Excuse me while I die of AWESOME
So I had a chance to get to the post office today and pick up the copy of Kiss Me Deadly which arrived in the mail for me.
Kiss Me Deadly is an anthology of "paranormal love", according to the cover. I bought it because Sarah Rees Brennan said she had a short story in it entitled The Spy Who Never Grew Up, in which Peter Pan is on a mission for Her Majesty's Secret Service.
And, true, The Spy Who Never Grew Up was pretty cool! Further proof that the distinction between "legitimate" stories and fanfiction is utterly bollocks: this is a mad, post-canon Peter Pan crackfic. There were many things I liked about it: the characterisation of Peter himself, halfway between daydream child and nightmare; Ninja Star the intersex fairy (like all fairies, zie can only feel one thing at a time, and 99% of the time zie feels fierce); the way that dystopic post-canon Neverland is heartbreaking, and slightly sickening, and yet still An Awfully Big Adventure. Sarah captures everything that is gorgeous and wonderful about Peter and Neverland and yet everything that is wrong about both of them.
There are, however, many things which I think let the story down - the handling of Tinkerbell, for example. The plot itself was pretty flimsy. Ashley seemed more like a... an interpretive mirror for Wendy, I suppose, than like a person. I really couldn't figure out what makes Ashley tick.
There were also some hilariously familiar fannish tropes in here: the story, like all the stories in this collection, contains a "paranormal" kiss, and the kiss was such a FAMILIAR fandom cliche that I cracked up laughing. But it works.
BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT MAKES ME LOVE THIS BOOK. Oh no. It turns out that the reason I am going to love this book like it is my long-lost soulmate or something is a story called The Hounds of Ulster by Maggie Steifvater. About Bryant Black and Patrick Sullivan, who are teenagers determined to become the gods of Irish punk music. Sullivan has a fiddle and Bryant has a guitar and they have sex, except in music form. It is hot. Possibly it's less hot if you (unlike me, Bryant, and clearly the author) don't think that really fast reels are sex in musical form, but still. It is hot. And then Patrick is seduced by a fairy, Bryant discovers that actually, Bryant is a smokin' hot guitarist and awesome in in Bryant's own right and THEN right at the end we find out that Bryant's birth name (which we already knew wasn't Bryant) was Anne. BRYANT FORMERLY-ANNE BLACK, guitarist, weight-lifter, shaven-headed Irish punk god. HELL YES!
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Kiss Me Deadly is an anthology of "paranormal love", according to the cover. I bought it because Sarah Rees Brennan said she had a short story in it entitled The Spy Who Never Grew Up, in which Peter Pan is on a mission for Her Majesty's Secret Service.
And, true, The Spy Who Never Grew Up was pretty cool! Further proof that the distinction between "legitimate" stories and fanfiction is utterly bollocks: this is a mad, post-canon Peter Pan crackfic. There were many things I liked about it: the characterisation of Peter himself, halfway between daydream child and nightmare; Ninja Star the intersex fairy (like all fairies, zie can only feel one thing at a time, and 99% of the time zie feels fierce); the way that dystopic post-canon Neverland is heartbreaking, and slightly sickening, and yet still An Awfully Big Adventure. Sarah captures everything that is gorgeous and wonderful about Peter and Neverland and yet everything that is wrong about both of them.
There are, however, many things which I think let the story down - the handling of Tinkerbell, for example. The plot itself was pretty flimsy. Ashley seemed more like a... an interpretive mirror for Wendy, I suppose, than like a person. I really couldn't figure out what makes Ashley tick.
There were also some hilariously familiar fannish tropes in here: the story, like all the stories in this collection, contains a "paranormal" kiss, and the kiss was such a FAMILIAR fandom cliche that I cracked up laughing. But it works.
BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT MAKES ME LOVE THIS BOOK. Oh no. It turns out that the reason I am going to love this book like it is my long-lost soulmate or something is a story called The Hounds of Ulster by Maggie Steifvater. About Bryant Black and Patrick Sullivan, who are teenagers determined to become the gods of Irish punk music. Sullivan has a fiddle and Bryant has a guitar and they have sex, except in music form. It is hot. Possibly it's less hot if you (unlike me, Bryant, and clearly the author) don't think that really fast reels are sex in musical form, but still. It is hot. And then Patrick is seduced by a fairy, Bryant discovers that actually, Bryant is a smokin' hot guitarist and awesome in in Bryant's own right and THEN right at the end we find out that Bryant's birth name (which we already knew wasn't Bryant) was Anne. BRYANT FORMERLY-ANNE BLACK, guitarist, weight-lifter, shaven-headed Irish punk god. HELL YES!
This entry has
comments on Dreamwidth. You can read and comment there using OpenId