A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Her fist-size nipples spiral hypnotically.

Olivia is a fallen angel of desire, which means she's a vampire. She feeds via "quills" in her mouth, which make cuts so small and sharp that people don't even notice them, but need to be frequently sharpened. This can only be done by grinding her quills against the quills of another angel-vampire. She can also bite people harder with "full fang," draining "several quarts" of blood which doesn't harm them so long as they get a blood transfusion within a couple hours. She and other vampire-angels pay $8000 a pop to hunt people whose blood has been tested for drugs/blood-borne diseases.

Like other vampangels, she has no vagina.

This book has some pleasingly batshit angpire worldbuilding, but unfortunately Olivia is only half the narration. The other half is the story of tormented neuroscientist Dominic, who is plagued by visions of past lives. He is extremely boring. His assistants are named Peter and Paul, in case we missed the religious themes.

I assume Dominick's love causes Olivia to grow a vagina, but I didn't get that far.

Berkley marketed the book as dark fantasy, not paranormal romance, which explains why it goes on for so long before Dominick and Olivia meet - I gave up before they did, but flipping ahead, it looks like it's about a quarter of the way in. For either genre, it's weird.

This is the same Skyler White who co-wrote The Instrumentalists with Steve Brust - a book which I made several determined attempts at, but never got past the first chapter.

In this ambiguously supernatural epistolatory novel, a soldier in an unstated war (but I'm guessing Vietnam) is thrown into solitary for attacking his CO. The circumstances of the attack are peculiar, and the soldier is recategorized as a psych case. About half the novel consists of letters between military psychologists who are treating/investigating him, and the other half is the soldier's autobiography, written in third person on the suggestion of the psychologist.

The soldier, who calls himself George Smith, had a nasty, brutish, and short childhood with an abused sickly mother and an abusive alcoholic father; when he's sent to a juvenile home, it's a huge step up. His sole interest in life is hunting, which he describes in obsessive detail (so warning for non-sadistic animal harm). His account has subtle lacunae, which are picked up on by the psychologist. This was written in 1961, so the psychology is unsurprisingly Freudian.

I'll spoiler-cut just in case, though the blurb gives it away and early events very strongly suggest it. ( Read more... )

Recced by scioscribe as an example of "is it SFF or not?" I'd never heard of it before and hadn't realized Sturgeon has written anything other than SF. It's an odd, intriguing book with an excellent final line.

Content notes: Graphic domestic violence, lots of hunting-related animal harm, non-graphic rape, child death.

Currently $1.99 on Kindle

From the preface:

With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires both is and isn't what the title and cover suggest. It's often very funny, but it's also much, much darker and more serious than I expected. If you can think of a trigger warning, this book probably contains it, and it holds up a mirror to some real-life issues in ways that I found viscerally enraging. (Not at the book, at RL racism, sexism, etc.) It's a fun, funny, compelling, scary, and redemptive book, and the one which conclusively broke my reading block by making me devour it in a pair of gulps. But it's not fluff.

Five White Southern women form a book club devoted to trashy true crime, which does and doesn't prepare them for James Harris, the supernatural serial killer who insinuates himself into their lives. Patricia, the narrator and main character, is the first to be chosen and damaged by him; her fight to save herself and her children widens and pulls in some unexpected allies, as well as James Harris's own and far more powerful allies. And I'm not talking about other vampires...

The women of the club, and some other women who are not in the club but are also part of the fight, are incredibly real characters. They're flawed in ways that aren't cute quirks, but are both personal shortcomings and ways in which they actively participate in the systems of injustice that are baked into American society. White women participate in racism, Black women participate in classism, and everyone moves to protect their own families at the price of others' lives (and sometimes their own). But they're also funny and kind and heroic. Sometimes I wanted to scream at them, and by the end of the book I was cheering for them.

