It is sooooooooo sexy. This is a different tunic. It is soooooooooooo sexy." And then a description of how All Slaves Love The Tunic, and how it seperates them from free women and...

Oh yeah. This part.

The next two paragraphs contain so much fucking fail I kind of cannot believe that it got written. How anybody can be this STUPID is beyond me. So go get up, go get your favorite alcohol, if you're at work wait until after this is done, and then come back when you've got a nice happy buzz to put between you and the UTTER FUCKING STUPID I am about to blog.

Free women had ambivalent attitudes toward the garmenture of slaves. They professed to approve of this degradation appropriately inflicted on mere slaves, but it was also said that they envied the slaves, the lightness of their garments, the air upon their bodies, the wonderful freedom accorded their limbs, so different from the heavy, bulky, confining layers of their own garmenture.

The free women have to wear basically burquas because men are SOOOOO lustful they will get raped and it is their own fault. So they envy the women who are raped on a regular basis, because OH MY GOD, they get to wear a light t-shirt. But only from behind their hands, because vocally they approve of letting the slaves be degraded. Nowhere in all of this do the women get a CHOICE in what they wear. No. They have to taylor their clothing to around MEN and their inability to control themselves around the deadly power of va-jay-jay.

And this book is supposed to be pro men.

It might be mentioned, in passing, that the Gorean free woman is commonly veiled, and that veils are denied to female slaves. This is appropriate, as they are animals. What fool would veil an animal?

 Possibly, one that doesn't want his animal to get raped. Because, you know, he might be concerned about his "animal's" well being.

A Gorean master commonly will know every inch of his slave, every curve, every crease, every wen, every pimple, every hair. How many husbands of Earth, I wonder, know as much about their wives.

Yes. Because viewing your women as property means you love them more than viewing your women as people. 

Being dehumanized is fucking traumatic, kids. And if you think of your woman as an animal, it isn't much of a streach to go from raping her to killing her, just because you feel like it. Husbands don't treat their wives the way masters treat slaves because they know this treatment isn't right. 

I wondered how many couples might be so precious to one another. Each so magnificently and joyously fulfilled, living the biotruths of human nature, of man and woman, of masculine and feminine, of dominance and submission, how could either even consider leaving the other?

You know when someone is precious to you when you put THEIR well being over your own. The needs of your genitals become secondary to the needs of theirs. Also...with this paragraph it is confirmed. John Norman is fucking insane.

Also, also? The man can sell the woman. The woman can't leave the man, but he can dump her on the side of the road like a puppy in a burlap sack and not feel bad about it at all.

I thought of the emptiness, the vacuity, of so many marriages. Might they not be redeemed, perhaps by so little as an act of will, a command, and a handful of thongs?

Because marrages and love are founded on trust. I trust that my mate will treat me like a human being and love me and my goals. I will do the same for them. Imposing your will on your mate will make YOU happy. It will break their trust in you and end the relationship. You might continue living together, but trust me, it is easy to give into inertia and continue to stay in an abusive situation just because you don't want to deal with the fallout of leaving. This does not mean that you love the person. It means that you are abused and the abuse is, sadly, the easier short-term option.

And now, for the next two passages, please replace the word "Slave" with the word "rape" and think about Todd Akin's rape comment.

Other Goreans tend to be less tolerant about these things, and feel that if a woman is stupid enough to allow herself to be captured, then she should be a slave.

So it's tolerance to consider that maybe a woman isn't responsible for a man's attraction to her. It's tolerance to consider that maybe, just maybe, the responsibility for rape is on the rapist and not the rapee. It's tolerance to think that maybe, just maybe, being forced to do or be something that you don't want to do, or be, is a bad thing.

And hey, you think I'm pushing it on the "replace slave with rape" thing? You think maybe I'm trying to see something that fits some bullshit feminist adjenda or something?

Others, with a psychological subtlety perhaps surprising in a primitive culture, recognize that a girl may covet the collar, and will thus court it, for example, walking at night on high bridges, frequenting certain areas of the city after dark, taking unnecessary journeys, and such.

There isn't a word. There isn't an image macro. There is nothing that can sufficiently express how bone-numbingly, mind-chillingly UTTERLY FUCKING STUPID that paragraph is.

When I worked the night shift at a bakery, I had to walk in front of a bar every night because I did not own a car. I was careful. I carried mace. I made sure to walk right next to the highway if I had to. Every night for two years. I walked because I had to, and not because I wanted to be raped. And right now, where I live? Sometimes I go walking at night. Because it is hot during the day and the stars are, frankly, fucking incredible at night.

