A few fiction reviews
Bite, with stories by Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, MaryJanice Davidson, Angela Knight, and Vickie Taylor. Yep, more supernatural explicit romance. This time, Hamilton offers a story that isn’t a chunk of a forthcoming novel, but a story set between Blue Moon and Obsidian Butterfly. The attempt to write Anita as she used to be - much more uncomfortable about sex, primarily - seemed half-successful. Though I didn’t go back and reread OB, Anita seemed a little too well-adjusted to dating the dead in this story. Not much happened - there was a girl who was too young to be turned into a vampire but wanted to do it anyway, and her mother sought Anita out for help. Anita did some smart things, like asking for help where appropriate, but it meant that the non-sex action mostly happened off the page. If you want vintage Jean-Claude and Anita relaxed enough to appreciate him, you’ll probably enjoy this story, if you can overlook the inevitable typos. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse story, involving a vampire Queen and a dead cousin, was okay, though probably more fun if I’d known the characters. MaryJanice Davidson’s story, with an isolated vampire vetinarian and her boytoy out to stop a vampire serial murderer, had moments of fun, but the romance came too fast and inevitably for me to enjoy that part.
Angela Knight’s “Galahad” - okay, so the protagonist was living a normal life, and then she found out that she was a witch with powers that would manifest if she had sex with a vampire three times - found it out in the middle of time number three, actually. So she’s now a gorgeous blonde witch living in a fantasyland, able to conjure whatever she wants, and then she gets a vision of herself fighting alongside a hunka burnin’ love who is, in fact, Galahad. Yeah, the Galahad, tormented hero with nightmares about all the people he couldn’t save over the years. Only he’s also a vampire, and vampires need to “milk” witches on a regular basis to prevent the witches, who’ve been magically altered to have more blood than the rest of us, from popping a blood vessel. So ... oh God I can’t go on. There’s amazing magical sex and destiny and a Capitalized Soul Bond obvious from the first look, at least to the secondary characters who all immediately recognize Twu Wuv while the primary characters sulk and protest that they don’t really want mind-bending sex and Soul Bondage. This is the kind of stuff that gives cliches a bad name. After that, Vickie Taylor’s inoffensive story -- about a guy who invents artificial blood, loses control of his invention to a vampire, and undertakes some serious revenge mixed with romance - was a mercy.
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: I guess I lack the right sense of humor for Adams. A guy named Cjelli, or currently Dirk Gently, has a detective agency where he bills people for work he hasn’t done and they don’t pay him, which in his opinion works out rather well but is less comforting for his ever-quitting secretary. There’s a computer programmer, his boss (quickly murdered by an Electric Monk but nonetheless hanging around to see what happens next), his boss’s sister who is also his girlfriend, and an old Oxford don who is more involved in the various improbabilities than he at first seems. It’s all very absurd, but I didn’t find it particularly funny, not even the Electric Monk who was invented to believe in things people didn’t want to waste their own time on believing, like God and pink.
Gregory Maguire, Lost: Perhaps because Maguire is known for Wicked, this book is presented as a riff on the Scrooge story. An American writer, somewhat stuck on her next book, comes to London to stay with her cousin, but the cousin isn’t at his apartment. Instead, there are workers who are trying to fix something in the kitchen, but are held back by the apparent haunting. Family legend has it that an ancestor was the model for Scrooge, having told a young Dickens the story of his own haunting - is a portrait of the ancestor/Scrooge somehow involved with the haunting and the cousin’s disappearance? The narrator is believably unlikable, and Maguire is skillful in slowly revealing just how very unreliable she is, yet I didn’t much like the story. Unreliability doesn’t bother me; unlikability is harder for me to enjoy. The story in the end is about the chokehold the past can put on the present, and the necessity of confronting rather than denying that in order to get the strength to move on. But really what I liked best was one of the poetry fragments the narrator recites: “Probable-Possible, my black hen,/She lays eggs in the Relative When./She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now/Because she’s unable to Postulate How.” I don’t think it has much to do with the rest of the book, but I might be wrong. (Maguire didn't write it; it comes from something called A Space Child's Mother Goose, I think.
Angela Knight’s “Galahad” - okay, so the protagonist was living a normal life, and then she found out that she was a witch with powers that would manifest if she had sex with a vampire three times - found it out in the middle of time number three, actually. So she’s now a gorgeous blonde witch living in a fantasyland, able to conjure whatever she wants, and then she gets a vision of herself fighting alongside a hunka burnin’ love who is, in fact, Galahad. Yeah, the Galahad, tormented hero with nightmares about all the people he couldn’t save over the years. Only he’s also a vampire, and vampires need to “milk” witches on a regular basis to prevent the witches, who’ve been magically altered to have more blood than the rest of us, from popping a blood vessel. So ... oh God I can’t go on. There’s amazing magical sex and destiny and a Capitalized Soul Bond obvious from the first look, at least to the secondary characters who all immediately recognize Twu Wuv while the primary characters sulk and protest that they don’t really want mind-bending sex and Soul Bondage. This is the kind of stuff that gives cliches a bad name. After that, Vickie Taylor’s inoffensive story -- about a guy who invents artificial blood, loses control of his invention to a vampire, and undertakes some serious revenge mixed with romance - was a mercy.
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency: I guess I lack the right sense of humor for Adams. A guy named Cjelli, or currently Dirk Gently, has a detective agency where he bills people for work he hasn’t done and they don’t pay him, which in his opinion works out rather well but is less comforting for his ever-quitting secretary. There’s a computer programmer, his boss (quickly murdered by an Electric Monk but nonetheless hanging around to see what happens next), his boss’s sister who is also his girlfriend, and an old Oxford don who is more involved in the various improbabilities than he at first seems. It’s all very absurd, but I didn’t find it particularly funny, not even the Electric Monk who was invented to believe in things people didn’t want to waste their own time on believing, like God and pink.
Gregory Maguire, Lost: Perhaps because Maguire is known for Wicked, this book is presented as a riff on the Scrooge story. An American writer, somewhat stuck on her next book, comes to London to stay with her cousin, but the cousin isn’t at his apartment. Instead, there are workers who are trying to fix something in the kitchen, but are held back by the apparent haunting. Family legend has it that an ancestor was the model for Scrooge, having told a young Dickens the story of his own haunting - is a portrait of the ancestor/Scrooge somehow involved with the haunting and the cousin’s disappearance? The narrator is believably unlikable, and Maguire is skillful in slowly revealing just how very unreliable she is, yet I didn’t much like the story. Unreliability doesn’t bother me; unlikability is harder for me to enjoy. The story in the end is about the chokehold the past can put on the present, and the necessity of confronting rather than denying that in order to get the strength to move on. But really what I liked best was one of the poetry fragments the narrator recites: “Probable-Possible, my black hen,/She lays eggs in the Relative When./She doesn’t lay eggs in the Positive Now/Because she’s unable to Postulate How.” I don’t think it has much to do with the rest of the book, but I might be wrong. (Maguire didn't write it; it comes from something called A Space Child's Mother Goose, I think.