The Bubonic Book Rat

Black Trillium - Three Petals, Three Authors, Three Sues and A Million Cliches

Mon, 18 May 2009 04:11:05 GMT

Black Trillium, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May and Andre Norton

You know what I really love? Fantasy. You know what I also love? Markets! You know, the kind of market with lots of stalls selling all kinds of interesting stuff, like jewellry and artwork and all the odds and sods people want to get out of their garages. It’s not like a shopping maul where everything’s regulated and the merchandise is pretty much what you’d find in any other shop. At a market, you never know what you’ll find.

At a particular market I went to, I came across a couple of guys who were selling old books – and they specialised in fantasy and sci fi. I got talking to them, and asked about their stock.

“Tell me,” I said eventually, “What’s the absolute worst book you have here?”
They exchanged glances. But then one of them got up and picked his way over to a box. After some rummaging, he brought out a truly sad-looking thing, whose spine was so badly weathered it had turned almost completely white and had long since lost the title. The front cover wasn’t much better off. It looked like snails had been eating it.

“Here,” he said, offering it up. “This is one of the worst. It’s got three authors, and they somehow managed to put all their worst attributes together into one book.”

Holy crap,, I thought, triple-distilled concentrated suck..

“All right, I’ll take it,” I said, “But I’m warning you – this thing had better be as bad as you say. If I’m less than completely disappointed I’ll come back and complain.”

“Don’t worry,” the seller said. “It’s crap.”

It was.

With regards to the three authors, I have to say I’ve never really understood why anyone would want to collaborate on something as personal as a novel. I mean, how do you do it, anyway? Is it a sort of round robin thing, taking turns to do each chapter? Do they sit down together and pool their ideas like a group of movie producers? Who does the actual writing?

Well, it turns out that, in this case, they all did. Out of curiosity once I’d finished the book I consulted Wikipedia and found that the three authors did indeed take turns at writing different bits of book. And to their credit, I couldn’t tell where each one left off and the next one picked up the thread. Apparently though they didn’t enjoy the process much at all (this seems to have happened before everyone had an email account), and as a consequence the various sequels weren’t collaborations. Instead, the three authors took the first novel and wrote their own sequels in various different ways, giving the series at least two different continuities. The story of how Black Trillium came to be has more intrigue and interesting plot twists than the actual novel… not that that’s saying much.

Characters
Kadiya, Anigel and Haramis
Three Princesses (yawn), who look nothing alike despite being triplets. Oh, but they are all of course amazingly beautiful and good. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Princess in a fantasy book who wasn’t beautiful and good. Oh, and innocent. Oh so sweet and innocent.
Anyway, I lumped these three together because, beyond those blanket terms of beauty and Lawful Good that I mentioned earlier their personalities really aren’t anything to write home about. Haramis is the bookish one, Kadiya is the tomboy… I guess, and Anigel (Anigel, Angel, har har, very funny) is the wussy girly blonde one. During the course of the book all three must learn to live up to their stations in life and overcome their own personal shortcomings in order to save… world… defeat supreme… Zzzzz….
Huh? Whu? Oh, sorry, dozed off there for a bit. Let’s continue.

Orogastus
The eeeeeevil wizard who teams up with an eeeevil King in order to take over the forces of implausibly shiny Good. Orogastus is actually the most likeable and interesting character in the book, but unfortunately, given the gag-worthy storybook niceness of the protagonists, he probably would have fitted better if he were your stereotypical cackling baddie with the big long fingernails and pointy beard. That aside I did like Orogastus, and even dared hope that maybe he would survive the book. This was despite the fact that he looked like Tim the Enchanter in my head.

The Plot
The cover of Black Trillium proudly boasts that this is “The Supreme Fantasy Epic Of Magic, Love And Treachery”. You gotta love how every second fantasy book on the shelf makes almost the exact same claim. I think it’s high time they all got together and sorted it out. Preferably in a cage match.

As for the plot, I think you’ve already gathered that the “supreme” part is 100% industrial-grade balderdash. Then again, blurbs like that are pretty meaningless to begin with. But I’ll let you be the judge, shall I?

The plot in brief: it opens with the birth of our three wonderful not-Sue-ish-at-all heroines, attended by some supreme wizard lady. For some reason the wizard lady person is referred to as the “Archimage” [sic]. Yes, Archimage, with that spelling. Why? I don’t know, but I kept thinking of a surfer dude in a pointy hat and a nametag saying “Hi, my name is ARCHIE MAGE”. Anyhoodle, Archie the Mage delivers the three Princesses and puts a magical amulet around each of their necks. The amulets aren’t described in much detail, but each one contains a bit of flower fossilised in amber. The flower is the titular black trillium, which is incredibly incredibly rare.

Fast forward the standard length of time, and the three Princesses have grown into improbably statuesque and sugar-sweet young women. Unfortunately for them their super-nice Kingdom of Niceness gets attacked by the eeeevil neighbouring Kingdom of Eeeevil less than a page later. Unfortunately (again), Daddy is a useless incompetent who first proves that he couldn’t fight off a squad of Girl Scouts, and then decides to toddle off on his own to fight the bad guys. No guard, no horse, nothing. Shockingly this plan doesn’t go so well and Daddy gets dismembered by the eeeevil, competent King and his eeeeevil offsider Tim the Enchanter.

The evil guys then go off to find the Princesses, since they are of course the object of some random prophecy which says one of them will put a stop to the evil guys’ evil ways… do I even have to type this up? Fucking hell I’m sick of this idiot plot setup.

Anyway, sigh, Daddy didn’t do anything to get his daughters out of Dodge before it was too late, so they’re kicking around in some room with their mum. Mum, on being warned that the evil guys are coming, quickly shoves them into the toilet (no, really), and then sits on her arse and waits to get killed off. The evil guys come in, try for about two seconds to make Mum talk and then kill her. Meanwhile the Princesses are hiding in the toilet, with literally one damn tapestry between them and the bad guys.
The bad guys glance around the room, fail to see the Princesses anywhere in sight, and wander off.

*headdesks like a motherfucker*

Oh, but it gets better. The three Princesses – actually, let’s just call them the three Sues – are rescued by three of their servants who help them to get away. Along the way they come across Daddy’s remains – now scattered over a wide area.

Naturally, since they’ve lived incredibly sheltered lives and have never seen a dead body until tonight, none of them have any significant reaction to this and one page later they’ve all forgotten about it.

Why are so many Sues sociopaths?

With that minor inconvenience out of the way, the three Sues escape the city and are split up. Each one heads off to find Archie Magie, led by one servant apiece. The servants, by the way, are representatives of the only non-human race in the book. Called Oddlings, they’re divided into various subspecies and are basically just a variation on your standard gnome/elf/goblin.

Various whacky hijinx ensue, but one way or another the Sues reach Aunty Maggie’s house, albeit seperately. She tells them that they must each go in search of a special talisman (like one wasn’t enough), so they head off.

The three Sues, by the way, each have their own plotline and each one was written by a different author. I honestly couldn’t tell the writing styles apart, and I’ll admit that’s impressive. I don’t think I could have done that. Then again, I wouldn’t have collaborated in the first place.

Another storyline follows the antics of Prince Antar, son of the evil King, and it couldn’t be more obvious that this guy is going to join the good guys if his name was changed to Prince I’m-Not-Really-Evil. His main motivation for changing sides is that he falls in love with Anigel, which he somehow manages to do when he’s never spoken to her. That’s some real Destined Love right there.

To cut things short, the three Sues find their talismans, Haramis has a sort of implied love affair with Tim the Enchanter, they meet up again, join their talismans into one big magical Sceptre thingy that kills anyone who’s secretly disloyal (oh goody, yet another way to avoid that pesky character development), stop Tim the Enchanter from setting off a magical Atom Bomb (seriously), kick bad guy booty and win the day. As if you couldn’t see it coming from a mile off, Anigel marries Antar and they rule together in peace and justice, and everything is good and sweet and wonderful, ad nauseum.

Wow. You just can’t buy originality like that, can you? (She says, swiping someone else’s line to make an ironic point).

Prose
Horrifying clichés and dull, dull protagonists aside, I think the thing I disliked the most about this book was the way it was written. I don’t know if all three authors write like this all the time, but the use of language made me cringe. It took a very Tolkein-esque olde-fashionde approach to both prose and dialogue, and unfortunately for the authors that sort of thing is and always has been a huge aggravation for me.

Let me just quote a passage that I found particularly heinous.

Quote:

“It is a hard thing for such as yourself to understand, child. You are gentle and loving yourself, and you have known only love and gentleness your whole life [which is why you barely blinked when you saw your father’s dismembered corpse~Jet]. But there are those to whom cruelty vouchsafes a dark thrill, a rushing sense of power. Small-souled and fearful themselves, surrounded by others who would wreak cruelty on them and finding scant happiness in life, they fall prey to the basest of all lusts – that which finds pleasure in destruction and the pain of others. The cruel one feels himself exhalted above all by his action. He feels more alive because of the death of others. He defies the Creator by rending creation. He scorns love and embraces hate, because it alone enkindles his cold and stagnant soul. There is no pity, no stricken conscience, no remorse in the wantonly vicious. There is only a hunger for more and more cruelty, because these persons can never be sated. Gentle folk may not respond to them gently, because evildoers do not know what love is, mistaking it for weakness. For this reason you, who are a gentle and loving Princess, must find a sterner way of dealing with such ones.”
“Oh, I could not,” Anigel said, trembling. “Never could I – not even after viewing this terrible sight!”

Only in a fantasy book, folks.

(In case you’re curious, the person monologuing was an old Oddling nurse – just the sort of person you’d expect to deliver a ginormous discourse on the nature of only-in-a-story Evil. Oh, and this is immediately after they’ve found Daddy’s dead body – a point when most people probably wouldn’t be in the mood for listening to a lecture on fantasy-novel morality).

No. Just no.

One other thing about the prose that really, really bugged me was the use of neologisms. Neologisms, for the neophyte (hah!), are made-up words generally found in fantasy and sci fi. They’re definitely useful things, since if you invent some new creature or concept you gotta call it something. The only time neologisms become a real problem is when they’re used to re-label things that already exist. This is something referred to as “calling a rabbit a Smeerp” – in other words, using a fakey made-up name for something that already has a name. It’s unnecessary, it’s clunky, and if you do it too much – like they did in this book – it’s just agonising. There must have been more than a dozen things in this book given stupid new names. For instance, the word “ells” kept being used as a unit of measurement. Only problem is there’s no indication of just how long an “ell” is, so when something is referred to as “thirty ells high” you’re probably not going to think “wow, what a tall unspecified object”.

We’re also constantly bombarded with made-up animals and plants, all of which have dopey made-up names but few of which are described in any great detail, leaving us with a lot of meaningless words with nothing solid attached to them.

One other, major problem with neologisms is this: made-up words sound made-up. Failing to attach a cohesive linguistic pattern to them only makes it more obvious. My advice is avoid it, unless you’re a language professor like ole Tolky and are a big enough nerd to actually invent your own form of speech. Personally I think it’s a waste of time.

WTF-eries
-The motivation of Tim the Enchanter, which made absolutely no sense. At first he comes off as just another power-hungry lunatic, but later on we discover that his only real interest lies in uncovering the secrets of your standard wise long-dead race. So why did he help the evil King conquer the good guys? We never find out

-Speaking of the long lost super race, we learn that they left various devices behind which Tim the Enchanter is using. In fact, it’s eventually revealed that the only powers he has derive from these devices. What makes this way, way more surreal than it sounds is that most of these devices are clearly modelled on modern-day technology. One of Tim’s lackeys wears a pair of headphones (really), Tim has a PalmPad PDA with a stylus, and most bizarre of all, he uses a computer tracking device. No, really. It’s called a “magic mirror”, but it’s a computer. It talks, and uses terms like “debug”, and crashes if you say the wrong thing. And no, I really don’t think it was meant to be a joke.

-Toward the end, Tim the Enchanter pulls a magical super-weapon out of his arse. It’s a glowing green orb that functions pretty much like an Atom Bomb. It’s a weapon of mass destruction, anyway. I don’t know why they bothered to include it, since it never gets used. But I think the biggest WTF about it is its name – the Doomful Effluvium. YARLY.

-While he’s introducing this Magic Eight Ball of Doom, Tim also briefly mentions something called “the Golden Pastilles”. I’m pretty sure they never appeared in the book, but the name gave me a vision of a roll of solid gold Lifesavers.

Conclusion
A painfully clichéd and lifeless book, with dull prose and characters that don’t manage to rise far enough above their stereotyped roles, Black Trillium fails to provide an exciting story and is bogged down by too many irritating mistakes to count. And a note to all fantasy authors: please drop the magical jewellery. I have had it up to here with amulets, rings and watch-chains of plot convenience, and I think I’m not the only one.