Taken just as a horror novel, it's a very effective and satisfying one. There are scenes which are incredibly scary, scenes which are viscerally horrifying, and plenty of dark comedy. It's hard to find a different take on vampires, but this one partakes of both satisfying old tropes and some extremely creepy new ones.

Vampires are always metaphors. They may represent the kind of raw sexual desire that drives people to throw away everything they value for a single touch, or a breaking with tradition and embrace of a different way of life, or the fear of one's own desires.

James Harris isn't that kind of vampire.

( Spoilers )

I definitely want to read more by Hendrix.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I started idly watching the new TV series The Passage (airing on Fox, but I'm watching on Hulu) based on having owned the book for probably ten years without reading it, and on the still image Hulu was showing, of a young black girl's face, which had an immediately compelling haunting, yearning quality. This was a very good life choice, as I'm enjoying the show a lot and the actress in question, Sanniya Sidney (age twelve) is excellent.

The next plot explanation is true of both book and movie:

The premise is that a secret government project, Project Noah, discovered an immortal vampire and decided to try to use him to create immortality and immunity from disease minus the vampirism. They tested the vampire virus via unethical experiments on Death Row inmates, all of whom just became vampires who are now silently and ominously lurking in clear plastic cages in the basement of a government facility. They appear to be essentially brain-dead, but are actually communicating with people via creepy dreams.

What kicks off the story is that a deadly avian flu virus is spreading through the world and heading to the US. A scientist in charge of Project Noah thinks the only chance of saving humanity is to infect a child with the vampire virus because younger people last longer before becoming vampires and neuroplasticity ~handwave handwave~ so they need a child who won't be missed and who will save the world!!! (This is equally stupid-sounding in both book and TV series; you have to roll with it.)

So they send two federal agents, one dude who's not important and a guy named Brad Wolgast who is divorced and whose only child, a girl, previously died tragically, to kidnap a young girl named Amy who is an orphan and who will definitely not be missed, to inject with the vampire virus and then presumably use her blood to synthesize a non-vampiric serum which will make everyone immortal and resistant to all disease including the avian flu. (Like I said. Roll with it.) Brad and Other Agent kidnap Amy, but Brad and Amy bond, Brad grows a conscience, and they go on the run together.

I liked the TV series enough that I couldn't resist picking up the book. Well...

In the book, Amy is weird and has special powers before she gets injected with the vampire virus. She's basically a Mysterious Creepy Child and is more of a plot device than a heroine, at least as far as I read because I ended up DNF-ing the book. The first fifth or so of the book is very effective as horror, which as a genre can work on pure atmosphere even if you don't like any of the characters. (I did not like most of the characters.)

The TV series is also effective as horror, but it's not primarily horror but more a character-based sf-with-horror-elements a la The Stand, and I like or am at least interested in almost all the characters. Amy is not a Creepy Child, but a smart girl from a rough background, who blends learned wariness with a heartbreaking openheartedness. It's a phenomenal performance and I love her. The TV series keeps the thing from the book where people keep saying how special she is, but since she does not seem to have any inborn special powers, it takes on a different meaning: she is special because she's her own wonderful self, just as a human being. Having a little girl repeatedly told that - especially a little girl of color - is really nice to hear right now.

The other major thing the TV series changed is the race and gender of a number of the characters. At least in the part of the book I read (I DNF'd about a quarter in), all the main characters are either white or race not stated except for an African nun, Lacey. Amy is white. The scientists and the Death Row vampires and vampire candidates are all male. In the TV series, Amy (main character) and the main Death Row vampire candidate (major character) are black. One of the two most important vampire characters (so far) is now a white woman, and one of the two main scientist characters is now a black woman. I have to say that I love these changes and I'm really enjoying the series. Amy and Brad are fucking adorable together (but not in a saccharine way), and the actors playing the vampires and vampire candidates are really compelling.

Three episodes so far. Hopefully it won't get canceled midstream.