A woman should not have to moderate her behavior to avoid being attacked. A man should not have to moderate his behavior to avoid being attacked. A man or a woman should have every right to go out at nine pm for a jog if eight pm is hotter than hell. The victims of violent crime ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE for their victimization. You cannot make someone decide not to do something. You can only survive it and, possibly, make DAMN sure they pay for the attempt.

Anyway, after John Norman sets humanity back about nine million years, he indulges in a wet dream about a woman from a rich city being enslaved, dragged back to her rich city, humiliated, and then raped by a random dude in a back room, thus making her see that she wants to be a slave!

And then Strawchick goes through the collaring ceremony and, instead of Rask having sex with her, is sent to work in the camp...because we need another couple chapters before this torture FINALLY ENDS.

Captive of Gor chapter Eleven

So if you remember the last two chapters, Strawchick AKA Elinor Brinton has been abducted from her slaver owner by Panther Girls (aka wild things) and sold to a dude who called her Cookie, symbolically burned her Last Posession From Earth, and almost got eaten by Cookie-man's giant talking man eating pet before running out into the Goren wilderness, bare-ass naked, to be eaten and devoured by the Things of the Night?

How does she make it back to her slaver owner, Targo/Torgo? We never find out, because the next chapter opens with her getting her ears pierced.

First of all, I understand wanting to skip the boring parts and not wanting Strawchick to wander around in the fucking woods by herself again, but John? Dude? There is no way in fuck Strawchick survived the woods naked on her own. Girlfriend is dumber than a bag of rocks on acid and BTW I still haven't forgive you for the Random Talking Bear-Monster-Thing. I might have two X chromasomes instead of your preffered target audience of XY, but I AM smarter than this.

Second...Strawchick was a model on Earth in the same era, or thereabouts, as Edie Sedgwick. Let me remind you what Edie Sedgwick looked like:

Those things? On her ears there? Those are earrings. And one of the trademarks in the seventies were earrings pretty much like what Edie's rockin' in that picture up there. So why are you asking me to believe that a model from the seventies would not have had her ears pierced LONG before she became a Gorean love-slave?

But hey, I'm expecting logic from a guy who wrote this sentence:

There were tears in my eyes, for my eyes smarted.

Because it'd be really weird if your knees were weeping, I guess. Moving on.

ALL the other girls are upset. Apparently pierced ears are a Slave Mark above and beyond the branding every girl got when she entered this lovely club, and NOBODY in this group, other than Earth-Girl-Is-Easy Strawchick is willing to go under the needle.

You know? A lot of the "customs" I've seen in this book so far? Have something similar on Earth. And there is nothing in this book so far that is not something seen in Caucasian culture, or something that we White Folks haven't absconded with and then bastardized. There's a great essay on cultural perspective that kind of makes me realize how very, very, VERY lazy this is (not that I'm any better, mind). The ear piercing thing is just kind of the last straw. It's a little like how sci-fi books mention MODERN masters and then Random Name, to sell that Random Name is just as good as Shakespere and Stephen King. Here's this cultural thing that is common on Earth that has a completely different meaning here. Because women only wear decorations for men. 

Now we take a long break from screaming slave girls to discuss the Culture and History of Turia. Which I don't care about. NEXT!

The girls are being kept in pens for training. Oh, hey, we haven't murdered many commas in this chapter. This needs to be fixed:

When released from the pens a girl is almost always desperately eager to please her master, that she not be returned to them, for further training.

These cages are heavily barred, and the bars are rather, irritatingly, widely set, but we cannot squeeze between them.

That's better. Damn, those uppety commas. If we don't practice decimation they might get uppety and start asking for equal rights! Keep 'em barefoot and in the sentence fragments, I say.

Oh, hey, Strawchick wasn't actually degraded by having her ears pierced. Let's do her nose, too! Equality among the sexes slaves is always a good thing.

So there is a discussion of training, and of what the girls eat (Stew) and of more training, and more of what th girls eat (stew) and...okay. This has to be addressed.

Steve Brust is a writer I love, and I actually got to meet the man personally a couple years back. One of the best pieces of world building advice he gave me (...and the room full of people around me, because this was not actually my question) was that you start with the food. So the endless descriptions of slave fare COULD be serving this purpose...

