Wolves of the Gods (or: My Plot Is Pastede On Yay!)
12) Wolves of the Gods, by Allan Cole, 404 pages
Okay. The first book in this series, Wizard of the Wind, was in places self-consciously cute and precious, or ghoulishly grisly, relying very much on stock reactions (Kids Are Cute, Wizards Are Mostly Wise Old Guys, Eating People Makes You Evil, Evil People Have Gross Personal Habits, etc.). This book managed to take that and turn it into functional stupidity.
Spoiler: The bad guys die at the end of book one. I can tell you this without ruining anything, because there they are at the beginning of book two, having been saved from death by the Miraculous Intervention of something that was only vaguely hinted at in the last 50 pages of the first book. When I first started this book, I was stricken with a sense of horror. "He wouldn’t do that, would he?" I asked myself. "He couldn’t possibly be that . . . stupid, could he?"
Guess if he was. Go on.
RIGHT! The bad guys came back. This time, as spooky, nasty, super-duper scary (drumroll please) werewolves!
Don’t get me wrong. I adore werewolves. Really. I mean, according to my husband, I AM one, so I figure it would make me a race traitor to complain about it on that basis alone. But this was just . . . stupid! It came out of nowhere, didn’t fit with the characters or the plot, and was, in general, insulting to my intelligence. Oh, those zany bad guys, getting all ticked off and growing wolf-snouts when they get mad, and, boy, is it spooky when they kind of break out in fur all over! Sort of like being angry gives them hairy hives.
They still fight together way too much to be believable as a threat, and seem hampered by the usual bad-guy’s overconfidence, leading them to make stupid mistakes over and over and over again. Maybe it would be more believable and compelling if we liked the villains. But we don't.
There is a certain chemistry to a villain, you know . . . you have to love to hate him. When he comes on the screen, you must feel a certain frisson of fear, because while you loathe him and dread what he will do to your beloved heroes, you also love to watch him, because a villain in top form is just a beautiful thing to see. To a certain extent, the villain is more important than the heroes. As an example of this that everyone can relate to, I will swallow my pride and cite Darth Vader. Man, was he scary.
Allan Cole managed to accomplish none of this. His villains are risible, pathetic mockeries who appear to have no genuine feelings but only apelike pantomiming running to the overstated and grotesque. "Look!" they say. "Look how villainous and terr-ri-bulll we are! See how we are eee-vulll! Woooooo! Look at our scary magic! See us torture some people! Woooooo! Aren't you scared yet? We have faaaaaangs!"
Ugh. Shoot me now.
Not to mention the recurrence of the Incredibly Stupid Circus. Have I said how much I hate circuses, and anything associated with them? The whole thing gives me a tired feeling akin to the lethargy that precedes total brain-death. Oh! And the insertion of a completely gratuitous Witches’ Guild that both furthers the image of witches as nasty old hags, and the assumption that witches are evil, and the idea that witches are not really powerful in their own right, but are just sort of screwing around. All of which I resent. I hate to hop on the PC bandwagon, but this is really an egregious example of a wretched stereotype - I would not be objecting if it were merely offensive, but it is also literarily hackneyed, which means it has no excuse whatsoever to exist except that Mr. Cole evidently didn’t care to come up with something more interesting.
There were also strong female characters in the first book. In this one there is only one.
Yes, Mr. Cole can write prose well enough to keep me from throwing the book across the room. But only barely. And his occasional poetry is not enough to redeem the essential inanity of this narrative. The idea behind these books is beautiful and compelling, yet the storytelling lives up to none of it. His persistent introduction of elements that seem out of place is both jarring and amateurish - as though he could not save the ideas for a separate book but had to incorporate them right away, urgently, forcing them into a place that they did not belong. (Note to all writers considering putting a circus in their book. Place a label on the cover saying: "Warning! Circus!" so that I will not read it by mistake and thus fail to be amused by your cutethy lithping dragon-woman and the Zthany Anticth of her merry crew. It'th tho tirethome.)
And the man cannot gracefully handle a flashback to save his sodding life.
