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seriousficFaerie Tale by Raymond Feist
F-list, I want to murder this book.
It's just so bad that there I can't just say "da da da." I have to go into the depths of what it does wrong, because it's pioneering new and exciting fields of bad.
To start off with, nothing happens for 200 pages. I'm serious. There's no drama, there's no conflict, there's no suspense. It's just family togetherness and teen nuptials and shit like that. It's like Jon & Kate Plus Three. Now, look at the cover art.
Look at that! There's a winged monkey, there's a naked kid, there's glowing people... it looks exciting, right? I'll tell you what, that shit is all in the last fifty pages.
Hell, just listen to the backcover. "Life was wonderful, full of magic--and about to be altered irrevocably by a Magic more real than any he dared imagine. For with the Magic came the Bad Thing, and the Faerie, and then the Fool... and the resurrection of a primordial war with a forgotten People (does that really need to be capitalized?)--a war that not only the Hastings but the whole human race could lose."
That sounds pretty neat, right? Well, not to Raymond Feist. He spends so much more time with the "life was wonderful, full of magic" than the Bad Thing or the Faerie, and trust me, no war. All the "primordial war" amounts to is the humans and elves shuffle their shoes and go "you know, war... not that great. Let's just go check for news on the Watchmen Ultimate Cut."
Okay, so you're thinking, why is![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seriousfic being such a bitch? Feist is obviously building tension and letting us care about the characters? Well, first off, screw you! And second, no tension. All that happens is that every chapter ends with this tall guy and his dwarf going "soon, soon" and "they won't be able to stop us this time!" That might be ominous the first few times, but Feist goes to that well, like, twenty times. By the end I was like "well, it's been ten pages, guess we're due for this tall guy and his evil monkey to stand around and be menacing." Not. Scary.
So, the plot. The Hastings, father Phil, wife Gloria, daughter Gabbie, teens Sean and Patrick, have moved into a house that's been abandoned for years (da na!). Soon after, they meet noirishly-named hunk o' beef Jack Cole, who romances Gabbie; Phil's old writing teacher Aggie; and Barney, the old Irish drunk, who I guess is the story's token ethnic character. Oh, and there are also these two researchers interested in their house (protip: if paranormal researchers of any stripe are interested in your prospective house, don't move in. You'll just end up going to them for exposition on how screwed you are), Gary and Mark. Good luck telling them apart. See, this is why you should include minorities in your work. Sean and Phil and Rashid are a lot easier to tell apart than Sean and Phil and Bob.
And all these people are exactly alike. There's nothing that sets any of their voices apart. There's one page where Gabbie, the teenage daughter, talks about how the land in California is sarcasian or whatever, and it's all desert even when there are plants, and I'm like "Yes, that is exactly how a teenage girl talks." No reason she can't talk like that, of course, it's just that you could've put that information in any of the characters' mouths and it would've come out the same. It's like Planet of the Mormons. Everyone gets along, there's no character flaws or distinctive patter to the dialogue, nope of these people are interesting. There's a page where Gary (or Mark) is shocked and so he "does something without his customary wry quip" and all I could think was "Hey, book, I'll decide if these quips are wry. PS, you have to make quips for them to be wry."
So, okay, the premise is that all these elven fairy tales are true and they're living in the woods outside the Hastings house, so you'd think there'd be some menacing done. Unless you count the aforementioned standing around and rubbing their hands together, nope! Gabbie meets Wayland Smith and he reshoes her horse while she thinks about how hot he is (seriously, that chapter is pretty much entirely "she's just about to cream her shorts, folks!" Spine-tingling).
Oh, and just to keep with that trend, there's a long chapter where Puck tries to rape Gabbie. Now, this is where the book goes out of its way to piss me off, because on the backcover there's this blurb from the Washington Post about how the book is replete with "more than a little stylish eroticism" and I'm guessing this is what they were talking about, and what the book is drawing attention to by using that blurb, because it kinda wants to have its cake and eat it too. It's a rape, it's a seduction, it's a rape, it's a seduction. Thin, thin ice.
It's very much written in this skeevy "his fingers caressed her sensitive love buds and his tongue darted out to greet her lips... oh, by the way, she's totally not into it" way. Then afterward, she's just "meh, whatever" about the whole thing. Which is a plot point and which could be scary, the notion than an elf has the power to rape you and then even rob you of your horror and outrage at the violation, but it isn't played like that at all. And whenever they refer to the rape again, the elves go "Ah, your daughter invited him with her passion" because she was thinking of her boyfriend (JACK COLE: PRIVATE EYE) at the time. Yes, ladies, thinking about sex means you're asking for it. So don't dress slutty and remember to only think about Jesus.