The Fountainhead

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:58:17 GMT

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

Yes, I read this book. Yes, all of it. Well, okay, I admit it – I skimmed through the last 80 pages or so. But that still means I got through more than 600 pages of this… book, and I sincerely believe that nobody should expect anything more from me. I’m not a godsdamned super-rat.

Sorry about that. I’m just a little cranky at the moment. Why? Because I just read this… book. After that I threw it across the room, as is the right of all… books of this… calibre.

Argh, sorry about the ellipses. This… book killed so many of my synapses that I’m having trouble stringing these word thingies together. Pardon me while I get myself a drink.

Aaah, there’s nothing like a bit of rum mojito flavoured with mint. Drunk out of a coconut shell, it’s even better!

Now then, let’s get on with it.

I think everybody’s heard of this book – generally in the context of its being yet another book everybody knows about but nobody actually reads. And if you have read it, then you have my slightly frazzled sympathy.

The main reason why people know about this thing is not because of its exciting narrative, likeable characters or rich prose. Instead people know it because of the system of philosophy it expounds, to whit, objectivism. Yeah, that’s a real good sign, huh? Screw good storytelling, it’s all about the philosophy, man. Pass the joint, will ya?

Sarcasm aside, I’m not really going to talk about the philosophy beyond this short bit right here. Writ brief, as far as I can make out, objectivism states that alturism just holds you back and that selfishness is the only way the human race can get ahead. Also, the only people who matter are the creative sort who come up with new ideas. Everyone else is just a loser who only knows how to copy and be all mean to the poor wickle clever types. According to Rand, if you’re smart and come up with great new ideas then you should only care about said ideas. That, and your own sweet self. As for the people who aren’t that creative, they can all go bathe in nuclear waste. In the meantime, their incredible dunce-hood and loserishness can make all the ubermenschen look cool by comparison. Even cooler, I mean.

That’s objectivism, in a nutshell. There’s a catch, unfortunately: in this idealised world were the really amazing artistic people are the only ones worthy of being alive, Ms Ayn Rand would only have one place, and that would be neck-high in green glowing sludge with everybody else.

I know I sound a bit too nasty there, but it strikes me as frankly hilarious that Rand, who obviously considered herself to be up there with the super-special artists, was quite frankly a terrible author who couldn’t tell a good story to save her miserable life. I’ll confess that some of the tenants of objectivism are somewhat valid, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s being told how to think by one of the worst books I have ever read in my entire life. Also, Rand was a druggo. There, I said it.

Ahem.

With that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

“Characters”

Howard Roark
Described as tall and gaunt with red hair, Roark wound up looking like Aaron Covenant from Undying in my head:

Unfortunately, there was no scene where a handsome Irish magician came in and cut his head off with a magic scythe. Which is a shame, because that would have really livened up this book. Not to mention that it would have saved me a lot of pain.
Roark is an architect, who at the beginning of the book gets kicked out of architect school for being too good. Well, okay, it’s because he ignores what the tutors say and does whatever the hell he feels like, but since he’s meant to be an uber-genius the first definition was basically right. Right after I read that scene I knew I was in trouble, but not even that prepared me for the most flat, unlikeable and frankly obnoxious character I have read in a very long time. I mean since I read The Fifth Sorceress.

All that is pretty unfortunate at least from Rand’s point of view, because the appendices in the back of the book outright state that Roark is supposed to be the “ideal man”. Sorry, Ms Rand, but there is no way in hell that this guy is “ideal”, not in any sense of the word.

Some people have said that Roark isn’t meant to be a character so much as a paragon, or an ideal. I’ve got another word for that, sweetie, and it’s “Gary Stu”. Even my Edward Cullen action figure agrees with me on that, and he’s coated in glitter glue.

There’s not really much more I can say about Roark, since he’s boring to the point that it’s easy to picture him as a cardboard cutout bouncing around South Park style from one scene to the next. Except minus the bouncing. That would be too lively, given that from his portrayal he may well be completely dead from the neck down – and probably from the neck up as well.

Peter Keating
Meant to represent Roark’s opposite, Keating is a sad loserish type who didn’t really want to be an architect but got pushed into it by his domineering stage mother. He has no original ideas but becomes famous by pandering to whatever people want. Keating, you fool! Don’t you realise that what your clients want doesn’t matter? Just because they’ll have to live in the buildings you design while you get a fat paycheck and then can move on doesn’t mean their opinion counts for anything! Geez, what an idiot.

Dominique Francon
Feh. Roark’s love interest… I guess. She actually starts out rather likeably, as a newspaper columnist who loves horrifying people by being politically incorrect. However, as with a lot of poorly written heroines all that goes out the window once she gets involved with Roark. And by “involved” I mean he marches into her house and rapes her one evening for no reason, after which she falls in love with him. Vomiting noises at this point are optional but encouraged.

Ellsworth Toohey
Toohey? You mean like the beer? Aw man. I don’t even like beer, but any sort of alcohol would be welcome at this point.

Supposedly Toohey is the villain, despite the fact that he doesn’t really do much and doesn’t actually start antagonising anyone until right near the end. His philosophy is all about taking over the world (OF COURSE! /M. Bison) by “enshrining mediocrity”. Which… uh… okay, actually that does make him pretty hateful as far as I’m concerned. Too bad I find all the other characters equally hateful to begin with.

Gail Wynand
Uh, yeah, this is meant to be a guy. Don’t look at me.
A newspaperman who’s vaguely likeable, at least until he starts going all-out to help Roark and nearly bankrupts himself in the process. Eventually he decides to leave well enough alone in order to save his livelihood. His wife, Dominique, divorces him by way of thanks. Bitch.

Everyone Else
Yeah, right. The only thing I have to say about any of these wastes of space is that they have some truly ridiculous names. Names like Lancelot Clokey and Homer Strick, all of which are meant to be taken 100% seriously. Honestly, Rand, next time just use a damned phone directory.

The Plot
There is no plot. Goodnight.

Oh, fine. What semblance of a plot there is follows the careers of Keating and Roark. One shoots to fame before eventually becoming a fat, alchoholic failure because he never had anything to offer to begin with. Poor him. As for Roark, the reader is treated to an endless string of scenes where he takes on clients, then drops them the instant they try and make him compromise his designs in any way, shape or form. And given that he generally speaks in one-word sentences, that means you have to read a lot of conversations like this:

Client: “Okay, the design’s great but I just want you to put some pillars in here”
Roark: *tears up contract*
Client: “Are you mad? Don’t you realise how big this comission is?”
Roark: “Yes”
Client: “If you don’t take it you’ll go under.”
Roark: “Yes”
Client: “C’mon, stop being such a dick”
Roark: “No”
Client: “You’re mad”
Roark: “Probably”
Client: “Fine, I’m out of here”
Roark: *lights cigarette without changing his expression*
Jet: “Go fuck yourself, Roark”

Roark is uncompromising to the point of insanity when it comes to his “art”, and at one point ends up working in a quarry, because apparently nothing is beneath him except letting that precious, precious art be interfered with. And yes, we do get descriptions of his sweaty muscled body. Thanks for asking.

Around this time he meets up with Dominique, who’s attracted to him but thinks he’s just a common labourer not worth her effort. So she teases him for a while until he takes the hint and rapes her.

There’s been quite a lot of “controversy” over the rape scene. Rand herself, when asked about it, said it’s not rape because a) Dominque wants him to do it, and b) he knows she does. Therefore, it’s consensual.

Unfortunately, since at no point does Dominique tell Roark she wants him to come into her house uninvited and force Little Roark into her hoo-ha while she fights back and screams for help, there is absolutely no way he could have known she “wanted” it.

Help me out here, guys: if you’re getting it on with a girl and she’s screaming, scratching at you with her fingernails and yelling for help, are you gonna be thinking “yeah, she’s totally digging it”?

I didn’t think so.

What makes this scene even more revolting is that while Dominique is fighting back, screaming for help, etc., she’s thinking “this is what I always wanted! Yay!”

No. Just no. A million times no.

Anyway, once again proving the old trope about rape = love, Dominique falls for our charming hero and they have an affair that carries on for some time until she suddenly wanders off to Keating’s house and offers to marry him. He, despite the fact that he’s currently organising his marriage to a different woman, agrees. Maybe there’s some subtext I missed, but this just completely threw me off.

Eventually Roark gets asked to design (get this) a “Temple to the Human Spirit”. This includes a nude statue of Dominique. Unfortunately the Temple is just so gosh-darned amazing and revolutionary that everyone hates it. Roark gets sued, and the Temple is remade into a “Centre for Subnormal Children” (wow, you sure couldn’t get away with a name like that nowadays).

Meanwhile Dominique uses her marriage to Keating to make him totally miserable. Why? I don’t know. It’s not like she has any reason to bear a grudge against him; maybe she just enjoys emotional torture.

Geez, this is one fucked-up chick.

Having done Keating over, she then goes on to marry Wynand out of the blue. Why? I don’t know, she just does it. Wynand, by the way, played pretty much no part in the story up until this point and may indeed have only been introduced just before Dominique offered to marry him. I’m uncertain because the plot was so utterly boring and had so many useless scenes and even more useless characters that I couldn’t keep track of who was who or why they were there.

Wynand is a lot nicer to Dominique, and finally asks Roark to design him a house. Roark agrees so long as nobody changes anything in his design (of course). Wynand agrees to stick to that, so obviously he’s a good guy. Accordingly, Roark deigns to be bestest friends with him. At least that’s according to the plot synopses on Wikipedia – his personality is so nonexistent that assigning emotions to him is close to impossible.

Roark then gets asked to build a housing complex, which he does on the condition (again) that nobody changes anything. His client agrees, but then changes things without consulting him.

In return, Roark blows up the building and gets arrested.

The book “climaxes” in a courtroom scene. Roark, of course, represents himself. Accused of wanton destruction, he stands up and monologues.

For three. Freaking. Pages.

The monologue in question has absolutely nothing to do with the case in hand, but of course nobody stops him as he rambles on and on, outlining the entire cut-price philosophy of objectivism for an audience that probably started walking out halfway through.

For some damned reason, after that the rest of the trial is apparently forgotten. No evidence is shown, and nobody else testifies. Roark just gets up, makes his long-ass declaration, and then the jury goes off to make its decision.

They find him not guilty – and this is despite the fact that in his monologue he just admitted to having blown up the fucking building. “Why” has nothing to do with it! He fucking DID it, you morons!

But this is Randland, where monologuing can do anything and objectivist = right, and people act like robots who can’t do anything other than what Madam Rand says. Forget acting like real people; when Rand rules, reality is irrelevant. It’s like a kind of objectivist Matrix.

*sigh*

So Keating’s sad little career is dead, Roark finally gets fame the “right” way, Dominique up and marries him, and the book ends and is thrown at the wardrobe door very hard. Thank gods.

WTF-eries
What can I really say? Regardless of whether you find objectivism valid, this book is a poorly written and painfully boring piece of drivel. I ended up skimming because, after 600+ pages I hadn’t the faintest clue what was going on, I was surrounded by characters whose names I couldn’t even keep straight, and the dialogue was so awful it made my brain burn onto the insides of my skull. The entire thing was a WTF. Still, in the interests of… whatever, here are the WTF-eries

-The rape
-The endless descriptions of ugly buildings and people’s outfits
-The constant infodumps giving the backstories of characters on the same page as they were introduced
-Dominique’s motiveless marriages
-The “trial” where they forgot to have a trial

Conclusion
Every time I told someone I was reading this book, the response was the same. “Why?”
They generally followed it up with “Well, good luck with that”

It didn’t do a lot to help me keep going.

I suppose I went into this book with a pretty negative mindset, partly because I don’t have that much interest in books from that period, and partly because I’ve only ever liked two “classics”, and both of them were written by George Orwell. But also, and this is the big point, I went in expecting to hate it because I have never, ever read a novel meant to push an ideal that didn’t suck. Maybe it’s because people with big ideals aren’t any good at telling good compelling stories, or more likely it’s just that if a philosophy or lesson of any sort is intentionally put into a story, rather than being allowed to emerge naturally, it cripples it instantly.

After all, how can a character hope to be likeable and well-developed if their whole purpose is to fit into a mould? The thing is, characters are meant to be people. They aren’t supposed to be ciphers or symbols, or completely anything. Not completely perfect, not completely imperfect. Real people are complicated things, and a truly great character should be complicated in the same way. Nobody is completely good or completely evil, whether it shows or not. Why should a character be otherwise? You sympathise with well-written characters because they feel real. They feel like real people.

Gary Stus, overblown villains, characters meant to push ideologies on you – those are not great characters. They're too simple, too one-dimensional - and simple, one-dimensional characters are BORING.

Say it with me, everybody: B – O – R – I – N – G spells “THE FOUNTAINHEAD”.

That concludes today’s English lesson. See you tomorrow, boys ‘n’ girls!

