Lord Sin's Loinfire Club

The Loinfire Club reads.... Covert Conception

2010-01-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

Covert Conception, by Delores Fossen

Natalie Sinclair was stunned to discover she'd been drugged -- and impregnated. Even more shocking was the identity of her baby's father: Rick Gravari, her sworn enemy. Now the only way to uncover the truth and reveal the mastermind behind their mysterious one night together was to join forces with the one man who was completely off-limits.

As the peril around them intensified, Natalie realized the dangerous men on their trail were nothing compared to the tender emotions provoked by her baby's father. But could she trust her once formidable foe's determination in his role as hard-nosed defender?

One year is an awfully long time. Enough to read an awfully large number of very bad novels, but the Chronicler had other things to write about. Excuses can take up another post, for the moment, she will again take up the metaphorical pen and tell you of the Loinfire Club's exploits reading this particular book...
Almost Jesus read out the blurbs for the possible books we could read and Pillywiggin mimed out the version for the hard of hearing. Whilst very amusing, this largely visual gag does not translate well to the writeup, so suffice to say it happened.

For various reasons, the conversation derailed to methods to sabotage the Baker's funeral. He has apparently promised his life's fortune to the one who best manages it and even with such meagre incentive, his friends were happy to oblige. The current favourites in terms of plan is to sneak into the funeral home and wrap the deceased in tin foil and rosemary. The Seamstress was then to show up at funeral in a bridal gown with a shotgun, demanding to be married to the deceased.

There are very many books. And there is consequently, much discussion. The news that the blog has come to the attention of Lucinda Betts, author of Moon Shadow and that she even left us a comment.

The Loinfire Club decided upon Irish Moonlight, mostly to inflict pain on the Pillywiggin (it, after all, being her homeland) but the unfortunate volume has apparently disappeared.
The Club was then torn between the Desert King's Pregnant Bride and Covert Conception.

Big L: "I haven't had one with a Desert King in it yet. I feel like I'm missing something."

In the name of Moon Shadow, one of our new members has stuck the label of "Brown Worm" onto one of the bottles. From this he gains the nickname of Ginger Worm and all is well.
Other additions to the Club are the Seamstress, the Frenchman and Boundless Rage (who would have been Impotent Rage but the Pedant is in a forgiving mood.)

Almost Jesus reads (and for some reason, chooses to begin with the author's biography):
Imagine a family tree that includes Texas cowboys, Choctaw and Cherokee Indians, a Louisiana pirate and a Scottish rebel who battled side by side with William Wallace.

The Chronicler: "Then you're thinking of a fictional family tree."

With ancestors like that, it's easy to understand why Texas author and former US Air Force captain Delores Fossen feels as if she's genetically predisposed to writing romances. Along the way to fulfilling her DNA destiny...

Almost Jesus: "Would any of the biologists in the room like to question that?"

...Delores married an air force top gun who just happens to be of Viking descent.

(The Chronicler wonders if this is just a funny way of putting "has an ancestor who came from Scandinavia.")
Pillywiggin explains the concept of standard categories to the uninitiated. The Chronicler attempts to explain the origins of the game on the inimitable Mrs Giggles' romance novel review website (sadly no longer there).

There follows here an anecdote about Almost Jesus' deviant past. Mostly about the time he almost got thrown out of a gay bar.
Almost Jesus reads out the cast of characters, as appearing in the front of the book.

Natalie Sinclair – Someone drugged her and her nemesis, Rick Gravari, so they'd have sex. Now, pregnant with Rick's child, someone wants them both dead and Rick is her only hope. Can they overcome a bitter past and work together tos save their child?

Rick Gravari...

Almost Jesus: "That surname is unusually difficult to pronounce."

Big L: "It was clearly meant to be Ricky Gervais."

The Pillywiggin shudders in horror.

Dr Claude Benjamin – Creator of the Cyrene Project, a plan to produce genetically superior babies.

Ginger Worm: "Does that plot itself count by itself as a Medical Complication?"

Dr Isabella Henderson – She also worked on the Cyrene Project...

Big L: "She's a woman who's not the heroine. We don't care."

...but now vehemently objects to it.

Seamstress: "I assume that to create these babies they have to rape women"

The Baker: "Because if they consent, it taints the DNA."

Almost Jesus: "Because genetically superior people are frequently not attracted to each other. Inconsiderate beings."

Boundless Rage: "If you're working on some sort of genetics project, can't you build some sort of pheromone system into it?"

Troy Jackson – A product of the Cyrene Project, he holds a grudge against Rick and Natalie.

The Balance: "This is not just a genetically modified baby... it's a Cyrene Project genetically modified baby."

Brandon Steven – He has the answers that Rick and Natalie need...

Azrael: "And two first names!"

Almost Jesus expresses his frustration at such first-name abundant people since it throws his name recognition skills.
And then the book begins...

Chapter One.

San Antonio, Texas.

"You're Pregnant, Natalie."

Pillywiggin: "Direct and right to the core."
(Little did she know how incredibly repetitive the book will get after this point.)

Natalie Sinclair blinked, stared at her sister, Kitt and then waited because she was certain that Kitt was about to deliver the punch line of a silly joke....

..."I haven't had sex in over a year," Natalie admitted.

Pillywiggin: "Not a slut!"

Though her sister no doubt already knew that.

Big L: "Due to her many secret security cameras planted throughout the house."

Pulling in her breath, Natalie set her teacup aside, the delicate bone china rattling against the saucer. Some of the Irish blend splashed onto a pair of entwined hand-painted yellow roses.

Pillywiggin cringes: "What is Irish blend? An Irishman has chewed some tealeaves and spit it back out again?"

"Dr. Benjamin did the pregnancy test," Kit continued...

Big L: "What and then gave it to her sister?"

"He called when you were in the meeting with the antique broker and when I pressed him about what was wrong with you, he finally told me...

Almost Jesus: "In flagrant disregard of doctor patient confidentiality."

In fact nothing about Kitt's ultra-solemn expression changed.

Frenchman: "So, sort of like hyper-solemn?"

Azrael: "So solem you can't even see it."

Natalie shook her head. "The test is wrong."

Big L: "This scene has continued for too long."

Kitt did some head-shaking of her own. "The doctor used your blood and urine samples to repeat it. Not once. But twice. And he repeated it again at my request. All three times, the tests were positive. Based on the physical he gave you and those test results, Dr. Benjamin thinks you're about four weeks pregnant."

Pillywiggin: "I don't care. That's a medical complication, I need a drink."

The Pedant: "It's complicated medicine."

"You remember a couple of months ago I hade surveillance cameras installed throughout the house?"

"Of course, I remember. Some items were missing, and we thought someone on the staff might be stealing from us."

The Chronicler notes this piece of clunky exposition. Of course, I remember, sister, which is why I'm going to tell you about the thing that both you and I remember, just to remind anyone who happens to be listening in...

"I didn't have the cameras removed after the problem was resolved... After I finished my conversation with Dr. Benjamin, I went through the surveillance tapes for the past four weeks."

The Loinfire Club bursts out laughing. Especially given Big L's previous joke about Kitt spying on Natalie with surveillance cameras.

The Chronicler: "Why would you do that?"

Big L: "Well, she had too much time on her hands... and is an obsessive stalker."

Almost Jesus: "That must have been one very long meeting with the antique broker if Kitt can have all those tests done and go through four weeks worth of tapes during it."

"...I found something..."

Oh.

Almost Jesus: "You mean you were watching me all this time?!"

That nearly stopped Natalie's heart.

Pillywiggin: "Medical complication."

The Club drinks.
"Explain something," Natalie insisted.

Almost Jesus: "Well, the internal combustion engine..."

Kitt typed a code on the keyboard, and Natalie instantly recognized the video feed that appeared on the screen. Nearly a month earlier.

Almost Jesus: "But not quite a month, since you're only four weeks pregnant."

The night of her surprise twenty-ninth birthday party.

Almost Jesus: "Was she surprised that she was twenty nine?"

Pillywiggin: "Because it's secretly your 40th birthday!"

She'd arrived back in San Antonio from a week-long antique-buying trip in Ireland...

Pillywiggin twitches: "It's a shit place to buy antiques. I'm starting a new category: abuse of my homeland."

The Balance (referring to the book Irish Moonlight, which mysteriously had vanished): "So this was the second secret Irish option."

The doctor had done some lab tests and given her prescription meds... Only instead of bed, she'd discovered that her mother had assembled three dozen or so of her close and not-so-close friends for a surprise birthday celebration.

"Are you saying this is when the so-called pregnancy happened? ... because, trust me, I would have remembered something as monumental as having sex with one of the guests."

Almost Jesus: "Or with a passing tramp."

Seamstress: "She's not a slut because she remembers when she had sex."

...that some of the night was a complete blur. She blamed the big blur on the prescription meds. Of course, the fatigue from the business trip hadn't helped, either... She'd felt like a zombie throughout the entire party.

The Pedant: "Medical complication."

"Even with Kitt fast-forwarding the event..."

Big L: "Kit's already seen the good bits."

Rick Gravari.

Almost Jesus: "It's really difficult to say."

Big L: "Just call him Gervais."

Rick had a way of monopolizing space as well... wearing jeans and a white shirt, he appeared to be his usual self. Aloof. Surly.

The Frenchman: "Who wears jeans and white shirts to parties?"

Azrael: "Someone who's aloof and surly."

Her mother had no doubt invited him...

The Pedant: "I know what, I'll invite some twats to your party!"

...but he definitely fell into the unwanted guest category.

Ginger Worm: "There's a whole category of unwanted guests?"

Almost Jesus: "Over there, yet another unwanted guest."

Natalie dismissed her surly, jeans-wearing nemesis...

Big L: "Her surly, jeans-wearing nemesis may well have to go down as a quote."

As the guests idled by the front door, she managed to locate herself.

Big L: "Holy Crap! I found myself!"

She definitely wasn't in the throes of having wild sex.

The Pedant: "We're glad she's that observant."
"Something went wrong with the surveillance equipment at this point... I'm not sure what. But that's not the only camera we had in operation that night. The lighting isn't very good, but here's some footage taken from the hall outside your bedroom."

Pillywiggin: "And when that failed, we have hired a small boy to watch you."

The Pedant: "This is just a PowerPoint presentation she's pre-made."

The hall was indeed poorly lit. And empty.

Ginger Worm: "Plot twist! You were impregnated by an empty room!"

"There's no camera in your bedroom so this is all we have," Kitt explained.

Pillywiggin: "That's what she says now."

She latched onto her Texas A&M coffee mug...

The Pedant: "There's some kind of crockery porn moment..."

The Chronicler: "She is an antiques dealer..."

The Baker: "She's speculating, it'll be valuable by the time she's dead."

Seamstress: "I thought she was drinking tea a moment ago."

The Pedant: "No, it was the other one who was drinking tea."

...took a long drink of the heavily scented espresso, and that's when Natalie noticed that her sister's hand was trembling.

Big L: "Maybe you should stop drinking espresso."

The Baker: "It gives her extra time to watch the surveillance footage of her sister."

Natalie couldn't see the faces of the couple, and without audio, she couldn't tell who was approaching her bedroom door...

Almost Jesus: "What an oversight."

She had absolutely no recollection of being in the hallway that night though she was certainly aware it'd happened. After all, she had woken up in bed the following morning.

Almost Jesus: "That would be a good indication."

The Balance: "Dammit! I wanted to teleport!"

Still, hadn't she had a feeling that something was wrong?

Almost Jesus: "I remember all of my intimate feelings from four weeks ago."

There follows a debate about whether or not one would notice feeling different in the morning after a sexual encounter. That Natalie doesn't feel different at all results in speculation that perhaps there wasn't sex and, in fact, only a syringe was involved.

During the course of this conversation, it is revealed that Almost Jesus knows too much about the Pedant's sex life.

Natalie moved to the edge of her seat, closer to the monitor. And she studied every inch of the screen...

Pillywiggin: "Windows task bar... windows task bar... bottom of image..."

The person walking beside her had his arm looped around her waist... It was definitely a man.

Almost Jesus: "That would help to explain the pregnancy."

A whole turkey-baster problem is brought up again by the Balance.

When she reached the door, she staggered forward and her arm rammed into the wall.

Pillywiggin: "It's almost stop-motion..."

Sweet heaven, she acted drunk.

Almost Jesus: "Sweet heaven! She's acting drunk in her own birthday party."

But she knew for a fact that she'd consumed no alcohol that night.

The Pedant: "Well, I suppose she was on meds."

Big L: "But surprise party. Thrown by her mother."

Almost Jesus: "If I was shattered and attending a surprise party thrown by my mother which my nemesis gatecrashed... I'd definitely want a drink."

The only thing she'd had to drink was a glass of sparkling fruit juice that someone on the catering staff had gotten for her after she arrived home.

Seamstress: "It sounds like a plot point?"

Almost Jesus: "Sparkling fruit juice. Well known for hiding rohypnol."

Kitt froze the image. Not that Natalie needed a second look to know who he was.

Boundless Rage: "She's clearing been fapping to this if she's got this frame perfect."

The man taking her into her bedroom was the one person on earth she considered her enemy. Rick Gravari.

Almost Jesus: "A note for life. If there is only one person on life you hate, is it really that difficult to tell your mother not to invite him to your birthday party?"

Seamstress: "Well, clearly she's one of these experiments, genetically programmed to fuck this other guy. Part of the Arian supremacy program."
To be continued...

The Great Grand List

2009-09-01T10:51:00.001-07:00

It's been a little while and I've been neglecting this blog (but then the Club hasn't exactly been having dozens of meetings since the last update), but I was reading Let Them Eat and was having a good rummage around my brain as to why romance novels annoyed me so much and I though I'd have it out once and for all, before the individual nit-picking overtook any sensible discussion of why I'm continuously disappointed in the genre:

1) I want it to show the diversity of love.

I want cultural differences. I want to be shown all the different sorts of relationships build across time and space (and all those fantasy lands). I want to see people conducting relationships in a way different from my own.

But instead, it only shows the same Perfect relationship in all times, in all places, in all settings. Instead of showing me cultural and personal variation, the audience is shown that all cultures and all Perfect Couples conduct their relationship more-or-less the same way and the setting is only wallpaper.

2) I want it to revel in imperfect love.

It's what always warms my heart. A relationship in all its little, bittersweet (but mostly sweet) imperfections. It's the little irritations that make it seem real and solid and human.

But instead, it only shows me more-or-less the same flawless relationship, where the Perfect Couple are simply telepathically perfect in bed, flawlessly work together and never, ever disagree trivially. True Love is shown to be completely effortless. For example, the hero, once he's found the heroine, is incapable of finding anyone (male or female) attractive ever again.

3) I want them to be honest.

The rhetoric around romance novels annoys me. The way the novel is discussed, reviewed, presented. It's the way the novel is presented as an examplar of Perfect Love as opposed to simply an instance of love, however flawed but true. It's not even presented as a fantasy, as something that is decidedly undesirable in reality. Kresley Cole's A Hunger Like No Other begins with what is essentially a rape fantasy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having one and writing one, but it would be nice if she and the readers showed some self-awareness when it comes to discussing it. Perhaps I'm very used to the rhetoric of "safe, sane and consentual", but the framing of the relationship as desirable, as "true love" and the hero's actions as justified all repel me.

I am quite capable of saying that I like reading about imperfect, functioning but really-fucked-up relationships. Time Traveller's Wife is probably a prime example in which the narrative itself admits how really rather messed up the whole thing is. Though, to be fair, I'm not going to go read any reviews; It'll probably just annoy me.

4) I want the setting to do something more than just prop up and excuse the audience's desires for the same old configurations and the same old prejudices.

I want it to be well thought-out. I want it to not be built around the author's desire to write about a string of Alpha men in a series. And I really don't want to hear the same old about the Importance of Virginity.

Opinions, perceptions and manifestations of love and desire differ throughout the ages. I want to read about it. Really ties back into point-number-one.

But this feeds into a larger point about how work is gendered and the sheer invisibility of women in fantasy fiction doing anything else other than generically rebelling, being housewives or being "ladies." Though that said, this is slowly, slowly changing.

5) It seems to deny that people can have a complex sexuality.

It seems to deny that people can have quite a different sexuality than their regular selves. It seems to deny that nice, quiet people can be dominant in bed (or vice versa). The Hero's extreme Alpha personality is a sign of how dominant he is in bed. Less alpha men are shown to be less sexually capable and less dominant in the bedroom.

Perhaps I'm just rather too aware of how geeky the kinky community can be (being a regular reader of Mistress Matisse and Twisted Monk), but it irks me that as opposed to showing the complexities of human sexuality and how surprising it can be, romance novels are wont to confirm first impressions, as though we all wore our "bedroom face" on our sleeves. Equally, the paired trope in which the sexual self is seen as the True Self is highly problematic.

The Loinfire Club reads... Tempt Me with Darkness

2008-12-21T06:59:00.000-08:00

Tempt me with Darkness, by Shayla Black

He’s an immortal knight hungering for satisfaction. . . .

As soon as Marrok sees Olivia Gray, he’s sure they met in eons past. He’s felt her soft, gentle curves writhing in pleasure beneath his own powerful body. . . Morganna! For centuries, towering Marrok, once the mightiest of King Arthur’s warriors, has endured a terrible curse the witch cast upon him when he spurned the witch.

She’s a modern woman about to discover ancient magic. . . .

Olivia shares a mystical—and irresistible—connection with brooding Marrok. Soon after the sexy warrior appears in her erotic dreams, he abducts her, demanding she uncurse him. Their intense passion is more powerful—and intimate—than either of them has ever known. Olivia may be the key to unlocking the diary that will break Morganna’s hold on his life. But in the wrong hands, the book also holds the power to destroy magickind. As they search for answers, a ruthless wizard returned from exile is building an army of evil. When he discovers Marrok and Olivia have the diary, only their love—with the help of a powerful group of magical Brethren—can save them.

After the Pillywiggen refreshes our memories with a grand declaiming of the rules of the drinking game and BoneGeek is reading:

PRESENT DAY
ENGLAND
BESIDE THE LUSH BANKS of a pond, a woman beckoned, familiar.
The Chronicler: "A pond is not sexy. Really."
Cathed: "Ponds make me think of ducks and I don't think there's an unsexier animal than a duck."
There follows a discussion about which is the unsexiest animal: ducks, slugs or frogs.

Yet Marrok of Cadbury had never seen her face in his life.
The Loinfire Club: "Cadbury?! "
The Anthropologist: "Did they just looked for something English? It ends in bury, so it must be quaint and English."
(The Chronicler wonders if this woman googles names before using them. Even if Black lives in a cardboard box in Texas surely she knows that naming her hero after the world's largest confectionery manufacturer is a mistake?)

A cityscape towered in the background. None of that held his gaze rapt. Her bare-to-the-skin nakedness...
Cathed: "To the skin? What other kind of nakedness can you have?"
The Anthropologist: "Bare-to-the-cardigan nakedness?"
The Pedant: "Oh, those sexy bare-to-the-ligaments nakedness."

The woman’s sable hair swept over one pale shoulder, curling under the swell of a generous breast topped by a berry nipple
Cathed: "So, we've got the Cadbury guy and a berry nipple... this sounds like a desert."

...and framing a birthmark he knew well.
She no longer possessed the platinum tresses into which he’d once thrust his hands.
Azrael: "It sounds like he's torn out all her hair out accidentally..."

Her new face was delicate—higher cheekbones, pert nose, pillowy mouth...
Azrael poses with a pillow to demonstrate. He flips it around for the "unhappy" face. It's probably funnier if you were there.

Acid hatred mixed with clawing desire. He tried to look away, but his gaze caressed her small waist, her curved hips, the moist flesh between her thighs glistening...
Cathed: "Get in there, gaze!"

Morganna bewitched him more now than she had on their wind-drenched night of shared pleasure an eon ago.
The Chronicler: "Wind does not drench. You need moisture for that."

The strawberry mark low between her breasts brought back memories of pale moonlight surrounding them as he’d succumbed to temptation and tupped her senseless.
The Anthropologist: "Tupped? We'll need a category for Ye Olde Englishe."
There followed a brief description of the etymology of the word "tupped", its relation to goats and if could be used sexily in earnest.

For that mistake, he’d paid dearly.
With the last fifteen centuries.
The Pedant: "Everyone goes to sleep after sex."

Mist swirled around her like the mystical fog of legend, as if caressing her.
Luca: "Fog is legendary, now."
Pillywiggin: "What she means is, mist swirled like mist."
Azrael: "No, what she means is, mist swirled like cheap cinematic mist made of dry ice."

Though she was deadly, Morganna in this new form captivated him. Today, society had clinical terms for his obsession.
The Anthropologist: "He has some sort of medical problem.... I'd like to call it Evil."
Then followed a discussion about M. Scott Peck's proposal to add Evil to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

To yield would only mean further torture. But his body betrayed him, inching closer, his cock swelling painfully. Cursing, he closed his eyes.
The Anthropologist: "They do that a lot in these books. No one has reliable bodies, ever... wait, inching? Like a caterpillar?"
Bonegeek: "I was thinking that too."
Azrael pictured it more like an earthworm, but agreed that the caterpillars move in a more "inching" manner.

Perhaps due to an overdose of House-watching in the household, there occurred here something of a differential on Marrock's condition.
The Anthropologist: "I think he's got some kind of dissociative disorder."