And it doesn't even go anywhere. The real Puck shows up and goes "no, it was this other fairy trying to frame me," so you think "hey, maybe Gabbie's gonna have a chance to get back at this guy" or something. Nope. Last five pages, they go "by the way, the King of the Unseelie Court (who is already dead) raped Gabbie while looking like Puck to get back at him for something. I'm not even going to get into what." Yeah, thanks for the ten pages of SEXY TIEM rape. That was so vital to the plot.
Then, two hundred plus pages in, Standing Around Guy and his sidekick Standing Around Lad go "the Compact is broken! Let's wreck shit!" And I'm like, FINALLY! Because remember the cover?
The Wild Hunt? Fairies? Elves? That could be pretty scary! We've got a dozen characters, let's put them in some trouble. It's been two hundred pages, if we don't care about them by now, we're never going to. Get it done.
Gary (or Mike), who's been in Europe for a few chapters, shows up and literally goes "ZOMG, YOU GUYS, I WAS KIDNAPPED BY AN ANCIENT CULT WHO PROTECT HUMANITY FROM TEH FAIRIES! SOME OF THEM ARE PLOTTING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD! WE ONLY HAVE ONE NIGHT TO STOP THE FAIRIES FROM DECLARING WAR ON HUMANITY!"
Fuck you, you Grizzly Adams-looking motherfucker! I had to read two hundred pages of family togetherness and bullshit about everyone's writing projects and Little League games and NOW, in the last fifty pages, you suddenly decide to mention the ancient cult? You couldn't, I don't know, put them in earlier? Build up some mystery? Actually show us Gary (or Mike) running afoul of them and getting kidnapped and escaping and his harrowing flight back to America to stop doomsday? And you couldn't even make Gary and/or Mike and their research mysterious or threatening in any way? Hell, there was a literal chest of buried treasure that was CURSED! YOU MADE THAT BORING! Fuck you! It's called build-up, motherfucker, look it up!!! If this guy had written Harry Potter, it would've been three hundred pages of Harry with the Dursleys, and then at the last minute Hagrid would've shown up and gone "HARRY YOU'RE A WIZARD AND YOU NEED TO GO TO A SCHOOL FOR WIZARDS AND OH NO THERE ARE EVIL WIZARDS TRYING TO KILL YOU THANKS FOR STOPPING THE EVIL WIZARDS GOOD NIGHT!"
So pretty much the entire cast steps out (I'm so glad we got to spend all that time hearing about their literary opinions!) for this showdown (and what remains is pretty much all menfolk. Even the twins have a bigger part in the climax than the mom or the daughter) between Standing Around Man: Sentinel of Liberty and the kids. And okay, this is at least interesting. There's peril and the characters actually have a goal they're trying to accomplish (besides vague shit like "get published" or "fall in love") and the big scary fairies are actually, you know, TRYING TO HARM THEM. How novel! In a horror story, scary things are happening! Someone should do a whole book about that. It'd be really easy to sell it, because you could do a cover like this.
But even this part sucks, because it's about half infodump. Feist picks now to go off on this ancient cult that's been maintaining the treaty between men and elves, and their ancient war, and how the elves are really energy beings, and on and on and on. And there's just no excuse for not being able to put this earlier in the story, when it could've caught the reader's interest. If your premise is that there's an ancient cult maintaining the treaty between men and elves and baddies are trying to fuck up the treaty, MAKE THE STORY ABOUT THAT!
So, what is the story about? We get a god-awful amount of information on writer ordinaire Phil Hastings and how he wrote the Star Pirates movies and now he's retiring to Ominous County... wait, Star Pirates trilogy? Big time money? Oh my god, Feist, did you make the hero George Lucas?
Okay, now I'm rooting for the rapist fairies. If anything they do can spare us Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, I'm for it.
Actually, I suppose a better equivalent would be the writers of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, who did the entire trilogy and are pretty well-respected in the industry. Since the books ends with the actually benevolent ancient cult (see how the author cleverly subverts expectations by taking things that sound like they would be interesting and then making them boring?) commissioning a fourth "Star Pirates" movie to get the Hastings family out of their hair, I guess that makes the book a little prophetic. After all, an omnipresent cult is as good an explanation for a fourth POTC movie as anything else.
Just terrible, terrible, terrible writing, and the author has rape fantasies. Avoid.
Lesson learned: Before making your main character an author stand-in, make sure you yourself are interesting.