...but it's not. Because "start with the food" IMHO means you first look at the land your characters live on, what could grow in that ecology, what they would have to do to produce those staples in sustaniable levels, and what jobs this industry would create in their community. As an example, the world of Rise of the Winterlord and Prince of the Gray Keep (Due out in December. End needless self promotion) the Gray islands are...well, islands. In a cold zone (I'd say north, but...um, not exactly.) The islands aren't majorly small (Hawaii to Indonesia size) but have a tiny growing season. They can grow a wheat-analogue, but the growing window is pathetic. Bread is a luxury. Mostly they eat sea-based products (Deepwater fish and seaweed. They have limited access to shellfish and the products of a reef-type ecology) or things that can grow well when its so cold outside, spit goes "clink". Five hundred years down the line from Rise, the Isles have a highly developed import/export culture...but their biggest import is still grains, and their biggest exports are plant-based oil (olive oil analogue) and products from a fungus that grows on the oil plants.

The girls on Gor? Eat stew with bread.

And the entire fucking universe breaks down once you start thinking about it.

The stew? I'll buy that. Stew is stew, you throw water, meat and some potato/carrot/cellery analogue into a pot, add salt, you get stew. But Bread? Gor might have bread, but if Gor does have bread, it is too valuable to give to slaves.

Here's what you need to have for bread to be a cheap thing: You need to have farms, and I mean massive, mass-production, be-careful-or-we'll-repeat-the-dust-bowl kind of farms. Also, the technology that makes large-scale farming a posibility. Plows. Things that can use plows, that aren't going to eat you or your children. Graineries. Flour mills. Bakeries. None of which are described even once. We get slaves and slave pens and descriptions of breif clothing (rather than brief descriptions of clothing) but not one description of waving fields of wheat-analogue. Do you know why America is memorialized for "amber waves of grain?" because those endless fields of wheat means we have enough grain to make bread that make bread-lines a possibility. Do you know why "Let them eat Cake!" got Marie Antwonette cut down a few notches? Because there was a drought and France's crops failed and they didn't have the wheat to make bread. A lot of the riots of the french revolution? Were about getting their hands on flour. 

I'd also go as far to say that Gorean social structure, which has NO emphasis on family whatsoever, does not support farm as an industry. Gender ideology aside, farming requires a family. Farming requires a large family that does not need to be paid a standard wage. The reason why farm wives had ten kids? At about six, sprog number ten becomes another pair of hands during Planting Season and Harvest Season. Slaves on Gor are not viewed as potential baby-making machines, but rather as toys for the sexy-sexy. If you had farmers on Gor they'd be looking at women's hips in terms of child-bearing and not how many times they could play hide the salami.


If wheat-analogue is scarce and the bread-making industry is so small it doesn't appear in this book even once (Seriously, John. How hard would it be to thread in one description of a bakery?) then bread becomes valuable. Too valuable to be given to slaves.

Oh, and one more thing? Do you know why women are historically bakers? Because it's a lot of labor. A LOT. OF. LABOR. And it is best accomplished on a large scale when you have all the population working at it, rather than just half. Men can do the outdoor half, women can do the indoor half, and twice the work gets done. Twice the work=bread on a large scale. And the chicks in this book? Are not working. They are sex toys for men. They are either slaves for the sexy-sexy, Free Companions chosen for the sexy-sexy, or cloistered virgins awaiting their chance at the sexy-sexy.

In short? Gor is a hunter-gatherer society, not a farming one. By giving his slave girls a staple common to Earth society where women are free to work themselves into an early grave, John has broken his universe.

And the worst part? he is dedicating pages to food porn. And unlike Hunger Games and Sunshine, because John wants to degrade his slave girls, the food porn isn't very porny. Accurate depiction of bread in this kind of society? The part in Hunger Games where Katniss and Gale go bananas over a couple whole wheat rolls, and the part where Peeta, the baker's son, admits that the only bread his family, the baker's own family, can afford to eat is stale. Not "EW MORE BREAD GIMME ANOTHER PASTRY". (Jesus. They don't have farms and they're feeding "female animals" pastries.)

I know it's a small point, I know it doesn't really matter that much in the scale of things here, but for fuck's sake, the man is dedicating pages to something that breaks his whole universe.

And that whole rant about wheat? Is more interesting than reading about slave guards playing grab-ass with Strawchick, which is what I've been doing for the last few pages.