City of Bones

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:26:29 GMT

I figured I may as well post all my archived reviews now. No sense in waiting around.

Hidden behind the veil of the mundane, lies the portal to another world. A world constantly in touch with our own, but still utterly separate – a world whose occupants are strange and solitary, each living in their own little corner of reality, but all of them bound by the same rules.

In this world, books reign supreme. And those who rule books, rule that world.

Once, in a seedy corner of this world, populated by fangirls, fanficcers and other undesirables, a woman called Cassandre Claire lived and worked. She wrote fanfictions for the Harry Potter universe – specifically, she wrote the Draco Trilogy, in which she more-or-less singlehandedly created the enormously popular “fanon” version of the obnoxious Draco Malfoy. The proper, canon version of Malfoy was a nasty little brat with white blonde hair but no other attractive features (Rowling described him as having a “pale, sneering face”, among other uncomplimentary things). In Claire’s hands, Malfoy was transformed into “a smooth, witty sex bunny who’s really not that bad underneath”. Her fanfics also led to the popular fandom expression “Draco in leather pants”.

Claire was also responsible for the humorous Lord of the Rings fics known as The Very Secret Diaries, and those coupled with the Draco Trilogy made her into what is known as a “big name fan”, lording it over her own subsection of the Harry Potter fandom to the point where, when she reported that someone had broken into her flat and stolen her laptops, her fans made enough donations to buy new ones. After she made some remarks about wanting an iPod, the fans obliged. Yes, Claire was her own little god; a mini Rowling, with her own obsessed readers (and, no doubt, some of them wrote fanfics of her fanfics).

But the seeds of Claire’s downfall had already been planted. Foolishly, blinded by arrogance and believing she could do whatever she pleased, she broke the single most powerful and binding law of this hidden world of books – committing a crime for which there is no forgiveness.

Plagiarism.

Claire had already been in the habit of peppering her fanfics with extensive dialogue quotes from sources like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Red Dwarf and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. But she got away with it, because the rules of plagiarism are much looser in fanfic.

But then she went one step further. A reader discovered that she had copy-pasted an entire page from a novel into one of her fanfics, without proper acknowledgement. This was beyond the pale. Further investigation revealed more plagiarism – layers and layers of it. And it must be noted that while she was writing these fics Claire was also employed as a journalist – and therefore should have known full well what plagiarism is.

Regardless, the reader who had spotted it reported her for it and she was banned from fanfiction.net immediately. There was an enormous scandal – the fangirls whined, Claire flounced and whined and threatened legal action, and fandom history was made.

(Read the full story here - warning: tl;dr ahead)

But Cassandra Claire was not finished. She returned, and this time she was touting an “original novel” of her very own. Which, probably thanks to her already established fame, was published. That novel was City of Bones, the first of a trilogy (of course).

Unfortunately for Claire – now calling herself “Cassandra Clare” – the literary world is not forgiving. Everyone knew what she had done, and even today her career as a novellist is tainted. Whether she likes it or not, readers everywhere refer to her as “that plagiarising fanficcer”.

And you know what? Despite all that, she still hasn’t learned her lesson – she’s still a plagiarist. And that really ruined this book for me.

The Plot

OK, stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

Ordinary, Not Pretty, Shy, Clumsy Girl Clary Fray lives an Ordinary life with her standard-issue Loving Single Mum, until one night she sees something strange and subsequently meets some odd teenagers who reveal she she is a ~~wizard~~ Shadowhunter (the author tried to call them Dark-Hunters, but got a cease-and-desist letter from the person who actually owned the term). Apparently there is a secret magical world that co-exists with the ordinary one, where ~~wizards~~ magical creatures such as vampires, werewolves and demons exist. Behold! A seemingly abandoned hotel is really the haunt of a clan of vampires! A ruined lunatic asylum is actually home to a family of ~~wizards~~ Shadowhunters! Magical beings are all around us, hidden from our eyes!
And when one of these magical beings – called Downworlders for some reason – gets out of line, it’s up to the ~~Aurors~~ Shadowhunters to police them.

The Shadowhunters are lorded over by an organisation called the ~~Ministry of Magic~~ Clave, which has an agreement to protect and co-exist with Downworlders. Unfortunately at some point, a very talented but dangerous young Shadowhunter called ~~Voldemort~~ Valentine decided that all Downworlders should be destroyed and “blood purity” protected. He gathered a group of misfits and malcontents who agreed with him, called ~~Death Eaters~~ The Circle, and which included his wife and a handful of others. After a failed coup, Valentine supposedly died and the Shadowhunters went back to life as normal while his former followers repented and went back to the good side.

OR DID THEY???

Ahem. Anyway, Clary learns all this in between various idiotic escapades with her new friends, where in true Harry Potter style the kids do all the dangerous stuff without informing their tutor ~~Dumbledore~~ Hodge. They encounter vampires that ride around on flying motocycles (coughcough), Clary’s best friend Simon gets randomly turned into a rat (so not like Wormtail at all, yes?), they meet a flamboyant warlock with no belly button, and eventually learn that Valentine is not dead! Ruh roh!

The Maguffin in this book is something called the ~~Holy Grail~~ ~~Philosopher’s Stone~~ Mortal Cup – a magical cup that turns people who drink from it into Shadowhunters. After a lot of tedious hijinx and painful attempts at “witty” dialogue, Valentine finally reappears, steals the cup and reveals the AWFUL TRUTH! To whit:

Quote:

“Clary, I AM YOUR FATHER!”

“Noooo! That’s not true! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!”

“I am! And the sexy male lead you were kissing – IS YOUR BROTHER! BWAHAHAHAH!”

*sigh*

After a boring would-be tense and emotional confrontation, Valentine takes advantage of the protagonists’ wimpiness and makes his escape with the Cup – laughing manically all the while, of course.

I’ve been practising my manical laugh. I’m getting really good at it, too.

The Characters

Clary Fray Our sweet protagonist is supposedly “clumsy” and “not pretty” (two of the most painfully clichéd things bad authors fall back on because they think it will stop their protagonist from being a Sue). Oddly enough, we never see one single instance of her actually being clumsy. Ever. Either way Clare’s efforts failed; Clary is a Sue anyway. Not a particularly obnoxious one, thankfully, but a Sue all the same, and as if that weren’t bad enough she’s also boring, rude and generally unlikeable. I do love spending a book with a character I like and can root for. Which is why I’m going to read A Feast for Crows now.

~~Harry Potter~~ Simon Clary’s geeky, Jewish best friend, who has messy hair, glasses, and an unrequited crush on her. He must be one of those guys who likes pain, because Clary treats him like shit. This is why he’s one of the few vaguely sympathetic characters; he gets such a raw deal you can’t help but feel sorry for him. Hell, the girl of his dreams would rather snog her own brother.

~~Draco Malfoy~~Jace Oh gods, Jace. Not Jace. Anything but that. I hate this guy so bad. Not that he’s particularly nasty or hateful – at least, no more so than anyone else. I hate him almost entirely because the author is so hellbent on making me love him it’s nauseating. Pale, blond and graceful, with Daddy Issues out the wazoo, he’s an obvious name-swapped Draco Trilogy Draco, right down to the constant one-liners. And I do mean constant. Nothing that comes out of this little jerk’s mouth isn’t a “witty”, “sarcastic” or “sexy” quip. This coupled with the fact that everyone wuvs him easily nets him the Obnoxious Stu of the Year award, and by the end of the book I wished someone would drop a fridge on him.

~~Remus Lupin~~Luke Clary’s mother’s best friend; a sad-eyed loser who happens to be a werewolf. I didn’t really feel anything for him one way or the other, but he did manage to deliver the longest monologue in the book, which is saying a lot.

Voldemort I’m not even going to pretend with this one. “Valentine” is such an obvious Voldemort ripoff I’m amazed nobody got sued. Down to the smooth voice, the obsession with “blood purity” and the old ~~wizarding~~ Shadowhunter families – this guy has the lot. He even has the long, thin fingers for gods’ sakes. Anyone who thinks Voldemort was a shallow villian should check this guy out – he’s Voldemort without any other dimensions and a backstory about half as believable and twice as melodramatic. I couldn’t even root for him; he was that boring.

Ripoffs
With this one I’m not going to list WTF-eries, because the ripoffs are pretty damned WTF-inducing by themselves.

-Obvious one: the plotline is ripped straight from Harry Potter, with some Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer thrown in
-The one-liners are pure Buffy
-We have a very clear Sybil Trelawny standin, in the form of a fortune-teller who lives near Clary and her mother
-Amusingly enough, Clare even stooped to stealing from herself, with numerous passages copy-pasted straight from her infamous fanfics. One would think that she would want to put that disgrace behind her as much as possible, but, well, one would be wrong
-The hidden library/training centre/living quarters where Clary and co hide out is an obvious copy of Hogwarts
-There are numerous references to the fanfics and the hoo-hah surrounding them – when Clary finds her home broken into, she wonders why no-one stole “the valuable laptops”, Simon has a button badge that says “Still Not King” (a popular line from the Very Secret Diaries), and several characters are either named after or modelled on real people from Clare’s inner circle. The references were clearly meant to be cute little waves to her friends, but frankly I found them annoying and self-indulgent

And there you have it. Fortunately, despite her supreme arrogance and continued flaunting of the accepted code of conduct, Clare is reaping the wages of sin. Some people have observed that her books are written as if to a formula intended to attract as many fangirls as possible, but despite that the fandom for the trilogy is tiny and not particularly active as far as I know. And Clare, like Valentine, will carry the stigma of her past crimes with her forever. As far as I’m concerned, that’s more than enough.

Shadowmancer

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:24:28 GMT

Hoo boy did this one have it coming.
I heard about Shadowmancer well before I read it – well before I even saw it, in fact. Touted as a “Christian answer to Harry Potter” (as if it needed one), it was written by a British vicar by the name of G.P.Taylor. From what I gather, Taylor is the sort of Christian known as “born again” – in other words, one of the most annoying kinds of Christian in the world. I’m going to say “screw risk pissing people off” – born agains are as irritating as hardcore fundies.

You see, when someone grows up with a religion it’s usually fine. It’s just a part of life for them. But when someone goes through the first part of their life without religion, then finds it later… ugh.

Newfound religion is like a new toy. Rather than just being something you’ve always done, it’s new and shiny and wonderful and you just gotta try everything it can do, plus you just gotta show it off to all your friends because they’re gonna love it. Leik, dude!

I mean, think about it. What did you do when you bought a new car? Drove around everywhere, showing it off to people. What did you do when you got a great new barbeque? Invited everyone over to try it out. Becoming a born-again is just the same, only with more praying.

And, like all born agains, Taylor just had to show off his shiny new toy. Unfortunately he chose to do so via Shadowmancer – a godawful attempt at a children’s fantasy book that really begs the question of why some manuscripts get read by more than two people, let alone published.

It’s an interesting question, and in this case it’s no surprise at all that Taylor didn’t get where he is by, y’know, impressing some publisher with his talent. Instead, he sent the manuscript to an agency to be assessed. The agency then sent it back saying it was the worst writing they’d ever seen.

Not to be put off, Taylor sold his precious motorbike and used the money to self publish. He later got picked up by an actual publisher, and through the power of dishonest marketning that focused on a gimmick rather than actual good writing…

Hold on a second. This is starting to sound awfully familiar. Does anyone else think they’ve heard this story before? I know I have.

Yuck, and I thought one Paolini was bad. Well guess what – there are two. And this guy matches Chris “the Prodigy” Paolini both in ridiculous egotism and a complete lack of any talent. You know, our favourite kind of author!

As if that weren’t enough, said dishonest marketing – which in this case focused on the supposedly religious aspects of the story – got Taylor a good high-end publishing deal plus – brace yourselves, folks – a movie deal.

Oh man, I think I’m gonna puke. Rats aren’t even supposed to have a gag reflex!

I have no idea if this movie will ever get made, but the rights have been sold, and rest assured that if it comes out, I’ll be there with an axe, ready to recap it the instant the DVD hits shelves.

But for now, the book.

I’m just going to take a moment to thank my friend wompom, who accompanied me to the bookshop and encouraged me to buy a copy of this book. Thanks to him you guys get to read this review, so if you like it be sure to say a good word for him.

OK, let’s get started.

The Characters

Obidiah Demurral: Described by the author as “a bad dude with a serious attitude”, or words to that effect. I should probably add that the author also claimed that this guy was leik a million times scarier than the villains of either Harry Potter or His Dark Materials. Get those knives sharpened now, everybody.
In fact Demurral is one of the least scary or convincing villains I’ve ever read in my entire life… and this is me saying that, so take note dear readers. He’s a vicar who was once a decent guy but who has now become evil and corrupt and started doing all sorts of wicked things in secret. No, not fondling children. Get your minds out of the gutter.