Shrooms
I didn't remember why I put Shrooms on my Netflix queue and, having watched it, I still don't. It's a slasher movie with no gore or nudity, so two strikes right there. It has an okay premise - an Irish slasher movie with the characters fucked up on shrooms so they actually have an excuse for acting like idjits - but... well, I just said there was no nudity or gore. How interesting can it be?
Lesson learned: If you're going to make a movie with a twist ending, make sure the movie is worthwhile UP UNTIL the twist endings. Also, make sure the twist ending isn't ass-tarded.
Weaveworld by Clive Barker
This book repeats itself three times. I'm serious, it needs more pruning than Donald Trump's hairpiece (funny AND topical!). The villain tries to get control of Weaveworld three times, and each time he's foiled he reinvents himself and comes back for more. And the plot doesn't really advance for all of that. The characters and their relationships stay pretty much the same, right through to the end. This should've either been three books or one PLOT.
Also, if you're going to have a love story, at least have the courtesy to do it well. The hero meets the heroine while he's engaged to another woman and pretty much immediately goes "I love you," which doesn't stop him from mooching off his fiancee for the rest of the book. Hero and heroine settle into this stupid "I love you, but I'm not in love with you" thing for the entire story, which I suppose is what I should expect from a gay man (boo! Who said that?). Then the heroine gets involved with another man and ten pages after he dies, she's kissing the hero and telling him she loves him. By the end, I was kinda rooting for the Scourge to drop-kick these assholes and their Extra-Special Snowflake World Of Super-Awesomeness in its fucking fairy tale face.
Lesson learned: The writing tip isn't "Kill your darlings," it's "Either kill your darlings or write fantasy."
F-list, I want to murder this book.
It's just so bad that there I can't just say "da da da." I have to go into the depths of what it does wrong, because it's pioneering new and exciting fields of bad.
To start off with, nothing happens for 200 pages. I'm serious. There's no drama, there's no conflict, there's no suspense. It's just family togetherness and teen nuptials and shit like that. It's like Jon & Kate Plus Three. Now, look at the cover art.
Look at that! There's a winged monkey, there's a naked kid, there's glowing people... it looks exciting, right? I'll tell you what, that shit is all in the last fifty pages.
Hell, just listen to the backcover. "Life was wonderful, full of magic--and about to be altered irrevocably by a Magic more real than any he dared imagine. For with the Magic came the Bad Thing, and the Faerie, and then the Fool... and the resurrection of a primordial war with a forgotten People (does that really need to be capitalized?)--a war that not only the Hastings but the whole human race could lose."
That sounds pretty neat, right? Well, not to Raymond Feist. He spends so much more time with the "life was wonderful, full of magic" than the Bad Thing or the Faerie, and trust me, no war. All the "primordial war" amounts to is the humans and elves shuffle their shoes and go "you know, war... not that great. Let's just go check for news on the Watchmen Ultimate Cut."
Okay, so you're thinking, why is
seriousfic being such a bitch? Feist is obviously building tension and letting us care about the characters? Well, first off, screw you! And second, no tension. All that happens is that every chapter ends with this tall guy and his dwarf going "soon, soon" and "they won't be able to stop us this time!" That might be ominous the first few times, but Feist goes to that well, like, twenty times. By the end I was like "well, it's been ten pages, guess we're due for this tall guy and his evil monkey to stand around and be menacing." Not. Scary.So, the plot. The Hastings, father Phil, wife Gloria, daughter Gabbie, teens Sean and Patrick, have moved into a house that's been abandoned for years (da na!). Soon after, they meet noirishly-named hunk o' beef Jack Cole, who romances Gabbie; Phil's old writing teacher Aggie; and Barney, the old Irish drunk, who I guess is the story's token ethnic character. Oh, and there are also these two researchers interested in their house (protip: if paranormal researchers of any stripe are interested in your prospective house, don't move in. You'll just end up going to them for exposition on how screwed you are), Gary and Mark. Good luck telling them apart. See, this is why you should include minorities in your work. Sean and Phil and Rashid are a lot easier to tell apart than Sean and Phil and Bob.
And all these people are exactly alike. There's nothing that sets any of their voices apart. There's one page where Gabbie, the teenage daughter, talks about how the land in California is sarcasian or whatever, and it's all desert even when there are plants, and I'm like "Yes, that is exactly how a teenage girl talks." No reason she can't talk like that, of course, it's just that you could've put that information in any of the characters' mouths and it would've come out the same. It's like Planet of the Mormons. Everyone gets along, there's no character flaws or distinctive patter to the dialogue, nope of these people are interesting. There's a page where Gary (or Mark) is shocked and so he "does something without his customary wry quip" and all I could think was "Hey, book, I'll decide if these quips are wry. PS, you have to make quips for them to be wry."