Major book spoilers ahead! I'm not sure how spoilery the book really is for the TV series, since it's already diverged significantly, but they're definitely spoilery for the book. ( Read more... )

The Passage: A Novel (Book One of The Passage Trilogy)

The second and equally delightful (thankfully, less gory) novel in a series of urban fantasies about an doctor to supernatural beings.

Greta is in Paris for a very specialized medical conference when she’s kidnapped by an edgelord vampire with poor fashion sense and a lot of unhappy minions, kept in a dank catacomb, and fed on nothing but coffee and chocolate croissants. (The person tasked with feeding her isn’t very imaginative.) If you’ve read the first book, I don’t think it’s spoilery to say that her compassionate and earnest presence makes the sad minions begin to rethink their life choices.

Though I missed Greta’s interactions with her usual crew, that crew is present, just separated from her for most of the book. I still find her romance with Varney the Vampyre completely and utterly inexplicable given the chemistry between her and Ruthven, but Varney is very sweet, there are several likable new characters, and the general atmosphere of people supporting each other, caring for each other, and trying to do the right thing is still present. Also, there are a whole lot of absolutely fucking adorable teeny monsters.

There is some death and violence, but this is overall an extremely cozy, comforting book that gives you hope for the world.

The first book, Strange Practice (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel), is currently on Kindle for $2.99.

Dreadful Company (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel)

Mea culpa: "To yard sale" is real slang meaning "to fall down." However, it comes from skiing/snowboarding, when a violent fall scatters your equipment like junk spread out on a lawn for a yard sale. Very witty and intuitively clear in that context! The context in Ward's book was a guy who was stumbling around his apartment either naked or in pajamas, I forget which. Nothing would have scattered had he keeled over.

Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood, Book 4) is the one with the human cop hero and the sad virgin vampire heroine. I actually liked the heroine, Marissa. The hero, Butch, was a total jackass. You could not have come up with a better example of how "alpha male" traits taken to extremes are actually asshole traits.

Butch had one of the stupidest conflicts I've ever come across in a romance novel. He's human and if his vampire girlfriend drinks his blood, he'll DIE. So she drinks from a vampire friend instead, which is how vampires normally feed. Butch is jealous because feeding has sexual overtones, and demands that she drink from him instead, even though it will KILL HIM. He gets so demanding about it and furious at her drinking from someone other than him that his poor girlfriend, who doesn't want to KILL HIM, starts starving herself!

So he would rather DIE by forcing the woman he supposedly loves to KILL HIM, thus leaving her alone, heartbroken, and horribly guilty, than have her perform a mildly sexual act with a friend that she needs to do TO LIVE.

Admittedly, this is called out as stupid in the book. But it's also portrayed that it's totally natural for Butch, a MANLY MANLY MAN, to prefer death to having his girlfriend have a relationship with another man which she has no choice over and does not regard as sexual (though Butch does.)

There was a nicely effective bit of body horror when Butch is infected with eevil and his come turns black. YIKES.

Bad medicine: Do not cram stuff into people's mouths if they're having a seizure!

Quote chosen by randomly opening book: "I threatened the king's life to ahvenge your honor!"

Lover Awakened (Black Dagger Brotherhood, Book 3) was my favorite. The hero of this one, Zsadist-- just pause to admire that-- is not an asshole. He's a physically and emotionally scarred survivor of kidnapping and repeated rape, who thinks he's too damaged to be anything but a killer and has some serious hang-ups about sex. Within the completely over the top context of the book, I have to say that this was handled pretty realistically and sensitively. And also milked for maximum angst. The heroine, Bella, is sexually assertive and mostly rescues herself. Very nice!

Zsadist's twin brother, Phury-- just pause to admire that-- has possibly the all-time best "how I lost my leg" story. Incidentally, a number of the male vampires are disabled, sometimes with magical compensation but often not. I liked this aspect of the series.