I had found, over the recent weeks of my bondage, to my fury, that men were becoming ever more interesting and attractive to me. How this thought angered me! I must struggle against it! Part of this was doubtless simply because I was in bondage and the effect of this on a female is no secret. She is dressed, if dressed, in a certain way, which excites both her and men; she must obey; she is familiar with bonds and being made helpless, which, aside from the security involved, impresses the mastery upon her and is sexually stimulating; she is vulnerable, and she is, for most practical purposes, legally and institutionally accessible, accessible as a female; indeed, legally and institutionally, as she is an animal in the eyes of the law, she is literally, and thus is accessible as, literally, a female animal; certainly she is owned, and she knows, particularly if she is a pleasure slave, that she is intended for, is seen in terms of, and exists for, the pleasures of men. That is her raison d’être, to serve and please men. It is hard then not to see men as her masters, for that is what they are; and she naturally, ineluctably, finds them attractive, men strong enough to command her, and do with her as they wish.

First of all, is it just me? Or halfway through that paragraph (which is in itself half a paragraph) did this stop being Strawchick's internal thoughts and turn into John Norman ranting? Also, there's this one "sentence" that...oh, fuck it. Here it is again:

She is dressed, if dressed, in a certain way, which excites both her and men; she must obey; she is familiar with bonds and being made helpless, which, aside from the security involved, impresses the mastery upon her and is sexually stimulating; she is vulnerable, and she is, for most practical purposes, legally and institutionally accessible, accessible as a female; indeed, legally and institutionally, as she is an animal in the eyes of the law, she is literally, and thus is accessible as, literally, a female animal; certainly she is owned, and she knows, particularly if she is a pleasure slave, that she is intended for, is seen in terms of, and exists for, the pleasures of men.

Apparently the humble comma has become an endangered species. John has moved on to wholesale slaughter of the semi-colon.

Also, and I might be wrong in this, but I think most of Norman's later Gor Novels were self-published. This was not one of them. I've tried not to go with the whole "A real editor somewhere approved this" because my stuff got rejected wholesale and with prejudice, and that means I've got no room to talk about shitty writing, but I have to say it here. Somebody read this sentence. Somebody with grammer training. Somebody whose job it is to look at sentences and fix them. They saw that lovely train wreck up there and left it alone. 

The scarier alternative--which I've seen comparing the published version of Twilight with the ARC--is that the train wreck is an attempt to fix an even bigger train wreck.

So the Guards are lusting after Strawchick and Strawchick is lusting after the guards, and I'm back to trying to find the plot instead of picking at the shitty writing. And...oh yeah. I forgot about this part.

The thing that I hate most about this book? It's not the shitty writing. I actually kind of like that. It's not the rampant mysogyny, the racism, the terrible worldbuilding, the lack of logic. Really, all these things are icing on the crazy cake and something that is fun to bitch about.

But to me, the heart of any book are the characters. I love Sunshine because Rae Seddon IS TOTALLY WHO I AM and the people around her ARE TOTALLY MY FAMILY. I love the Mercedes Thompson books because Mercy kicks ass, and it'll probably be yours. I love Hunger Games because CinnaKatnessGalePeetaJohannaFennickAnnie RUE! (sobs!) and I squee over every encarnation of Sherlock Holmes I've ever met because he is just that awesome. Even Twilight is redeemed by Alice, who should have been the main character of the series if there were any justice in the world.

The characters in Captive of Gor are all, every one of them, right down to the most minor character you can imagine, terrible people. The only thing that should happen to Gor is carpet nuclear bombardment. Not because of the slavery, the mysogyny, or the rampant stupdity, but because of the utter lack of anything remotely resembling moral character. None of these people are good, and the only lucky thing about this series is it is all fiction.

Two characters I may have mentioned in passing are Ute and Inge, fellow slave girls and Strawchick's sort-of friends. Ute, especially, has been Strawchick's comforter. The one who pets her head and tells her everything will be alright. Right now, Strawchick is sharing a pen with Ute, Inge and Lana, who is basically Strawchick 2.0. Ute and Inge clean the pen, Lana and Strawchick do not. Ute and Inge ask Lana and Strawchick to help clean the pen, and they refuse because they are far too valuable.

Here is what a sane person does: clean the pen, because otherwise you'll be beaten, and withdraw the friendship from this terrible woman, who is taking a great deal of comfort from your kindness and who doesn't deserve a single ounce of your time.

What do the ONLY two nice people in this book do?