Marrok opened his eyes as a fresh rush of desire slammed him.
The Anthropologist: "Again, like a battering ram? Or a line of invisible American Football players pummelling him repeatedly throughout the conversation?"

Want was a luxury; this woman he needed. The feeling was as new as a baby’s first breath…and as welcome as the plague.
Azrael: "A good bit of juxtaposition again. Neither are things you really want to think about when it comes to sex."

(The Chronicler later wonders if anyone could possibly compare anything – let alone sex – with the utter devastation of the Black Death if they had actually lived through it. After all, this man is fifteen hundred years old. Or maybe he's just completely sociopathic.)

And likely illusory, merely one of Morganna’s tricks.
Cathed: "She's really good at that illusory breath play."

...then she waved her hand. Suddenly, she clutched to her naked breasts the ornate red book he knew meant the difference between his life and death...

The Anthropologist: "Oh no! She's a communist!"

Nay!
Bonegeek: "Nay has a line all to itself."
The Anthropologist: "Like an Ye Olde Version of the Darth Vader thing."
Cathed: "Doth not want!"

Marrok launched himself at her. They fell to the ground in a tangle of breaths, arms, and legs.
Cathed (mishearing): "Entangling breasts, it can happen.

Her plea spiked his fevered lust.
The Anthropologist: "Medical complication."

He ached to sink deep into her.
The Anthropologist: "Medical complication."

But he had to resist this fatal woman.
The Chronicler: "Not sure that one counts."
The Anthropologist: "She has malaria."
Bonegeek: "Or plague. On her breath. That would make her fatal."

He was on fire for her. A heartbeat from explosion.
The Anthropologist: "Like that episode on House."
("A guy takes his heart rate, and the number he comes up with makes him either about to die or bad at math. They wait a bit, and since the guy doesn't die, House concludes that he sucks at math; he writes the patient a prescription for StickyBear Math Town." from Television without Pity)

As she wriggled under him, lightning chased across his skin.
Bonegeek: "The caterpillar metaphors haven't gone away yet..."
Pillywiggin (showing us all her picture): "We have the cock-a-pillar."
Cathed: "But what does it turn into afterwards?"
The Pedant is reminded of something creepy in Pan's Labyrinth.

Later, he’d remember all the reasons he could not.
Cathed: "I'll remember those later."
Pillywiggin: "Maybe he needs a mnemonic."
The Anthropologist: "Oh, yes, yes, she's actually a man.... how could I possibly forget!"
Cathed: "Maybe I should write it on my hand."
Pillywiggin has drawn the Fucker-fly, the next stage of the cock-a-piller.
The Anthropologist: "Is that what people mean when they say butterfly kisses?"

Marrok dropped his hands to her thighs and pried them wider.
The Chronicler: "As though she was resisting... how rape-like."
The Loinfire Club also makes a series of unoiled hinge noises.

“If you tempt me thus, you will take what I give you. All I give you.”
The Anthropologist: "I don't think that's how it works under the British legal system."

From one instant to the next, his clothes melted away and he poised himself at her entrance.
Pillywiggin: "What? His clothes melted?!"
The Pedant: "Well, he shouldn't have worn candyfloss then, should he?"

With a wave of her pale hand, Morganna unlocked the volume. The cover fell open, revealing a hint of its pages, as she faded away.
The Anthropologist: "Is it wrong that the book is described in more flirtatious terms than the woman?"

“Give it to me!”
He shouted at fog. She—and the book—were gone.
Again, she’d used her power against him. Desire sizzled deep but he was, as ever, cursed.
The Anthropologist: "Damn you, Mao!"

“I am the key.” Her soft entreaty swept through the wind. “Find me.”
Marrok dragged himself to his feet, suppressing a primal scream. He must hunt her. That cityscape behind the pond he recognized as London.
The Anthropologist (who is quite familiar with the city): "Oh, is this set in London then?"

Around him, something rattled. Marrok sat up with a startled gasp, his bed rumpled, eyes wide.
The Anthropologist: "Eyes wide... he's been eating flumps."
The Pedant: "He's been chomping down on Santa's North Pole..."

(The Pedant had bought some flump-knock-offs – essentially long thin marshmallows – that were called "Santa's North Poles." The innuendo was, of course, not missed and it became a theme for the rest of the evening. As Cathed was eating one, the Anthropologist remarked that her pupils were dilating, much to our alarm.)

Panting, he scanned his surroundings. Bare walls, carved bed. A sword beside his hand. Glock under his pillow.
Azrael: "A glock?!"
The Anthropologist: "Is that like a flump only more so?"

There is some discussion about whether or not the author means a gun, but then, the first things American gamers (or at least, in White Wolf setting documents) are told about England as a setting is that we have much, much stricter gun control over here.

His cottage, not a mist-draped clearing. No Morganna.
The Chronicler: "That'd be a very expensive cottage in London. That said, he could be a cotter and therefore his dwelling – no matter what it looked like – would be a cottage. But I'm quite sure the back of the book says he's a knight."

The book! Marrok whipped his gaze around. On his bedside table rested the leather-bound tome. The vehicle of his never-ending torment, the key to his freedom, was still here and still locked.
It had been but a dream.
Or perhaps a message? Though it had been centuries, Morganna had once enjoyed reaching from her exile to taunt him in sleep.
The Chronicler is utterly sick of modern portrayals of Morgan le Fay as a slutty evil woman and rants about it loudly. It's not even the evil that gets on her nerves, it's the combination of slutty, evil, beautiful and sex-centric plans. There will, no doubt, be a post itemizing her hatred in greater detail in the future.

Shadow and torment her he would...
Azrael: "Sounds almost Yoda-like."

A sharp rap against the cottage’s front window startled Marrok
Cathed: "Why is our Alpha Male hero who sleeps with swords and guns being startled by loud noises?"
The Anthropologist: "He just had a freaky dream about his cock turning into a caterpillar, cut him some slack."

He hadn’t had a visitor in a decade, and preferred it that way. Guests were both unexpected and unwelcome.
The Anthropologist: "In the middle of London, bloody hell!"
The Chronicler: "What? No door-to-door salesmen? No junk mail? Where does he live?"

As he slid around the corner, his heart raced with the anticipation of impending battle. [...] If someone had come to take the book from him, he would greet them with bloodshed.
Azrael: "Not the shedding of their blood, just bloodshed."
Cathed: "Maybe it's like Love Shack, but better."

Marrok crept forward, crouched for attack. The shadow disappeared.
The Chronicler: "I'm sure he's supposed to be all hardcore, but he only comes across as paranoid right now."

Heaving an annoyed sigh, Marrok yanked the door open to find a nightmare nearly as bad as the one that had awakened him. Golden hair spiked above sleek brows and wicked blue eyes. A glittery Hollywood smile...
The Anthropologist: "I'm still not convinced this man isn't batting for the flump team."

“If today is your day to conduct beheadings, count me out.” Bram flashed the million-dollar smile that had seduced magickind into seeing things his way for four hundred years.
Bonegeek attempts some sort of accent for this voice and there are many humorous attempts that the written medium simply cannot reproduce. We discovered in due course that the motherland of humanity is Pakistan due to it being where all accents drift to in the end. Bonegeek finally settled on a Welsh accent for this character, which gives him rather likable, laid back air which rather endears him to the Loinfire Club. That and Bram is only a letter off from Brad, the name of the Loinfire Club's favourite accountant non-hero.

The Chronicler feels that the date of four hundred years ago may be significant and wonders if Bram was involved the Reformation. The Anthropologist is less optimistic and condemns it as simply a number Black picked out of thin air.

Bram would not go away until he spilled his secret, though Marrok cared little what the wizard had to say. He must find Morganna in her new guise, then force, coerce, or beg her into unlocking that accursed book and setting him free.
Cathed: "So rape, rape again and ask nicely."

Marrok stared at his rumpled chinos.
The Anthropologist: "He wears chinos?!"
Bonegeek: "Sexy sexy old man chinos."

“Did you come all this way to be my mum?”
“If you need one…” Bram shrugged, mischief lurking in his eyes.
There is something about flump being the new euphemism of choice.

“To talk to you,” Bram said through the door. “You know that only something gravely important could bring me to the Creepified Forest.”
The Anthropologist makes a face at the stupidity of the name.
The Chronicler is reminded of the Creeping Brain for no good reason.

“All right, then. I am the only living being who knows of your immortality and still speaks to you.”
The Anthropologist: "Is that meant to be in a Gollum voice? Smeagols wills speaks to you..."

Marrok grunted and reached for his toothbrush. “I am not interested. I must hunt.”
“The local market too civilized for your Dark Ages upbringing?”
Azrael: "I'm going hunting with my toothbrush! I'm bored of hunting with this whole knives and guns thing!"

Though the wizard loved to antagonize him, Marrok knew the darling of magickind would not visit without cause.
Pillywiggin: "Stop using the word magickind! It offends me!"
Bonegeek: "You don't have to say it."
The Anthropologist: "I'm wondering if the darling of magickind is some kind of special title. Maybe elected."
Azrael: "No, more likely it's something that magazines would name every few years."

Vision. Being in the same room with anything or anyone magical was enough to give him hives. Having Bram around was like a permanent case of leprosy.
The Anthropologist: "As opposed to those impermanent cases of leprosy that people get all the time."
Bonegeek: "I was out last night and my finger fell right off. Just a touch of leprosy."
The Chronicler again wonders at the flippant use of these diseases that in the middle ages was really rather serious.

The Chronicler reviews the rest of The Darkest Kiss

2008-12-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

The Darkest Kiss, by Gena Showalter

After the Loinfire Club struggled through the first chapter of The Darkest Kiss, the Chronicler picked it up (always the masochist when it comes to terrible fiction

) and decided to finish it. Here follows a report for those who are curious about how the story about Anarchy and Death live happily ever after...

First of all, The Darkest Kiss is really quite a bad book, but it doesn't suffer from the stereotypical problems of normal romance novels. The heroine is more free of the classic I Am Not A Slut complex than most (with one or two incredibly annoying and notable exceptions, but I'll get to that.) The hero isn't full of rape and ravishment threats, doesn't stalk the heroine, invade her personal space and call it love.... And yet all this doesn't stop it from being really quite an annoying book.

The World Setting

The Chronicler is that most of The Darkest Kiss' readers probably don't care about the metaphysics of its fictional universe and exactly how it all operates. Given that it's the second book in the series, perhaps it should not be expected to lay down the setting with introductory simplicity. And yet it makes no effort to advertise it's Not-the-First-Book status.* That said, the Chronicler really doubts her problems with the setting are answered in the previous book.

The setting is riddled with sweeping statements and loopholes. For example, the origin story is mind-boggling:

Once upon a time, there was Pandora's Box (aka dimOuniak) and in it were lots of demons. These warriors, led by one who felt insulted he didn't get to guard it (?!), opened the box. As punishment, they were made into living prisons for the demons.

Now, this story seems simple. Or at least. Showalter thinks so. But it's not. She's vague as to how much our version applies. Was the pre-box-opening free from Death, Pain, Promiscuity, Lies and all that? Are these simply demons of the concepts as in they are the physical embodiment of them, free from personality and scheming or are they more sophisticated? Were they physical, as in, after release, did the demons personally kill/rape/torture/lie to everyone in their way or did they just possess people and make them do so?

The Chronicler really wants answers because it's actually relevant to the plot. Galen, the Keeper of Hope... wait, Hope is a good thing, right? It was in the original. So why was the demon of it imprisoned in the box along with the other demons? Was the pre-box-opening world also free from hope? And if it's a good thing, should he be allowed to go about and do his work, keeping people's spirits up despite all the death, promiscuity, lies, doubt, defeat (etc) that is happening all over the place?... Sorry, derailed myself there. Galen, who has demon of Hope imprisoned inside him, is running around being the leader of an organisation that busies itself tracking down the imprisoned demons** and killing them all, because the blame the demons for all the shitty things that happen.

The main characters are justified in not knowing what would happen if the imprisoned demons are killed, but they seem phenomenally uncurious about the effects of their death. Baden, Keeper of Distrust, has died and the world doesn't seem to be devoid of distrust, but you can't really fault the hopeful warriors of Galen to keep trying. I'm really okay with them being selfish about their own death versus the world being painless forever, but can they not at least consider the possibilities? What would answer my question is a description about the pre-box-opening world, but Showalter just doesn't want to share.

But then we get to other metaphysical problems. The Greek deities are real. Fair enough. And they differ somewhat from legend, which is again, fair enough. Though it would be better if Showalter actually acknowledges these differences and addressed them, since of all the pantheons the average person would have heard of Greek is quite high on the list. But the immediate question that follows is: Are any other pagan pantheons real? They certainly aren't geographically confined to their original continent, so where is everyone else? They don't have to exist, but it's just really odd because there is a Christian heaven and hell, where some select souls get to go after death (very select, I'll come to that), and yet there are no other gods. Showalter doesn't even feel the need to say, "I know the ancient Greeks believed in an underworld that's different, but that's because they're wrong and were off their tits on mushrooms." Most books employing an existing mythology in its world-building puts in a line or two, the standard: "What a silly superstition you humans have about garlic and vampires. We fear it not."

The Anthropologist suggests perhaps that Showalter simply doesn't realise that other religions have a different vision of heaven and hell. But then she does as she mentions Hades later, but it doesn't seem to feature in any great way.

It's just weird to try to fuse the two.

Lucien, Incarnation of Death

Which really quite neatly brings me to Death Himself. Now, beauty is the eye of the beholder and all that, but it really defeats the point of having an ugly hero if the heroine finds him irresistible. The point of Beauty and the Beast is that Beauty grows to love him despite his appearance and eventually grows to love his appearance as well (the latter part surfaces in modern retellings and I quite like it.) But if she thinks he's walking porn to begin with, then he might as well be walking porn to everyone else.

He scrubbed a hand over his face, the scars so puckered they abraded his palm. Had they scratched Anya?

Anya's over-the-top attraction to Lucien comes across as delusional. His descriptions of himself as horrifically scarred don't add up to her descriptions of him. He wonders if his scars are scratching her but whe

n we're reading from her point of view, Anya hasn't even noticed, which is weird considering how much attention she was paying to him.

Now that I think about it, who is the man on the cover? He has the mismatched eyes of Lucien, but he lacks the horrific scaring. Also, as the Anthropologist notes, MrCoverModel is incapable of ever moving his arms since it would distort his carefully placed shoulder tattoo.

Lucien's insecurities are ridiculous. He obsesses about how Anya is perfect and how he is so scarred all her attraction must be feigned... but what is most annoying is that he possesses the ability to see emotions with his damned SpirtEye. He saw her passion. But after this one use of his magic power, he doesn't really use it again in the book. He doesn't even use it to see if Anya's faking it. Seriously.

In this spiritual realm, Anya’s passion appeared a blazing pink. Real. Not faked, as a part of him had assumed. That pink trail glittered with a dazzle unlike anything he’d ever seen.

Lucien, Keeper of Death

But that's not really the bone I want to pick when it comes to Lucien and his job of soul-ferrying. He insists he hates his job and that he finds the taking of innocents distasteful, but he never really articulates this hatred as anything other than (as Azrael puts it) the hatred one has for an exceptionally dull desk job. If he believed that his own death would stop death forever in the world and if his existence was really that joyless... wouldn't he try to end it? Why doesn't he have some sort of philosophical stance on the necessity of death, if only to justify to himself his existence and not feel like a bastard?

Now he was charged with the responsibility of collecting human souls and escorting them to their final resting place. Even if he opposed the idea. He did not like taking innocents from their families, found no joy in delivering the wicked to their damnation, but he did both without question or hesitation

One isn't really sure how free will and the gods (keepers?) interact. Is he personally responsible for the deaths of his victims or not? He didn't chose to have the demon of death stuck inside him, but then if he believes what he's doing is truly Evil. He mysteriously thinks he is, but he arrives at the scene and sees the mangled bodies of the soon-to-be dead. (The Anthropologist notes a quick comparison thing to Death of the Pratchett's books, who sees his job as a necessity but doesn't see any reason to make it any worse for the people concerned.) Lucien thrusts his arm into the chests of the dying, retrieves their soul, teleports to the gates of either heaven or hell and tosses them in, all rather unceremoniously. I understand he's on a tight schedule, but really, it can't be pleasant. Nor does it seem very Greek since they have ideas about Charon, the ferryman of Hades.

He was still at a loss as the pearled gates opened wide, revealing golden streets and bejeweled, arched lampposts hanging like diamond-studded clouds. White-clothed angels lined the sides, singing a melodious welcome, their feathered white wings gliding gracefully behind them.

I can't get over how Christian heaven and hell are. Pearly gates with golden streets is very specifically Christian. It's straight out of The Book of Revelations, "The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made from a single pearl." There is nothing of this in Greek mythology and it is jarring. But that isn't what is getting to me.

“Lots of people die. Every minute. Every hour. Why don’t you have to escort all of them?”
“Some remain to wander Earth, some are reborn and get the chance to start anew. Some, I think, are escorted by angels.”

That practically makes him redundant. I know that he can't be too tied up with this whole soul-ferrying business since he needs to have time for being with Anya and hanging around with his heterosexual friends, but it really diminishes the character when we find out he doesn't deal with all death, that he's just one soul-collector amongst many.

HE WAS KNOWN AS THE Dark One. Malach ha-Maet. Yama. Azreal. Shadow Walker. Mairya. King of the Dead. He was all of those things and more, for he was a Lord of the Underworld...

The other odd thing is what qualifies as evil enough to land a soul in hell.

The man’s sins suddenly flickered through the demon’s awareness and in turn through Lucien’s. As the man had already proven, he had considered himself above the law, slaying anyone who got in his way—men, women, children—all in the name of a better world.
Bastard.
Maintaining a strong grip on the protesting spirit, he flashed to the entrance of hell. Not Hades—that gloomy underworld was reserved for those who did not deserve either the tortures of hell or the glories of heaven. This man deserved the flames. Though the gates to the fire pit were closed, Lucien could feel the intense heat radiating, could hear the symphony of tormented screams inside, the demonic laughter. The jeers. The stifling scent of sulfur permeated the entire area, enough to make a man gag.

Firstly, as the Anthropologist points out, considering himself above the law isn't really more than what Anya is doing in her daily life. Given how many legal systems Lucien must have lived through, it seems odd that he would attach that much significance to any actual law code.

But more importantly, this man wasn't just working for a better world. He was working for a world that is devoid of pain, suffering, death, war, lies... He is working for paradise on earth. I'm not saying that I feel this means he deserves heaven, I'm just saying that in his paradigm, it's justified and I'm uncomfortable with the idea that this man deserves eternal torment. I'm uncomfortable with the adamance with which the hero thinks this. I'm not saying that I personally believe that the ends justifies the means every time, but there are many things that have been done in the name of the Greater Good and these things do include the American War of Independence (picking an example that most Americans would like to think of as a Good Thing) and the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution.***** Perhaps again it is that Showalter doesn't think that the audience may disagree on this point, that her reader won't read that and feel uncomfortable. It's that the Universe judges it so with Absolute Morality, not simply the hero's personal morality.

Two bodies lay on the floor, a man and a woman. The man, Lucien instantly knew thanks to his demon, had wrongly suspected the woman of cheating on him, had shot her and then turned the gun on himself.
Bastard, he thought, then stilled.

Now, I'm not saying that killing your girlfriend for cheating on you is morally right. But again, I'm uncomfortable with the idea that it deserves eternal torment in hell. Eternal is a very long time, like seriously. And he did kill himself afterwards. I'm not saying that I like him or that he deserves heaven, but eternity in hell?

Furthermore, what did that woman do to deserve heaven. Again, I'm not saying she necessarily doesn't, but what differentiates her so very much from everyone else since this is a setting where only a select few get into heaven.

She [the dead spirt] saw him and gasped. “Naked,” she said, staring at him. “Am I in…heaven?”
Should have dressed first. “Not yet.”

Can you really respect Death who goes to work naked?

Anya, Minor Goddess of Anarchy

Yes, minor.

“You are the minor goddess of Anarchy.”
“There’s nothing minor about me.” Minor meant unimportant, and she was just as important as the other, “higher” beings, damn it.

No, minor means she wasn't widely worshipped, which she wasn't. She doesn't have a cult, let alone a widespread one. She has no temples or shrines dedicated to her. She's minor and none of her quibbling is going to change that. Her petulant, foot-stomping tantrums come across like a six-year-old insisting that they're all grown up, because being a child is unimportant. She doesn't hold power in the divine courts of the Greeks, uninvolved in godly politics. She seems to serve no function in the everyday running of the world. I'm not sure you can get more minor than that.

When she’d first come to earth, she hadn’t known how to control her rebellious nature. Gods had been able to protect themselves from it, humans hadn’t. Besides that, she’d been almost…feral from her years in prison. A simple comment from her—you aren’t going to let your brother talk to you like that, are you?—and bloody feuds erupted between clans. An appearance at court—perhaps laughing at the rulers and their policies—and loyal knights attempted to assassinate their king.

Showalter has no idea what anarchy means. When Showalter describes Anya's deep need for anarchy, she describes pyromania and kleptomania. Anya controls her instincts to anarchy and disobedience by stealing, and whilst that is anarchic on a personal level in that she is disobeying the law that tells her not to steal... kleptomania just isn't anarchy. Neither is doodling moustaches on the original Mona Lisa. And really, it's quite unremarkable and dull.

Eventually she’d learned that if she fed her need for disorder with little things—petty theft, white lies and the occasional street fight—huge disasters could be averted.