Beadle: Demurral’s poor whiny incompetent lackey. This guy wouldn’t be out of place in a 1940s sitcom, with his boozing, limping about and constant wingeing. He’s so pathetic that as our story opens he’s clutching at Demurral’s jacket like a little kid. The author made some extremely clumsy attempts to make the reader have some sympathy for Beadle. All I’m going to say is FAIL.

Raphah: Oh gawds. Or should I say, O’ Mighty Riathamus. A black dude from Africa, Raphah is basically nothing but the author’s mouthpiece. And, since his purpose in the story boils down to A) Plot catalyst and B) Device for preaching thinly veiled Christianity, he’s not the most likeable or realistic character.

Unfortunately, when a character is specifically intended to act as a vehicle for religious preaching to the point that it forms the core of their personality, it makes them come off as infuriatingly self-righteous. Raphah certainly does. He represents the perfect Christian in this story, which means that he’s never frightened, never uncertain and never ever wrong about anything. All he does is search for a certain treasure Demurral stole from him, and preach. Constantly. At everyone. Everywhere. This kid never speaks to ANYONE without trying to convert them – and succeeding. Because he never fails at anything. He’s too perfect.

Raphah is also exceedingly irritating. He doesn’t seem to understand concepts like “tact” or “sensitivity”, or “minding your own damn business”. Everyone he meets has to be interfered with in some way. He takes the opportunity to confront every single damn character with their own personal sins, basically telling them that UR LIFE: UR DOIN IT RONG! The concept of free will doesn’t seem to mean much to Raphah – if somebody’s not on their knees begging for forgiveness from the Almighty, then it’s up to him to give them a good shove and maybe cut a leg tendon or two.

Of course, nobody ever finds his smug certainty that they must all do exactly as he does annoying or rude. Because he’s always right.

Thomas: A random kid who Raphah teams up with. I’m pretty sure he’s meant to be the protagonist, but frankly there isn’t much to say about him. Intended as a sort of “everyman” character that kids can relate to, he’s completely boring and has one of those “the-author-has-no-talent” personality disorders that causes him to do random stuff at random times. Sometimes said random stuff happens for plot reasons, but more often it’s because the author wants to jam in yet another opportunity for Raphah to be right.

Kate: A Girl. Really, that may as well have been her name. She comes on Thomas and Raphah’s journey for absolutely no reason other than to be a helpless person for our hero to protect and rescue all the time. She also suffers from Thomas’ disorder, since she goes from tough trash-talking tomboy to whiny little girl at the drop of a tricorn hat.

Jacob Crane: A rough-and-tumble smuggler and bandit, complete with gold earring. Crane at least has a spine and some semblance of common sense, but unfortunately the author couldn’t decide what his character arc was going to be so he starts several and then forgets about them halfway through. Several times it looks like he’s on the road to some sort of redemption, but he never gets there. A chapter or so later, he starts off on the road to redemption again. Then the same thing happens a third time. Then he decides to work for Demurral. Then he decides to help the kids for no reason. Then he’s looking after his own interests. Then he’s helping the kids again. Then he starts wondering about his life and whether he’s truly happy. Then-
You get the idea.

Everyone Else: Screw ’em. The author didn’t bother to give any of them personalities, so why should I care? Oh, that’s right – I don’t.

Plot
This one’s fairly simple. Demurral has stolen a golden angel statue called a Keruvim (oh I see what u did thar, Taylor!). He plans to get his hands on the other Keruvim that supposedly exists somewhere, and use the two in conjunction to overthrow God – here called Riathamus. However Raphah has come from Africa to get the Keruvim back. Thomas and Kate team up with him because they both hate the eeevil Demurral.
All sorts of whacky hijinks then ensue, with more than a few pointless plot cul-de-sacs and random conversions, before a lame climax where the Devil is (really easily) defeated, and, uh…

And then… um…

I actually had to re-read the last couple of pages more than once, because I couldn’t quite accept the fact that the book was over. There had been some sort of climax, but at about the midway point it suddenly stopped and the book was finished. The Devil had been deafeated, but… what about everything else? What happened to Demurral? What happened to Beadle? Did they both die? What about Thomas and Kate? Raphah got resurrected (of course), but was he okay? He didn’t even get any dialogue! Did he go back to Africa? Did Thomas go with him? What about all the demons and the evil worshippers who were helping Demurral? I didn’t give a shit about any of it, but I didn’t even get the opportunity to flip them all the bird for farewell! What the hell?

Maybe it was a misprint, but I sincerely doubt it. And maybe there’s a sequel that might answer some of those questions, but I don’t know about that. Nor do I really care. This book was a ginormous waste of time.

WTF-eries
What can I say? This book was all over the place. All sorts of random junk was thrown into the plot, along with plenty of extraneous characters who never did a damn thing. The author actually had a few intriguing scenes and ideas, but none of them had anything to do with the story. For example, Crane at one point comes across a bush that’s been covered in ribbons and locks of human hair. Who decorated it? Why? No explanation. At one point the characters see a wicker man on fire. Who made it? Who set it alight? More importantly, was Nicholas Cage inside? No answer given. The characters spend some time at a mill inhabited by a family of people who have an extra finger on each hand and are apparently some kind of other race. Said family help the heroes out, then vanish from the rest of the plot. What was the point of having them there, or making them non human? Oh, right – there was no point. Move on.
Mention is made of monsters called Thulaks, Dementor ripoffs whose touch causes lifelong depression. None of them are ever actually seen.

Even worse are the pointless plot deviations that actually have a purpose – ie. that of making Raphah look even more speshul and wunnerful. For example, the part where Raphah is imprisoned under the care of an ugly drunk woman who likes to play with Tarot cards. Needless to say Raphah is too damned righteous to just ignore the fact that she’s mucking about with, oh – PIECES OF CARDBOARD WITH PICTURES ON THAT HAVE NO MAGICAL POWER WHATSOEVER. Instead he butts in, tells her the cards are OMG SO EBIL, rudely snatches them off her and tosses them in the fire. She just passively accepts the fact that he’s destroyed her property and after he magically heals her deaf son she instantly becomes a better person.

Because, you know, it’s really just that easy to change someone.

I don’t really need to add that this woman never appears again. She was there for one reason: to act as the spiritual equivelant of a dummy with a target painted on it. Just a little marksmanship practise for dear ole Raphah. He’ll be getting that merit badge any day now.

Conclusion
Putting aside my mistrust of religion, I really have no problem with people going to their holy places and saying their special words. I don’t care what other people believe. If it makes you feel better, go ahead.
All I ask is that you leave me alone.
I don’t want to be preached at, I don’t want to be converted, and I sure as hell don’t want to be caught up in someone else’s “holy” war.

Oh, right.

I also don’t want to read crap like this book, which uses the guise of “entertaining” children’s literature in order to ram half-baked religious babble down the victim’s throat as hard as possible for 100+ pages. I sincerely doubt this book managed to convert anybody – it’s just too badly written. Which means that this book failed not just as a work of fiction but also as an evangelical tool. Way to go, Taylor. You’re a champ, dude.

Sadly, the failure of this book (it sold well for a while, then took a nosedive when people began reading it) hasn’t stopped Taylor. Au contraire – he has several more books out by this point, none of which have sold particularly well. Perhaps just well enough to stay on shelves for a while, but I really doub- wait, scratch that – I know that none of them will last any great time or make any great impact. This book, like its inheritors, is due to be forgotten – consigned to the trash-heap of literary memory where it belongs. The movie, if it ever comes, will do the same.

If it doesn’t, I sincerely promise that I will eat my own underpants with mustard.

The Legend of Rah and the Muggles

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:10:06 GMT

The Legend of Rah and the Muggles

Or, as I prefer to call it, The Legend of Rah and the Arsefaces.

This book is a bit like the old classics, in that more people have heard of it than have actually read it or have any idea of what it’s about. I know of only one other person in the world who actually owns a copy, and they wrote the only review for it I’ve ever seen. http://www.magespace.net/mugrev.html

Anyone who’s heard of this book would probably have done so because of the memorable (as in memorably stupid) incident where the author, Nancy Stouffer, sued J.K.Rowling for plagiarism. Supposedly, Stouffer claimed that she had written a book which used the term “Muggles”, and also contained a character called Larry Potter. In other words, ZOMG U COPIED MY IDEA U SLAG!

To this day, Stouffer still owns a site called www.realmuggles.com, on which she maintains her wounded insistence that Rowling is profiting off her wunnerful idea. Never mind that nobody ever read her book, and that “muggle” is already a well-known British slang word. Never mind that Rowling almost certainly derived it from the term “mug”, meaning a stupid person. This is all about one thing: sour grapes, and lots of them.

The lawsuit was a fiasco, with Stouffer and her lawyers eventually ordered to pay damages for wasting the court’s time and also for lying. Another thing that many people (including the media) don’t seem to be aware of is that the book does not contain a character called Larry Potter. In fact Stouffer had a totally different book that included a character by that name. When you know that, the already flimsy case she had falls apart even further.

Despite her loss, Stouffer doesn’t seem to have taken the hint and to this day her website and pretty much everything she’s said on record reeks of wounded pride. Check out the list of supposed similarities at realmuggles.com – it boils down to things like “chequered floors” and “a castle by a lake”. Mein Gott!

Interestingly enough, the copy of the book that I eventually bought off eBay seems to have been published post-lawsuit. I picked this up from the fact that it has the address for realmuggles.com in the back, but also because I looked at the title page and the imprint page, and saw a little “tm” mark after every. Friggin’. Word. Seriously! “Rah” has a tm, “muggles” has a tm – on the imprint page there’s a little list of words supposedly belonging to the author, in which she actually tries to lay claim to the term “elders”! Watch out Paolini – she’s gonna sue you next! Not that a plagiarism suit against you would be entirely out of order.

It’s pretty easy to see why a new edition of this book got published after the lawsuit – failed or not, it would have created new interest in it. I should add, though, that the author is apparently pissed off at the cheapo publisher that printed it. Apparently she feels she didn’t get enough royalties or some such thing. Never mind that I got my copy for a dollar.

Backstory aside, what about the actual book?

C’mon, you know I’m going to say “it sucks”. When have I ever reviewed a book here where I haven’t started out by saying “it sucks”.

This book sucks. There, I said it. Now, I could go into my usual long-ass rant about why it sucks, but after a while I got to thinking that maybe it’d be easier if I just showed you a couple of the illustrations from inside the book. They were drawn by the author, and I apologise for the slight distortion at the edges. I had to scan them from my copy, since not even Google had anything I could have used. Since it’s a hardcover, scanning the pages entailed standing over the scanner and pressing down on the spine for a good fifteen minutes, so you guys had better be grateful.

I’m sort of sure these characters were supposed to look variously cute or quirky, but unfortunately they look like… well, they look like they’ve got arses for faces. Really, there’s no other way of looking at it. Try and keep your eyes on those horrible, transvestite-grade-madeup features and not start expecting to see turds come sliding out.

I think that really sums up this book quite well. It aims for cute and ends up weird and not a little misguided.

Plot

OK, well, since this book was supposedly ripped off five ways to Sunday by dear old J.K.R, you probably all want to know what happens in it. I’ll summarise, then – but be warned. You’ll be infuriated that the bitch got away with this level of copying. It’s an outrage, I tell ya!

-The book opens with a prologue that instantly had me question just who it was meant to be aimed at. It basically reads like something out of a highschool textbook – formal language, long words, dry content. It outlines how there was a nuclear war sometime in the future, and then the rich people left the polluted continent behind and sailed off for sunnier shores, leaving the “have nots” behind to suffer. Instead of dying slowly of radiation poisoning, the “have nots” ended up mutating into horrible, monstrous aberrations of nature. In other words, the Arsefaces pictured above.

So far so bad. Right off the bat the author makes it clear that she has no idea how to write for a particular audience – kids aren’t going to understand any of this, let alone be interested enough to keep reading. Unfortunately, this problem with tone and language will continue for the rest of the book.

-After the weird, textbook-y prologue, the first proper chapter starts and the book’s tone shifts abruptly into high fantasy. A noble lady called Catherine lives in a castle and is expecting her first child. Our heroine, who is of course beautiful and good, is sad because her husband, a knight, is off fighting in some random war or other.

From what we’re shown, it would seem that after the nuclear war mentioned in the prologue, the rich people who left for greener pastures then proceeded to regress to the Middle Ages for some reason. At least, we’re never shown any sort of technology that wouldn’t fit in a generic high fantasy book – no electricity, no computers, no cars, no nothing. No, this isn’t explained – why the hell were you expecting that?

Anyway, Lady Catherine (who is of course referred to as Cat) gives birth to adorable twin boys and then finds out her husband has died in the war. She breaks down in beautiful tears, then starts flirting with the butler. Because, you know, once your significant other dies you have to get a new one right away. I honestly mean it when I say that I used to think like that when my age was in the single digits.