Tie Lana and Strawchick's nose rings together and then torture them with the string. After the cage is cleaned, the two formerly nice people tie Lana and Strawchick to the cell bars by the nose ring and leave them there, all day.

From this point on the interactions with the other girls and Strawchick are basically catfights, followed by exceptional cruelty, followed by pretend kindness, followed by mind numbingly stupid betrayal, followed by something that straddles make-up sex so firmly those paragraphs should have their own dildo. Also, Strawchick lies, gets caught lying, gets a reputation for being a liar and hates how everyone else views her. She's better than that.

This is a real attitude that real people have. I'm dealing with several people like that at my job. I don't get it at all. I get it when the rep is because of gossip and isn't true, but when you know you earned it, why do you hate that people see the real you?

Back to review.

...oh for fuck's sake.

My thoughts strayed back to that terrible night, when I fled from the hut, into the darkness, leaving the beast feeding on the carcass of the destroyed, bloodied sleen.

NO. This goes back at the beginning of the chapter. I've just read six pages about cat fights, lying slaves and girls being tied up by their hair that I didn't bother blogging about because it was that boring. I don't care about how she got back to the slave chain now. I want her to get out of the slave pens and on with the story.

Nope. Basically, Strawchick wandered around in the murder forest until she stumbled upon a member of Targo's team, who stayed behind while everybody else went on to Koroba. Ah, well. At least he didn't chase her with his space ship.

And then the flashforward is over and Strawchick rambles on about how Women Are Natural Slaves, and then we find out that Verna the Panther Girl has been captured by a character from the first Gor book. And Targo's hundred girls are on their way! Have we forgotten about them? I sure had. Also, Rask is attacking Places. The outlaw. Who was mentioned once, a long time ago, back when Strawchick met Torgo.

God, this chapter is long.

And we get a recap of how Rask attacked Torgo, because even John Norman knows its been too long for us to remember who the fuck this guy is.

THIS CHAPTER IS WAY TOO LONG.

But there is one plus. This line of description:

...only the wild, bleak crags of the scarlet Voltai...

Is a few letters away from being the best Twilight/Gor Crossover EVER.

...the wild, deep craigs of the scarlet Volturi. And I would totally pay money for a cage match between Tarl Cabot and Aro. Strawchick can be Bella's first meal post vamping.

 Oh, and you know how Strawchick is scared of men?

Women, it was said, had special reason to fear Rask of Treve. It was said he had a gargantuan contempt, and appetite, for them. It was said that when he used a woman, he then branded her, with his name, as though she, once used, no matter to whom she might afterwards be given or sold, could truly belong only to him. It was also said that he would use a woman only once, claiming that he had, he, Rask of Treve, in once using her, emptied her, exhausted her, taken from her all she had to give, and that, thus, she could no longer be of interest to him.

Wanna take bets on who her master will be? Oh, and after all that description, Strawchick gets a random mysterious male visitor!

Once, there was a visitor to the pens, a tall stranger, partially hooded, who wore robes of blue and yellow silk, those of the Slavers. He had, over his left eye, a strip of leather, which was wound about his head. He was shown through our section of the pens by Targo.

Gee, I wonder who this could be! We're not going to find out. Instead Ute and Inge, realizing that Strawchick is a terrible human being, stop wasting time on her, and she has to beg Lana for friendship. Lana, of course, uses Strawchick for favors and extra food. They deserve each other. Strawchick then dreams about her MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. AND THEN...end chapter, THANK YOU GOD.

TOMORROW: ...I hate this fucking chapter with the fire and passion of ten thousand suns. All I had to do was see the title, and I now have the frantic urge to start rocking in a corner. STRAWCHICK PICKS BERRIES! CW GOES FUCKING INSANE!

Captive of Gor chapter nine

I don't want to do this today. Why do I not want to do this today? This is why:

yes. It's free and I'm not getting money for that, but STILL. THIS IS AWESOME.

I want to bask in this. I want to put it on a T-shirt, but it's not that impressive. If it were on the other side of that list, ya know, the paid side? THAT would be awesome. That would be "Hey boss, you know this job of mine? You can go stuff it" level awesome. Which isn't going to happen any time soon, but still. A lot of people are reading this book now, and sales for the book right before It? Are up. Much more up then they ought to be. I'm now pretty confident that I'm gonna make my goal for this month.

In short? I want to be happy. Am I going to be happy reading this? Yeah, probably not. Mostly because it begins with the image of a woman being lead around on a choke leash.