What immediately came to mind as something she could be doing is feeding her desire for anarchy by inciting rebellion against tyrannical leaders across the world. She would justify to herself that many of the riots she incites may not succeed, but that freedom is a cause worth dying for. She would tell herself that she has a need to incite rebellion so she should at least do it in a place where she knows there is an unjust dictator. She could work ferrying equipment to guerrilla fighters and pass messages. She probably won't get personally invested in any cause too much, but she'd hang around salons and bitch about dictators, though she wouldn't put much store in political idealism. Would that cut a little close to home for escapism? Perhaps, but it would make her so very much more interesting. That heroine is one I can root for... pit she only exists in my head.

“Once I attended a masked ball and dressed as the devil. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the year was eighteen-nineteen and I created quite a stir, let me tell you. When I asked Baron something-or-other to sell me his soul, he tried to stab me with a butter knife.”

It was great when Showalter finally decided to tell us a little of what Anya was doing for the last few millennia, but why she doesn't talk nostalgically about past rebellions? I disbelieve she wasn't there for the French Revolution, wasn't involved in the English Civil War or the Glorious Revolution, didn't care about the leaderless state of medieval Iceland.****

Showalter's blindspot really cripples Anya's potential as a character. She seems so very petty when compared with what she could be doing. Self absorbed and really... well, what claim has she in being a goddess when she isn't doing anything to affect the world? She's hardly the embodiment of a force if she isn't involved in places where anarchy is at its zenith. Surely not all rulers deserve their thrones? And not all laws are just?

The Goddess of Lawlessness and Sexual Sin

Dysnomia is really obscure a figure, usually coming in lists of personifications. She is named daughter of Eris...

"But abhorred Strife [Eris] bore painful Toil [Ponos] and Forgetfulness [Lethe] and Famine [Limos] and tearful Sorrows [Algea], Fightings [Hysminai] also, Battles [Machai], Murders [Phonoi], Manslaughters [Androctasiai], Quarrels [Neikea], Lying Words [Pseudea], Disputes [Amphillogiai], Lawlessness [Dysnomia] and Ruin [Ate], all of one nature, and Oath [Horkos] who most troubles men upon earth when anyone willfully swears a false oath." (Hesiod, Theogony 226; as quoted on Greek Mythology Link).

Now, in the context of that list, it is quite easy to see that Dysnomia is not associated with promiscuity. She is lawlessness in the sense of chaos and anarchy. She is lawlessness as in the world turned upside down. The opposite of ordered, stratified Greek society. She is by no means an important figure, but the reduction of her to some slutty goddess (which isn't really true in Hesiod, at least) who sleeps her way around Olympus seems a bit of a slap.

Her kiss had been sinful. Delightfully so. But the woman he’d held in his arms had not seemed evil. Sweet, yes. Amusing, absolutely. And, shockingly enough, vulnerable and wonderfully needy. Of him.

The whole novel is firmly set in the moral framework that views sex as sinful (the standard of romance novels) and it's really quite jarring. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Greek pantheon would know that they hardly adhere to our sexual standards. A classicist would be able to describe all the nuances of Greek sexuality, but suffice to say it is hardly identical like our own. Read Thornton's Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, for example. No, we don't know what it was like exactly and there is hardly critical consensus, but they are not exactly like us. If they were, it would be really dull. These are immortal warriors from the dawn of time, can't they at least think a little differently?

Why did he have to look so sexy standing there? The sun was acting like his lover, caressing him, weaving an angelic halo around his dark head. Yes, angelic. He was a fallen angel just then, causing her pulse points to throb and her stomach to quiver.

Even more perplexing is the constant reference to angels. At first the Chronicler simply thought it was metaphorical (which is odd since they don't exist in Greek Mythology) but then references to real angels happened. The reader is never told how they fit into the hierarchy. Presumably with the existence of demons there are also angels, but who are they working for? What purpose do they serve?

Anya the Warrior Princess

Showalter allow Anya to fight competently when it comes to the various combat sequences, but why does she dress her in the literary equivalent of cheesecake? I know she's busy bucking trends and expectations, I know she doesn't really need mobility since she can teleport but...

"Despite what you seem to think, I am a powerful being, and I choose whether or not to endanger myself." [...]
Finally, he looked at her—and immediately regretted it. She wore a white gossamer gown with gold threaded throughout, and was even lovelier than he remembered. With the golden glow of moonlight crowning her and emerald plants framing her, she was an ancient queen straight out of a storybook.
The top layers of her pale hair were piled on her head, the rest tumbling down and begging for his touch.

Firstly, he was there in the ancient times and he hardly has time for storybooks, so maybe she should be "an ancient queen like that one he saw in Sparta" or something.

Secondly, her comment that she is a powerful being is really rather undermined with the gossamer gown. Maybe mortal armour is useless for her and she likes the way it looks but Showalter never justifies Anya's battle wear, especially since she doesn't blast them with her lasers, she actually enters the melee.

The Canonical Characters were Mean to Me

The Darkest Kiss, as the Anthropologist pointed out, is a lot like Knight of Darkness in that the author is writing about a setting she seems to despise. Kenyon dramatically recast the Arthurian setting to conform to her ideas of manliness and relationships and ideal worlds, keeping almost none of the original concepts.*** Sandra Hill did the same to the Viking era and Showalter is doing the same now with Greek mythology. She uses so very little of the classical Greek religion, the big names of the pantheon barely make an appearance. Her use of Christian heaven and hell points to a world setting badly thought out. When gods from classical myth do turn up, it's only be mean to Anya and call her names in goddess-training-school. Showalter just doesn't seem to care about her source material.

Inexplicable Pop Culture References

The Anthropologist wondered about the pop culture references and the tendency for these books to feel dated really quickly. It doesn't make Anya any more connectable. Or likable. Where did she pick up all that slang anyway? Surely hanging around valley girls and chavs is hardly feeding her anarchic desires.

Shortly after, he’d found her a second time and threatened her with the Lords. Now here she and Lucien were, about to go Halo 3 on each other. Score one for Team Cronus.

What does "about to go Halo 3 on each other" even mean? Does it just mean "perpetrate some sort of violence"? Or is the hero going to be permanently stuck in some suit of power armour and aliens will descend from space? It's a shooter game and most of the violence in The Darkest Kiss is even gun violence....

To be continued... on the subject of The Darkest Kiss...
How Not to Write Sexual Tension
Distancing the Reader: Revelations of Backstory
Romance Novel Curses
The Other Keepers

---

* Perhaps it's publishers wishing to appeal to readers who shy away from reading books out of order, but this decision to not imprint a large number on the spine really does impair one's ability to understand the world setting and actually get into the book. MrsGiggles has complained on many an occasion about the false advertising of non-standalone books. And every dedicated Harry Potter reader is well sick of Rowling's insistence on reiterating the plot of the previous books in her first few chapters.... So, a compromise is need. This the Chronicler well understands. But the point is: two pages of things-you-should-know situated just before the beginning of the story really can't be that much effort to produce. Or maybe they feel it'd scare away readers who want to just leap into the romance and feel uncomfortable with needing to acquire prior knowledge.
But that is the crux of the problem: pretending the book can stand alone when it can't.

** Why are they called "Lords of the Underworld" anyway? They don't possess an underworld, which presumably is Hades, but this setting has a curiously Christian afterlife. There's a heaven, complete with pearly gates and a sulphurous hell. What is the Underworld, in that case? And why does being a walking prison make them lords of it?

*** To be fair, every era does this, but the Chronicler is often annoyed when a thing goes from being interesting to boring and nonsensical.

**** Some anarchists hold that medieval Iceland is the closest thing to a realised ideal system in their book. A government where there is only one paid official (the lawspeaker) and regular gatherings to settle issues. Minimalist government, eh?

***** I'm not happy about the things that happened in the Cultural Revolution. It was horrific. Thinking about it makes my uncomfortable. But I'm not going to say I believe that everyone who participated in it was evil with a capital "E" and deserving of hell.

The Anthropologist Reviews: 'A Hunger Like No Other' by Kresley Cole

2008-11-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

Some might say that faithful devotees of the Loinfire Club are connoisseurs of pain. Truly awful writing can cause several different kinds of pain in readers: pain both acute (screaming "GAH!" and flinging the book across the room) and chronic (lying on the floor and groaning as though you've eaten too much bad ham- Chapter 1 of 'The Darkest Kiss' seems to bring out this response in people). Lord Sin's minions expect a certain number of unpleasant symptoms from a new book: in 'A Hunger Like No Other's case, we were stocking up on aspirin in anticipation of a particularly headache-inducing case of Fantasy Eugenics*. However, as it turned out, we didn't especially care about the stupidity of the book's magic system, nor the author's lack of knowledge of realworld geography, nor the irritating attempts to sound 'hip' and 'cutting edge' in a way which will no doubt look hopelessly dated within a few years from now**.

These all paled in comparison to our horrified reaction to Lachlain, the book's hero. Again, the horror came not from the fact that he is a Scottish werewolf billionaire, nor from the fact that he believes the best way to keep a wife happy is to constantly buy her things (one new piece of priceless antique jewelery every day, apparently). It's the fact that he is a persistent liar, a kidnapper, a domestic abuser, and a rapist. I've been pained by the actions of many a stupid hero in the past, but I can categorically state that Lachlain is the first romance novel protagonist who ever made me feel physically ill. By the end of Chapter 3 I was shaking with rage and too sick to my stomach to eat any of the Chronicler's delicious Japanese curry. If Kresley Cole was trying to write the next 'Silence of the Lambs', this would be a compliment. However, as the Chronicler has noted, the book is being marketed as 'romance' and the heroine allegedly ends up blissfully in love with this man, so I can only assume that this wasn't the intended response.

'Rapist' is a word that gets thrown around quite a lot in response to the highly dubious sex scenes in many of the Loinfire Club's books. So, in the interest of clarity, let me state that under British law, Lachlain is not a rapist. Technically speaking, it looks like he's just guilty of somewhere between three and six counts of sexual assault (plus at least one count of abduction with intent to commit a serious sex offence). I'm not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), but looking at the June 2000 British Home Office report:

"we recommend that these offences should be redefined in the following way:

that rape be redefined to include penetration of the mouth, anus or female genitalia by a penis;
a new offence of sexual assault by penetration to deal with all other forms of sexual penetration of the anus and genitalia;
rape and sexual assault by penetration should be seen as equally serious, and both should carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment;
a new offence of sexual assault to replace other nonpenetrative sexual touching now contained in the offence of indecent assault."

Furthermore:

"Both rape and sexual assault by penetration are dependant on lack of consent, as rape is at present, but this concept is so important that we recommend: [that] consent should be defined as ‘free agreement’ [...] the definition of recklessness in sex offences should include the lack of any thought as to consent which can be described as ‘could not care less about consent'.

...The law should include a non-exhaustive list of examples of where consent is not present such as where a person:

submits or is unable to resist because of force or fear of force;
submits because of threats or fear of serious harm or serious detriment of any type to themselves or another person;
was asleep, unconscious, or too affected by alcohol or drugs to give free agreement;
did not understand the purpose of the act, whether because they lacked the capacity to understand, or were deceived as to the purpose of the act;
was mistaken or deceived as to the identity of the person or the nature of the act;
submits or is unable to resist because they are abducted or unlawfully detained;
has agreement given for them by a third party."
(http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/set_summ.pdf?view=Binary)

Amazingly, the last bullet point seems to be the only rule on consent which ISN'T broken by Lachlain at some point (and that's possibly purely because there's never a third party present who COULD have consented on her behalf). Having said this, the Chronicler is of the opinion that Fate is doing its best to consent on Emma's behalf throughout the book, due to the idiotic way that the 'lifemate' mechanism works. More on that later.

Her first sight of him is him charging across a tourist-filled square towards her, hurling tables out of the way as he screams at her. She runs away and thinks she's managed to escape, before "she felt claws sink into her ankle a second before she was dragged to the muddy ground and thrown onto her back" (p.9). He covers her mouth to keep her from screaming. Then when he's had a good look at her, he forcibly pins her down by her wrists and throat and kisses her while she begs him to stop ("N-no. Please. You have the wrong woman. Don't do this! Please!" -p.10). He then forcibly strips her with his claws (bear in mind, they're in a public park), before ordering her to take him to her hotel room (while she does her best to hold her shredded clothing together to cover herself).

He keeps a tight hold on her all the way to the hotel room, "dragging" her along with a "vise-like grip" (p.13). He only relaxes his guard for a moment, when he's dragging her across the road and almost gets hit by a car (he responds by punching the car "claws crumpling the metal like tinfoil, sending it skidding. When it finally stopped, the engine block dropped to the street with a thud. The driver threw open the door, dived for the street, then darted away" -p.12). When they get to the hotel, she notes that the room is ten floors up and completely soundproof, giving her no way to escape.

"He found the bathroom, yanked her inside, then tilted his head at the fixtures. “Clean yourself.”
“P-privacy?” she croaked. Amusement.
“You have none.” He leaned his shoulder against the wall and crossed his muscled arms, as if awaiting a show. “Now, undress for me and let me see what’s mine.”" (p.16)

She manages to lock the bathroom door while he's distracted by the need to steal food from a terrified room service clerk.

""He limped to the door to the bathing chamber and found it locked. He shook his head as he broke the knob easily, then entered a room so thick with steam he could hardly spy her balled up against the opposite wall. He lifted her up by her arms, scowling to find her still wet and dirty.
“You’ve no’ cleaned yourself?”
When she only stared down at the ground, he demanded, “Why?”
She shrugged miserably." (p.19)

He takes off all his clothes and informs her that if she strips voluntarily, then he'll let her contact her family (although even as he says this, he's aware that it's a lie- "in fact, keeping her from her vampire kin would just be the beginning of his revenge." -p.20).

"When he loomed closer, she peeled the wet jacket and blouse away, then the shredded undergarment beneath them, hastily draping a thin arm over her breasts.
“Please. I-I don’t know who you think I am, but—”
“I think”—before she could blink, he’d ripped her skirt clean from her body and tossed it to the ground—“that I should at least know your name before I set to touchin’ you.”She shook harder if possible, her arm tightening over her breasts." (p.21)

Honestly, I don't think there's any way to summarise how revolting the rest of the scene is: I'll just have to quote as selectively as possible:

"“Put your foot there.” He motioned to the narrow bench along the shower’s back wall. And spread her thighs? “Um, I don’t—”He lifted her knee and placed it there himself. When she began to move it, he snapped, “Doona dare. Now, lean your head back against me.”" (p.24)

"His fingers inched lower. “Keep your legs open to me.”
She’d just been about to shove them together again. She’d never been touched there. Or anywhere else, for that matter.She’d never even held a man’s hand.Swallowing nervously, she watched as his hand trailed down to her sex. “B-but you said—”
“That I would no’ fuck you. Trust me, you’ll know when I’m about to.”" (p.25)

"Her eyes had been heavy-lidded with lust, but now they widened in panic again. “Y-you said you wouldn’t.”
“Changed my mind when I felt you wet and needing.”
She did want him—as she was supposed to. He frowned, uncomprehending when she struggled. Even in his weakened state, quelling her fight took little more effort than holding a wildcat. He pressed her against the wall, pinning her there [...] She’d gone tight again. If he tried to fuck her like this, he’d tear her—but he didn’t care." (p.26)

"Need to be inside her. Haze. She would make him wait longer for the mindlessness he craved? Torturing me just as her kindred did. He bellowed with rage, his hands shooting out on each side of her head to crush the marble behind her.Her eyes went stark once more. [...] He wanted her willing. But he’d take what fate had given.
“I’m going tae be inside you tonight. Best relax.” She gazed up at him with her brows drawn as though with despair.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt me. You p-promised.” Did the witch think that promise would be enough to save her? He gripped his cock, dragged her leg up to his hip…
“But you said,” she whispered, devastated that she’d believed him. She hated being lied to, especially since she could never lie back.
“You said….”" (p.27)

"He stilled. With a deep growl, he released her leg and hit the wall again. Her eyes widened when he grabbed her and turned her around. Right when she was about to scratch him, bite him, he pulled her into his arms again, her back against his chest. He shoved her hand to his erection, inhaling sharply at the first touch.
His voice gone guttural, he said, “Stroke me.”
Glad for the reprieve, she tentatively held him, in no way able to fit her palm around him. When she didn’t begin at once, he bucked his hips. She finally ran her hand over him in long strokes, looking away.
“Harder.” She tightened her fingers, face hot with embarrassment." (p.27-8)

"Taking a towel, he dried her completely. He even pinned her still—by hugging an arm around her waist—to run the cloth slowly between her legs. Her eyes grew wider as he continued to inspect her as if she were a prospective purchase. He palmed the curves of her bottom, then brought his hand down hard on each side, making sounds of…approval?He must have noticed her bewildered expression, because he said, “You doona like me learning you?”
“Of course not!”
“I’ll allow you to do the same.” He placed her palm flat on his chest, dragging it down, a challenging look in his eyes.
“I’ll pass,” she squeaked, jerking her hand back.Before she could even cry out, he swooped her up in his arms and carried her to the bed, roughly tossing her there." [...] Enough!

“I—can—dress—myself,” she snapped.He yanked her around to face him, and his tone went deadly.
“Doona displease me, vampire. You canna imagine how many years of rage I’ve got pent up, ready to be tapped.”
She glanced past him, and her jaw slackened when she saw the distinct claw marks that had rent the bedside table.
He’s a madman.She helplessly raised her arms." (p.30)

So it's clear: he doesn't technically "rape" her, as far as British law is concerned (that is, he realises that she's so tight, presumably from panic, that he's likely to tear something if he puts his penis inside her- and, after a certain amount of thought, he decides that he doesn't want to injure her right this minute). So instead he settles for 'only' digitally penetrating her while she begs him to stop, then forcing her to give him a handjob. He gropes her a bit more, despite her clearly stating that she doesn't want him to. Then he throws her to the bed and forces her to dress in nightclothes that he's picked out for her. She makes another escape attempt. Just in case you wondered what kind of person he is, he "enjoyed letting her think she was about to succeed before he dragged her back and tucked her into his side. She went limp, then passed out. He didn’t know if she’d fainted or not. Didn’t particularly care." (p.34)

He then forces her to fall asleep next to him (which she does, because vampires don't seem to have any choice over whether they fall asleep after sunrise- they're effectively in a coma during daylight hours). While she's asleep, he takes the opportunity to steal her credit card and go shopping for designer clothes, "though he continually found his thoughts returning to his new prize" (p.39). There is some difficulty due to the fact that the stolen card belongs to a 'Ms Troy'...

"Initially, there had been some hesitation on the man’s part. He’d asked if “Mr. Troy” could provide any identification whatsoever.
Lachlain had inched forward in his seat, staring him down for long moments, his expression balanced between anger at the question and embarrassment for the man for asking. “No.’’ The answer was casually threatening, succinct, subject-ending.
The man had jumped at the word as he might at an unexpected gun report. Then he’d swallowed and hesitated no more, even at the most bizarre demands." (p.39)

Lachlain's purchases include clothes for himself and for Emma (when dressing her, he specifically chooses very revealing underwear but very conservative overclothes, because he doesn't want other men looking at his property). He also rents them a Mercedes. Presumably he's going on the basis that she was renting a very expensive hotel room; we eventually learn that he's managed to rack up a six-figure credit card bill (see p.346).

When he comes back, she's still unconscious, so he passes the time by going down on her while she's incapable of resisting (which is also explicitly a type of sexual assault under British law- he's penetrating her with his tongue while she is "asleep, unconscious, or too affected by alcohol or drugs to give free agreement". She wakes up at sunset, realises what's going on, and manages to kick him hard enough to get him off her. His response?

"A red haze covered his sight and confused his mind. He roared as he charged her, throwing her to the bed and pinning her down. He freed his trews and gripped himself, about to shove into her, crazed with his rage and lust..." (p.42)

Yes, how dare the stupid bitch reject him like that? No wonder the man is angry!

"Maybe fucking her regularly, taking his pain out on her, was what he was supposed to do. Of course. He felt himself calming at the thought. Yes, he’d been given a vampire solely for his pleasure, for his revenge." (p.43)

As it happens, she manages to narrowly escape being brutally raped, by using her magic powers to scream loud enough to shatter glass and nearly burst his eardrums. This distracts him for just long enough for her to attempt suicide.

Yes, you heard that right. The first encounter with the hero of this ROMANCE NOVEL is so traumatic that the heroine literally wants to kill herself (by jumping off a tenth-floor balcony).

"She whispered, “Why are you doing this to me?”Because I’ve wanted what’s mine. Because I need you and I hate you.
“Come down now,” he ordered. She shook her head slowly.“You canna die from this. From sun, or losing your head, but no’ from a fall.” He made his tone casual, though he was uncertain. They were how many floors up? If she was weak…“And I’ll easily follow you down to bring you back here.” (p.44)

This guy should totally be a suicide counsellor. When it comes to reasons not to kill yourself, "because you'll only survive and be horribly injured and then I can easily hunt you down and rape you" is quite a compelling argument.