So, okay, the premise is that all these elven fairy tales are true and they're living in the woods outside the Hastings house, so you'd think there'd be some menacing done. Unless you count the aforementioned standing around and rubbing their hands together, nope! Gabbie meets Wayland Smith and he reshoes her horse while she thinks about how hot he is (seriously, that chapter is pretty much entirely "she's just about to cream her shorts, folks!" Spine-tingling).
Oh, and just to keep with that trend, there's a long chapter where Puck tries to rape Gabbie. Now, this is where the book goes out of its way to piss me off, because on the backcover there's this blurb from the Washington Post about how the book is replete with "more than a little stylish eroticism" and I'm guessing this is what they were talking about, and what the book is drawing attention to by using that blurb, because it kinda wants to have its cake and eat it too. It's a rape, it's a seduction, it's a rape, it's a seduction. Thin, thin ice.
It's very much written in this skeevy "his fingers caressed her sensitive love buds and his tongue darted out to greet her lips... oh, by the way, she's totally not into it" way. Then afterward, she's just "meh, whatever" about the whole thing. Which is a plot point and which could be scary, the notion than an elf has the power to rape you and then even rob you of your horror and outrage at the violation, but it isn't played like that at all. And whenever they refer to the rape again, the elves go "Ah, your daughter invited him with her passion" because she was thinking of her boyfriend (JACK COLE: PRIVATE EYE) at the time. Yes, ladies, thinking about sex means you're asking for it. So don't dress slutty and remember to only think about Jesus.
And it doesn't even go anywhere. The real Puck shows up and goes "no, it was this other fairy trying to frame me," so you think "hey, maybe Gabbie's gonna have a chance to get back at this guy" or something. Nope. Last five pages, they go "by the way, the King of the Unseelie Court (who is already dead) raped Gabbie while looking like Puck to get back at him for something. I'm not even going to get into what." Yeah, thanks for the ten pages of SEXY TIEM rape. That was so vital to the plot.
Then, two hundred plus pages in, Standing Around Guy and his sidekick Standing Around Lad go "the Compact is broken! Let's wreck shit!" And I'm like, FINALLY! Because remember the cover?
The Wild Hunt? Fairies? Elves? That could be pretty scary! We've got a dozen characters, let's put them in some trouble. It's been two hundred pages, if we don't care about them by now, we're never going to. Get it done.
Gary (or Mike), who's been in Europe for a few chapters, shows up and literally goes "ZOMG, YOU GUYS, I WAS KIDNAPPED BY AN ANCIENT CULT WHO PROTECT HUMANITY FROM TEH FAIRIES! SOME OF THEM ARE PLOTTING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD! WE ONLY HAVE ONE NIGHT TO STOP THE FAIRIES FROM DECLARING WAR ON HUMANITY!"
Fuck you, you Grizzly Adams-looking motherfucker! I had to read two hundred pages of family togetherness and bullshit about everyone's writing projects and Little League games and NOW, in the last fifty pages, you suddenly decide to mention the ancient cult? You couldn't, I don't know, put them in earlier? Build up some mystery? Actually show us Gary (or Mike) running afoul of them and getting kidnapped and escaping and his harrowing flight back to America to stop doomsday? And you couldn't even make Gary and/or Mike and their research mysterious or threatening in any way? Hell, there was a literal chest of buried treasure that was CURSED! YOU MADE THAT BORING! Fuck you! It's called build-up, motherfucker, look it up!!! If this guy had written Harry Potter, it would've been three hundred pages of Harry with the Dursleys, and then at the last minute Hagrid would've shown up and gone "HARRY YOU'RE A WIZARD AND YOU NEED TO GO TO A SCHOOL FOR WIZARDS AND OH NO THERE ARE EVIL WIZARDS TRYING TO KILL YOU THANKS FOR STOPPING THE EVIL WIZARDS GOOD NIGHT!"
So pretty much the entire cast steps out (I'm so glad we got to spend all that time hearing about their literary opinions!) for this showdown (and what remains is pretty much all menfolk. Even the twins have a bigger part in the climax than the mom or the daughter) between Standing Around Man: Sentinel of Liberty and the kids. And okay, this is at least interesting. There's peril and the characters actually have a goal they're trying to accomplish (besides vague shit like "get published" or "fall in love") and the big scary fairies are actually, you know, TRYING TO HARM THEM. How novel! In a horror story, scary things are happening! Someone should do a whole book about that. It'd be really easy to sell it, because you could do a cover like this.