I get that people are turned on by that image. I'm not really one of them, but I get that some people are. HOWEVER, what makes that a turn on is consent. If you're turned on by the idea of a woman being lead around on a choke leash without her consent, you are somebody I don't ever want to know. Sorry. You're probably a nice person, but you scare me.

So after kidnapping a slave that has no earthly use for them--they're not setting Strawchick free, folks--the panther girls go hurtling through the woods, dragging her after them like a two-year old's pet rock on a string. Also:

If I should stop in pain, struck, or stumble, the merciless choke leash, closing on my throat, impelled me forward again.

That sentence is completely incomprehensible. You can discern a probable meaning but it's like your eye picking meaning out of disjointed objects. It's not actually there.

 So the panther girls spend the next few pages demeaning Strawchick, because slave. I guess this world never heard of Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad. (OH MY GOD. Harriet Tubman and Katness Everdeen OF GOR. Put them together. The men would never survive.) and Verna declares that Strawchick is a true slave on the inside. Because us silly women don't even get ourselves. Strawchick begs to join them and Verna decides that if Strawchick fights one of her underlings to the death, she gets a place in the band. It is the only way for someone who is tainted as a slave to join the ranks of the free, and...

...you know? You know? You know? This whole scene is a metaphor for virginity. Once the pop-top is popped, you can never go back without pledging great sacrifice...and even if you do, you are forever branded as a slut. I say this as someone who was raised in that fundie universe, and despite what I said about pickles, I do still value virginity. Because I am religious, I have the right to see all the ugly hypocritical spots on my beleif system and still love being a Christian anyway. But there is a fine line between valuing purity and devaluing those who've had sexual activity, and Christianity tends to obliterate it every time. I said it last time, I'm saying it today: There is no room in this BDSM psychotic universe for a virgin/whore complex. It makes the whole thing kind of silly.

Anyway, the whole reason Strawchick has been kidnapped is, someone has bought her. From Verna. Who did not own her. Because it's easier than asking Torgo for her. And in keeping with the virginity theme:

It seemed they were of a sex, or breed, other than, and superior to my own. Among such women I could be but the object of their scorn, what they despised most, only Kajira. 

And among them I felt myself to be only Kajira, one fit to be tethered and led, scorned as an insult to the beauty and magnificence of their sex. 

I was other than, and less than, they.

I shouldn't be having youth group flashbacks in your BDSM porn, John. I really shouldn't.

The panther girls, meanwhile, have an orgy. I said it was a metaphore for virginity. I didn't say it was a good one.

And while watching them Strawchick realizes that they too, are slaves deep down inside and that she is so much better than they are. They lead her to a house, and after yet another demeaning sequence where Strawchick has to either acknowledge that she is a slave or die--which doesn't mean shit, you know, 'cause threats--they leave her to her new master.

She goes into the hut, screams, and the chapter ends.

...oh, I get it. The panther girls are the plot monkeys, and we're about to get some Plot back into this story.

(No. No we're not. It's going to try, but there's no air in Gor. Plots can't breathe here.)

Captive of Gor chapter eight

I think I remember this part, and I think I hated it.

Strawchick and the other slave maidens realize they're at a port town. They look out and see the world around the city of Laura.

Because giving a city a girl's name in a book that is about misogyny--and don't fucking pretend it is not, Mr. Norman, I am totally on to you here--is a normal and natural thing. Like slavery!

Oh, and let me address the most horrific thing about the book. It's not the slavery, the whippings, the implied rape, the bullshit that makes Hubbard's ten-inch-penis look tame. Oh, no. It's the horrific murder of the gentle, placid comma that occurs on every single fucking page. Hide the children, kids. This is ugly.

I saw a slave girl, in a brief brown tunic, regarding us. Where the tunic parted, at her throat, I caught the glint of a steel collar.

Families of commas died for that sentence, my friends.

Now, to some of you this sentence may look passable. Well, it is not. The lovely website Reasoning with Vampires has taught me well. There are a few acceptable ways to employ a comma in writing. These are:

1. To separate two complete thoughts. These two thoughts belong together, so you can't completely sever them.
2. To separate items in a list. Apples, orange, pears and bananas go in the same catagory. Commas do not.
3. To create what the lovely Dana calls a commathetical pause. The comma, which isn't really happy about this, preforms the same job as a parenthesis without actually having to use a parenthesis.

In the case cited above? Obviously, neither one nor two apply. Three could apply, but let's take a step back and apply logic here. I know, I know, this is Gor, and we shouldn't, but it's kind of asking for it.