"She seemed to wake up, her brows drawing together, her eyes bleak. “I just want to go home,” she said in a small voice.
“You will. I vow you’ll go home.” To your new home. “Just help me get to mine.”
“If I help you, you swear you’ll release me?”
Never. “Aye.”" (p.46)

So, having explicitly lied about eventually letting her go, he manages to convince her to get down from the balcony. The tense neardeath experience over, he decides this is an excellent time to threaten her with rape again:

"If she’d assumed he would give her privacy because he’d learned a lesson, she’d have been wrong. He walked right in and opened the shower stall door. She jumped, startled, fumbling not to drop the conditioner bottle before catching it on the pad of her forefinger.She saw his fists clench and open, and that finger went limp. The bottle thudded.One hit…
The image of the shredded bedside table flashed in her mind, then the memory of the car he’d batted like a crumpled piece of paper. Chunks of marble that hadn’t been pulverized still littered the shower floor. Fool. She’d been a fool to think he wouldn’t hurt her. Of all the things she should fear, she feared pain the most. And now a Lykae [werewolf] clenched his fists in anger. At her.She turned into the corner, giving him her side to try to shield her nudity. And because if he hit, she could sink down and draw her knees to her chest. But with some foreign curse, he stalked off." (p.51)

"She turned into the corner, giving him her side to try to shield her nudity. And because if he hit, she could sink down and draw her knees to her chest." Ask yourself, does that sound more like something that belongs in a romance novel, or in a harrowing account of sexual abuse?

He follows this up by allowing her to make a phonecall to her family (who are sick with worry over the fact that she missed her plane after he kidnapped her. They haven't been able to reach her mobile since it was broken while he was violently assaulting her). Obviously he secretly listens in on the phoneline to make sure she doesn't try to tell them where she's being held.

Emma calls her Aunt Regin (who is the last of some undescribed race of flangebeasts called the Radiant Ones, and hunts down supernatural predators for fun). Regin informs Emma that she's in even bigger trouble than she suspected: not only is she being held prisoner by a violent sex offender, there is also evidence that she's being hunted down by a murderous and hideously-powerful vampire.

And then a very strange thing happens. Emma tells Regin that she is with a man. Regin immediately assumes that Emma, being half-vampire, has persuaded a man to allow her to drink his blood (which she's never done- she feeds only from blood banks).

“If not to drink him, then what would you want with a man? Huh?”
Her voice quavering with anger, Emma said, “What any woman wants! I’m no different from you—”
“You want to, like, sleep with him?”Why did she sound that disbelieving?
“Maybe I do!" (p.59)

"...[Emma] felt a glimmer of hope. She’d been aroused by Lachlain. She’d felt regular lust—not blood lust. And she’d been so close. Even tonight, she’d been to the edge with him. [...] "All right, you want to know? I think he’s…he’s wildly handsome!” With emphasis on wild. “He knows what I am and we’re leaving Paris together.”
“Great Freya, you’re serious. What’s he like?”
“He’s strong. Said he’d protect me.” Great kisser. Intermittently insane. With a broad chest she’d wanted to lick like ice cream.
In a scoffing tone, Regin asked, “Strong enough to take down a vampire?”
“You have no idea.” (p.60)

“When are you leaving Paris?”
“Tonight. Right now, actually.”
“That’s good, at least. Tell me where you’re going.”
“So Annika can come drag me home by my ear?” And fight Lachlain to the death?
“Nope. Tell her I’ll be home week after next at the latest, and that if she tries to find me, I’ll know she doesn’t trust that I am more than capable of taking care of myself—”
Regin snorted, then laughed outright.
“I can take care of myself.” Her tone hurt, she asked, “Why is that funny?”
Shrieking laughter.
“Piss off, Regin! You know what? I’ll send you a postcard!” She slammed the phone down, then snatched up her boots. Stomping into the first one, she muttered angrily, “I will so go.” Another boot shoved on. “And I won’t be catching any Stockholm syndrome." (p.61)

In this context, references to Stockholm Syndrome seem less like a lighthearted quip and more like an entirely accurate psychiatric diagnosis. It's probably less than an hour since she woke up and found him assaulting her in her sleep. Since she had to bodily fight him off from RAPING her. Since she threatened suicide because that was her only chance of escape. Now she has a chance to call for help. OK, there's a good chance he's listening in, and he's clearly psychotic; so even if she tries to come up with some kind of codeword for "I've been kidnapped", he might work it out and be so angry that he rapes and/or murders her. Given his previous behaviour, that seems entirely possible. But just a short while ago she concluded that remaining his captive was literally a fate worse than death. What's changed since then? His behaviour? He broke into her bathroom again and then sulked when her only response was to desperately huddle in the corner, but I suppose that this might count as gentlemanly, relative to him forcing himself on her in the shower.

Just to drive the point home- remember that whole weird "it's not consent if the victim submits because of threats or fear of serious harm" thing that the British Home Office has got going on?

"I'll take you here on the grass on your hands and knees, till well after the sun rises." (p.12. Reader, remember that he knows full well that she's a vampire, and that if she's out in direct sunlight for more than a few seconds, she'll physically catch fire).
Kiss me back, witch, while I decide if I should spare your life. Kiss me like you want to live.
She did [kiss him]. Not because she wanted to live overmuch, but because she thought he would make sure her death was slow and torturing." (p.15)

"Looking at the door like that? I’ll catch you before you make it from this room."
(p.20)

"I doona have to grant you anything! I could just take you in here and then in the bed.” (p.21)

"You canna escape me. You only provoke my anger.” [...]
"I-I don’t want to anger you,” she said with a shaky breath. “I just want to go-” “Do you know how many vampires I’ve killed?” he murmured, either ignoring or not hearing her words."
“No,” she whispered. She wondered if he truly saw her.
“I’ve killed thousands. I hunted them for sport, stalking their lairs.” He ran the back of his dark claw across her neck. “And with one swipe of my claws I severed their heads—before they even woke.” His lips brushed over her neck where he’d trailed his claw, making her shudder. “I could kill you as easily as taking a breath.”
[...]
“Are you going to k-kill me?”He smoothed a strand of hair from her lip.
“I have no’ decided. I’ve never hesitated a second before you.” He was shaking from holding his position above her. “When I wake from this haze—when this madness clears, if I still believe you are what you are…who knows?”
[...]
“You would hurt me that way? [referring to rape]”
“Without a second thought.” His lips curled. His gaze seemed intent on her face, but his eyes were still vacant.
“And that’s just the beginning of the things I’ll do to you, vampire.”(p.33)

---

*Fantasy Eugenics is our current placeholder name for the fiction subgenre in which authors appear to be trying to deliberately cross-breed idiotic fantasy species with badly-defined superpowers, thus giving rise to generations of hideous and over-powered offspring. In AHLNO, for example, the heroine has one vampire parent and one valkyrie parent. The vampire side gives her the ability to teleport and mindread people by drinking their blood. The valkyrie side means that whenever she is feeling a strong sensation, her eyes go silver and lightning begins striking the surrounding area. The novel speculates (on p.264) that this must make it exceptionally difficult for valkyries to masturbate discreetly. She also has pointy ears: the book doesn't mention these as either a vampire OR a valkyrie trait, so perhaps they're just some kind of minor unrelated birth defect. In addition, she acquires the werewolf template as the result of drinking werewolf blood. This presumably means that the eventual offspring of Emma and Lachlain will be part-vampire, part-valkyrie, part-human, part-wolf-spirit, part-biscuit.

**Examples: loud and pointed references to leetspeak, iPods, Buffy and Crazy Frog ringtones.

The Loinfire Club reads... A Hunger Like No Other

2008-11-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

A Hunger Like No Other, by Kresley Cole

The Chronicler remembers all the heated debate back on "Dear Author" over a romance trilogy that ended with vampire hero's death at the hands of the heroine. A romance novel is defined by its happy ending and anything else would result in the readers feeling cheated. Jane wrote: "I kept thinking as Candace Steele engaged in various relationships with men other than Ash that - huh, this doesn’t sound like a romance but I will hang on. After all, the spine of the book says romance. Ballantine says this is a romance. It must be a romance right? I can live through the multiple partners and the separation so long as the hero and heroine end up together."

Well, let's put it this way:

When reading through A Hunger Like No Other, the Chronicler wondered about whether or not it was a romance novel. After all, it was sold as a romance. The quote on the front cover called it one. It even won a RITA, and those are really prestigious, the veritable Oscars of the romance novel world. The spine and the blurb certainly weren't calling the book anything else... Azrael came out and said it and I think he's right: "This book isn't a romance novel. It's just about rape. Seriously. It's crossed the line."

The Chronicler has no problem with people wanting to write about their rape fantasies (or any other, for that matter) as long as they is plenty of warning on the tin and preferably heavily flanked with caveats about how rape really isn't okay in the real world. More importantly, don't try to sell me that fantasy as a romance novel. I don't just feel cheated, I feel concerned about how no one else seems to have noticed this gaping flaw and allowed the book to win a RITA. I wonder if we were even reading the same book.

The Restitution was quite repulsive enough with its heroine waltzing off into her happily ever after with her rapist who never really apologises. It was all part of God's plan that she suffer through her rape to save that man's black, black soul and wasn't it worth it in the end? He could have raped her hundreds of times when he was holding her captive and he only raped her one, wasn't that nice of him?

But really, this pales in comparison. If only because The Restitution actually acknowledges that rape is quite a traumatic thing for a woman.

Now, admittedly, the Loinfire Club throws around the word "rape", quite a bit, and for that we know we're bad people. Often the situation described is more in the realms of dubious consent and sexual harassment, but Kresley Cole's A Hunger Like No Other really defies all expectations and previous experiences. This isn't a forced seduction or a punishing kiss...

At the point where we put down the novel, several chapters into the book, the werewolf hero has broken free of his fiery prison under Paris, forced himself onto the heroine. He rips her blouse off in the middle of Paris. He then forces her to show him the way to her place and asks her to clean herself. When she refuses, he strips her naked, gropes her in the shower, fingers her and, deciding against ripping her open with his massive cock, relents and asks her to use her hands instead. He toys with her throughout the night, allowing her to think she's managing to escape but catching her the last minute with superhuman strength. He wakes her up by going down on her and then forces her to call her aunts and tell them she'll be away for a while. He listens in, worried that she might tell them to descend with their supernatural powers, but the good little heroine doesn't and they set off to Scotland.

Now, all this happens without werewolf hero asking for consent of any form or at least informing Emma that she's his soulmate and that fate has willed it they be together forever and ever. Emma alternates between being confused, aroused and scared. I am well aware that Mr-Rapist-hero has been imprisoned for a hundred and fifty years in a fiery hell and, presumably, chaste for every minute of it. I am also aware that he hates vampires and would be killing Emma if she didn't smell of true love... but none of this really seems to justify his actions even a little bit. The only way you could possibly believe frustration justifies rape is if you believe male lust is this overpowering, uncontrollable drive that strips they of rational thought, morality and human empathy. And I don't believe that. Seriously.

I don't care that he's enraged about her being a vampire and that he's been tortured by vampires for centuries. That doesn't justify rape. That especially doesn't justify him thinking to himself that Fate is chaining Emma to him forevermore with the whole soulmate business so that he can take out his rage over being tortured on her. I don't care that he's attractive or that she's a bit aroused -attractiveness isn't a free pass and arousal is certainly not consent. I don't care that they're predestined mates, since funnily enough, rape can happen within marriages. I don't care that he doesn't quite bring himself to penetrate her vaginally; it's hardly any mercy on his part. I don't care that Socrates thinks there's a beast in the best of us. It's really, really no excuse. I don't care that he's surprisingly gentle, it's still no substitute for consent.

That we aren't give any cultural touchstone of any sort ("Werewolf chicks dig rape", "where I come from, this is how you say hi") makes it even more difficult to see any reason to justify the rapist-hero's behaviour. It's not that cultural upbringing justifies this behaviour, but that the author seems to not feel it necessary, that the reader would simply sympathise with the lying, manipulative sex offender.

At no point in the first few chapters is the heroine in control of her situation. At no point was she consenting to all the sexual contact the hero inflicted on her. Really, this point is becoming laboured, so I'll move onto the whole abduction business. He takes over her life, steals her money and her credit card. He decides where they're going and what they're doing. He decides how she'll dress, what underwear she'll wear and watches as she changes. He listens in on her conversations, threatens her with rape, torture and death....

It is also baffling how baffled the heroine is. He told her repeatedly and without ambiguity that he intends to rape her. Maybe she's so sheltered she's never read the odd case of woman-kept-in-basement-and-repeatedly-raped-etc in the newspapers. Maybe its his Scottish accent obscuring his meaning.

Oh, and a real half-valkyrie would have castrated him by now.

(Rant out of system now. It may be a little while before the Chronicler manages to face Cole's again and post the full write-up...)

The Loinfire Club reads... The Darkest Kiss

2008-11-15T14:20:00.000-08:00

The Darkest Kiss, by Gena Showalter

She has tempted many men… but never found her equal.

Until now.

Though she has lived for centuries, Anya, goddess of anarchy, has never known pleasure. Until Lucien, the incarnation of death—a warrior eternally doomed to take souls to the hereafter. He draws her like no other. And Anya will risk anything to have him.

But when the merciless Lord of the Underworld is ordered by the gods to claim Anya herself, their uncontrollable attraction becomes an anguished pursuit. Now they must defeat the unconquerable forces that control them, before their thirst for one another demands a sacrifice of love beyond imagining...

Preamble and Dedications

Cathed has been re-reading Cupid's Melody this morning, apparently.

The Anthropologist: "You have to remind yourself how bad these things are. Or else it'll be like grade inflation, but not. We'll forget how bad and wrong the old ones are and the judgment would be skewed... it's like Connie Mason's lactation fetish. It's weeks before I think of that these days."

This week (at the Anthropologist's urging) we are reading is Gena Showalter's The Darkest Kiss.

(The Anthropologist has recently found F.A.T.A.L. and if that becomes the theme of this week's meeting... well, the point is, there were many digressions about it and anything she says is merely a rehash of the horrors of the actual review. If you, dear reader, feel like poking your eyes out with a spork, this is a valid alternative.)

The Balance decides to start by reading the (unusually long) dedication...

To Kresley Cole. You would let me wear your skin if at all possible—and I won't mention what you’d let me do to your eyeballs...

Pillywiggin: "What?! Eyeballs?"

To Marjorie Liu. Because you spank on and there's nothing cooler!

The Anthropologist: "Mental image I didn't need!"

(The Chronicler notes that Majorie Liu is also a paranormal romance novel writer.)

To Jill Monroe. You are a sister of my heart— hearter? sisart?—and even though you stole my gnome, I can't imagine a life without you. For realsies.

The Anthropologist: "WHAT?!"

Pillywiggin: "I don't think book dedications is a good idea."

The Chronicler: "I don't think book dedications this length is a good idea."

Art director Kathleen Oudit and designer Juliana Kolesova—I owe you big-time! The lips on this cover…Shiver! And you didn't blink twice when I mentioned one brown eye and one blue eye.

The Anthropologist: "Because they don't expect that, romance novel cover artists, mismatched eyes."

(Also, the cover is really freaky. The more you stare at it, the more weird it seems. For a start, that man's arm is now forever fixed in that position as any movement will distort his butterfly tattoo. Secondly, his head is far, far too small for his torso and his pecks glow... the Anthropologist thinks he has a birth defect which means he looks as though his head is photo-shopped on.)

HE WAS KNOWN AS THE Dark One.

Cathed: "As they are."

Malach ha-Maet. Yama. Azreal....

Cathed (pointing): "He's Azrael! But he's Azrael!"

The Balance: "Different spelling. It's spelt Az-real."

Azrael: "That's okay, then."

Long ago he had opened dimOuniak, a powerful box made from the bones of a goddess...

Cathed: "As you do."

... unleashing a horde of demons upon the earth.

Pillywiggin: "You make it sound so casual."

Cathed: "Like trying to open a restaurant."

The Anthropologist: "And what, he couldn't hire any good waitresses because of they just kept falling in love with him?"

Pillywiggin: "He could always hire lesbians and old people."

The Anthropologist: "Around this man, lesbians aren't lesbians for long..."

As punishment, he and the warriors who aided him were forced to house those demons inside themselves, melding light and darkness, order and chaos...

Pillywiggin: "So, a mobile, sentient prison is better than a non-mobile, non-sentient one."

(The Balance: "Yes, the best way of preventing these demons from escaping is by putting them inside sentient prisons who don't want them to have them inside them.")

Because he was the one to open the box, he had been given the demon of Death. A fair exchange, he supposed, for his action had nearly caused the demise of the world...

Cathed: "God! If I'd known that I wouldn't have done it!"

Now he was charged with the responsibility of collecting human souls and escorting them to their final resting place. Even if he opposed the idea.

Azrael: "He opposes the idea of death in general?"

He did not like taking innocents from their families, found no joy in delivering the wicked to their damnation...

The Anthropologist: "Taking innocents from families... remember what that means normally in these books..."

Pillywiggin: "Death... Death of rats... Death of hymens..."

Azrael: "Skeleton with artfully lodged scythe."

Resistance, he’d soon learned, brought something far worse than death to his door. Resistance brought an agony so complete, so inexorable, even the gods trembled at the thought.

Cathed: "Oh dear."

The Chronicler: "Exactly why are the gods contemplating his punishment with anything other than glee?"

Did his obedience mean he was gentle? Caring? Nurturing? No. Oh, no. He could not afford softer emotion. Love, compassion and mercy were enemies to his plight.

Anger, though? Rage? Those he sometimes embraced.

Azrael: "Both anger and rage."

Woe to anyone who pushed him too far, for man would become fully demon. A beast. A sinister entity who would not hesitate to curl his fingers around a human heart and squeeze...

Loinfire Club laughs.

The Anthropologist (referring to the new Halloween toy): "We have to get the heart!"

Squeeze so tightly that human would lose his breath and beg for the sweet kiss of eternal sleep only he could offer...

The Loinfire Club each squeeze the "Throbbing Heart" in turn.

With that thought, the Prologue ends and the first chapter begins...

The Darkest Kiss, part two...

2008-11-15T14:10:00.000-08:00

Chapter One...

ANYA, GODDESS OF ANARCHY, daughter of Lawlessness, and dealer of disorder,

Pillywiggin: "Tell, not show!"

All of the dancers were human females, beautiful and nearly naked, chosen specifically by the Lords of the Underworld to provide the night's entertainment. Both vertical and horizontal...

The Anthropologist: "If they're sitting down, it's not really vertical or horizontal... it's a sort of Z shape."

Wisps of smoke cast a dream-fog around them, and pinpricks of starlight rained from the swirling strobe...

The Anthropologist: "It's a Vampire From Twilight mooning everyone!"

From the corner of her eye, she caught a scintillating glimpse of a taut immortal ass...

The Anthropologist: "No ass should ever scintillate!"

Cathed: "Maybe that's why you'd want one... they're walking mirrorballs!"

The Lords of the Underworld were delectable immortal warriors who were possessed by the demon spirits that had once resided inside Pandora's box.

Pillywiggin: "We know."

And now, with a few rounds of hard liquor and even harder sex, they were saying goodbye to Budapest, the city they'd called home for hundreds of years.

Cathed: "Budapest?! It's living in Stockton!"

Anya wanted in on the action. With one warrior in particular.

There are some debates over which one it is she sees.

Cathed: "Darkest and Most Seductive one, obviously."

The Anthropologist: "No, it can't be. She says 'each more dangerously seductive than the last' and this isn't the last book in the series..."

"Part," she whispered, fighting her intrinsic compulsion to shout "Fire" instead and watch as the humans raced away in a panic, screaming hysterically...

Pillywiggin: "What? Ah... I see. She's trying to get them to move."

Let the good times roll.

Pillywiggin: "Is that all she can come up with? How about shouting 'Smallpox'?"

The Chronicler: "What's holding her back from shouting 'Fire'?"

An erratic pulse of rock music that matched the erratic beat of her heart blasted from the speakers, making it impossible for anyone to hear her.

The Balance: "Medical complication..."

Cathed: "But she is a goddess of anarchy."

Pillywiggin: "I don't wanna pump blood! Shut up! Stop stressing on me! I want to hear my own music."

Heated breath caught in her lungs, and she shivered.

Pillywiggin: "Why is she shivering if she has something warm near her? Or is she that anarchic?"

Lucien. Deliciously scarred...

Pillywiggin: "Delicious... So he's scarred with licorrice?"

Azrael: "Or with the Cadbury's signature."

The Anthropologist: "It's like TT's fake blood. The people making the phys-reps ended up coming up with a concoction that tastes of chocolate..."

...irresistibly stoic and possessed by the spirit of Death.

The Anthropologist: "Back me up on this, Cathed. Didn't the stoics have a thing about celibacy? It doesn't seem to end well."

Cathed: "I really don't think stoic is that attractive."

Pillywiggin: "He has a face like the London Underground map!"

Right now he sat at a table in back, expression blank...

Cathed: "Wow. Hot."

"—she was right. I checked the satellite photos on Torin's computer. Those temples are rising from the sea."

Pillywiggin: "Get back in the sea where you belong!"

"One is in Greece and one is in Rome, and if they continue to rise at such a swift rate, they'll be high enough to explore sometime tomorrow."

Pillywiggin: "What? Out of the River Tiber? I didn't think there's that much space in it..."

The Balance: "It says the sea in the book..."

Pillywiggin: "But Rome doesn't have a sea."

Cathed, the classicist, affirms this. As does Wikipedia.

No one else would—or could—see them. She had made sure of that with a sweet little thing called chaos, her strongest source of power, hiding the temples with storms to keep humans away, while at the same time feeding the Lords enough information to draw them the hell out of Buda...