With the enemy knocking on the doors, Cat puts her two (unnamed) sons on a raft and sends them out onto the ocean so they won’t get killed along with her. The fact that two unweaned babies wouldn’t last ten minutes on the open sea is not an issue, possibly because It’s Magic, or possibly because the author doesn’t do that fancy “thinking” stuff.

Her role in the story over, Cat disappears never to be seen again. See ya ’round, slag. Or not.

-The twins (who are of course suitably Aryan and cute) float on the sea for ten days (!!), which needless to say has no ill effects on them whatsoever. The stupid raft doesn’t even capsize. Instead it gets found by some random talking sea creatures, who drag it to the shores of Arseface country before (you guessed it) disappearing from the rest of the book.

Rah and the Muggles has a recurring thing where characters are abruptly introduced, only to vanish again without trace. Since nobody has any personality, it’s not really that noticeable, but it does make the whole thing feel rather surreal.

-The twins are found by the Arsefaces, as in the picture above, and are named Rah and Zyn. For some reason their arrival causes light to return to Arseface country after a century or two of darkness. Despite this the plants immediately start growing again (and I mean that literally). The Arsefaces think this is peachy

-The next few chapters are written in an awkward, jerky way, with the “plot” jumping forward in time without notice several times. First the babies are babies and a few random things happen. Then they’re suddenly toddlers, and more random things happen. The only thing of note at this point is that Zyn starts to look different from his brother, as his hair and eyes start to change colour. The Arsefaces proclaim that twins becoming less alike as they grow is something that does sometimes happen. In real life, probably not, but it is an interesting idea. Which, needless to say, goes nowhere and doesn’t contribute anything to anything.

-Rah and Zyn suddenly jump to being preteen kids. More cutesy stuff happens, none of which leads anywhere or builds to anything.

-The time-lurches finally stop when the twins are grown men of twenty-five. The only really recurring thing we’ve seen so far is that they have a bit of a rivalry going, and Zyn is inclined toward jealousy of his perfect brother. By the time they’re both twenty-five, Zyn has basically turned evil. He gathers a bunch of other malcontents and they run off to live on a deserted island, after which some more nothing happens.

-After a ludicrous seven years (!!!) have passed, lack of food finally becomes enough of an issue that Zyn takes action. He and his cronies sneak back onto the mainland, kidnap Rah and steal all the food they can carry

-The “good” Arsefaces – helped by several more talking animal characters the author only saw fit to introduce right now – rescue Rah, who then declares that Zyn and his friends will live on the island in exile forever, and that the Good Guys on the mainland will send them food by airdrop

The end.

So you see, Your Honour, it is clear that the plaintiff has a solid case against the defendant. I trust the jury will agree.

WTF-eries

Reading this book, it’s really quite hard to tell just what the author was trying to do. The plot feels so much like each chapter was just made up on the spot that I’d find it hard to believe that wasn’t the case. The tone shifts wildly, from formal scholar-speak to high fantasy, to light-hearted kiddy story, to I-don’t-know-what-this-is-meant-to-be.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the entire book is crammed with spelling errors, grammatical problems, typesetting mistakes and ginormous plot holes. The whole thing put me in mind of an old fishing net, washed up on a beach after being savaged by a very big shark. You can recognise what it was meant to be, but it’s barely hanging together, and in such a way that it can’t do what its maker intended.

All in all it’s pretty easy to see why Stouffer’s case was laughed out of court. I’m all for artists getting what they deserve, and in fact I think that’s exactly what happened.

Good night, and gods bless.

The Fifth Sorceress - Opening the Box of Fail

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 07:08:46 GMT

A while ago, my harddrive broke and I lost everything on it. My university assignments, all my completely legal movies and MP3s, everything.

I also lost all my old reviews. Most of them I managed to get back by going through the archives at the booth, but two had vanished. One was my review of Twlight. The other was this one. I wasn't hugely upset over losing the Twilight review, but The Fifth Sorceress was one of my best, and I was very unhappy about losing it. I decided to start this LiveJournal so that none of my reviews would ever be lost again.

However, not all things that are lost stay lost. In desperation, not thinking anything would come of it, I spoke to Albert. He, it turned out, had access to old threads - including the one where I posted my Fifth Sorceress review. He may still be able to get back the Twilight review, but for the meantime, here is the crown jewel of my reviews. Enjoy!

A fantastic read. Fantasy novels can be hit or miss but his one is a definite hit… Newcomb writes with a boldness and originality rarely seen in first novels.

Dear Outland reviewer: Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck your grandmother, fuck your parents, fuck your sister. Fuck your entire family unto the ninth generation.

Ahem.

Robert Newcomb is a relatively new author – one of those upstarts who got published who-knows-how, and who like all talentless hacks has a shitload of marketing behind him. Sadly, as with other flash-in-the-pans with nothing of value to offer the reading public, there is always a backlash. In this case, people rushed out and bought the first book after hearing bullshit like “fully realised fantasy world”, “compelling characters” and “Firmly in the George R.R. Martin camp of realistic fantasy” (all actual quotes from “professional” reviewers).

Then they actually read the book and almost universally hated it. If you don’t believe me, have a look at this sucker’s page on amazon.com. The first book has quite a few reviews, some good, some bad. Book two has fewer reviews, and more of them are bad. Book three has even less, and once again, more of them are negative.

Books four, five and six have virtually no reviews at all. I think we can all figure out exactly why this is the case.

Now, I don’t know too much about why this piece of shit got published, beyond what I’ve heard second-hand: apparently, the “author” is married to a writer, and his only exposure to fantasy was Terry Goodkind’s creepy Objectivist sex fantasies. This story may go a long way toward explaining the content of this book.

You all know me by now and know very, very well how I get about overhyped trash. Accordingly, once I’d heard the other hype, this to do with phrases like “worse than Eragon”, I paid a trip to the bookshop, where I bought not just this one, but three of its sequels. And yes, I am that insane, because I’ve ordered the two I couldn’t find.

After a few weeks of steeling my courage and finishing one of the good books my boyfriend gave me, I settled down with a bottle of butterscotch schnapps in one hand and a blade in my pocket, to uncover the true horror of The Fifth Sorceress – a book I can only describe as a huge Box of Fail.

After a few pages, I paused my reading and dug out a red pen. The first chapter or so of my copy is now covered in crossings-out, underlined passages and increasingly deranged and crudely-phrased comments. I’m a well brought-up rodent who almost never swears, so it says a lot that by about page 30 I was using the f-word every other paragraph. Eventually I had to abandon the adding of notes and so on, partly because a vein was going in my forehead but also because it made the experience of reading the book that much slower. And trust me, nobody wants that.

So let us unfurl the sails and set out on a voyage on the Sea of Bad Writing, and find out why this book has finally and inevitably driven me insane.

The Setup

I’ll try and keep this brief. In a land called Eutracia, people with “endowed blood” can use magic. This goes for both men and women, but for reasons that are never explained, men use the Vigours, which are Good, and women use the Vagaries, which are Evil. At some point in the history of the country – wait, it was 300 years before our story begins, as we’re told approximately three billion times throughout the text. Yes, exactly 300 years. And the number is always there as a number rather than being spelled out, which annoyed the hell out of me.

Anyway, so 300 years ago (dun dun dun dun dundun dun), a group of eeeevil Sorceresses used the Vagaries to wage war on the non-Evil men, who eventually defeat them thanks to a magical book and a magical stone, called the Tome and the Paragon, respectively.

However, like all Good Guys they’re also morons, so when they capture the Evil Sorceresses they don’t kill them, just send them into exile. SMRT. Needless to say the Evil chicks survive and come back for revenge.

300 years later, we’re introduced to Prince Tristan. Described in the blurb as “a reluctant monarch-to-be”, he dresses in black, carries a “quiver” of throwing-knives, and is unmarried but a serial womaniser (the author was obviously aiming for “badass” here). He also, judging by the way he acts, knows dick-all about anything and may in fact be mentally retarded.

Oh yeah, and he’s the Chosen One. Of course.

Incredibly, the book is unimaginative to the point where he’s actually called The Chosen One – the text calls him that, and other characters call him that too. So not only was the author so unoriginal that he resorted to the old Chosen One malarkey, but he couldn’t even be bothered to try and hide it. Anyway. Tristan doesn’t want to be King – too bad for him, because as we meet him he’s days away from taking the throne. Wangst wangst wangst. He spends most of his time sleeping around or practising with his precious throwing knives.

He also has a horse (a stallion, of course), which acts like a dog. I’m serious about that last part; the thing comes when he whistles and even plays fetch. Not that this ever factors into the story.

I don’t know what Our Hero wants to do with his life other than become King; by the looks of it, he’d rather spend his time whining.

Oh yeah, and he’s meant to be thirty years old. Not eighteen. Not twenty. Not thirteen, which is approximately how old he acts. Not an age where his immaturity would be just annoying rather than annoying and nonsensical. Thirty.

Unfortunately for whatever the author was trying to achieve, the protagonist acted so unlike a thirty-year-old that I kept seeing him as a teenager in my head anyway.

Fail #1: Unlikeable main character

Anyway, long story short, Tristan is saved from becoming King when, surprise! the Evil Chicks (there are four of them) show up in the middle of the ceremony along with their Evil minions who are, believe it or not, actually called Minions. Can’t you just see the “boldness and originality” leaking out of the pages? Surely you can!

Fail #2: Painfully obvious clichés with no attempt to hide or change any of them

Kluge (yes, really), the leader of the Minions, hands Tristan a sword and gives him an ultimatum: cut off Daddy’s head yourself, or watch us slowly torture him to death. Naturally, Tristan takes advantage of Kluge’s idiocy and promptly uses the sword to launch a brave assault on the Minions and give his family the chance to escape.

Oh, wait. Actually he just cuts Daddy’s head off. Then he tries to attack Kluge. He gets his ass handed to him in ten seconds, and then has to lie there helplessly while his mother is gang-raped and then killed (thankfully we don’t actually see it), and his sister is dragged off.

Fail #3: Protagonist is a moron

Luckily for him, the Wise Old Mentor (what, you didn’t think there wouldn’t be one of those, did you?) helps him escape. Afterwards, he reveals that he and his fellow wizards knew the Evil Chicks were coming, which is why they sent the rest of the wizards away from the palace to escape the massacre now taking place in it. The King and Queen also knew, and so did the head of the Royal Guard, but none of them did anything to protect the population at large from the Minions.

Fail #4: Good guys are as evil as the bad guys

Long story short, the Evil Chicks take Sister away to their domain in a country called Parthalon, where they brainwash her into becoming one of them. They also take the Paragon, which they plan to use in a spell that will enslave the entire world. Isn’t that a bit… extreme? I’m not sure why anyone would mind being enslaved to them – at least, I’m not sure why most guys would mind, considering that the Evil Chicks are all extremely hot and into bondage.

Yeah, author’s got issues. He also more or less lifted this verbatim from Goodkind and his Mord-Sith (evil hot bondage chicks who work for the evil emperor).

Again, “boldness and originality”, guys. Just keep reminding yourselves about that part.

Fail #5: Stealing from Goodkind (Goodkind, of all people!)

After a lot of bumbling around, Tristan, who I’ll now be renaming Emoboy, trips over a succession of plot conveniences one of which eventually gets him to Parthalon along with Wise Mentor Guy. About five minutes after they arrive, they promptly get captured so the author can share even more of his bondage/sex fantasies with us.

Fail #6: Author sharing his fetishes in public

One of the Evil Chicks rapes Emoboy and instantly conceives his child, whom she explains will grow up to be her slave. Incidentally, it’ll be born in less than a day thanks to some random magical thingy.

That done, they start up the enslaving spell. Unfortunately, they’re not doing it right and it will destroy the world instead of enslaving it. Again, isn’t that a bit excessive?

*shrug* Who gives a shit?

One of the few rules the magic system in this world seems to follow is that when the Paragon isn’t being worn by someone with endowed blood, every magic-user loses their powers. They don’t get it back until the Paragon (that’s the random magical stone I mentioned earlier) has a new wearer. As King, Emoboy was meant to wear it.

Fail #7: Arbitrary and unconnected rules of magic

The spell begins. But Emoboy, who has no training in magic and shouldn’t be able to use it anyway since the Paragon isn’t around anyone’s neck just now, is able to use it anyway because ~~the plot calls for it~~ he’s the Chosen One. He uses telekinesis to… uh… knock the Paragon out of place. The spell instantly fails (much like this book), and all the Evil Chicks die. Except for Sister. And the one carrying Emoboy’s kid.

Fail #8: Anticlimactic and contrived “climax”

The pregnant Evil Chick gets chased by Emoboy up onto the roof, where she suddenly turns all weak and whiny and then hurls herself off the edge. Afterwards Emoboy fights Kluge (the head of the Minions) and beats him by – I swear – using the old “made you look” trick. Kluge dies and, yes, the Minions immediately swear loyalty to Emoboy.