John is using these commas as commatheticals. But they don't need to be commatheticals. Commatheticals describe something extra, something that isn't quite part of the same thought but that for some reason needs to be there anyway. I've been scratching my head for a good example, and I decided to fall back on my own writing. Not, mind you, because I think my writing is perfect (It's self published. It's imperfect by definition) but because I edited it, I know why the commatheticals are there, and more importantly I know where they are. Anyway, this is a "good" commathetical pause:

Adrienne couldn’t help but gape, and she was no small-town girl, or Rim-world colonist, to be stunned by a shiny building.

Why is that bolded part in there? Because it breaks into the sentence to provide you with information the sentence wouldn't have otherwise, It's a pause. An aside. Something whispered into a cupped hand while the real play is still going on. In the Gor example? The girl's clothing and the location of her collar are things that you just plain observe. No commas needed. And also? Where the fuck else would that collar be? On her thigh? Would it be HIGH on the THIGH, Mr. Norman?

Moving on.

They are transported into Laura, worldbuilding occurs, Strawchick is demeaned, and then...

There must be someone in Laura who could return me to the United States, or who could put me in touch with those who could!

Right.
 
And then they find male slaves who are being demeaned because, OH NOES, they were captured by WOMEN. Oh dear, what kind of brute could be captured by WOMEN? And better yet, they're the panther girls, wild women who live in the forest without men.

And then John gets his stupid on. Again.

“Some were doubtless once slaves,” said Ute. “Others were once free women. Perhaps they did not care for matches arranged by their parents. Perhaps they did not care for the ways of their cities with respect to women. Who knows? In many cities a free woman may not even leave her dwelling without the permission of a male guardian or member of her family.” Ute smiled up at me. “In many cities a slave girl is more free to come and go, and be happy, than a free woman.”

Yeah. Let's refer to black/white relations in the deep south pre Civil War for a minute, shall we? Black men weren't equal to white men, but when they were free they were treated with respect. Also? You can't sell a free man to somebody they hate who will treat them badly if they are free. How the fuck can a slave girl leave her house without her master's permission? Second verse same as the first.

Also? This is basically the Taliban with dancing slave girls. This is not free anything.

Ute tries to convince Strawchick that all she really wants in life is a penis Master. Ute once had a master that she was happy with, but she tried to bend him to her will and so had to be sold. Yeah.

I'm gonna have a fucking meltdown before this book is over.

Scratch that. Before this chapter is over. Because you remember that part back in chapter three where I said Norman got something right? And he ruined it? He must not have thought he did a good job the first time, because he just backed up and went Clara Harris on its ass:

 “In your dreams,” she asked, “what sort of man is it who touches you, who binds you and carries you away, who takes you to his fortress, who forces you to do his bidding?” 

I recalled how, outside the penthouse, hurrying to the garage, a man had looked at me, and had not looked away, and how, fleeing, branded, frightened, helpless, I had felt, for the first time in my life, vulnerably and radically female...I recalled the brief fantasy which had passed through my mind of myself, in such a band, marked as I was, naked in the arms of a barbarian.

You know, it is completely acceptable to have rape fantasies, but what you're fantasizing about is not being raped. It's being held down by somebody hella masculine while you're having sex. Being raped is being made to have sex when you do not want to. And it does not feel good. It's why red-yellow-green exists in bondage play. Fuck, John, even Fifty Shades of Gray got that part right. And the bigger problem here? Ute is asking "What kind of sex do you fantasize about?" and Strawchick immediately remembers a violation. It's like dumping salt in your coffee without knowing it. Then we go back into a fantasy. Sorry, kids. That part in the middle has nothing to do with consensual sex at all.
Moving on.
More world building occurs while we're moving on to Laura. There is an incident on the docks where a guy touches Strawchick, and instead of feeling offended she is proud, because nobody tried to touch her rivals. Right. And then we get the next wall of stupid John Norman wants to slap us with today.

“It is hard for a white silk girl to be beautiful,” said Targo.

Yes, guys. Elinor "Strawchick" Brinton, who manipulated her way through college via the power of her va-jay-jay, who was a professional model and who has been in the hands of slavers for over a month now, is a virgin. We are expected to buy that this manipulative, bitchy, stupid girl kept her legs crossed and never accidentally ruptured her hymen pole vaulting or bycycling or something. Strawchick has never had sex. All of her problems with men and her resistance to slavery boils down to she never had sex.