Cathed: "Buddah?!"

The Balance: "Budapest in short."

The Anthropologist: "I was thinking about trying to drag hell out of Buddah..."

Pillywiggin: "It's why he's so fat. He's got hell inside him."

"Perhaps the new gods are responsible. Most days I am sure they hate us and long to destroy us, simply for being half-demon."

The Balance: "I think that's a very good reason to hate them."

Lucien's expression remained blank.

The Anthropologist: "Is he still being irresistibly stoic? Man with hammer... does not matter..."

"If we're lucky, we'll find that damned box while we're there."

Azrael: "Damn that box! It killed my family!"

Anya ran her tongue over her teeth. Damned box, aka dimOuniak, aka Pandora's box.

Pillywiggin: "How many times have they explained the same box?!"

Cathed: "We get it."

The Anthropologist: "It's a book written for people with short time memory loss."

Boring? Ha! Anya had never met anyone who excited her more.

Cathed: "She is really, really excited by boring people."

The Anthropologist: "Has anyone read that book I wrote about accounting?"

Cathed swoons.

Azrael: "Is that some sort of dullness fetish?"

The Balance: "So the goddess of anarchy has a dullness fetish."

The Anthropologist: "That makes a certain amount of sense. Like that neat freak bureaucrat who wants to screw Fry..."

Cringe when they saw his scars, sure. But none of them wanted anything to do with him—and that saved their lives.

The Anthropologist: "Maybe they're allergic to liquorice."

"Notice me," Anya commanded softly. A moment passed. He didn't obey. Several humans glanced in her direction, heeding her demand, but Lucien's gaze latched on to the empty flask in front of him and remained, becoming a wee bit wistful. Much to her consternation, immortals were immune to her commands. [...]

"Bastards," she muttered. Any restrictions they could place on her, they did. "Anything to screw with lowly Anarchy."

Azrael: "She's the goddess of anarchy! You'd think her spells would summon a pineapple or something in front of him... That would totally attract his attention."

There are various theories about what boring and prosaic thoughts about the flasks is flashing through his mind:

Cathed: "Hmmm... maybe I spent too much on this at the flea market. Maybe I shouldn't have impulse-bought it... oh, but it wasn't really on impulse, but maybe it would be cheaper from a second hand shop...etcetcetc..."

Anya hadn’t been favored during her days on Mount Olympus.

The goddesses had never liked her because they assumed she was a replica of her "whore of a mother" and would jump their husbands.

Cathed: "Eris isn't a whore! She never got invited to any of the orgies!"

(At this point, we're under the impression that Anya's mother is a goddess of discord and we've assumed that she's a canonical goddess - thus Eris.)

The guys had wanted her, though. Well, until she'd killed their precious Captain of the Guard and they'd deemed her too feral [...]

The little shit had tried to rape her. If he had left her alone, she would have left him alone. But noooo.

The Balance: "It has four Os. And it's in italics."

Pillywiggin looks pained.

Cathed: "Noooo!"

Pillywiggin: "How many Os?"

Cathed: "Four."

The Anthropologist: "And in a strange font. A font of pain."

She didn't regret cutting the black heart out of his chest, didn't regret placing said heart on a pike in front of Aphrodite's temple. Not even a tiny bit.

(The Chronicler is wondering if this is meant to be a sacrifice to Aphrodite or otherwise...)

Choice. The word rang inside her mind, bringing her back to the present. What the hell would it take to convince Lucien to choose her?

Cathed: "She likes freedom of choice but she likes mindraping mortals?"

Pillywiggin: "Well, she is anarchy. She doesn't have to make sense."

She stomped her foot.

The Chronicler: "That's just pathetic."

For weeks she'd cloaked herself in invisibility, following Lucien, watching, studying...

The Chronicler: "And you're surprised he doesn't notice you?! You're invisible!"

Cathed (droning on): "Oh, maybe I should have checked on Ebay first..."

The Anthropologist: "Ebay might be a bit too exciting for this man... In fact, the internet is too interesting for this man."

Cathed: "Maybe I should check the stock market, just to see how it's doing."

The Balance: "No, the stock markets are fluctuating a bit too much. It would be too exciting."

And yes, lusting. He'd had no idea she lurked nearby, even as she willed him to do all sorts of naughty things: strip, pleasure himself…smile.

Cathed: "That would be spoiling the stoic façade... he could still strip stoically, though"

The Chronicler: "He's like St Benedict incarnate!"

Pillywiggin: "That man really hated laughing."

There is some speculation about high level stoics and their possible ability to be able to have sex without their expression changing. There is miming and giggling.

But she’d wanted to see his beautifully flawed face light in humor just as much as she’d wanted to see his naked body glisten with arousal.

Azrael: "He might be cheating and recently had botox."

Had he granted even that benign request, though? No!

Cathed: "And meanwhile, he's just sitting there counting the coasters..."

A part of her wished she'd never seen him, that she hadn't allowed Cronus, the new king of the gods, to intrigue her with stories about the Lords a few months ago. Maybe I'm the idiot...

The Anthropologist: "Why does it have to be a zero sum game? Maybe they're both idiots!"

Cronus had just escaped Tartarus, a prison for immortals and a place she knew intimately. He'd imprisoned Zeus and his cohorts there, as well as Anya's parents. When Anya returned for them, Cronus had been waiting for her. He had demanded Anya's greatest treasure. She'd declined—duh—so he'd tried to scare her. Give me what I want or I'll send the Lords of the Underworld after you. They are demon-possessed, as blood-hungry as starving animals, and they will not hesitate to peel the lovely flesh from your bones. Blah, blah, blah. Whatever.

Cathed: "So he threatened her... wait... the author actually wrote 'blah, blah, blah... oh'."

She'd ended up seeking out the warriors on her own. She'd thought to defeat them and laugh in Cronus’s face, a sort of look-what-I-did-to-your-big-scary-demons kind of thing.

Pillywiggin (rolling her eyes): "Fascinating."

One glance at Lucien, though, and she’d become instantly obsessed.

The Chronicler notes that that can't possibly be healthy.

She'd forgotten her reasons for being there...

The Chronicler: "That happens a lot with heroines..."

It was just that contradictions tantalized her, and Lucien had so very many. He was scarred but not broken, kind but unbending.

Azrael: "Kindness and bendiness are not synonymous."

The Chronicler: "Neither is scarred and broken, for that mater."

He was a calm, by-the-book immortal, not blood-hungry as Cronus had claimed.

Pillywiggin: "Flangey, but dull."

He was possessed by an evil spirit, yet he never deviated from his own personal code of honor. He dealt with death every day, every night, yet he fought to live.

The Anthropologist: "If you're immortal, you don't have to work very hard to stay alive."

As if that wasn't enough to prick her interest, his flowery fragrance filled her with decadent, wicked thoughts every time she neared him...

Azrael: "Wait, flowery fragrance?"

The Anthropologist: "Must be really inconvenient to find flowery fragrances irresistible. What if she gets sprayed with perfume in department store... an impromptu orgy?"

Azrael: "She must really freak out people in when walking in parks."

Why? Any other man who smelled like roses would have made her laugh. With Lucien, her mouth watered for a taste of him...

Cathed: "He's so hot in his grey socks."

(The Chronicler: "At least the author is acknowledging roses is a stupid scent for a man... but it's still stupid.")

her skin prickled with white-hot awareness...

The Balance: "Heat. Skin comment. And Medical Complication!"

Pillywiggin: "Three in one combo!"

Gods, he was sexy. He had the freakiest eyes she’d ever seen.

Cathed: "Freaky good or freaky bad?"

Pillywiggin: "Like a Cyclops?"
The Anthropologist: "Freaky is not a good word either."

One was blue, the other brown, and both swirled with the essence of man and demon...

Cathed: "I've seen creepier eyes."

Pillywiggin: "Like David Bowie, but less interesting."

The Anthropologist: "except he has a fruit pastel stuck to his face."

And his scars… All she could think of, dream about, crave, was licking them.

The Anthropologist: "It's because it's made of liquorice."

Cathed: "Why can't you just talk to him?"

Possessed by Promiscuity, Paris was blessed with pale, almost glittery skin....

Cathed: "It's a sparkly TWILIGHT VAMPIRE!"

...electric-blue eyes, and a face the angels probably sang hallelujahs over, but he wasn't Lucien and he did nothing for her.

Cathed: "Angels sing praise of demonic faces?"

The Chronicler: "She's mixing mythologies. Or simply copy-and-pasting an oft-used descriptor."

She might deal in petty disorder, but she never uttered a threat she didn't plan to see through. To do so smacked of weakness, and Anya had vowed long ago never to show a single hint of weakness...

The Anthropologist: "But drooling and shivering in the middle of the dance floor doesn't count..."

Azrael: "That's not weakness. It's drug abuse."

Paris's laughter intensified and managed to snag Lucien's attention. Lucien's gaze lifted, first landing on Paris...

The Balance: "Lucien's gay."

then locking on Anya. Her knees almost buckled. Oh, sweet heaven. Paris was forgotten as she fought to breathe

Pillywiggin: "Too many gaze!"

Azrael: "He's been deliberately not looking at her to kill her under an avalanche of his gaze."

Did she imagine the fire that suddenly sparked in Lucien's mismatched eyes? Did she imagine the way his nostrils flared in awareness?

The Anthropologist: "You're just pretending he's noticing you. You're just deluding yourself over his cold."

... Licking her lips, never removing her gaze from him, she eased into a sensual bump and grind and made her way toward his table...

Azrael: "Wait. She's bumping and grinding whilst walking?"

The Anthropologist: "She's walking quite slowly then, since at any given time, about 40% of her is moving in the opposite direction."

Azrael: "She could be bumping and grinding the furniture."

Up close, he was six-feet-six of muscle and danger.

Azrael: "He's made of steak, tied together with police tape."

Pure temptation.

Pillywiggin: "Steak is very tempting."

The Balance: "And she's an anarchist, so she can't help but cross police tape."

There was a brief diversion in which the interesting quote is...

Pillywiggin: "I can't think of anything more dull than a clairvoyance conference."

"We meet at last, Flowers."

Cathed: "She really is the goddess of anarchy. She's going for the gay accountant."

She ground her left hipbone against the hard juncture between his legs, turning erotically and presenting him with a view of her back

The Anthropologist: "Juncture is not an erotic word."

Azrael: "Neither his hipbone."

Her ice-blue corset was held together by nothing more than thin ribbons...

The Anthropologist: "That implies it's not very tightly cinched. Which would render the corset pointless."

...and she knew her skirt hung so low on her waist that it failed to cover the bands of her thong. Oopsie.

Cathed: "And there I was thinking she's written her number in binary."

Azrael: "Appeal to the sodomite!"

Men, mortal or otherwise, usually melted when they caught a glimpse of something they shouldn't.

The Balance: "...like Cthulhu."

The Anthropologist: "It's not really a glimpse. She's just been showing off her thong all night because she's not capable of dressing herself."

...body as she raised her hands over her head then leisurely ran them through the thick mass of her snow-white hair...

The Anthropologist: "Mass is also not a sexy word."

Her nipples hardened.

Pillywiggin: "Pebbling!"

The Anthropologist: "Is she masturbating on the dance floor? Not that people would be shocked with all the fucking, but...."

"Why did you summon me, woman?" His voice was low, yet as disciplined as the warrior himself.

Pillywiggin: "Boring, then."

The Darkest Kiss, part three...

2008-11-15T14:06:00.001-08:00

(Painting by Hans Baldung Grien, "Death and the Maiden", a painting to bear in mind.)

Listening to him speak was more arousing than being touched by another man, and her stomach clenched...

The Anthropologist: "It's only reinforcing the idea that she's a loser. She spent ages staring at him, willing him to notice her and now, despite her literally humping him, he's not really responding."

"I wanted to dance with you," she said over her shoulder. Bump, bump, slllooow grind. "Is that a crime?"

He didn't hesitate with his answer. "Yes."

"Good. I've always enjoyed breaking the law."

The Anthropologist: "You have an interesting legal system in Budapest. Is this a holdover of the Soviet days?"

A confused pause. Then, "How much did Paris pay you to do this?"

"I get paid? Oh, goodie!"

The Chronicler comes to the conclusion that this woman's narrative voice is exceptionally annoying.

Stepping back, grinning, she brushed her ass against him, arching and swinging as sensually as she was able. Hello, erection.

The Anthropologist: "She's making progress then."

The heat of him nearly liquefied her bones.

Pillywiggin: "Lava heat!"

"What's the currency? Orgasms?"

The Anthropologist: "What is the exchange rate between the dollar and the orgasm?"

Speculation results.

In her dreams, he always grabbed her and meshed the hard length of his cock into her at this point.

The Anthropologist: "That makes her even lamer."

In reality, he jumped backward as if she were a bomb about to detonate, creating more hated distance between them.

The Anthropologist: "If the response to I want to sleep with you, is leaping behind tables, then you're doing something wrong."

Pillywiggin: "Or recoiling like he's a stoic."

A sense of loss immediately blanketed her.

The Chronicler: "Again, the increasing pathetic desperation."

"No touching," he said. He'd probably done his best to sound calm, but he had sounded on edge. Strained.

The Anthropologist: "He's saying this from behind the table, bear in mind."

Her eyes narrowed. All around, people watched their interaction and his rejection of her.

The Anthropologist: "All around, everyone noticed what a loser she is."

They were still pursued by Hunters, humans who foolishly believed they could create a utopia of peace and harmony by ridding the world of the Lords and the demons they carried inside them.

The Chronicler notes that this is a really bad time to be trying to pick guy up in bar.

Ignore them. You're running out of time, chica.

Pillywiggin: "Are you up with the slang?"

The Anthropologist: "I'm up with the Spanish... In fact, I'm subando with the Spanish."

Azrael: "No, that's too foreign."

She ran a fingertip over the top band of her thong, not stopping until she drew the hot focus of his gaze to the glittery angel wings in the center.

The Anthropologist: "ARGH! No! That just makes you seem like a chav!"

Pillywiggin: "Hasn't that been apparent already?"

The Anthropologist: "But that's really tacky!"

"I was just about to walk away," he choked out.

The Anthropologist: "She sounds like the evil slut character... which means we can stop drinking for the I am not a Slut complex.... It's sociologically interesting, but AAAHHHH!"

Azrael: "Do you say that in seminars a lot?"

At his words, her nails elongated into little claws.

The Anthropologist: "Eewww... It sounds uncomfortable. And weird."

She'd shown herself to him, even knowing that the gods would be able to pinpoint her exact location—something it was best to avoid since they planned to snuff her out like a mangy animal. She would not leave this club without a reward.

The Chronicler: "Wait. She's risking almost certain death to shag him?"

Pillywiggin: "It's probably expected from shagging death itself..."

The Chronicler: "And on the sidenote, isn't she very against rape and very for choice of one's sexual partners a moment ago?"

Determination intensifying, she swung around with another roll of her hips, the length of her pale hair caressing his chest. As she nibbled on her bottom lip, she plumped her breasts.

The Anthropologist: "What? Plumping her breasts?"

The Chronicler: "I think she's consciously making them swell."

Azrael: "Isn't that what you do to scatter cushions... it's probably reminding he need to do some housekeeping..."

"But I don't want you to leave," she said with a practiced pout.

The Anthropologist cringed.

"What's wrong, sweetness?" Merciless, she moved forward. "Afraid of a little girl?"

The Chronicler: "Eww!"

Pillywiggin: "A little crazy girl."

The Anthropologist: "A little crazy girl wearing an angel thong!"

His lips thinned, but he didn't reply. Thankfully, he didn't move farther away, either.

Pillywiggin: "Because the walls are in the way."

Azrael: "Also because it wouldn't be stoic."

He was utterly magnificent. Rainbow-colored strobe lights rained down his face and body,

The Chronicler: "Rainbow coloured lights really shouldn't be a selling point... it's like sparkle vampires all over again."

... a body so finely sculpted it could have been chiseled from stone. He wore a black tee and stone-washed jeans, and both hugged rope after rope of hand-over-your-panties muscle. Mine.

Pillywiggin: "Where is the hand-over-your-panties muscle?"

The Anthropologist: "I'm pulling up a human anatomy diagram now..."

Azrael: "Wikipedia won't be able to help you now."

Pillywiggin: "I don't even understand what that could mean."

The Chronicler: "Why is this woman's idea of an in-charge woman comfortable with her sexuality a childish, stalker slut?"

The Anthropologist: "Because Come to Me."

"I'm not touching you, sweetcakes." But I want to…I plan to…I will.

The Anthropologist: "She's a rapist."

"I'll dance with you," another warrior said, cutting her off. Paris again. "No." Anya didn't switch her attention. She wanted Lucien and only Lucien. No one else would do.

Pillywiggin: "Why?"

She recognized the deep timbre of his voice. Sabin, keeper of Doubt.

Cathed: "I have doubt... I think..."

Azrael: "No, it's more like: I have doubt... No, you don't. It's all mine!"

Bait, stupid girls that they were, were all about self-sacrifice; their job was to seduce a Lord to distraction so Hunters could sneak in and slay him. And really, what kind of moron wanted to kill the Lords rather than make out with them a little?

Pillywiggin: "Who would want to... gyah?!"

Cathed remarks that there hasn't been a I am Not a Slut moment yet.

The Anthropologist: "She only wants to sleep with one man. But is really bad at it."

Oh, yes. The plague. One of the Lords was possessed by the demon of Disease. If he touched any mortal skin-to-skin, he infected that person with a terrible sickness that spread and killed with amazing swiftness

Pillywiggin: "They're backplotting at every conceivable moment."

Unfortunately, there were many, many more Hunters out there. Seriously, they were like flies. Swat one away, and two more soon took its place. Even now, they were out there somewhere, waiting for a chance to strike. The Lords had to remain cautious.

The Anthropologist: "Why are they being cautious if they have ridiculous flange powers and are immune to throat cut?"

"Besides, there's no way they could have figured out a way to bypass our security," Reyes added...

The Anthropologist: "Given all of you are having sex all over the party, you probably aren't really paying much attention to security."

"And maybe the big guy and I can go the next few minutes without an interruption. In private." They might have gotten the hint, but they didn't leave.

Pillywiggin: "'Cause our mate doesn't want to shag you!"

Of course, he didn't. But his nostrils did that delicious flare as his eyes followed every movement of her palms

Pillywiggin: "That's missing quite badly. You aimed for hands and got nostrils."

"Pretty please, with a cherry on top of me."

The Anthropologist: "If it turns out she's a virgin, it'd be so hilarious..."

His eyes flickered with fiery provocation. Not her imagination, she realized. Hope flooded her.

The Balance: "Barrack Obama..."

Pillywiggin is in pain.

The Balance: "Maybe she looks like Sarah Palin, but with white hair!"

The Anthropologist: "NOO!"

(The Chronicler regrets that this meme hasn't died yet.)

"Do you not find me desirable, Flowers?"

Cathed and Pillywiggin: "Why does she keep calling him that?"

A muscle ticked below his eye. "That is not my name."

Cathed: "Lucien 'Death' Flowers."

The Anthropologist: "To be fair, 'Death Flowers' is probably quite a scary name to an Aztec."

Alrightie, then. She turned and bent down to the floor. Her skirt rode up her thighs and gave him another, better, glimpse of her blue thong and the wings stretching from the center.

The Anthropologist: "It's not a glimpse. It's right there. It's been there all evening. We're getting bored of it now!"

There is discussion of exactly what's going on there.

As she pushed to a stand, mimicking the motions of sex as she did so, she slowly circled, offering a lingering full-body shot.

The Chronicler: "This woman is not subtle."

Pillywiggin: "Nor anatomically plausible."

"You smell like strawberries and cream." As he spoke, he looked like a predator about to pounce.

The Anthropologist: "You smell like dairy products."

Azrael: "Technically, she smells like a dairy product and a fruit."

"Bet I taste like it, too," she said, batting her lashes despite the fact that he'd made the fragrance seem like a horrendous affront.

The Anthropologist: "So, that's ketosis plus some sort of milky discharge."

There is some discussion about whether or not it's some sort of yeast infection.

He growled low in his throat and took a menacing step toward her. He raised his hand to—grab her? Hit her? Whoa, what was that about?

Azrael (raising a fist): "I hate strawberry and cream!"

...before stopping himself and fisting his fingers. Before remarking on her scent, he'd been distant but maybe-kinda-sorta interested. Now he only seemed interested in throttling her.

Azrael: "He was probably at some point sexually abused by a tea lady at Wimbledon."

Anya ceased moving, staring up at him in openmouthed astonishment. Because she smelled like fruit, he wanted to hurt her?

The Anthropologist: "Make her stop talking like she's a teenager... more how she imagines teenager thinks."

That was—that was supremely…disappointing.

Pillywiggin: "That's some interesting abuse of punctuation."

Azrael: "It's chaotic enough to be within her purview."

Men liked women who threw themselves at them. Right? She'd observed mortals for too many years to count, and that had always seemed to be the case. Key word, chica—mortals. Lucien wasn't, and had never been, mortal.

The Chronicler: "See! She's learning the I am not a Slut complex..."

Why doesn't he want me? In all the days she'd watched him, he hadn't favored a single woman.

Pillywiggin: "He's a personification! Not a sexual being!"

He didn't prefer men. His gaze didn't linger on males with hunger or any hint of softer emotion.

Pillywiggin: "O rly?"