Bad medicine: If you've been injected with a drug, vomiting won't "get it out of your system." It's in your bloodstream, not your stomach.

Quote chosen by randomly opening book: Before Zsadist left, he took one last look at the fish tank. The food was almost gone now, snipped off the surface by little gaping mouths, mouths that came at it from the underside. (I like this, actually. Zsadist is feeling triggered and unsettled and not consciously noticing it, but everything around him has taken on a slightly sinister tinge.)

In Lover Unbound (Black Dagger Brotherhood, Book 5), we learn that Vishous-- just pause to admire that-- is canonically bisexual and has a crush on Butch. Sadly, this is the book about his romance with a woman, Jane, a doctor who gets kidnapped to tend Vishous' wounds. The romance made no sense in this one. Vishous is traumatized by early noncon same-sex encounters so now he can only have sex by dominating women in completely consensual BDSM settings, and he and Jane have sweet banter and then he repeatedly dubcons her but it's OK because she consented, sort of, and then he subs for her in penance for... something. What? It also turns out that he knows how to resurrect the dead, which may have been set up in previous books but seemed out of the blue in this one. Bonus WTF "happy ending."

Bad medicine: You STILL don't stuff things in people's mouths if they have a seizure!

Quote chosen by randomly opening book: Butch's jaw dropped and he pulled a bobble.

Sometimes I worry that I am a jaded reader who has lost the capacity to be boggled by a book. Then something like Lover Revealed comes along, and I realize that no, I can TOTALLY still be boggled. I am sincerely amazed that this series was published by a traditional publisher. Not because it’s terrible. (It is, sort of, but it definitely has its virtues as well.) But because it’s so utterly cracktastic and bizarre.

How do I even describe the whacked-out id-fest that is this book…?

It’s about a brotherhood of ginormously muscular vampires. Like these guys: http://www.kinseyinstitutegallery.com/data/photos/189_1r2002_29_32.jpg. (NOT WORKSAFE.) A lot of scenes in the book would look basically like that if drawn, in fact.

They are manly, manly, manly vampires. Who do man things. They are possessive and alpha. Manly! Muscular! Into brand names! When they bond, their sweat smells like Old Spice. And they wear very, very expensive brand-name clothes. And use manly slang.

Best of all, they have manly, manly names. ACTUAL NAMES: Vishous. Phury. Rhage. Rehvenge. Xhex (the lone manly female vampire. I presume this is pronounced Sex.) Tehrror. Hhurt. Tohrture. Ahgony. Zsadist.

ZSADIST.

They spend their time male-bonding, fucking, angsting, ogling each other’s beautiful yet manly bodies (and faces, and clothes, and hair), and hunting vampire-killers who are wusses who smell like baby powder. You’d think their manly, manly, manliness would be shown to better effect if they had opponents who weren’t ludicrously overmatched.

The worldbuilding consists of the letter h. A truly cool vampire does not avenge a loved one's death - he ahvenges it. They don't have contests like mere mortals - they have cohntehsts. And only a plebe would go into seclusion when she could experience the far more special sehclusion. And so forth. An especially manly man is phearsom.

This book has more homoeroticism than many novels I’ve read in which men were fucking each other on-page. The Brotherhood vampires are constantly touching each other, sprawled naked on a bed with each other, discussing each other's sex loves, popping giant boners around each other, and admiring each other’s swelling muscles.

Except for two of them (who get a canon romance later, good for you, J. R. Ward), they are canonically straight. Straight, I tell you! These are heterosexual romances. In theory. Here is an actual excerpt from Butch’s totally heterosexual POV.

"My flesh," he whispered.

He seemed to hesitate before turning to Butch. Then he pivoted and their eyes met. As candlelight flickered over V’s hard face and got caught in his diamond irises, Butch felt his breath get tight: At that moment, his roommate looked as powerful as a god… and maybe even as beautiful.