But even this part sucks, because it's about half infodump. Feist picks now to go off on this ancient cult that's been maintaining the treaty between men and elves, and their ancient war, and how the elves are really energy beings, and on and on and on. And there's just no excuse for not being able to put this earlier in the story, when it could've caught the reader's interest. If your premise is that there's an ancient cult maintaining the treaty between men and elves and baddies are trying to fuck up the treaty, MAKE THE STORY ABOUT THAT!
So, what is the story about? We get a god-awful amount of information on writer ordinaire Phil Hastings and how he wrote the Star Pirates movies and now he's retiring to Ominous County... wait, Star Pirates trilogy? Big time money? Oh my god, Feist, did you make the hero George Lucas?
Okay, now I'm rooting for the rapist fairies. If anything they do can spare us Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, I'm for it.
Actually, I suppose a better equivalent would be the writers of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, who did the entire trilogy and are pretty well-respected in the industry. Since the books ends with the actually benevolent ancient cult (see how the author cleverly subverts expectations by taking things that sound like they would be interesting and then making them boring?) commissioning a fourth "Star Pirates" movie to get the Hastings family out of their hair, I guess that makes the book a little prophetic. After all, an omnipresent cult is as good an explanation for a fourth POTC movie as anything else.
Just terrible, terrible, terrible writing, and the author has rape fantasies. Avoid.
Lesson learned: Before making your main character an author stand-in, make sure you yourself are interesting.
Shrooms
I didn't remember why I put Shrooms on my Netflix queue and, having watched it, I still don't. It's a slasher movie with no gore or nudity, so two strikes right there. It has an okay premise - an Irish slasher movie with the characters fucked up on shrooms so they actually have an excuse for acting like idjits - but... well, I just said there was no nudity or gore. How interesting can it be?
Lesson learned: If you're going to make a movie with a twist ending, make sure the movie is worthwhile UP UNTIL the twist endings. Also, make sure the twist ending isn't ass-tarded.
Weaveworld by Clive Barker
This book repeats itself three times. I'm serious, it needs more pruning than Donald Trump's hairpiece (funny AND topical!). The villain tries to get control of Weaveworld three times, and each time he's foiled he reinvents himself and comes back for more. And the plot doesn't really advance for all of that. The characters and their relationships stay pretty much the same, right through to the end. This should've either been three books or one PLOT.
Also, if you're going to have a love story, at least have the courtesy to do it well. The hero meets the heroine while he's engaged to another woman and pretty much immediately goes "I love you," which doesn't stop him from mooching off his fiancee for the rest of the book. Hero and heroine settle into this stupid "I love you, but I'm not in love with you" thing for the entire story, which I suppose is what I should expect from a gay man (boo! Who said that?). Then the heroine gets involved with another man and ten pages after he dies, she's kissing the hero and telling him she loves him. By the end, I was kinda rooting for the Scourge to drop-kick these assholes and their Extra-Special Snowflake World Of Super-Awesomeness in its fucking fairy tale face.
Lesson learned: The writing tip isn't "Kill your darlings," it's "Either kill your darlings or write fantasy."
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-25 06:00 am (UTC)The_Lurker
Date: 2009-09-25 07:17 am (UTC)I saw shrooms some time ago, i found it to be pretty forgettable. The best part of the movie is the synopsis, hehe. I saw the ending coming a mile away. People who didn't, need to watch more movies, lol.
Clive Barker is much like Stephen King, the older the book, the better.
OT: Chocolate(2008), Thai movie, it's like a AU!Cassandra Cain film. I have a new favorite actress now, lol. And...she...Kick...ASS!!! In her new movie she use drunken-acrobatic-rapping-hiphop-muay-thai! Not joking. LOL.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-25 06:13 pm (UTC)I don't think I am, so I just make the stand-in a secondary or background character, or make it look like me if you were drunk and had bad eyesight and maybe hadn't got too much sleep lately, metaphorically speaking.
>Weaveworld by Clive Barker
I stopped even trying to take that sucker seriously right about the time the book described, in loving detail, about how one of the protagonists started to spew magical fairies and pixie dust out of every orifice.
I'm not going back to check for exactly what they were spewing, because that would require going back to page through a book I threw away years ago.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-25 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-26 09:45 pm (UTC)"10,000 volts of electricity... in my pants!"
no subject
Date: 2009-09-27 03:40 am (UTC)I've seen the book before but didn't pick it up, thank the dark lords. If I ever see it again, I think I'll hiss and flee like a vampire from a blessed cross.
Thanks once again for providing this public service, dear serious cat.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-27 07:49 pm (UTC)"That's what she said!"