Was he in love with a specific woman, then, and no other would do? If so, the bitch was going down!

Pillywiggin: "'Cause that's endear you."

The Chronicler wonders about the world view where every unattached man is expected to want to and consent to have sex with anything that offers itself.

Thoughts of using "Smother her with your expanding breasts" as Emic Seaweed (the band which the Anthropologist, the Balance and Pillywiggin have formed)'s second album title surface.

Smoke continued to billow through the building, hazy, dreamlike.

Loinfire Club: "It's on fire?"

Lucien hadn't moved an inch; it was as if his entire body were rooted in place. She should give up, walk away, cut her losses before Cronus found her...

The Anthropologist: "Do it! Do it! Do it now!"

Only the weak give up. True. Determined, she raised her chin.

The Loinfire Club groans.

With only a thought, she changed the song blasting through the speakers. The beat instantly slowed, softened...

Cathed: "What is this? A school disco? This is the slow song time?"

Pillywiggin: "Surely the goddess of anarchy can only set songs on shuffle?"

"You're going to dance with me," she purred. "That's the only way to get rid of me." Just to taunt him further, she stood on her tiptoes and gently bit his earlobe.

The Anthropologist: "Just flash him. That's the only thing in your slut repertoire that you haven't done."

There was a rumble in his throat as his arms finally wrapped around her. At first she thought he meant to push her away...

Azrael: "Hasn't he already threatened to punch her?"

Then he jerked her deeper into the curve of his body, flattening her breasts against his torso and forcing her legs to straddle his left thigh...

The Anthropologist: "That must look really awkward. Try to imagine it...."

Slowly, decadently, he swayed her side to side, their bodies staying meshed together, her core rubbing just above his knee.

Pillywiggin: "Is she not in great discomfort?"

Gods in heaven, this was better than she'd imagined...

Pillywiggin: "Did she just swear by herself?"

The Anthropologist (referring to the hero of Cupid's Melody): "At least it's not By the Stones!"

He was big. Everywhere. His shoulders were so wide they dwarfed her; his upper body so muscled it enveloped her...

The Balance: "Eeeccclllurrrp!"

Azrael: "She's now gyrating in his torso."

Pillywiggin: "Gelatinous cube!"

Even if he wanted her the way she wanted him, she couldn't have him. Not fully. In that respect, she was as cursed as he. But she could still enjoy the moment.

Pillywiggin: "Why not?"

His nose nuzzled her jawline.

The Anthropologist: "He's also really, really flexible. As well as being huge."

Pillywiggin: "He is a gelatinous cube."

The Balance: "He's a muscle elemental."

"Just because," she said, inhaling his heady rose perfume

The Anthropologist: "Why does he smell girlier than she does?"

Azrael: "Because he's just better than she is."

Her nipples were still hard, so hard, and rubbing against her corset, enhancing her desire...

The Loinfire Club speculates about whether or not her corset is a proper boned one or not. There is some consensus that it's something else that is probably uncomfortable in real life.

"Do you find it amusing to tease the ugliest man here?"

"Ugliest?" When he appealed to her as no one else ever had? "But I'm nowhere near Paris, sugarpop."

Pillywiggin: "That might be a good thing to say to him, except for the sugarpop part."

The Anthropologist: "If she's an immortal goddess in Hungary, why does she talk like a waitress from Texas?"

The Balance: "Because it's only the demon-trapped-inside-them guys that are from Hungary. She could well be from Texas."

"I know what I am," he growled with the faintest trace of bitterness. "Ugly is being kind."

There is debate over what the hero looks like, since it is becoming abundantly clear that he looks nothing like the man on the cover since he is unscarred.

The Anthropologist: "He looks like he was eating gummi bears at one point and forgot they're stuck to his face."

"If you know what you are, sweetness, then you know you're sexy and deliciously menacing." [...]

He glared down at her. "Menacing? Does that mean you want me to hurt you?"

Pillywiggin (in reference to a line of Edward's in Twilight): "Can I crush your skull?"

His nostrils flared again...

Pillywiggin: "His nostril flares are like everyone else's gazes."

The Anthropologist: "A little light that goes off like a distress signal. He's signalling to his friends across the room..."

Closer…closer…Yes, contact. Oh, great gods! She glided her hands over his chest, luxuriating in the feel of his nipples as they reached for her...

Cathed: "His nipples are reaching for her?!"

The Anthropologist: "I'm sure I've read a Lovecraft..."

...savoring the ropes of strength that greeted her.

The Balance: "But they're strength-roped nipples!"

However he'd gotten the scars could not have been pleasant. He'd suffered. A lot. The knowledge suddenly angered her as much as it entranced her. Who had hurt him and why? A jealous lover?

The Chronicler feels this paragraph speaks for itself as to how dense, obsessive and annoying this goddess of anarchy is.

Looked like someone had taken a blade and carved Lucien up like a melon, then tried to put him back together with the pieces out of order.

Pillywiggin: "Melon..."

The Anthropologist: "He's a melon elemental! Or a melemental!"

Did he have similar scars on the rest of his body? Her knees weakened as a new tide of arousal flooded her. She'd watched him for weeks, but she hadn't gotten a single peek at his delectable form.

Pillywiggin: "Because he doesn't habitually strip for anything..."

Somehow, he'd always managed to bathe and change after she left.

Pillywiggin: "Oh. She's just bad at it."

The Anthropologist: "Can you say 'restraining order'?"

Had he sensed her and kept himself hidden?

The Anthropologist: "When is Chronos going to reappear and kill them all?"

"If I didn't know better, I would think you were Bait, as my men do," he said tightly.

The Chronicler: "If she was, she wouldn't tell you."

If she assured him she wasn't Bait, she would seem to be admitting that she knew what Bait was.

Pillywiggin: "Why can't she say what she is?"

"Do you want me to be?" she said in her most seductive tone. "'Cause I'll be anything you want, lover."

Azrael: "Silly."

The Loinfire Club finds out, at this point, that Azrael ate four bowls of salmon chowder and are horrified.

Pillywiggin: "I ate two and I'm feeling full!"

Azrael: "I have my specialities and in them I excel."

Now, there was a loaded question. She wanted all of his masculinity focused on her. She wanted hours to strip and explore him. She wanted him to strip and explore her. She wanted him to smile at her. She wanted his tongue in her mouth.

Pillywiggin: "The author really hasn't heard of show not tell."

The Anthropologist: "These are not mutually exclusive option! If I can do them at all the same time..."

Azrael: "I can totally revolutionise and streamline my sex life!"

At this point, only the last seemed achievable. And only by playing unfairly. Good thing Devious was her middle name...

Pillywiggin: "Anarchy and deviousness are two different things."

Cathed: "Tickle him!"

Lots of plans are formulated. Mostly to do with cutting his tongue off.

"I'll take a kiss," she said, gazing at his soft, pink mouth.

The Anthropologist: "I'm not sure you want to give me that mental image.... it makes him sound like some sort of FTM transsexual..."

"I need a moment alone with her."

The Anthropologist: "I want a moment alone with her. In this roomful of dancing people, with lesbian sex in the background."

There is talk of the scenes of the Matrix Reloaded with the lesbians making out.

Yes! Except his friends stayed put. Jerks...

The Balance: "She is Sarah Palin. She calls them jerks."

She arched her back, pressing the core of her into his erection. Mmm, erection.

Pillywiggin: "My favourite breakfast."

The Anthropologist: "Really can't imagine how he's bending down to "

His words should have offended her, but she was too caught up in the tide of pleasure that simple embrace elicited to care...

Pillywiggin: "Simple embrace where you're semi-masturbating against his knee."

The Balance is holding his hand in a benediction gesture.

Azrael: "You look like a Greek Orthodox icon."

The Anthropologist: "You're looking like a Teacherite icon."

"Kiss her, Lucien, before I do. Bait or not," Paris called with a laugh. Good-natured as the laugh was, it was still edged with steel.

The Anthropologist: "That doesn't make any sense."

Lucien continued to resist. She could feel his heart beating against his ribs...

The Balance: "...And that is the gospel of the Lord."

Azrael: "Thanks be to the Lord!... Dammit!"

Pillywiggin: "Your years as an altar boy have not been wasted, Balance."

Anya jerked his head down to hers and smashed her lips against his. His mouth instantly opened, and their tongues met in a deep, wet thrust. There was an intense rush of heat through her as the addictive flavor of roses and mint bombarded her.

Azrael (with a bowl of chowder): "Seriously, I'm eating here."

She pressed deeper, needing more of him. All of him. Plumes of fire infused her entire body. She rubbed against his cock, unable to stop herself. He fisted her hair, taking complete control of her mouth.

Pillywiggin: "This woman isn't aware of the other meaning of fisting, is she?"

The Chronicler wonders at the ultra-alpha nature of his kisses despite the fact that Anya is technically the one seducing him.

She'd entered the gates of heaven without taking a single step.

The Anthropologist wants desperately to skim.

His tongue thrust back inside her mouth, their teeth banging together...

The Anthropologist laughs.

Passion and arousal were a hot blaze between them, a raging inferno. Truly, she was on fire...

The Loinfire Club busies itself with the multitude of "fiery" drinks.

"More," he said roughly, palming her breast.

Pillywiggin (in a squeek): "Breasts!"

With one hand, she gripped the hem of his shirt and lifted. With the other, she caressed the ropes of his stomach. Scars. She felt scars and shivered, the jagged tissue wonderfully hot

Pillywiggin: "Liquorice!"

She almost came, his reaction like fuel to an already blazing fire. She did moan.

The Chronicler would be rolling her eyes if she could.

Her eyelids cracked open, and she nearly gasped when she realized they were indeed outside, leaning against the club's exterior in a shadowed corner. He must have flashed them there, the naughty boy. He was the only Lord capable of transporting himself from one location to another with only a thought. A skill she possessed, as well. She only wished he'd flashed them to a bedroom.

Pillywiggin: "This is not the time for exposition."

He raised his darkly haloed head, blue and brown irises intense, before pinning her with another scorching kiss. On and on it continued, until she was willingly, blissfully drowning in him. Branded to her very soul, where she was no longer Anya but Lucien's woman. Lucien's slave.

The Chronicler: "So much for being in control."

No, there would be no flashing, she realized with disappointment...

Cathed: "No flashing for me..."

She wasn't wearing a bra, so the hardened pink tips of her nipples were visible, two little beacons in the night.

There is much laughter and some confusion over what is happening with her breasts since they were previously encased in her corset (made clear with chaffage) but now they're beaconing...

The Balance: "Maybe it was an underbust and her nipples were drooping."

The Chronicler: "She could mean a corset-style top?"

Pillywiggin (pointing at the Anthropologist's glass of smoothie): "Look at that swollen purple shaft of drink!"

Poor, tortured Reyes, keeper of Pain. He liked to cut himself. Once, she'd even seen him jump from the top of the warriors' fortress and luxuriate in the feel of his broken bones.

The Loinfire Club giggles.

"You don't really want him," Reyes said. "We all know that. So tell us what you do want before we force you to tell us."

The Chronicler: "Unpleasant thing to say about your friend."

Lucien stepped in front of her, blocking her from the men. Was he…protecting her? How utterly sweet. Unnecessary, but sweet. Some of her anger evaporated. She wanted to hug him.

"Leave her alone," Lucien said. "She doesn't matter. She's unimportant."

[...]

A red haze winked over her vision. This must be how my mother always felt. Nearly all the men Dysnomia had taken to bed had hurled insults at the woman when their pleasure had been sated. Easy, they'd said. Not good for anything else.

Cathed (muttered): "Dysnomia?"

(The Chronicler: "Really minor goddess. Daughter of Eris. Not sure why she's seen as an uber-slut here, though. Odd that the author re-imagines her as being hated for being a slut instead of an actual spirit of lawlessness and opposition to civil order.")

Anya knew her mother well, knew Dysnomia had been slave to her lawless nature, as well as simply looking for love. Mated gods, single gods, it hadn't mattered. If they had desired her, she had given herself to them.

Pillywiggin: "Don't backstory in the middle of the scene."

Cathed: "More importantly, don't backstory in the middle of a sex scene."

Pillywiggin: "He thrust in her and that reminded her of the time when she was seven..."

Of all the things she'd expected and yearned for him to say, unimportant hadn't been close. She's mine, maybe. I need her, perhaps. Don't touch my property, definitely.

(The Chronicler: "She'd rather he claim she's his property than be unimportant? From her point of view, she's just some random chick who's humped his leg recently. If she's more meaningful to him, it'd just be weird.")

Azrael (referring to the Balance's style of reading): "I'm sure romance novels delivered at that speed is akin to assault.... I'm going have a lie down."

The Balance is going faster.

Pillywiggin: "He's speaking in tongues! The Holy Spirit is Among Us!"

"You have been following me. I recognized your scent." Strawberries and cream, he'd said earlier, accusation in his voice. Her eyes widened. Pleasure and mortification blended, spearing her all the way to the bone. All along, he'd known she was watching him.

Pillywiggin: "She sucks."

"Why did I get the third degree if you knew who I was? And why, if you knew I was following you, didn't you ask me to show myself?"

The Anthropologist: "Because I wanted an excuse to not take fucking showers."

"Well, no." Much as it would have saved her pride, she suddenly realized she didn't want him thinking she gave her kisses away so easily. "Not yet."

The Chronicler: "You were humping him a moment ago... She's learning to not be a slut..."

She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, her frustration renewed.

The Anthropologist: "Do many people do that when they're frustrated?"

Revulsion? He should be grateful! Hadn't she liberated him from the curse that had forced him to stab his BFF every night?

The Balance: "They use BFF!!"

Pillywiggin: "God! Kill me.... I need a lie down."

Azrael: "You can have the rug. I think I've recovered."

The Anthropologist: "We're lying down on the floor in shifts now, are we?"

The Balance: "About the BFF..."

Yes, damn it. She had. But his look was one she knew well, and one that never failed to raise her hackles. [...]

Because of her mother's amorous past and the widespread expectation that she, with her free-spirited ways, would follow suit, every Greek god in Olympus had projected that same sort of revulsion at her at one time or another. At first, Anya had been hurt by their smug disdain. And for several hundred years, she'd tried the good-girl thing: dressing like a freaking nun, speaking only when spoken to, keeping her gaze downcast. Somehow she'd even squelched her desperate need for disaster. All to earn the respect of beings who would never see her as anything more than a whore.

The Anthropologist: "Is this leading up to an I am not a Slut?"

The Chronicler: "Almost certainly."

One fateful day, when she'd come home from stupid goddess training...

Pillywiggin: "What?"

The Chronicler: "It's training to become a stupid goddess."

Pillywiggin: "1 + 1 = cock!"

...crying because she'd smiled at Ares and that bitch Artemis had called her ta ma de...

Cathed: "The canonical goddesses and gods are being mean to her!"

(The Chronicler wonders what that means. All that google can come up with is the Mandarin – literally meaning 'of his/her mother', a sort of equivalent of 'dammit!' – and that's just weird, since these are classical deities and it's not a direct insult. Unless there's some Roman or Greek equivalent that's eluding google...)

Dysnomia had pulled her aside. Whatever you do, however you act, they are going to judge you harshly, the goddess had said. But we all must be true to our own nature. Acting as anyone other than yourself merely brings you pain and makes you appear ashamed of who and what you are.

The Chronicler: "She'll soon discover her true self isn't a slut..."

Others will feed off that shame, and soon it will be all that you are. You are a wonderful being, Anya. Be proud of who you are. I am.

The Chronicler: "Exactly why is she proud of Anya living a lie and against her anarchic instincts?"

From then on, Anya had dressed as sexily as she pleased, talked whenever and however she wanted and refused to look at her feet for any reason other than admiring her strappy stilettos. No longer had she denied her need for disorder.

Pillywiggin: "Strappy stilettos aren't very disorderly."

The Chronicler: "Surely dressing comfortably and happily would be more anarchic? Instead of conforming to other people's ideas of sexy and attractive? Why is this author fudging the ideas of anarchy/disorderliness with sexiness?"

"You are the daughter of Dysnomia," Reyes continued. "You are the minor goddess of Anarchy."

Pillywiggin: "She probably knows this already."

The Balance: "But we might have forgotten."

She would never be ashamed again.

The Chronicler: "Except for just now."

"There's nothing minor about me." Minor meant unimportant, and she was just as important as the other, "higher" beings, damn it.

The Chronicler: "No, minor usually means 'not having many worshippers' and 'not being quite as powerful,' both of which can be quantitively measured."

But because no one knew who her father was—well, she did, now—she had been relegated as such.

The Chronicler: "You've never read any classical mythology, right? And it's no surprise that her father's Chronos, so stop hiding it."

The Chronicler: "Wait. Just a minute. She's of the Olympian pantheon. The ones who have sex in every conceivable form..."

Pillywiggin: "And some unconceivable...."

Cathed: "Golden shower of light!"

The Anthropologist: "But she wears a thong with angel wings on it."

The Chronicler: "That is really slutty."

Irritation flickered in his dark eyes, but he continued calmly. "As I told you, since your appearance weeks ago I have been researching you, learning everything I can. Long ago, you were imprisoned for murdering an innocent man. Then, a hundred years or so after your confinement, the gods finally agreed on the proper punishment for you. Before they could carry out the verdict, however, you did something no other immortal had ever managed to do. You escaped."

The Balance: "He's backstorying again..."

She didn't try to deny it. "Your research is correct." For the most part.

Pillywiggin: "I'm glad I keep my own wiki entry up to date."

"Guards were placed in every corner to fortify security, as the gods feared the strength of the prison depended on the strength of its keeper. Over time the walls did begin to crumble and crack, which eventually led to the escape of the Titans."

Gonna blame that on her, was he? Her eyes narrowed.

"The thing about legends," she said flatly, "is that the truth is often distorted to explain the things that mortals cannot understand."

The Balance: "But they're immortals... so they should be able to understand it."

"You hid here, among humans," Reyes said, ignoring her. Again. "But you weren't content to live in peace even then."

Pillywiggin: "Personification of a concept!"

"You started wars, stole weapons and even ships."

Cathed (gasping): "Even ships!"

Pillywiggin: "She's a shipper!"

There is much gasping.

The Anthropologist: "Maybe it's like being a cattle rustler in a Western?"

"...You caused major fires and others disasters, which in turn led to mass panic and rioting among the humans, and hundreds of people being imprisoned."

Pillywiggin: "Anarchy. Was in the job description."

Warmth suffused her face. Yes, she'd done those things.

The Anthropologist: "Why is she ashamed?"

The Balance: "Maybe it's a good sort of warmth. Like a warm and fuzzy feeling.... oh, no..."

...she'd first come to earth, she hadn't known how to control her rebellious nature. Gods had been able to protect themselves from it, humans hadn't. Besides that, she'd been almost…feral from her years in prison.

The Anthropologist: "What tells me that she's going spend rest of book angsting about that, isn't she?"

A simple comment from her—you aren't going to let your brother talk to you like that, are you?—and bloody feuds erupted...

The Chronicler: "That's not how feuds work. It's about not letting other people talk to your brother like that. Feuds don't tend to happen within families; they happen between families."

An appearance at court—perhaps laughing at the rulers and their policies—and loyal knights attempted to assassinate their king.

The Chronicler: "So she's single-handedly responsible for all feuds, assassinations and disorder everywhere? And what exactly is her opinion of Iceland's political structure with its systematised feuding?"

Eventually she'd learned that if she fed her need for disorder with little things—petty theft, white lies and the occasional street fight—huge disasters could be averted...

Pillywiggin: "But it's her nature!"

The Chronicler: "So none of the civil wars right now are her fault? By this logic the world should be more orderly now and...well..."

There is some defending of the concept – though not the execution. The Loinfire Club is quite fond of a shit-stirring goddess, however Anya is really getting on our collective nerves.

"I did my homework on you, too," she said softly. "Did you not once destroy cities and kill innocents?" Now Reyes blushed.

The Chronicler: "Honestly!"

Cronus, who had taken over the heavenly throne mere months ago, bringing new rules, new desires and new punishments, was about to arrive... As a bright blue light appeared in front of her, chasing away the darkness and humming with unimaginable power, she flashed away. With a sense of regret she had no business feeling, she left Lucien behind—taking the taste and memory of their kiss with her.

Pillywiggin: "Thank GOD the chapter's over!"

Pillywiggin: "I have brain indigestion... The Loinfire Club has pain."

The Chronicler: "On the bright side, not much to write up."

Pillywiggin: "Only because it's so horribly hard to get through... There's just so much wrong..."

The Anthropologist: "But no incestuous overtones on p. 2!"

The Loinfire Club doesn't read.... Twilight

2008-11-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer

When 17 year old Isabella Swan moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father she expects that her new life will be as dull as the town. But in spite of her awkward manner and low expectations, she finds that her new classmates are drawn to this pale, dark-haired new girl in town. But not, it seems, the Cullen family. These five adopted brothers and sisters obviously prefer their own company and will make no exception for Bella. Bella is convinced that Edward Cullen in particular hates her, but she feels a strange attraction to him, although his hostility makes her feel almost physically ill. He seems determined to push her away ? until, that is, he saves her life from an out of control car. Bella will soon discover that there is a very good reason for Edward's coldness. He, and his family, are vampires ? and he knows how dangerous it is for others to get too close.

The Chronicler feels she really needs to get some more horrible books to bash, or perhaps better books to gush over. Mediocrity is really quite difficult comment on and even more difficult to read. After a while the mind numbs to the dull prose and what nuggets of interest are only interesting in comparison.