Dude, You're John Norman. You're writing a novel series about bondage sex slaves. There is absolutely no reason for you to have a fucking virgin/whore complex. Or is this the same whore/virgin whore thing Hubbard had going for him?

The girls get taken to some compound, where there are lots of other girls and...hey, everybody in this book is white.

...yeah. I'm not touching this one with a ten foot pole. Moving on.

Compound. Lots of other slave girls. Long conversation about hair braiding and girls wanting to touch other girls. Torgo is here to buy some of these other girls, and he chooses women who respond to being manhandled a certain way. Apparently this indicates the inner slave, and suddenly I'm having a Yu-gi-oh "heart of the cards" flashback. But hey, Strawchick, we haven't heard from your pride in a while:

I thought, however, that none of them had responded as I had responded.

Thanks. We needed to be reminded our narrator is a bitch. Also, she gets to feed the woman that was kidnapped last chapter. How does she treat her fellow unwilling captive?

I was given the task of feeding her. When I first unhooded her and removed the gag, she had pleaded with me that I help her escape, or tell others of her plight. What a fool she was! I would be beaten for such an act, perhaps even impaled! I told her, “Be silent, Slave!”

But Strawchick! Maybe she could help you get back to the states!

Moving on. Strawchick gets something called the "Stabilization Serums" which I guess is the bug-eyed alien elixir of immortality. It hurts. We go into great detail on this. After these shots are over, her guard almost rapes her, and then backs down because she is a virgin--I'm sorry, "White silk" and must be protected.

I repeat this: virginity is like the pop-top on a jar of pickles. It only has value to the consumer.

Strawchick is coming to terms with her captivity, and even begins wanting a master. Because, you know, Stockholm Syndrome does not exist in this world. And paragraph after paragraph just makes me want to hurl.

 I was so beautiful that they would settle for nothing short of having absolute power over me. I smiled to myself. I had been found interesting enough, and beautiful enough, to enslave!

Yeah. No.

But because she has accepted her fate, she gets a promotion: She'll be the eleventh girl on Torgo's chain. Given that we're down to sixteen other girls, this is heady stuff to our Strawchick. This means that she is almost beautiful. She's honored.

Gag me.

They also find out they're being taken to  Ko-ro-ba (I am writing that as Koroba from now on) to be trained as pleasure slaves. Also, the kidnapped woman?

This time, when I fed the new girl, the former Lady Rena of Lydius, I permitted her to eat at her own pace, and gave her the water bag more than once. 

When she had finished she looked at me. “May I speak?” she asked.

 I saw that the hood, her gag and the bonds had taught her slavery. “Yes,” I said. 

“Thank you,” she said. I kissed her, and then regagged and rehooded her.

Stockholm Syndrome has set in there as well.


Then the girls have to serve food to a bunch of men. And beg permission to serve them. And then they're thrown meat as part of a game, and Lana dances, and I am SO READY for this chapter to be over, and it isn't. And you have no idea the HUGE number of info dumps I have jumped in trying to get even this far. A guard wants to have sex with Strawchick, and she doesn't know if she wants it, but she is white silk and WHY IS THIS CHAPTER NOT OVER YET and then Strawchick says this:

I did not want slave fires to be ignited in my belly. I sensed how fiercely they might burn, how needful they might make me. I did not want to be so owned, put so at the mercy of men. I recalled how the small man on Earth had assured me, when I lay bound before him, on my own bed, that I would learn to crawl and beg.

Okay, one more time, and this is the last time I swear: BEING RAPED DOES NOT MAKE YOU WANT MORE SEX.

And then the camp is attacked. Thank fucking God. Only it's panther girls here to humiliate the men, they don't give two shits for the women, and the chapter is not over yet.

The lead panther girl is called Verna. She ties all the slave girls to the feet of their masters, and gives this little speech:

How beautiful she was, and proud and fierce, in the brief skins and gold ornaments. She was beautifully figured and she carried herself arrogantly before them, taunting them with her beauty, and spear. 

“I am Verna,” she told them, “a panther girl, of the High Forests. I enslave men, when it pleases me. When I tire of them I sell them.” She walked back and forth before them. “You are tarsks and beasts,” she told them. “We despise you,” she said. “We have outwitted you, and captured you. We have bound you."

You wanna bet what's going to happen to her in a couple chapters?

We're gonna find out. They take Strawchick with them into the forest and THANK YOU GOD, the chapter ends.