Fail #9: Idiot World politics

With that “victory” under his belt, Emoboy and Wise Mentor Guy prepare to kill Sister and her newborn child (which arrived in about five minutes, with no noise or mess). Yes, our heroes are prepared to kill someone they love, and a newborn baby as well, because Sister is probably still Evil and her baby… is also evil? Or something. And they can’t just take her home and see if she recovers because

<ERROR: LOGIC NOT FOUND>

Fortunately, Sister just randomly gets better on her own once she’s seen the baby, because brainwashing is something you can just get better from without any help or therapy at all, and a woman isn’t a good woman unless she’s got a baby to wuv.

Fail #10-37: Obvious, continuous and unapologetic misogyny

The end.

Characters

Huh? What? Characters? Hahahah.

Sorry, this section is going to be rather short. I really have nothing to say about the characters because there weren’t any. I’m serious. This book has no characters.

Instead, it has one, single, ubercharacter, who is in every case the author wearing a crude cardboard mask and using a different name. Everyone talks exactly the same – from rich to poor, thirty years old to 300 years old, Eutracian or Parthalonian, human or supernatural creature. You’ll hear precisely the same dialogue from a gnome, a harpy, a palace guardsman or a city whore.

They act in robotic and unconnected ways, following the plot and doing whatever it requires without ever deviating from it.

They also talk. A lot.

Wondering exactly what Wise Mentor Guy is planning? Sit down and listen as he explains every detail very slowly and thoroughly. Can’t figure out why the leader of the Evil Chicks hasn’t just killed Emoboy? Fear not! She’ll tell him and you exactly why, and take three pages to do it! Want to know exactly what’s going through the mind of a giant evil monster while it eyes our hero and bares its horrible dripping fangs? Don’t worry – it’s about to tell you! And Emoboy cares about you too, because he’s just going to sit there and wait until it’s done before he attacks or tries to run away.

The story literally came to a standstill every time someone opened their mouth, and since they did it at the slightest excuse, it had the same effect on the pacing as you’d get if you greased a clock’s gears with Clag glue. The characters would Not. Shut. Up. No matter where they were or what they were doing – fleeing for their lives from the servants of evil, fighting monsters, racing against time to escape before the castle roof fell in on them – they rambled on and on, often about things only vaguely related to the situation at hand. They had the attention spans of small children too: one moment Emoboy is snarling and spitting threats at some guy, demanding information about his kidnapped sister, and five seconds later he’s asking about sentient butterflies. After wasting ten pages on this, they suddenly go back to talking about Sister.

I might have liked the Evil Chicks better, considering that they wanted Emoboy dead – something I could easily sympathise with – but they’re just as idiotic as everyone else; spilling every last detail of their evil plans for the entire world to hear, as if it fucking mattered whether Emoboy knew exactly why they wanted his firstborn child.

The constant, inane chattering from the characters had the effect of stripping away every last shred of suspense and intrigue – everything was known, nothing was a surprise. The author did attempt to spring a few “plot twists” on us, such as the revelation that Wise Mentor Guy used to be married to the leader of the Evil Chicks, but it came out of nowhere and had so little relevance to what had come before – and what came after it too, for that matter – that it was more of a “huh? Whut?” moment than a “gasp! Nowai!”

OK, so this section wasn’t short. Oh well.

Plot

Are you fucking kidding?

WTF-eries

The entire freaking book.

Prose

OK, so Plot, Character and Worldbuilding are one big heap of Fail. What about the prose?

Well, one thing I noticed was how poorly edited it was. There were spelling errors, misused words, and quite a few times I had the odd feeling I’d come across a word that didn’t actually exist. Redundant descriptions and exposition ran rampant; the author used certain phrases over and over again until I started giggling at them. Then he kept on using them until I stopped giggling and started grinding my teeth. For example, Wise Mentor Guy raises his eyebrow to make a point, and this “infamous eyebrow” is described as rising about five times a page, always with the exact same wording. Emoboy’s “dark hair” and “black leather vest” are mentioned at least three times a chapter. One of the Evil Chicks is described as “exotic” in every single scene she appears in.

I saw hundreds of things – thousands of things even the most incompetent editor should have spotted and corrected in the first round of editing alone. This leads me to conclude that either the book received no editing whatsoever, or that it was edited by a gibbon. The copy editor was probably a chimp.

As for the prose itself… well, I think I’ll let it do the talking. Here are a few choice snippets that I underlined while reading:

“…the captain thought to himself” ~pg. 29 (He’s not telepathic, people – who else is he going to think to?)

“He had defiantly ignored his requisite daily classes…” ~pg. 38

“I thank the Afterlife, his terrified mind shouted.” ~pg. 40

“Shimmering slivers of prismed sunlight randomly found their way…” ~pg. 55

“…both crashed into his mind like dual awakening explosions.”~pg. 83 (This is meant to be a metaphor, by the way)

“…[Wise Mentor Guy] was literally about to come apart with rage.”~pg. 568 (Gosh, me too!)

The author also uses the words “aquamarine”, “blatant”, and “simply” over and over and over again. Doesn’t he know any other adjectives? For fuck’s sake, if your vocabulary is really that small, get a freaking thesaurus!

OK, I think I’ve gone far enough with this. There’s only one thing left I want to talk about: the misogyny. This book made me think of something I’ve read about called the Madonna-Whore complex. The big villains are all women – all of whom dress like sluts, and practise “sexual depravity” – in other words, they are willing to have sex with many men rather than get married to one guy. They use magic to stop themselves getting pregnant – ie. they use contraceptives and only get pregnant when they want to. Oh, and they also enjoy a little lesbianism on the side, which is presented as horrifyingly Wrong and Perverted.

True, this is wrapped up in slavery and torture, but the picture is still clear – and ugly. Evil women are promiscuous, bisexual and use birth control. As far as male homosexuality is concerned, I guess the author wasn’t even willing to go there. By contrast, the good women are all either sweet innocent virgins, married, or pregnant. Good women are weak and helpless and always need a man to look after them.

The only hint of an interesting addition to the flat and predictable plot was that Sister is also the Chosen One – in other words, what we really have here is the Chosen Two. Except Sister isn’t required to do anything. Her only role is to… er… well, she doesn’t have a role. Emoboy has to rule, and she has to raise her child. That’s it. She doesn’t try and fight back against the evil sorceresses who have her imprisoned and undergoing cruel brainwashing. Instead she lies there passively and allows herself to be corrupted until her heroic brother comes to save her. Afterwards she’s suddenly and miraculously healed by her baby, at which point her story arc, such as it is, comes to an abrupt end and she goes home to play Mommy like all women should.

All that’s really missing from this mess is the obligatory Love Interest. Emoboy in fact gets two love interests – both of whom he rescues from other men before they throw themselves at his feet, and who are ready to jump in bed with him less than a day later. The first one turns out to be evil, and the second one passively agrees to hide until her Prince Charming gets back from his fight with evil. Needless to say, she dies at the end purely so Emoboy can hold her dead body and scream NNNNNNNOOOOOOO!!!! at the sky.

And there you have it, and there you can keep it. I hate this book, and I hate that it got published, and I’m not sorry at all for all the horrible things I just said about it, because it deserves every word. Sometimes, I feel utterly ashamed for liking fantasy.

Special Addition: I didn't formally review the sequels, but I did read some of them. Here are my comments, copied over from the old thread.

I've just finished the sequel to this thing. And yes, it is worse.

And one of the things that annoyed me most about the first book isn't just in the second - it's raised to the power of twenty tooth-grindings. No, not the misogyny, though that's still present. It's the nonstop talking.

Literally 6/8ths of the book is taken up by pages and pages of inane dialogue - dialogue that, once again, sounds identical for every character (with the exception of one guy who inexplicably talks like a caveman), and comes accessorised with that old favourite of untalented writers: unnecessary dialogue tags.

For those who don't know, "said" is an invisible word. You don't notice it while you're reading. Authors who know what they're doing use "said" about 95% of the time. Dialogue tags, such as "snapped", "growled", "hissed" or "whispered" are alternatives for said. There's nothing wrong with using dialogue tags - if you want to emphasise the fact that a character is speaking quietly, or let the reader know that a piece of dialogue was said with a hint of, say, sadness, implying that there is another meaning behind the words themselves.

Bad writers, however, hate the word "said", and go to great lengths to avoid using it. Their characters don't "say" anything - instead they snap, exclaim, question, answer, ad nauseum. Not only is it utterly unnecessary, but it drains all the meaning out of these words. After a while the reader starts ignoring them just as he'd ignore the word "said", so they may as well not be there anyway. If you don't believe me, here's a simple test: pick a word, any word. Say it. Say it again. Say it over and over again. See how long it takes before the word stops being a word and becomes just a noise.

This is what happens when authors use repetition and clog up their text with superfluous adjectives and other related nonsensica. The same applies for purple prose - flowery, over-the-top description. Check this out: "The shining blade of the weapon penetrated the man's terrified eye, instantly bringing forth a vile spurt of viscous transparent liquid". Now try this: "The dagger pierced his eye, and horrible clear sludge bubbled out". Which sentence had more impact, and made you feel more revolted at the description? Hint: it's the one with fewer words.

Unfortunately Newcomb doesn't seem to know the difference between meaningless words and something that actually has an impact on the reader. Just as a for instance, at one point of his characters has poisonous powder thrown into his eyes, painfully blinding him. The moment where that happened was shocking - for about half a sentence. Literally less than a paragraph later, before any potential horror or dismay could settle in, the characters went back to their endless babble as if nothing had happened. There was no emotional response from them, and there sure as hell wasn't from the reader. Not this reader, anyway.

The book literally drowned in technical problems like this. The villains monologued for pages and pages, losing any shred of menace they may have possessed on their first entrance. The good guys, instead of doing anything, sat around in their hideout and talked on and on, pausing occasionally to switch topics. Even action scenes were so tediously described, and so full of bland prose and unimaginative word use, that they did nothing to wake up slumbering readers. I swear, these books are pure agony. The casual reader would probably hate them; someone with experience in writing and editing is likely to turn suicidal by the tenth chapter.

Oh yeah, and plot-wise, we have:

-Supposedly dead/Long lost relatives coming back to torment the heroes (in this case, two of them. "Boldness and originality", people)

-Some guy who's addicted to his own brain fluid

-An assassin who's supposedly the best around, who leaves taunting notes - in rhyme, I might add - and dies at the end because like all brilliant assassins he likes to pull the old "even the odds" trick before attacking. Instead of, you know, using his super-special crossbow to put an arrow through Emoboy's eye and end it right there At the end, the Big Villain accidently kills himself while the hero just lies there on the floor whimpering. The evil plot fails because of precisely nothing the good guys did. Yeah, that's a real climax right there.

Now, if you'll excuse me...

*unpacks sniper rifle and slowly loads it while climbing the stairs of the clock tower*

And my comments on the third one:

*long, slow sigh* OK. OK. OK. okay...

Last night I finished the third book in the series, and I regret to inform you that I'm not going to read any more of them. The two I ordered haven't arrived, and if they ever do I'm not going to pick them up. I swear to gods, paw on heart, no kidding around or exaggeration, that reading this trilogy was like being the protagonist of Apocalypse Now. I finished book three, hurled it across the room, stomped on it and then collapsed and lay on my bed in the semi-darkness, feeling like I'd been physically beaten and quietly wondering if there was any point in going on.

This trilogy was so bad, even by my standards, that reading it literally sucked out my will to read. In the past, I've managed to slog through bad books by telling myself how each page is more material for when I come here to shred it. But with this, that defence no longer worked. The third book finally killed my sense of humour, and I have nothing funny to say about it. Seriously, it's that bad.

Not that book three was that different from its predecessors; in fact it was better than book two. But the combined force of all three books was just too much. I finally gave up and skimmed the last half of book three before hurling it away. It took me a strong effort of will just to come back and write this down.

And yes, this is why my avatar has changed once again.

*takes a deep breath*

This trilogy was nothing but a big fat waste of my time. The plot goes nowhere, the characters haven't been developed one iota from how they were in book one, and the worldbuilding and magic system are nonsensical to the point of inducing headaches.

Incidentally, the whole Chosen One thing went precisely nowhere. By the end of book three Tristan Stu hasn't even begun his training in magic, let alone done any of the things he's meant to do as the Chosen One. Hell, he hasn't even read the prophecy and found out just what that is. The excuse given is that they can't train him because it could be dangerous, and he can't read the prophecy, because that would... also be dangerous. Or something. Seriously, that's the only rationalisation we get. And since there's nothing to suggest this state of affairs will change, reading on is utterly pointless.

Instead of doing anything remotely connected with what was set up in book one, the characters spend their time fighting a succession of cardboard-cutout villains, all of whom are related to them for no particular reason and with increasingly tenuous reasons given for their existence. I'm not even going to think about reading any more of this guy's stuff. Frankly, I would rather re-read Touched by Venom. At least that was competently written.