Mrs Giggles wrote that Stephanie Meyer created "the most potent kind of pornography for teenage girls in Twilight - the Mary Sue epic love story." And, preamble aside, the Chronicler maintains that this assessment is the most succinct, witty and accurate assessment of Twilight possible and that anything she can add is really just flogging a dead pony. Elizabeth Hand dissects all four books with great wit and brevity... But the rambling habit never stopped me. Neither will the fact that Twilight has already received numerous awards (The

Anthropologist remarked that she never heard anyone scream "Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year" with that much horror).

Incidentally, the cover of Twilight is really pretty. Proverbs and pronouncements aside, it was in fact the reason why The Chronicler owns a copy of the book. That and there is something compelling about the blurb:

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him — and I didn't know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Of course, when you think about it harder there are holes to pick at and the promise of unconditional love is all well and good in concept, in quotes, but it is often makes for a perplexing – if not alienating – read. Dark, twisted obsession makes for a fascinating read, but the trap of romanticising it so often ensnares the author and the reader is presented a picture of dubious relationship practices as an ideal rather than a compelling perversion.

Isabella "Bella" Swan moves into Forks, which we are assured to be the most damp and overcast little town in all of America, and meets Edward Cullen, the sparkliest, most beautiful vampire ever. In the last quarter or so of the book, something resembling a plot kicks in and some vampire by the name of James decides he wants to hunt Bella for sport, but that is really inconsequential to the True Love that exists between Bella and Edward.

The opening chapters are interminable and shows again all the weaknesses of a first person narrative.* Meyer has an eye for incidental detail and one is torn from seeing it as clutter and seeing it as building a believable – if dull – character. Bella calls her father "Charlie" and her mother "Reneé". The Anthropologist theorises latent and repressed resentment or that they're "hip" parents who insist on being called their first names. However, Bella calls them "Mom" and "Dad" in speech and emails thus the "voice" of her narrative seems somehow... off.

Bella's description of her new truck makes me wonder if she's aware that the indomitable Toyota Pickup is foreign:

Plus, it was one of those solid iron affairs that never gets damaged — the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.

But much of Twilight shows a great blind spot in general knowledge, such as when Edward tells Bella that his favourite blood is that of a mountain lion and "Grizzly [Bear] is Emmett's favourite." He adds:

We have to be careful not to impact the environment with injudicious hunting. We try to focus on areas with an overpopulation of predators.

The Balance, ever the voice of reason and conservation biology, notes that this would mean nowhere. Whilst neither the grizzly bear nor the mountain lion is currently listed under "threatened" by the World Conservation Union, both populations are somewhat precarious. "Near threatened" is hardly a green light for vampires to start wrestling down mountain lions and draining them of blood.

But maybe the world of Twilight is completely different from our own when it comes to this and has a real problem with predator overpopulation...

The Anthropologist notes that Meyer seems to recycle common vampire tropes by substituting in less famous names in hopes that this obvious filing off of the serial numbers would give the impression of an original idea. Instead of Navajo skin-walker werewolves, she has them as Quileute. Instead of Michelangelo and Raphael Sanzio being inspired by Vampires to paint, it's Francesco Solimena, also of the Italian Renaissance. The new names doesn't make it feel more fresh or original.

Meyer struggles with creating the obliviously beautiful heroine – the ugly girl who is simple a pretty girl with glasses:

I should be tan, sporty, blond — a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps — all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun.

Instead, I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete.

"Ivory-skinned" is in no way a derogatory descriptor. Neither is a soft slenderness. In fact, all one can get from the passage is that she is conventionally attractive. She tells us both her height (5' 4") and weight (110lbs), conveniently allowing us to work out her Body Mass Index, which we, of course, proceeded to do. (The Anthropologist was rather gleeful about this since she'd never been given the information to do this to a romance novel heroine before.)

It rather difficult to actually give Bella's claims of being an unpopular outcast any credence. She soon has a plethora of male admirers and multiple female friends (most of whom are nice but mildly jealous of her).

On the other hand, it is perhaps quite easy to see why she hadn't many friends back in Phoenix as she goes through her first day making unsympathetic snap judgements on the people who are nice to her:

When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me.

"You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?" He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type.

It's not even that I don't like snarky people, but Bella's brand of sarcasm comes across as unpleasant, borderline misanthropic and not particularly incisive (or funny, for that matter). She is also utterly oblivious to the possibility that she may be doing something wrong in her inability to communicate and sympathise with her peers.

(Incidentally, we never do discover whether or not "Chess Club Eric" is actually member of any chess club – or if there is a chess club at this school – he is given this label by Bella and it is used forevermore.)

Meyer claims that Bella's sudden surge in popularity in Forks high school is based in part on her own ugly-duckling-now-swan university experience. Of course, there is quite a big difference between switching from one high school to another and from high school to university. Usually, the case of "stock surge," as Meyer put it, is caused by there simply being more people at college and exposure to a greater number of people. The Anthropologist also quips that Meyer's anecdote is probably coloured by the fact that she attended Brigham Young University, where the beauty is measured by willingness to become a happy housewife. (The Anthropologist would like to add that she was being very snarky at this point and doesn't mean it literally.)

Probable or not, it's immensely hard to sympathise with the self-proclaimed unattractive girl who finds herself being asked by three (not including the hero) boys to the "girls' choice spring dance." Which is really reason enough to reject them since they blatantly fail to grasp simple concepts (and will no doubt have trouble with concepts like "consent" later on in the evening.) Bella takes her new friends and admirers very much for granted. She doesn't even seem to care much about them and they start blurring together into this faceless, chattering mass, which really doesn't recommend the character to me.

The same applies to most of Twilight, there is a great distance between the showing and the telling. As readers, we're told repeatedly that Bella is clumsy to the point of endangering herself, yet we little evidence of this in her actions. I understand the need for comic hyperbole, but the "joke" of Bella's clumsiness needs to be reinforced with some actual correlation with reality. I don't know, she could get hit by a volleyball more. Or walk into a lamppost whilst reading. We're told Bella is bookish, yet she is rarely shown reading and it seems never to surface in her conversation – surely any seventeen-year-old who has wild imagination and a bookish way can come up with something more creative than "Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker" in an entire month. For that matter, "Bruce Wayne" is a stupid explanation for Edward's supernatural abilities since Batman has none; he's just really, really rich.

I had decided to read Wuthering Heights — the novel we were currently studying in English — yet again for the fun of it...

I know I've odd opinions about the Brontës, but who reads Wuthering Heights "for the fun of it"? It's an immensely emotionally draining book. (Unless, of course, you find it alienating, messy and dull, which is another popular opinion.) It's really quite dark and unlike, say, Jane Eyre, it's quite difficult to overlook the dark bits – the murderous hero, the unapologetically selfish heroine... But perhaps this attitude to the events of Wuthering Heights will explain her later reaction to Edward's vampirism.

But yes, the vampires of Twilight, the main attraction... they are quite possible the least subtle ones this side of serious literature. They are aloof, never talk to any of the students and sit by themselves in their little huddle in the cafeteria:

[They] were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel.

(At this point, the Chronicler hastens to add that she clearly doesn't mean any of the medieval masters...)

Not only that, but they all have:

dark shadows under those eyes —purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose.

...which you'd think would crimp their perfect, perfect beauty. It's explicitly describes as being more like an injury rather than overly enthusiastic eye-shadow application. But clearly Bella (or Meyer) is of the opinion that abuse victims are hot.

The deathly pale complexion, unearthly beauty (despite adopted) and uniformly bruised eyes aside, they also don't eat. They all sit there with their food in front them, looking at nothing in particular ("away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell") and not eating. They then proceed to throw away their uneaten food. And this happens, we could but assume, every day. Wasting the food aside, it seems inane that no one has noticed this. Especially since I'm sure anorexia is quite a problem in high schools (one that is looked out for) and the girls look like "Sports Illustrated" models, which implies underweight to me.

I hope you're getting a full image here, dear reader: inhumanly beautiful, deathly pale clique with uniformly bruised eyes sit together, not looking at anything, not eating, every lunch time at the cafeteria. I wouldn't suspect vampires, but cult would be high on the suspicions list.

Bella and Edward stare at each other, a lot. Edward stares at her with a "hostile, furious" expression on his face. And she shies away from his gaze, but stare at him when he's not looking. This game of stares goes on for far, far too long. The blurb makes no secret of Bella and Edward's eventual relationship so it really begs the question why it can't cut to the chase, especially when the misunderstandings and double-meaning really gets on my nerves.

Edward heavy-handedly hints at how very dangerous he is and the reader is in on the fact that he's a vampire, but Bella isn't and... suffice to say, the Belief Turnstile is badly handled. It's a very, very long time before Bella finds out that Edward's a vampire and the whole sequence lacks suspense (since the reader already knows he's a vampire and is impatient for the revelation) and momentum, let alone actual believability. Bella hears about vampires from Jacob Black, a family friend and then ends up googling it. She then ponders if Edward could be. Later, he confirms this... it's just dull. And never does she actually feel threatened by him.

Of course, it's never clear what Bella's worldview was, pre-vampires. She swallows the website wholesale and moves on to speculate whether the Cullens were vampires. She doesn't need to, well, fit them into an emerging picture of the world she lives in. If someone were to prove to me that vampires exist, then the next question is whether or not other folkloric creatures exist and which versions of the folklores are most accurate. Then is the question where they fit in the universe: Is there a heaven and a hell? Do we have souls or not? Etc, etc...

Bella's just incredibly uncurious. She asks Edward about popular culture vampires, but neglects to ask him about the three pages of Wikipedia reading she did.

I felt a spasm of fear at his words, and the abrupt memory of his violent black glare that first day… but the overwhelming sense of safety I felt in his presence stifled it.

Their relationship is described with self-contradicting hyperbole and never does the reader glimpse the "heart" of the relationship, how the two characters actually function together as a couple. Bella falls in love with him without really interacting with him in any meaningful way beyond stares (and they're not even meaningful stares, the sort the allegedly pierce the heart and make one feel truly understood) and a few words of cryptic conversation. We never find out the contents of her Edward-filled dreams, since she doesn't really know enough of his personality to extrapolate what interacting with him would be like (unlike he, who was probably busy listening in on every conversation she has via mind-reading). Besides his statuesque beauty – literally, actually, since vampire skin resembles marble in its texture and hardness – he seems to have little to recommend him.

The most remarkable conversation is this one, early in their relationship:

I couldn't remember the last time I'd talked so much. More often than not, I felt selfconscious, certain I must be boring him. But the absolute absorption of his face, and his never-ending stream of questions, compelled me to continue. Mostly his questions were easy, only a very few triggering my easy blushes. But when I did flush, it brought on a whole new round of questions.

He asks her questions like "What music is in your CD player right now?" and what her favourite gemstone/flower/colour/book/movie is. It 's even likened in the book to psychoanalysis. It's baffling, since most hold these topics to be conversation starters, where there is an exchange of opinion and discussion as opposed to a one-sided interrogation. One could read this as how a vampire (due to being dead) is utterly unable to really experience real preference and opinion, thus is leeching of her vivid and exciting life experience, but it's not really the way it's presented to one. Plus, Edward does actually have opinions and is functionally the same as a normal human.

The Anthropologist posits that it's because the teenage female desires a teenage boy who inundate them all the questions like those on facebook and myspace, desiring to know all those pointless preferences like a "which angel are you?" quiz, because that is their standard of meaningful correspondence.

Meyer uses Edward's bloodlust as an odd metaphor for sexual desire – Edward's sexual desire is equated to his desire to drink (and kill) Bella – which gives the whole book an odd allegorical side, which Meyer explicitly point to. But it's a tightly-controlled-yet-overpowering desire which Bella can never understand, neither does she feel anything akin to it – really quite repulsive, outdated sexual politics, in my opinion, but it's found in trace quantities in at least half the romance novels on the market, so I'll not harp on that too much. Elizabeth Hand finds in Meyer "unrequited female erotic yearning", but it's hardly the case. There's nothing even vaguely erotic about Bella's yearning. She's a good girl. Her admiration of Edward, though isn't physical – or so she insists. It's what's behind the face, she tells her friend, she's fascinated by the idea of a redeeming monster.

But Bella (unlike Jane Eyre, for example) isn't the agent of his redemption, she's remarkably passive throughout the story. Edward is already well on the road to redemption (set on by Dr. Cullen) when he meets her. Pillywiggin goes as far as calling her the "meatbag" Edward wheels about the place and refuses to let talk. Edward notes that he feels the most "human" when around her, but it's never really explained what that means.

(Actually, Dr. Cullen's backstory is really odd. It takes him, literally, months to develop the philosophy to drink animal blood instead of human. Seriously. How thick is this founding father of vampire "vegetarianism"? In addition, after a few centuries of self-control, he manages to resist bloodlust so much he can work in a hospital.)

Still, telling her that she must stay absolutely still when he kisses her, or else, he'll accidentally kill her, seems a bit much.

There really was no excuse for my behaviour. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure

Edward's declarations of his immense skull-crushing strength is weird:

"If I was too hasty… if for one second I wasn't paying enough attention, I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake. You don't realize how incredibly breakable you are. I can never, never afford to lose any kind of control when I'm with you."

With that kind of strength... well, surely he'd be accidentally putting holes into walls, breaking doorbells, stamping through floors... telephones must be a nightmare as he accidentally punches them apart with his fingers. But of course, this sort of strength only applies when with Bella (or alternatively, Bella is just made of tofu).

Speaking of kisses, the book also boasts of what Pillywiggen has branded the most unsexy kiss she's ever read:

He seemed unaware of his watching family as he pulled my face to his, lifting my feet off the floor. For the shortest second, his lips were icy and hard against mine. Then it was over. He set me down, still holding my face, his glorious eyes burning into mine.

Bella is rather frail, she faints at blood (especially inconvenient when dating a vampire) and later faints at Edward's kisses. She has a special scent that only Edward can smell (no, I don't know why, or how he knows this) though she is still immensely attractive:

"If you didn't smell so appallingly luscious, he might not have bothered." [...]

"I thought… I didn't smell the same to the others… as I do to you," I said hesitantly.

"You don't. But that doesn't mean that you aren't still a temptation to every one of them. If you had appealed to the tracker — or any of them — the same way you appeal to me, it would have meant a fight right there."

After Bella is told that she is to inform her father that she's going out with Edward (so that he has an incentive to bring her back), she promptly decides to not do so, since if Edward succumbs to bloodlust and kills her, she doesn't want to get him into trouble.

It's probably common knowledge by now and barely worth mocking, but Meyer's vampires literally sparkle:

His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday's hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare.

The Anthropologist has much snark concerning how this conforms to teenage female aesthetics, but it's really getting too easy...

There is something compelling about the lion-in-love-with-the-lamb trope, and Meyer does milk it for all its worth, but she doesn't let the story darken or deepen. Edward really isn't a very objectionable vampire. Vampires being harmed by holy water and daylight reinforces as metaphysical acknowledgement of their inhuman, inherently diabolical nature. By getting rid most of the traditional vampiric trappings, Meyer's vampires just aren't very monstrous. Or scary.

There is nothing that isn't immediately forgiven by Bella. She isn't repulsed by the fact he doesn't drink blood, or that he has killed numerous people (admittedly serial killers, rapists and muggers) in the past in order to drink their blood. Her acceptance of him, this unconditional love, doesn't seem tested by his revelations. She takes it all in her stride. Monstrous, Byronic heroes work only if the heroine, the author, the reader, the rest of the cast, all acknowledge that he's actually monstrous.

It's telling, perhaps, in the phrasing of how Meyer says that Edward is based on Jane Eyre's Edward Rochester, because both "see themselves as 'monsters.'" It's the self-perception as monstrous, but Meyer, however sees Edward as a gentlemen, full of "olde-worlde charm." Of course, the Chronicler often finds that the world seems to reading a different book than her. Rochester is monstrous, in many ways. He was ready to commit bigamy (no small sin in Victorian England), he's got his wife locked up in his attic, madness aside, he's not really giving her any decent care or treatment. He also had mistresses (also no small sin in Victorian England). Jane is drawn to him, but she cannot forgive him and cannot marry him, so she runs away from temptation. But the point is, Rochester is a man weighed down by his past inhabiting a world that acknowledges his sinfulness. He's genuinely haunted by that past. Edward Cullen, on the other hand, flits about his teenage classroom. His decade of murdering murderers is brought up only once and never again, not even by Bella (seriously, that more than half her age spent drinking blood). Bella's absolute faith in Edward to control himself, to not kill her simply adds her mind-numbing naiveté and solidifies Edward as "just misunderstood."

Perhaps it's because he's so very well-controlled that Edward comes across as an automaton. Meyer speaks of "sacrifice" and she relates it to her college experience at Brigham Young University... It's as though she's not really aware that when most people write about "sacrifices" made for love, they don't mean "no sex before marriage" or "no alcohol at college." They usually mean things grander, more epic, shall we say. That Edward's sexual/bloodlust struggle is rather too dull to be placed at the fore of the book... well, we know he's not going to succumb. Bella's hardly going to die by his hand.... So where's the tension? Bella doesn't have graphic fantasies of him gnawing her neck off and doesn't really actively tempt him beyond just existing.

Meyer also notes in the same interview that "Edward goes to great lengths so nothing bad happens to Bella, she is cared for so much. A lot of the book's appeal is the thought of being loved to that extent [...] There has been some antagonism from men about Edward. They are jealous because they don't want to try that hard."

Of course men don't want to try that hard. And no man should. It's creepy. Edward seems to do nothing else but stalk her (and hunt for food). He spends all his sleepless nights sneaking into Bella's room and watching her sleep, seemingly immune to boredom. (Pillywiggin theorises that Bella's a one-woman radio station in her range of sleep-talking, but I doubt that's what Meyer has in mind.) He stalks her, literally following her about and finding out where is by reading the thoughts of those around her. And this is all before they actually get together and declare their love and all that.

Yes, Edward can hear the thoughts of everyone around him (except for Bella) and has no qualms eavesdropping on her conversations with other friends and acquaintances. Bella simply cannot talk to anyone about him, cannot confide in anyone without him finding out. It's creepily invasive. Worse, Bella doesn't have a problem with this. She doesn't feel as though her privacy was invaded, neither does she discourage him doing so beyond a jokey reprimand and she also doesn't feel that perhaps her friends wouldn't want creepy century-old vampire crawling all over their thoughts, making her come across as thoughtless and sociopathic.

At the end of the day, Edward looks seventeen, but why is he condemning himself to year after year of high school education? This is never elucidated in the book, but as Mrs Giggles points out, "I can only shudder as I imagine how vapid Edward must be to enjoy being a permanent teenage kid." But he doesn't act like a seventeen-year-old. Hand describes him as "an obsessively controlling adult male," more father than boyfriend, and she's not far off the mark.

"You are my life. You're the only thing it would hurt me to lose."

I know, you're seventeen and you've no idea what to do with the rest of your life yet. But to anchor your entire existence on someone else is creepy and unhealthy. Has she not thought of her parents, her friends, her studies. Has no other hobbies that would be inconvenienced due to her vampirism? Perhaps it's because Meyer's so very de-fanged her vampires there's really not much choice. Being a vampire is just better. Eternal youth, supernatural strength, agility, perception and beauty.... There simply aren't any downsides. White Wolf's vampires, for example, have no creativity and all that they feel and create is merely a reflection of their alive years. Admittedly it's ridiculously angsty, but at least, it's a tangible downside. "I want to be a great artist, but I also love you, dear vampire" is a reasonable (if angsty) plot.

In conclusion, it's bad. And boring. Bella is infantile, passive and spineless. Edward is annoying, holier-than-thou and inhuman. As a bonus it also contains ideas about sex and relationships that I'd rather teenage girls didn't make into the stuff of their daydreams.

---

* A first person narrator is limited to narrating what he or she sees. It is through this character's eyes that the reader perceives the world – a great asset when the character is interesting and has an idiosyncratic world view, but also an immense weakness when the author imperfectly hides behind this persona and starts puppeting characters about or worse, when unintentional voyeurism, sadism or masochism is created through lingering descriptions of things.

A dubious metaphor proved possible!

2008-10-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

Hurray! The Chronicler's dictatorship of this blog is finally broken! Now her in-depth academical analysis and recounting of deranged ramblings can be sullied by a cheap visual gag.

We at the Loinfire Club have long mocked all references to the pebbling of nipples. None of us were quite sure how such a process might occur, what it might look like or why it isn't treated at the bizarre medical condition it must surely be.

But now, during my recent dirt-snuffling adventures, I have come across (ba-boom-cccch!) some genuine pebbled nipples, in the form of these two ladies.

For anyone who cares, they're both neolithic statue-menhirs on Guernsey; on the left is the St Martin's example and the Castel example on the right.

But anyway, I refuse to believe any romance-novel damsel to have breasts as pebbly as these two.

Pillywiggin

It has arrived...

2008-09-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

Brisingr, by Christopher Paolini

The Royal Mail have kindly deliver to the Chronicler's house, a copy of Paolini's latest masterpiece, the third book in the four-book-Trilogy. It's a brick of a book, as the old Anti-Shur'tugal forums used to call it. It has yet to be opened and the Chronicler thought perhaps she should record a few thoughts on what she expects before she opens the book.