Unfortunately, I am one of those afflicted people that cannot put down a book once it is started, and I cannot abandon a series midstream. So I must regrettably suffer through the next book and hope that it is somehow better. My intuition tells me that it won’t happen, so the best I can do is slog through as quickly as possible, and reward myself with some Steven Brust afterwards. Having vented my bile, I shall now proceed to other things.
link
Okay. The first book in this series, Wizard of the Wind, was in places self-consciously cute and precious, or ghoulishly grisly, relying very much on stock reactions (Kids Are Cute, Wizards Are Mostly Wise Old Guys, Eating People Makes You Evil, Evil People Have Gross Personal Habits, etc.). This book managed to take that and turn it into functional stupidity.
Spoiler: The bad guys die at the end of book one. I can tell you this without ruining anything, because there they are at the beginning of book two, having been saved from death by the Miraculous Intervention of something that was only vaguely hinted at in the last 50 pages of the first book. When I first started this book, I was stricken with a sense of horror. "He wouldn’t do that, would he?" I asked myself. "He couldn’t possibly be that . . . stupid, could he?"
Guess if he was. Go on.
RIGHT! The bad guys came back. This time, as spooky, nasty, super-duper scary (drumroll please) werewolves!
Don’t get me wrong. I adore werewolves. Really. I mean, according to my husband, I AM one, so I figure it would make me a race traitor to complain about it on that basis alone. But this was just . . . stupid! It came out of nowhere, didn’t fit with the characters or the plot, and was, in general, insulting to my intelligence. Oh, those zany bad guys, getting all ticked off and growing wolf-snouts when they get mad, and, boy, is it spooky when they kind of break out in fur all over! Sort of like being angry gives them hairy hives.
They still fight together way too much to be believable as a threat, and seem hampered by the usual bad-guy’s overconfidence, leading them to make stupid mistakes over and over and over again. Maybe it would be more believable and compelling if we liked the villains. But we don't.
There is a certain chemistry to a villain, you know . . . you have to love to hate him. When he comes on the screen, you must feel a certain frisson of fear, because while you loathe him and dread what he will do to your beloved heroes, you also love to watch him, because a villain in top form is just a beautiful thing to see. To a certain extent, the villain is more important than the heroes. As an example of this that everyone can relate to, I will swallow my pride and cite Darth Vader. Man, was he scary.
Allan Cole managed to accomplish none of this. His villains are risible, pathetic mockeries who appear to have no genuine feelings but only apelike pantomiming running to the overstated and grotesque. "Look!" they say. "Look how villainous and terr-ri-bulll we are! See how we are eee-vulll! Woooooo! Look at our scary magic! See us torture some people! Woooooo! Aren't you scared yet? We have faaaaaangs!"
Ugh. Shoot me now.
Not to mention the recurrence of the Incredibly Stupid Circus. Have I said how much I hate circuses, and anything associated with them? The whole thing gives me a tired feeling akin to the lethargy that precedes total brain-death. Oh! And the insertion of a completely gratuitous Witches’ Guild that both furthers the image of witches as nasty old hags, and the assumption that witches are evil, and the idea that witches are not really powerful in their own right, but are just sort of screwing around. All of which I resent. I hate to hop on the PC bandwagon, but this is really an egregious example of a wretched stereotype - I would not be objecting if it were merely offensive, but it is also literarily hackneyed, which means it has no excuse whatsoever to exist except that Mr. Cole evidently didn’t care to come up with something more interesting.
There were also strong female characters in the first book. In this one there is only one.
Yes, Mr. Cole can write prose well enough to keep me from throwing the book across the room. But only barely. And his occasional poetry is not enough to redeem the essential inanity of this narrative. The idea behind these books is beautiful and compelling, yet the storytelling lives up to none of it. His persistent introduction of elements that seem out of place is both jarring and amateurish - as though he could not save the ideas for a separate book but had to incorporate them right away, urgently, forcing them into a place that they did not belong. (Note to all writers considering putting a circus in their book. Place a label on the cover saying: "Warning! Circus!" so that I will not read it by mistake and thus fail to be amused by your cutethy lithping dragon-woman and the Zthany Anticth of her merry crew. It'th tho tirethome.)
And the man cannot gracefully handle a flashback to save his sodding life.
Unfortunately, I am one of those afflicted people that cannot put down a book once it is started, and I cannot abandon a series midstream. So I must regrettably suffer through the next book and hope that it is somehow better. My intuition tells me that it won’t happen, so the best I can do is slog through as quickly as possible, and reward myself with some Steven Brust afterwards. Having vented my bile, I shall now proceed to other things.
link