Vishous stepped in close and slid his hand from Butch’s shoulder to the back of his neck. “Your flesh,” V breathed. Then he paused, as if asking for something.

Without thinking, Butch tilted his chin up, aware that he was offering himself, aware that he… oh, fuck. He stopped his thoughts, completely weirded out by the vibe that had sprung up from God only knew where.

In slow motion Vishous’s dark head dropped down and there was a silken brush as his goatee moved against Butch’s throat.

With delicious precision, V’s fangs pressed against the vein that ran up from Butch’s heart, then slowly, inexorably, punched through skin. Their chests merged.

Butch closed his eyes and absorbed the feel of it all, the warmth of their bodies so close, the way V’s hair felt soft on his jaw, the slide of a powerful male arm as it slipped around his waist. On their own accord, Butch’s hands left the pegs and came to rest on V’s hips, squeezing that hard flesh, bringing them together from head to foot. A tremor went through one of them. Or maybe… shit, it was more like they both shuddered.

This is part of a climactic initiation scene in which all of the Black Dagger Brotherhood fondle and then punch Butch, then tell him to turn around and face the wall. Honest to God, I had to go back and re-read several paragraphs to figure out what Ward meant to have going on next if it wasn’t a gangbang. It sounded exactly like a slightly euphemistic description of an orgy.

My best guess on how the Black Dagger Brotherhood came to be is that the author took as her inspirations Tom of Finland, gangsta rap videos circa MTV, and the Gucci men’s wear catalogue, then smoked a giant doobie and wrote a vampire novel.

The result is completely rhidiculous, yet strangely rheadable. I read the whole thing in a day and am now halfway through Lover Awakened, the bhook about Zsadist. Send help. And an h-remover.

Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood, Book 4)

Luke knows enough just enough about what his father does as a black ops infiltrator to know which questions not to ask. But when his dad goes missing, Luke realizes that life will always be different for him. Suddenly he must avoid the kidnappers looking to use him as leverage against his father, while at the same time evading the attention of the school's mysterious elite clique of Russian hipsters.

This YA novel is even more fun than the cover copy implies, throwing together werewolves, Indian legends, secret evil laboratories, martial arts, and – yes, really – a mysterious elite clique of Russian hipsters. And more. Much more. Despite its everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, it’s a surprisingly coherent action-adventure with a big helping of comedy.

Given the title and cover, it’s no spoiler to say that Luke is a werewolf. Like Bruchac, the author, he’s also an Abenaki Indian. Between the Indian werewolves and a cool take on vampires, I suspect that Twilight was one of the inspirations for this novel. It’s not a parody, but there are a few winks in that direction. Luke, a bad-ass literature geek with a political bent and a mind crammed full of information, was reminiscent of a Cory Doctorow character, but with the saving grace of being much less smug. I liked him.

The mix of action, new riffs on old myths, and wisecracks would probably appeal a lot to Percy Jackson fans. It appealed a lot to me. There’s some over-explaining and messaginess, and while Meena, the girl Luke crushes on, is a likable character with her own issues, she is structurally just The Girl. And the denuement is a bit rushed. But overall, I liked it a lot. Many of you would probably like it too.

This is one of the debut titles of Tu Publishing, an imprint of Lee and Low and the only mainstream YA imprint I know of in America dedicated to publishing multicultural sf and fantasy. They’re off to a good start.

Wolf Mark

Meet Joseph Bruchac: poet, novelist, storyteller, musician, nuclear physicist, race car driver

Lady Elyssa Amaterasu Yamato Wentworth is a half-Japanese, half-elf, half-uncle thousand-year-old vampire queen who takes on Jacob, a bad-ass ex-vampire hunter, as her bodyguard/boy toy. (Her Japanese and elf heritage is mentioned but doesn’t really come up beyond that, which is probably just as well.)