The Da Vinci Code

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:17:01 GMT

Yes, that's right, I'm back and I have another review for you. This one was fun because I got to do some photoshopping.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan “it’s totally true” Brown

It’s been a while since my last review, but after a brief hiatus and the tragic death of my old harddrive (and all the data that was on it), I’m back and ready for another shot.

My history with the Da Vinci Code is pretty uninteresting. I noticed and then proceeded to ignore all the hype around it, being more or less completely disinterested in thrillers and aggressively disinterested in anything the media keeps telling me I should be excited about.

I had an acquaintance who was a born-again Christian, and who despised the book the way I despised Eragon. At the slightest excuse, he would go off into a long rant about how utterly worthless he thought it was, how it should never have been popular at all, blah blah blah.

“It’s not because I’m a Christian,” he would always add. It sounded more unconvincing every time he said it.

Regardless of all the completely unnecessary fuss going on over it, I went to see the movie on opening night. I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. In fact, I’m listening to the soundtrack right now.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered to read the book at all, but one day I was browsing through a used bookshop. While buying a copy of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I casually mentioned to the owner that I had an interest in reading bad books.

“Well,” he said, “the really bad stuff is outside.”

Intrigued, I went out there for a look.

“Hah,” I called back a few moments later, “six copies of The Da Vinci Code?”

“Oh, you can have one of those for free,” the shopkeeper said in disgust. “In fact, you can come back tomorrow and take another one. Hell, take all of them.”

I snickered and stuffed a copy into my bag. The rest is history.

Keeping in line with my former policy of ignoring the hype, I’m not going to say much about the “controversial” stuff in this book – partly because everyone already knows about it whether they’ve read it or not, and also because what I’m thinking is screw the controversy – that’s just salesman’s bullshit. What I noticed and what I care about is that this book sucks.

The Plot

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock, here’s the low-down. A ruggedly handsome symbiologist called Robert Langdon teams up with an attractive French cryptologist called Sophie to investigate the murder of her grandfather – who, despite being painfully shot in the stomach, somehow managed to leave a crapload of pointlessly complicated clues behind. Instead of, oh, picking up his mobile phone and just bloody well telling his granddaughter everything. Or maybe just calling an ambulance. But you can’t expect people to act logically in this book – the focus here is on puzzles, puzzles and more puzzles, not sensible plotting or character motivation.

Said puzzles, by the way, frequently serve to make the story that much more irritating. Basically, they fall into two categories: the ones the protagonists solve in ten minutes, while under what ought to be tremendous pressure, and the ones that are so blatantly obvious that I solved them the instant I read them. For instance, the one where they come across some writing that’s apparently in some strange language that neither of them recognise despite their numerous degrees in code-cracking. They sit there scratching their heads like a couple of chimps, completely stumped.

I took one look at the “mysterious language” and went “hey, that’s just English written backwards. What, are you blind? Everyone knows Da Vinci wrote in reverse – he was left-handed!”

Nevertheless, when they finally figured it out it was touted as a great achievement. See what I mean about them being morons?

Long story short, our extremely boring protagonists get mixed up in the dealings of an ancient cult or two, listen to a lot of bitching about how eeeevil modern Christianity is, and eventually discover that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a daughter. And, uh, that’s it, actually. In the movie it’s revealed that Sophie is Christ’s secret descendant, but unless I blinked and missed it the book doesn’t include that revelation.

Now, truth be told I did actually find myself agreeing with some of Brown’s points about how modern religions tend to be too focused on men and how the “sacred feminine” has become tied up with witches and the evils of sex – see, this is one reason why I don’t like religion much. Too much hate dumped on women and sex – two of the best things life has to offer! At least according to most guys I’ve met, anyway. ;)

That aside, I personally don’t give a rat’s hiney whether Christ might have been married or if Mary Magdalene was originally intended to found the new church after his death. In fact, I don’t care whether either of them ever existed at all. I can see how it might piss off religious groups, but while reading the book my reaction to these “controversial” angles was “who cares?”

Characters

Blargh. Who cares about them either? Robert and Sophie have got to be two of the dullest, stupidest and most completely uninteresting protagonists in the history of pulp fiction. Some of the things they do are idiotic to the point of becoming outright surreal – for example, toward the beginning they’re both in the Louvre. The French police are rushing to arrest them and could be there at any minute. So naturally they stand around with their hands on their hips and have a fifteen-minute conversation that could easily have waited until after they’d escaped.

As if that weren’t hilarious enough, they then act surprised when they get busted by a security guard. What did you think was going to happen?

Our heroes are such nincompoops that they’re very lucky the police chasing them are morons as well – and that the plot is contrived in such a way that they always manage to escape despite having no fighting skills or previous experience in running away from the law. The French can’t be too happy about seeing Paris’ finest depicted as such a bunch of incompetent boobs.

Probably my favourite characters are Lee Teabing, the “eccentric” British scholar, and Silas, the self-flagellating albino monk. Both of them are ludicrous caricatures, but entertainingly so, and at least their antics brought some relief from the relentless tepidness of the heroes. Silas, for his part, kept being referred to as “the albino”, which meant that my mental image of him kept shifting into something like this:

The Prose

One reason why I now agree with my friend that this book shouldn’t have been published – at least not in the state it’s in – is that, given that Brown is a thriller writer, it’s something of a handicap that he cannot write suspense to save his life. Cannot. Can. Not. This guy could not write a tense scene if his life depended on it.

Part of the problem is the prose, which is as bland and dull as the people it describes. The plot doesn’t help, since it’s contrived to the point that it’s painfully easy to see where it’s going and the reader is never left in any doubt whatsoever that the protagonists will escape and win through.

But the main problem, in my view, is something that could easily have been fixed by a competent editor – or, in fact, any editor who wasn’t stoned out of his mind.
The problem? Infodumping. And not just any infodumping.

Right in the middle of a scene – frequently at a point in the story where a competent author would be concentrating on ramping up the tension – Brown will suddenly break off and give us a huge chunk of information about the local history or architecture. These infodumps often go on for pages, and have almost nothing to do with the plot point at hand. And by the time they’re done, the reader has completely forgotten where they were up to in the story.

Here’s an example:

Our hero has just been rudely awakened by the French police. They tell him that the curator of the Louvre has been murdered, and they want him to come and see the crime scene with the body still there. Shaken (well, not really – he doesn’t “do” emotion), Langdon accompanies them to the Louvre.

‘Okay,’ we’re thinking, ‘this should be interesting – someone’s been murdered, and we’re about to see the body. What does Langdon think about all this? Is he scared?’

Then, right in the middle of that, the text takes a sharp turn into a 500-word infodump about one of the landmarks Langdon’s car is passing.

Just as we’re recovering from that, we get another infodump – this time about the Louvre. What it looks like, its history, Langdon’s thoughts on it – blah blah blah, on and on and on, none of it referencing or even alluding to the murder or the murder victim.

By the time the first infodump was over, I had literally forgotten what was happening or why I was supposed to care, and when the second one rolled around I got a sense of impending doom that turned out to be a fair warning for what was ahead.

Sure enough, Brown didn’t let up on the infodumps one bit. It happens continuously through the entire book, getting steadily more and more boring, and more irritating. Everything the reader needs to know – and plenty of stuff the reader doesn’t need to know, or even care about – is put into these infodumps, and they have the effect of straining all the interest out of the book until what we’re left has all the excitement – and about the same literary merit – of a pair of old socks.

Overall, The Da Vinci Code fits into a certain, very sad category of books – the kind of books I can’t really make myself feel anything about because they’re bland and uninteresting to the point where I can’t even get annoyed about how badly written they are. I can’t make myself care about that, or about the book’s ridiculous popularity, and writing a review for it felt more like a chore than an opportunity to vent.

But I still liked the movie.

A Special Gift

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:03:24 GMT

Recently, one of my longtime readers created this as a present just for me.

Who other than myself would love to see a t-shirt version?

Touched by Venom

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:57:31 GMT

Hey guys. I'm back and posting another review. This one's a relic of the old forums, so not everyone may have read it yet.

In the meantime, I still need suggestions for more books to pick on. I've run out.

This review was written in stages, before my current structure had been worked out.

First Impressions

Okay, several complaints at this point.

1.Endless made-up words, often awkwardly spelt, few of them necessary. Add nothing and are impossible to keep track of

2.Silly-sounding and confusing character names

3.Infodumping can be annoying, certainly. But when the text of the entire first three or four chapters consists of nothing but infodumps scattered at random, you have a problem. The story all but grinds to a halt – it moves forward, jerks to a stop, moves, stops, moves, stops… imagine a car being driven by some idiot who keeps knocking the handbrake, and you’ll get the idea, if not the same mental whiplash I got

4.So far there’s nothing really resembling a “hook” to draw the reader in; also, the author has a very bad habit of using this old copout: ‘In fact blah blah blah, but I didn’t know that at the time and now I do’. It’s very disorienting

5.I didn’t get very far in before I fell asleep, but the characters were unengaging, the dialogue comical (“hey-o”? Who in the world says “hey-o”?), and the author was already bludgeoning me over the head with how “gritty” and “cruel” her world is. Nice

6.Oh, and beastiality-with-dragons has already come up. I dunno about you, but I sure want to read on now!

Second Impressions

1.Am now more than halfway through the book. Nothing has really happened

2.The narrative often feels like a detailed summary of a story, rather than say, an actual story

3.The language is really starting to get on my tits. What sort of lowly peasant girl has this sort of vocabulary? The story is told in first person, but switches randomly between “uneducated young person” and “where-the-fuck-did-you-learn-that-word scholarly analysis”. The cold, rigid way the story is told has the effect of distancing the reader from what’s going on, and makes emotional involvement next to impossible

4.Okay, why the hell did the author decide to throw in beastiality? Was she high? Was this some sort of attempt at titillating her audience? Was this supposed to be “hot”? If so, mission fucking FAILED

5.The protagonist is one small step away from being a Sue – as it is she’s just plain irritating. In a society where women are the lowest of the low, she somehow contrives to be free-spirited and constantly get away with defying her superiors. Yeah, right, I’m totally buying into that (moron)

6.Is there actually a plot in this book? I can’t find it

7. The main character has suffered a painfully graphic female circumscision... but she's somehow still able to masturbate, and does it a lot (that keeps happening in the sequel, too). Does the author actually know how a female circumcision works? My money is on "no".

Final Impressions

This book is sick and wrong when it isn’t boring, and it also condescends to the reader by repeating information unnecessarily and using an overbearing tone that became quite irritating. Very often, the narrator says “understand, see…” and goes on to blather about some piece of information that’s apparently very important.

Thesaurus abuse and purple prose run rampant through the text. The book is told in the first person by a supposedly uneducated peasant chick, and yet uses words like “curoscating”, “opalesce” and even “gastro-intestinal”. Er, what sort of peasant knows words like that? In fact, to hell with that – what sort of ordinary person of any kind knows words like that, let alone uses them in everyday conversation?

The purple prose becomes quite comical too. The author never uses “black” if she can use “sable”, or “shiny” if she can use “iridescent” – in fact, I’m not sure if she used plain language to describe something more than once in the whole book. There is also an awful lot of description, often of things that aren’t important, or of things we’d rather not have described at all.

More importantly, I think the biggest problem here is that the author, wanting to shock people and/or write something “gritty” and “dramatic”, decided to do it by throwing in all the nasty stuff she could come up with. Unfortunately that idea backfired badly, because the end result is that the reader feels revolted, and resentful toward the author for subjecting the audience to this sort of sick and grossly misguided thinking. It’s true that we all have thoughts and ideas that are sick and wrong, but the difference is that most of us have the good sense to keep it to ourselves. We don’t write it down and publish it in novel form, and we sure as hell don’t expect people to pay us for the privilege of reading it. Gah, compared to this, The Wayfarer Redemption’s poorly-written rape scenes are like something out of Dick and Jane.

And would you believe it gets even worse in the sequel? Because I’ve read it and it does.

Breaking Dawn

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:30:49 GMT

To kick off, here's one of my old favourites - my review of Breaking Dawn. I did a review of Twilight as well, but it perished along with my last harddrive, and seems to have been deleted from the Agony Booth archives as well, so unless someone else saved a copy it's gone forever.
Happily, my Breaking Dawn review is way better.

Anyway, on with the show!

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyers

I have a word that sums up this book rather well, and that word is “meh”.

Yes, I, Jet, famed Plague Rat, have finished the inexplicably notorious tome that completes the set of four bland vampire-themed tales, and here is my report.

I’m afraid to say that I was disappointed.

Judging by the way people talked about this book, you would expect to find something special – something that scaled such heights of awfulness that even the mighty Jet would cringe. But deep down I had doubts about that, and those doubts were confirmed.

