Books And Shit
Aug. 3rd, 2012 06:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficSo on my trip to the depths of Ohio, I did some reading. Firstly, the first three books in the Kate Daniels series. They seemed well-written, but for some reason I just couldn't connect with them. Maybe it was a bad reading environment, I don't know. It's kind of the typical urban fantasy set-up: badass but neurotic and "undateable" lady, weird vampires, weird werewolves, ancient evil. Here, the world got Shadowrunned. In the future, magic returns to balance out all the technology that's cropped up, so they switch off. Magic doesn't work when technology works and vice versa. It's a little post-apocalyptic, since one of "technology's" things is the high-tensile steel used to build skyscraper. I think guns don't work either, so lots of crossbows and swords, since they work in both conditions.
Kate Daniels is this lone wolf type who slowly finds herself working for nice people and making friends and having a family, that sorta thing. For some reason, they give you the broad strokes of her backstory throughout the first three books, you can pretty much figure it out, then there's an infodump in the middle of the third book without much of a reason or a twist. Just "Yup, you guessed it." So it might've worked better for me if her origin had just come up in the first book, explaining why she was such a lone wolf, because she doesn't come off that way on her own. She has this guardian she loves, she has a partner, but then apparently her making friends is a big deal, so…
This isn't an Anita Blake thing either. I don't think there's one sex scene in all three books, just some make-outs; it's more of a Moonlighting thing between her and, naturally, the most powerful and ornery hot wolf dude around. Weirdly, the books' lycanthropes have a mating ritual of breaking into the homes of those they're attracted and doing stuff like cooking meals or pulling pranks to express their sexy interest. Naturally, this happens to ladies who aren't lycanthropes, like our heroine, and for a bit it seems like they're subverting the Twilightiness of this (there's a subplot where a character reads romance novels and complains of the forced nookie/manly tears nature of The Pirate Lord's Virgin Mistress). But then they turn around and play it for laughs or "aww, he really does care."
And it's not like this is an accepted thing in the book's world, since the heroine has to have this explained to her. I get that it's the lycanthropes' culture, but you wouldn't see, I don't know, a Muslim man become attracted to a woman from Illnois and replace all her clothes with burqas. That would be a bad romantic gesture. As one character comments, the werewolves are perfectly capable of getting dressed, carrying out a conversation, and eating with utensils, but when they want to behave badly, they just go "Oh, I can't help it, I'm part-animal." So I'd prefer more going in that direction to sexy, sexy home invasion.
I also read The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, which is apparently a remake of the original Frankenstein (yes, I guess books do that now), but in this one ol' Victor meets up with poets! Like Lord Byron. I know what you're thinking; "Lord Byron: Frankenstein Fucker." But no, it's just like a really boring crossover fiction, like a Batman/Superman story where Batman and Superman just talk about how Robin and Superboy are doing instead of punching a ten-story-high Lex Luthor. I guess that works if you're a fan of Batman and Superman, but as you might've guessed—really, if you didn't figure this out when I wrote a story where Megan Fox had sex with a Megan Fox clone, I don't know—I'm not big into poetry.
So, hundred pages in and Victor hasn't even started digging up bodies yet, I called it. Sorry, but I like my Frankenstein stories to have more reanimated dead corpses and less scenes where the lead character goes "Poor people? THERE IS NO GOD!"
Kate Daniels is this lone wolf type who slowly finds herself working for nice people and making friends and having a family, that sorta thing. For some reason, they give you the broad strokes of her backstory throughout the first three books, you can pretty much figure it out, then there's an infodump in the middle of the third book without much of a reason or a twist. Just "Yup, you guessed it." So it might've worked better for me if her origin had just come up in the first book, explaining why she was such a lone wolf, because she doesn't come off that way on her own. She has this guardian she loves, she has a partner, but then apparently her making friends is a big deal, so…
This isn't an Anita Blake thing either. I don't think there's one sex scene in all three books, just some make-outs; it's more of a Moonlighting thing between her and, naturally, the most powerful and ornery hot wolf dude around. Weirdly, the books' lycanthropes have a mating ritual of breaking into the homes of those they're attracted and doing stuff like cooking meals or pulling pranks to express their sexy interest. Naturally, this happens to ladies who aren't lycanthropes, like our heroine, and for a bit it seems like they're subverting the Twilightiness of this (there's a subplot where a character reads romance novels and complains of the forced nookie/manly tears nature of The Pirate Lord's Virgin Mistress). But then they turn around and play it for laughs or "aww, he really does care."
And it's not like this is an accepted thing in the book's world, since the heroine has to have this explained to her. I get that it's the lycanthropes' culture, but you wouldn't see, I don't know, a Muslim man become attracted to a woman from Illnois and replace all her clothes with burqas. That would be a bad romantic gesture. As one character comments, the werewolves are perfectly capable of getting dressed, carrying out a conversation, and eating with utensils, but when they want to behave badly, they just go "Oh, I can't help it, I'm part-animal." So I'd prefer more going in that direction to sexy, sexy home invasion.
I also read The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, which is apparently a remake of the original Frankenstein (yes, I guess books do that now), but in this one ol' Victor meets up with poets! Like Lord Byron. I know what you're thinking; "Lord Byron: Frankenstein Fucker." But no, it's just like a really boring crossover fiction, like a Batman/Superman story where Batman and Superman just talk about how Robin and Superboy are doing instead of punching a ten-story-high Lex Luthor. I guess that works if you're a fan of Batman and Superman, but as you might've guessed—really, if you didn't figure this out when I wrote a story where Megan Fox had sex with a Megan Fox clone, I don't know—I'm not big into poetry.
So, hundred pages in and Victor hasn't even started digging up bodies yet, I called it. Sorry, but I like my Frankenstein stories to have more reanimated dead corpses and less scenes where the lead character goes "Poor people? THERE IS NO GOD!"