Like many things sexual, this is completely ridiculous but also pretty hot if you’re into it, and solely ridiculous if you’re not. I like reading about sexually dominant women having creative sex with men who are personally assertive but sexually submissive, which, at least within professionally written erotica, seems to be very much a minority taste. In fact Joey Hill is the only writer I’ve found who writes that. However, I don’t actually read that much erotica, so there may be much more out there that I’m not aware of. (If so, please rec it. I plan to buy oracne's The Duke & the Pirate Queen and/or The Moonlight Mistress
on my next Amazon run - will those suit?)

While the cracktastic A Witch’s Beauty, the one with the male angel with two-colored blood, the tentacled demon mermaid whose trauma was being eaten by fish, and the zombie dinosaur apocalypse, was readable as a novel apart from the sex, this one is pretty much wall-to-wall sex: bondage, telekinetic masturbation, CBT (the kind that isn’t cognitive-behavioral therapy – I was squicked by that and skimmed madly), “you must have sex with my vampire pals’ female servants on top of the dining room table while we all watch,” three-second refractory periods, in a mall fountain, on a sofa, on the forest floor, onna stick, etc.

I wasn’t that into Jacob, though I did like Lyssa – but then I was much more into the mermaid than the angel in the other Hill book I read, so Hill may just be better at female characters. And while I can’t say that the prose would win any prizes, Hill at least did not write here that “desire festered in his balls,” which puts the prose a huge cut above that other book of hers, which did have that line on page three, and which forever prevented me from reading any further.

What can I say? This is porn, porn, and nothing but porn. But if you’re in the mood for porn, and this is the sort of porn you like, you could do a whole lot worse.

The Vampire Queen's Servant (Vampire Queen, Book 1)

I can't in all honesty call this a good book. It is, however, an incredibly entertaining one, infused with the Page-Turn Spell also notable in early Laurell Hamilton and Janet Evanovich. It's also supremely cracktastic and shamelessly wish-fullfilling, though unfortunately some of Singh's wish-fulfillment is my squick. But so it goes.

In a modern world much like ours except that not very nice angels have divided up and rule the world, and angels create vampires, white-haired and gold-skinned part-Moroccan (other parts unknown) Elena is a not-quite-human vampire hunter. When an angel creates a vampire, the vamp gets immortality but must be the angel's slave for a hundred years. If the vamps cut and run, Elena retrieves them.

But then Elena is hired by the alpha bastard to end all alpha bastards, gorgeously sexy archangel Raphael, to capture an archangel-vampire. Singh calls this creature a bloodborn, but I prefer anpire. Raphael threatens Elena, threatens Elena's best friend's infant daughter, mentally overrides her will, and generally is an overpowered asshole. But Elena, who is so tough herself that she scares most men, feels delightfully feminine in the presence of a man who is stronger than her. BAAAAAAAAAAAAARF.

I detested the equation of abuse and coercion with masculinity, and being weaker than men with femininity. I also detested Raphael. My single favorite moment of Elena-Raphael interaction was when she shot him in the wing.

The multiracial cast of supporting characters is fun, and I would have liked to spend more time with them. I also liked the crazily lush worldbuilding and the all-out idtasticness of it all. The angels' wings and everyone's eye colors and hair colors are described in the sort of detail I would have loved when I was tewlve, and kind of still do in certain moods. Angels exude glittering angel dust, which tastes great and gives you an orgasm when you eat it. It also explodes all over when angels orgasm, I kid you not!

ETA: The angel dust comes from the wings. Though it's not clear whether or not it comes exclusively from the wings. Normally I'm not big on cum descriptions (or on the word "cum") but in this one and very special case, I was very disappointed at the lack of one. I also, again very uncharacteristically, was sad at the lack of detailed description og Raphael's genitalia (except for his wings, which seemed to be some sort of secondary sex characteristic.)

Totally ridiculous and has some of the most politically objectionable gender dynamics I've come across in a while, and yet I would happily read more. What can I say? I'm still laughing at the fact that angels make vampires.