Breaking Dawn is not the worst book I’ve ever read – it’d take a lot to top Robert Newcomb. Yes, it’s bad. But it’s bad in a boring, inane way – the kind of badness that’s more likely to bore me than piss me off. In fact, it made so little impact that I nearly didn’t bother to write a review at all because I just couldn’t summon up the interest.

It says a lot about a book’s quality (or lack thereof), when I can’t even be bothered to tear it a new one.

But I’ll do my best.

The Plot

Plot? What plot? Nothing happened in this book. Soap operas have more action and suspense.

OK, I’ll summarise what semblance of a plot I managed to find: irritating, brain-dead protagonist Bella finally gets married to her irritating, personality-less vampire beau Edward. Meanwhile halfway-likeable werewolf Jacob hangs around and mopes because he wanted to get the Sue, damn it!

Bella and Edward have a perfect wedding followed by a perfect honeymoon, followed by a not-so-perfect unexpected pregnancy.

This is the first thing that pissed people off. Why? Because the author had firmly established that vampires are sterile. Ignoring your own canon for the sake of a plot twist – that’s beyond bad form. This is also why more than one person said they thought the author was too lazy to actaully write book four, and instead just stole a slightly better than average effort off fanfiction.net.

The pregnancy advances super-fast, because the baby is a super-freak vampire baby (also because the author didn’t want to drag things out over nine months – instead she just made it feel that way). Super-baby is also super-strong, and when it kicks it first bruises its poor vapid mother, then progresses to breaking her bones from the inside. Yeah, it’s really appealing that way.

Less appealing is the part where Bella’s new vampire family tells her that bubs is killing her, and that she must get an abortion. But NOOO! She can’t kill the precious little rib-breaking bundle of joy she never wanted in the first place! Evil mutant babies have the right to LIIIIVVEEE! It’s a child, not a choice!

And blah blah blah. It was really all too stupid to be offensive, but I had to note it was there – most likely because the author is a Moron – uh, Mormon.

Anyway, Bella refuses to abort, the baby gets bigger and bigger and basically starts ripping her to bits before Edward gives her an impromptu caesarean… with his teeth. Yeah, that bit was really in there.

What made me laugh about all this is that the author famously boasted about how “clean” her books were – no sex or violence or any of that stuff that makes books so ~~interesting~~ harmful. Except she not only has sex in this book (featuring “tasteful” fade-to-blacks every time), but also a hideously and utterly pointlessly gruesome pregnancy/birth, complete with descriptions of breaking bones, Bella vomiting a “fountain of blood”, and, of course, Edward chowing down on afterbirth. Mm, nummy.

Oh, and after the birth Bella gets made into a vampire at last (so now she finally stops whining about how awful it’ll be to hit twenty and become an old fogey).

One thing I haven’t mentioned so far: in this “universe”, werewolves like Jacob are capable of “imprinting” – ie the moment they meet their soulmate, no matter what the circumstances, some kind of instantaneous soul-bonding thing happens and from that moment on the werewolf is attached to that person – with the very clear implication that they’ll become sexually involved at some point.

Plenty of people wanted Jacob to end up with Bella – probably because unlike Edward he has an actual personality, with flaws (dear gods), and because he has a sort of animal vitality to him that makes him feel alive, rather than being an icy-cold, rock-hard man-statue like Edward.

Well, in this book the “Jacob problem” is instantly solved when he finally imprints… on the baby. And it isn’t implied that they’ll be lovers one day – it’s fucking stated. Edward actually calls Jacob “my son” toward the end.

*vomits*

Yeah, way to fuck up your only halfway decent character, Ms Meyers. I bet everyone was thrilled. This is just like Paolini first making Murtagh turn evil, and then giving him almost no screentime in books two and three. Only, like, a billion times worse.

Anyway, the Volturi – the very senior vampire council which hails from Rome and tells all the vampires how to live (SUBTLETY!) – gets word about this supposed “vampire baby”, and comes a-knocking with the intention of killing everybody (woohoo!) because it’s forbidden to make a child into a vampire. If only they knew that the baby was really a super-special sparkly magical Sue, they’d… uh… kill her even more slowly and painfully. Or maybe that part was just me.

So Our Zeroes now have to gather allies in preparation for a terrible vampire battle, and Bella makes secret plans for Jacob to flee with the baby in case everything goes wrong.

After chapters and chapters of fairly effective suspense, the big bad guys finally show up and… they talk it through and then everything’s okay and they can all go home.

Yeah, Stephenie Meyer doesn’t “do” climaxes. Maybe it’s against Moron – uh, Mormon doctrine.

After the clima… uh… after the nothing, Edward and Bella settle down with their perfect baby to live their perfect never-ending lives, the end.

Ms Meyer… I just have to say this, I’m sorry. I can’t help it. If you don’t have a climax – if, in fact, your entire book is totally uneventful – then when the reader gets to the end, they’re not going to feel much of a sense of achievement. Why? I dunno, maybe it’s because they haven’t achieved anything by reading the book. Call me crazy, but most of us like to be, y’know, rewarded for our efforts. Remember Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? By reading that particular book, readers got to find out what happened to all the characters and how the final battle played out. By reading Breaking Dawn, we got to find out that everyone is perfect and wonderful and nothing bad will ever happen ever. Well, we got that and an endless catalogue of expensive cars, dresses and mansions.

WTF-eries

OK, this is where I’m really going to let loose.

I think my main problem with this book wasn’t the horrible pregnancy/birth, the non-climax, or even the thoroughly squicky Jacob/baby ship. My main problem, overall, was how pointless it all was.

After Bella becomes a vampire, she turns out to be even better and stronger and specialler than all the other vampires (unlike them she doesn’t spend a year as a bloodthirsty monster), plus she gets special powers. She also gets her super-special baby, who by the way proves the truth to a certain formula I thought up:

Mary Sue X Gary Stu = Mary Sue squared and raised to the power of 1,000

This baby is not just a Sue. She’s not just an uber-Sue. She is, in fact, something altogether more special: the Messiah of Mary Sues. Yes, the Sues have a Chosen One of their very own, and it is called Renesmee Cullen.

The power of Renesmee compels you! Repent and accept the power of the Lady and Saviour, or be doomed to the fires of normality forever! REPENT! REPENT FOR THE END IS NIGH! I have seen the light, and its name is RENESMEE! HALLELUJAH!

Ahem.

What, you think I’m kidding? You think I’m fucking kidding? Why are you laughing? This is the truth. In fact, I may just start my very own Reformed Baptist Church of Renesmee right now and avoid the rush.

Let’s just make a little catalogue here, just so it’s all totally clear.

Sue Factor #1: Ridiculous Name
Check. Apparently it’s supposed to be a combination of “Renee” and “Esme” – the two grandmothers. I’m probably going to offend a lot of people now, but when I encountered that name my first thought was “that’s so… American”.

(In fact I understand it’s a Mormon thing to combine the names of parents/grandparents).

Sue Factor #2: Super-Speshul Powahz
Let’s see now – Renesmee actually gets her powers before she’s born – namely, she has the power of empathy/telepathy (a very, very common Sue-power). She also has the typical vampire traits of super-speed, super-strength and super-whatever-else-you-care-to-name. She ages super-fast – albeit for no discernable reason – but will stop ageing once she’s physically about 18 and stay that way forever – again, for no reason.

Sue Factor #3: No Flaws or Weaknesses
She’s a baby, but thanks to the super-fast ageing she doesn’t do any of those annoying inconvenient baby things like pooping or crying or sticking everything in her mouth. She doesn’t even wake up in the middle of the night and need feeding. Gosh, it almost makes me want to have a baby! Except I’m pretty sure any child of mine would be an ordinary smelly human. Drat.

(A little aside: a ranter on youtube responding to an insane fan pretty much summed up Renesmee by saying; “if you want a perfect baby like that, buy a fucking doll and coat it in Crystal Meth”).

Sub-Point: A Half-Breed With All the Strengths but None of the Weaknesses
Despite being half-human, Renesmee has no human failings – in fact, she’s stronger than full-blooded vampires, which makes no sense whatsoever. But in all fairness, nothing about her makes any sense, which leads us to the next point:

Sue Factor #4: Immunity To Canon
Let’s face it: according to the previously established rules of the Twilight canon, Renesmee shouldn’t even exist. Vampires. Are. Sterile. They. Cannot. Have. Children. Meyer had even said as much outright in interviews. And yet, here is this child – this complete and utter violation of canon. Changed our mind, did we, Meyer? Either way I can tell you really thought it all through. Well done.

Sue Factor #5: Everyone Wuvs Her
Total number of characters who disliked Renesmee and never had their minds changed at any point: 0.00
Total number of characters who were suspicious at first but were soon Born Again: about 10
Total number of characters who experienced love at first sight: about 37
Total number of characters who loved her so much they fully intend to hang around until she’s old enough to screw: 1 (to be fair, the imprinting thing didn’t feel like “ew paedophilia!” to me – instead it put me more in mind of an arranged marriage. Which is still horrible and wrong, but oh well).

Sue Factor #6: She Makes Everything Better
Renesmee not only gets rid of all Bella’s residual guilt over playing tiddly-winks with Jacob’s heart, but also helps Edward and Jacob to get over their hatred for each other, and unites all the vampires. And she does all of this without even trying – she exists, and it all just kind of… happens. Again, Sue Messiah, people. There’s no other explanation.

Sue Factor #7: So Pretty!
Let’s just say that Renesmee’s perfect teeth, complexion, body, hair and voice get described approximately three times a chapter and leave it at that.

Of course, what makes the Sue Messiah better than the regular old Messiah (aside from no pesky sacrificing-your-life) is that she doesn’t have any commandments or life lessons to worry about. Sues of the world: existing is all you need to do. You don’t have to work for anything, you don’t have to suffer or die or even get a pimple. Be still and quiet within yourself, accept your specialness, and everything you ever wanted will be handed to you on a silver platter.

Take Bella. Once Bella was just like you. She was doubtful, she was cynical! She didn’t believe that the Sueness was real – she didn’t embrace her destiny! She lived an empty and meaningless life, and she didn’t even realise it!

But then she let the Sue Messiah into her heart, and the sun rose in her soul! She accepted the Truth, and all her dreams came true instantly – she didn’t even have to lift a finger! She got everything she ever dreamed of, and some things she didn’t even know she wanted, plus the moon and a silver toothpick. Just for good measure. You never know when you might need a silver toothpick. The power of the Sue Messiah compels you!

Conclusion
And so it goes. In all honesty, I can see exactly why some people love these books. At bottom, they’re not meant to be about struggle or sacrifice or action, or any of that other stuff some books waste their time with. They’re wish fulfilment, pure and simple. After all, what teenage girl hasn’t dreamt of being beautiful, rich and powerful and having an equally beautiful, rich and powerful True Love by your side – forever?

Young people hate the idea that they’ll age, and they hate the idea of dying. Deep down, we all believe we’re immortal and that we’ll keep our looks and strength forever. I mean, it’s bound to happen to someone, right? So why not me or you? I mean, if you’re eighteen – that’s the perfect age to be, right? Your twenties, thirties, forties and fifties can’t possibly have anything to offer – you already know everything, for gods’ sakes.

To be eighteen forever – bliss! Right?

Wrong.

These books don’t work for me because they’re wish fulfilment – but they’re fulfilling the wrong wishes. I don’t want any of the things Bella gets. I don’t want to live forever. I don’t want to look like a supermodel. I don’t want to be super-fast or strong. I don’t want a perfect super-child. I don’t want Edward.

I want to live a mortal life, with all the pain and disappointments and even the ultimate ending it has to offer. I want to keep my own features, which wouldn’t fit on a supermodel but are still beautiful in their own way. I want my Mendo, who’s flawed but who’s funny and warm and generous and sweet, and who’s more than handsome enough for me. And who loves me for who I am, not for some imaginary idea of perfection that Ms Meyer says I should want to be.

I want the real world and I want a real life, warts and all. Compared to all the joys and beauty of the place we live in, the glittering, plastic reality Stephenie Meyer imagined is nothing. Who wants a vapid, brain-dead world like that, where outer beauty and material possessions are all that matter? Where no victory ever takes any real effort? If you never struggle, how can anything you have be meaningful?

No thanks, Bella – I’ll gladly age and die, so that I can live.

The Beginning

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:13:15 GMT

I am the Bubonic Book Rat. I sleep on a bed of shredded pages by night, and by day I roam the streets, infesting bookshops and infecting bad writers with my own special brand of plague.

Bad books are my trade. I sniff them out, I read them, I shriek and curse and gnash my teeth, and finally I shred them. Bad books are my pain, my joy and my purpose. Read my reviews if you will. The only payment I ask for is recommendations. Find bad books. Tell me about them. The Bubonic Book Rat shares your pain. Fantasy is my speciality, but I'm looking to branch out. Surprise me.

I have a fair wad of reviews archived already, so before I start anything new I'm going to post those at decent intervals.