We're all aware of the very striking similarities between Paolini's work and that of Star Wars, but the reviews of both the books and especially the movie (example) have picked up on this. Whilst Paolini really can't write, he's not utterly retarded and is probably furiously trying to steer his plot away from any similarities. He's the master of retroactive continuity, rewriting the past and very reality of the setting to suit himself. We've seen him pull Great Revelations from bad-cliché-land throughout Eldest. He re-wrote an entire race (the orc-like urgals) in the last chapters of Eldest, a great Twist that, believe me, he had not even dreamt of when writing Eragon, and it shows.

Precisely what horrors will Brisingr bring? Well, besides the fact that I passionately hate the man for butchering my beloved Old Norse in the title (see here for full rant) and as much so for what he did in creating the Ancient Language.

So, what with Paolini actively working to topple ideas of what is going to happen next, some of the Star Wars ideas probably won't float. But I'm fairly sure there will be plenty of creepy love between Arya and Eragon, probably even more ignoring of Saphira as she is treated like an extension of her rider. I'm confident that Paolini's world-building skills won't have gotten better and he probably hasn't taken a course in medieval economics. His language will be even more overwrought and laboured than before. He may or may not have bought a new thesaurus but all the classic crimes of adverb abuse and adjective lists will no doubt be committed.

Oh, and random names from mythology will happen for no good reason.

The Chronicler should probably open the book now...

Cult of the Butcher God

2008-09-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

Along time ago, before the forming of the Loinfire Club, when the Chronicler wrote as an ambiguously-gendered poster known as "Theo", there was a theory... The Chronicler is still so very fond of it that she wants to share it yet again as she opens the new chapter of Brisingr.

We were reading Eragon, late one night, after enduring the horror that is the film (very pretty, though) and came up with the following theory, which neatly explains the some of the silly economics ofEragon and what happened to the gods of Alagaesia (as Eragon does repeatedly mention the existence of nonspecific deities.)

A Butcher requires 1200 people
A Blacksmith requires 1500 people
A Healer requires 1700 people
A Carpenter 550 people
A Tanner 2000 people
From: Medieval Demographics Made Easy

Yet Carvahall has but a population of 300...

The Cult of the Butcher God

The Humans of Alagaesia worship certain gods. One of the most important ones is The Butcher God. He has certain strictures, of which one can deduce by reading the book:

1) Thou shalt eat much meat; thou shalt not survive without eating meat.

This can be seen in Eragon and his family's need for meat to make it through the winter. Despite owning a farm and all its produce, they still need more meat from hunting and eat chicken for breakfast whilst their on the verge of not making it through the winter. Whatever happened to porridge? Or the eggs of the chickens. Or the milk from the cows.

This can also be seen in Eragon's raid of the Butcher when he runs away from Carvahall. He cares nothing for bread or other staple foodstuffs that don't rot in a day. He must have meat.

This also explains why Garrow's farm has such ridiculously small amounts of produce, yet still has excess to be sold off at Carvahall. They scorn the eating of vegetables. (They finished harvesting in about a day.)

2) The priests of the Butcher God shall be known as Butchers. There shalt be one in every settlement and they shalt be Clean.

This neatly explains why there is a butcher in Carvahall, when there is no need for one in a small farming settlement, where everyone can do their own butchering and own their own animals.

3) Thou shalt not kill your own animals. Take thou animals to the butcher so that they may be prepared in the Holy Way. Thou shalt then buy back thou meat.

This explains why the butcher, Sloan, has business. This explains why he has a ready stock of meat and even why he still has a stock of fresh prime cut meat to fill up Eragon's backpack when Horst demanded it, instead of having sold it all during the day.

4) Thou shalt cast aside the cheap cuts as they are unworthy of the Butcher God. Thou shalt eat only prime rump steak and the other good cuts of meat. Not even the dogs are fit to consume the unworthy meat.

It is obvious that everyone, including Horst, Garrow and Eragon, are devout worshippers of the Butcher God. Their concern over meat and their need for it thoughout the books can be seen.

This also explains the consumption of chicken for breakfast and Eragon's fondness of the simple fare of a hunk of meat boiled in salty water. This explains why Garrow isn't carefully boiling oxtails and offal for meaty stock for use in cooking.

5) Fish is not a Meat. Thou shalt not eat Fish instead of Meat.

This explains the curious lack of fishing near the sea or the enormous lakes (more on that later) of Alagaesia. They just don't need it. No one eats fish at any point, only ever cheese, meat or bread.

The second god of Alagaesia is the Smith God. These are his strictures:

1) Priests of the Smith God shalt be smiths. Only they shalt fix and make metal goods. For only they know the holy way.

Explains why every single village has its own smith and why Roran needs to take his chisel into Carvahall to get fixed. Of course, this is discounting the other meaning of chisel-fixing.

2) Thou shalt always take at least two apprentices.

Because one just isn't good enough.

Neatly explains why Horst needs two apprentices when he's working in one small village in the middle of nowhere, with nary a long distance journey horse in sight.

3) All thou horses shalt be shoed.

Gives Horst the business he needs when farm horses often don't need the shoeing due to only ever plodding on soft soil.

4) Thou must be a Master Smith to create complex machinery.

Explains why Horst is consulted for those damn mill parts. It's not a matter of skill, but of religious status. And that's never logical, is it?

5) All things shalt be forged and wrought. Even if they really shouldn't. Thou shalt love all things made of shiny metal. All things of worth shall resemble metals. Liquid and the appearance of liquid makes things more Holy.

This explains the poor starving family can spend money on trinkets, as Garrow repeatly produces not very much money from his pocket and tells Roran to spend it on a trinket. It also explains how the elf's helmet in the prologue is "wrought" out of amber and gold, wrought being a very specific action of folding and beating metal. Nigh impossible with something as soft as gold and as brittle as amber.

This also explains Chris' habit of describing things as "wrought" and "forged" out of something when its a mind-bogglingly stupid mixed metaphor that just doesn't work. Also, it explains Chris' other annoying habit of refering to things resembling liquid metals and gems. "Molten copper", "liquid diamond", "liquid silver"... etc...

This explains why Chris spends more time describing the sword (Ra'zac) than Eragon's angst about his dying uncle or the sheer horror of the death-strewn village. He spends far more time gazing on the arrows and spears.

6) Gold is the most Holy of all metals. All things of Importance shall be made of its brilliance. Next most holy is silver.

Explains why Eragon's armour is made out of gold, the very soft and heavy metal that is useless as practical armour. The helmet of gold in the prologue and assorted other inappropriate objects made from this metal.

There is also the Judgement God, who decides what is good and evil. He is probably often depicted playing chess, with black and white pieces. His strictures are as follows:

1) All Good things shalt be beautiful, shiny and white. All Evil things shalt be black, ugly and smelly.

This explains how Arya can smell of pine trees after months of imprisonment with the Urgals, who smell of fetid flesh.

This also explains the appearance and colour of everything in the book, such as the black arrows of the Urgals vs the swan-feather-fletched arrows of the elves. This explains the white baby on a spear and the black crow about to eat it.

2) Killing is neither good nor evil. If you are good, it is good to kill evil things and evil to kill good things. If you are evil, it is evil to kill both good and evil things.

The elves are fervent worshippers of the Judgment god. His duality can be seen rather prominently in their descriptions. They kill Urgals and other evil characters without reservation. They mutilate enemy corpses and kill envoys, and it's all okay, because they're Good and the enemy is Evil.

Finally, there is the Merchant God. He is less widely worshipped, but we can detect his cult in the major trading cities.

1) Taxes are Evil as they Oppress trade.

This explains why the Empire of Galbatorix is evil, despite having no other obvious act of oppression. Taxes are evil in the eyes of the Merchant God, and that is why the Empire must be deposed.

2)Thou shalt keep records of All thou transactions on Parchment.

This explains why everything is written on parchment instead of paper. (Parchment being expensive things made out of animal skins and paper being the cheaper stuff made out of wood chips and bark.) This also explains why records have been kept about the selling of Acid-Oil to the Ra'zac, which really has no reason to be on records anywhere. Empire owned ships, shipping to locations of the super-secret hideout of the Ra'zac shouldn't really leave a paper trail, yet it does.

Cult of the Farmer God

Thus are the strictures of the Farmer God:

1) All farms must be as far from cities as possible, so as not to be tainted by their civillisation.

Explains why there appear to be no villages or farmhouses or fields near cities. It also explains why Carvahall, little village at the edge of the great and glorious Empire, is featured on the map of it. It is a farming village furthest away from the cities, therefore it is becomes a site of pilgrimage and holy importance. Hence all the traders travelling there every year, why else would they visit? After all, villagers from a community with its own smith and tanner - thereby usurping all possible business from visiting tinkers - should be travelling to a market town yearly instead.

It also explains why Garrow's farm is a whole ten miles away from Carvahall for no real reason.

2)Thou shallt sell your Produce to the first trader thou meetest who will buy it. Thou shalt not hold out for a better deal.

It explains why Garrow sells his produce to random traders instead of travelling to a market town where he would set his own price.

It also explains why Eragon only manages to sell his horse for "a few coins", when it should be worth quite a lot of money, as horses are. (Horses are worth something in the ball-part of 300-600g of silver.)

3) Thou must pick a variety of crops on the same day. Thou shalt pick from each of your crops on each day of the harvest, for all are equal in the Eyes of the Farmer God. And thou shalt store it in a Holy Place.

Explains why Garrow and his helpers pick a little bit of everything: "last of the barley [...] prickly-vined squash, the rutabagas, beets, peas, turnips, and beans" (p.21, Eragon, hardback) all on one day. They should have more produce than that, so, if we give them the benefit of the doubt, they're using some mighty interesting picking tecniques.

4) All produce of the farm is holy in the eyes of the Farmer God and must be preserved for as long as possible. Eat of cheese and bread, the holiest product of the Farm.

This is why they carefully preserve everything for no reason and then neglect to eat it at any point. Or even think about eating it.

This explains why they only ever eat bread and/or cheese, when the characters of Eragon are not hunting. They do occassionally eat porridge or other foodstuffs, like that cherry pie of Eragon's (cherry pie is holy because it contains preserved cherries), but mostly, it's just bread and cheese.

It also explains why Eragon's bread can last over two weeks in the desert.

This also explains why Eragon feels the need to preserve Brom's body. And where Eragon has seen a mummy before (cf. the nitpick of Garrow's description). The Farmer God acts as the God of Death, or at least, death rites, in the bizarre culture of Alagaesia.

5) Thou shalt not improve thou fields with fertilliser or irrigation or any such other unnatural acts.

This explains why there is so much dry grass around Carvahall which should be irrigated and fertillised into good farmland and thus producing amounts which could last them through winter without supplementing. Hence also Garrow and other farmers not needing to have a mixed farm (the most logical sort of farm to have in case crops or animals of one variety fail). Of course, we can assume this is a world where crop rotation hasn't been invented yet.

Not wanting fertilliser would mean not needing to keep animals for that ever useful byproduct.

Moon Shadow, continues, part four...

2008-09-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

Bonegeek: "Are you sitting comfortably?"

Wiping my hands on the skirt of my fitted kirtle, I flung the door open.
The Pedant: "How do you fit a kirtle? It's a shapeless, loose garment."

He had the sexiest voice I'd ever heard. The Star Goddess herself would be weak in the knees with his voice.
The Chronicler: "No, she wouldn't. The Star Goddess is made of tougher stuff than that."
The Pedant: "She doesn't have knees."
Big L (mistaking him for the hero): "She's seen him jerk off in a box."
The Pedant: "What you need is not a prayer or a summoning spell, it's a personal ad."

A face like a fox, angles and laughter.
The Pedant: "Angles plus laughter does not equal fox!"
The Anthropologist:It's a mokosh on his head."

Eyes the color of turquoise stones and just as bright. They very nearly matched the unusual jerkin he wore.
The Balance (who allegedly has fashion scent): "Ewww!"
Big L: "It's always about the jerkin..."

(The Chronicler notes that this seems to suggest fashion-wise, this scene is somewhere in the Renaissance.)

Turquoise leather wasn't something I'd seen before...
The Balance: "That's because it's tasteless!"

... but if designers saw how this man wore it, blue jerkins would be all over the streets.
The Pedant: "Turquoise is not blue!"
Bonegeek: "I think I need to make some turquoise armour now."
Ramble and diversion about Maelstrom and Bonegeek's desire to get some turquoise marriage armour.

"come in," I said, warmly, "No, the position isn't filled."
The Anthropologist: "Dodgy comments..."
The Anthropologist: "He's wearing a turquoise jerkin, he has to be trustworthy!"

"I hadn't realized from the ad," he said, "but you're a Love Wizard, aren't you?" [...]
Not stupid, then. "What gave it away?"
The Pedant: "Because she's only wearing a kirtle."
The Anthropologist: "Because she has a heart in her pentagram."

Oh, my flier had finally found the guy I needed, the guy I wanted.
The Pedant: "He's literate."
The Anthropologist: "On the bright side, we haven't had any I'm not a Slut moments."

I sent a mental kiss of thanks to the Star Goddess.
The Anthropologist: "Who didn't appreciate it..."
The Pedant: "and washed her face afterwards."

Retrieving the Wabizi hand mirror from the end table, I settled next to him.
The Anthropologist: "Is that a second wave feminist hand mirror? The ones you use to inspect your own vaginas with?"
The Pedant (in some sort of flashback): "Middle-aged muff!"

If he passed the mirror's test, I'd have the perfect partner. Handing him the mirror, I said, "Look in the depths for a minute while I ask you some questions."
The Anthropologist: "Can you try to find my clit?"

The mirror reflected a truth for him nearly immediately. He had strong magic. [...] He was touching the face of a woman, both gazes filled with an intense love. She was beautiful. Her chestnut-colored hair was twisted at the top of her head.
The Balance: "Like Palin."
The Anthropologist: "Yes, yes, like Palin."

Wispy tendrils had escaped, and they framed her high-cheekboned face.
The Anthropologist: "Like Palin."

Her eyes looked kind.
Bonegeek: "Not like Palin."

"This is amazing magic," he said. "I've never heard of such a thing."
(The Chronicler wonders why, since he lives in the same bloody world setting. Is he part of the underclass? The unmagical masses? Who knows?)

In the depths of the glass, I watched as Fyord presented a box made of rosewood to the beautiful woman.
The Anthropologist: "It's a bomb, isn't it?"
The Pedant: "It's a baby's leg."

A fire crackled in a bedroom...
Big L: "We need to clarify this to be a metaphorical fire..."

...sending cozy shadows dancing across huge tapestries. Bathed in the light of flickering flames, the largest tapestry depicted fair maids picking daisies form a huge field of wildflowers while tall hounds stood at their sides.
(Tapestries are expensive things, dear reader, even today. It rather undermines their later claims of poverty and financial problems.)
The Anthropologist: "I'm making that a new category for Housekeeping fetishes!"
Big L: "You can't ... you're trying to kill us with the sips we'd have to take for that?"
The Balance: "She can, she's got the book."

Lying on a tall four-poster bed made of cherry, the woman wore a filmy gauze of virginal white. More relaxed, Fyord lay naked beside her, holding her hand. She looked ready to bolt...
The Anthropologist: "That's not a good sign."

He did it again, getting closer to that ticklish spot beneath her arm.
Bonegeek: "Oh, how erotic..."

...she picked up a pillow and bopped him over his head.
The Anthropologist: "And then beat him to death with it. Dear God, please!"

He ran his hand over her stomach, her ivory thigh.
The Balance: "She's only go one leg... it's a very expensive prosthetic."

She quivered under his touch, but fear wasn't on her face. Anticipation was.
The Balance: "It's literally there, sitting. It's a little imp by the name..."

On the love seat next to me, Fyord placed his hand over the glass protectively. "That's my wedding night," he said.
Bonegeek: "She's a voyeur."
The Chronicler notes that it's quite an invasion of privacy to look into the memories of a job applicant. Why can't she just ask him questions like a normal person? This is a setting that awknowledges "brainscans" as creepy, but somehow when you're doing it through a mirror and it's the heroine doing it, it's perfectly alright.
The Anthropologist: "This is a lot quicker than installing security cameras into everyone's houses."

From this bed, a tiny kitchen could be seen.
The Anthropologist: "Good housekeeping fetish!"

This image must have been from that morning, because Fyord was wearing his unusual turquoise jerkin...
Bonegeek: "I should hope significant time has passed, since she's thick with child."
Big L: "It could be magic semen."

"You love her, don't you?" I asked, knowing the answer before I heard it.
"With all my heart. Ceara's brother gambled away the family fortune..."
The Anthropologist: "So you have mindrape magic of many varieties, but you choose not to use it for anything useful. Like finding that rapist, instead you go off and pry on other people's honeymoon night."

"Gambling terrorizes some people," I said. "It's an addiction, like alcoholism."
"Can you treat it?" he asked with a sudden rush of hope.
"No," I said, my mind working the problem as it always did.
The Chronicler: "Because no one has asked her this before and she's thought about it before."

"Addictions are hard to treat. Wizards can Sense the illness, we can see the disease in the molecular structures of the cells, but we can't change the cellular structures."
The Balance (pained): "You can see gambling in the cellular structure..."

I looked across the room thinking with frustration of the various addicts who'd sought my help. It didn't matter what they were addicted to – alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling – I couldn't help them.
The Pedant: "But you think a Love Mage would be able to help with sex addiction."
The Chronicler: "But why would you go to a Love Mage for addiction? Maybe you could try a Addiction Mage..."

"Perhaps someday..."
There followed here an explanation about hyphens and ellipsis, how they have complicated relationships across the pages of these books.

"Then you see I need a job, a profession. My parents and I decided a long time ago to ignore my magical aptitude and focus on the family business. I've been trained in banking and investment..."
(The Chronicler: "Yes, this is the pseudo-fantasy pseudo-Renaissance setting with half-orcs, brownstones and banking and investment banking firms.")

...but Ceara's brother... after he did with my signature, well, I've been blackballed from any of the money careers."
The Anthropologist: "Can't he just report the bastard and clear his name?"
Big L: "You have seen the Police in this setting."
The Pedant: "They're only interested in cum-covered hoboes."

"I'm a Tan," he said, his dark hair hanging in his eyes.
The Anthropologist: "That's the lamest magic colour ever."
The Pedant: "Is it better or worse than brown?"

"I can't hire you," I said. The breadth of his shoulders gave me so many reasons to want to hire him.
The Chronicler: "I can only think of one there."

"But you've found your heart's mate. If you take this job with me, the love of your life will be jeopardized. You don't want to put your relationship with your wife on the line for this, believe me."
"But she wants me to get this job as badly as I want it. We have a strong relationship."
Big L: "Waspor would approve of strength."

"Neither of you understand of a Love Wizard's assistant."
Big L: "I think we can guess."
The Pedant: "Maybe she needs love, as a love wizard."

"We didn't' know what kind of Wizard you were, but it's such a respectable line of work...
There are giggles over the word "respectable".

If only he weren't so happily married. "Fyord," I said, taking his hand in mine. I worked hard to ignore the chemistry of his cells whispering to mine.
The Balance: "What? Are they reacting? Fusing together into one horrible mutant?"

If you were to take this job, you and I would have sex frequently [...]It's true that many times you'd think – you'd feel like – you were making love to your wife. Those times probably wouldn't hurt your relationship."
The Chronicler: "Because if you're fantasising of someone else whilst having sex with your boss, it doesn't actually count."

"But there're other times when you'd have to lead the spell. During those times, you'd know exactly who you were having sex with...
The Anthropologist: "Because all the other times, I'd be drugging you to the point of oblivion."

...Very few human relationships can withstand that, and from what I've seen of you in the mirror ...
The Chronicler: "What did you see? Some generic love scenes? There was no personality developed there?!"

...it would kill you and your beloved."
The Chronicler: "Why can't she trust him and his wife to make that decision? Themselves?"
The Anthropologist: "To be fair, most people would argue that having sex with someone else ruins your relationship."
The Chronicler: "True, not everyone has an open relationship... but I'm sure Dan Savage will beg to differ."

... and I wished I'd found him first.
The Chronicler: "There you go. The true reason she doesn't want him is because she can't do with just sex and wants a lover instead of an assistant."

Fyord sat silently for a moment, staring at his hands as if they could help him.
Big L: "It's weird, I feel like I have cum on my hands."

"I need a job," he said finally.
The Anthropologist: "I can sweep the cum off the floor for you when you're done..."

"Fyord, I'm a Love Wizard. I fix relationships – not ruin them."
The Chronicler: "Curious how we're on page 26 and we still don't really know what she means by that."

"I have a friend at the local Guild who might be able to guide you toward a more appropriate apprenticeship."
The Chronicler: "Maybe one in which you work in an environment where everyone wears a mask with your wife's face painted on it. Because you really shouldn't be talking to anyone else... but as long as you think you're talking to your wife. It's all okay."

"That might help," he said. "I'm looking into every possibility."
Big L: "Not looking very hard, clearly."
The Pedant: "We're back to the fact that she needs a personal ad."

"Also," I added a warning, "Ceara is due within the month."
He looked at me and blinked. "No," he said. "She's due in two months time."
"I saw her only through the mirror, but I Sensed she's due imminently...
The Chronicler: "Imminently =/= a month."

Love Wizards deliver a lot of babies, and I'll happily deliver your child...
The Chronicler: "Because I'm that good. I see her through a mindrape mirror and I can tell... And more importantly, is there anything she doesn't do?"

He'd been so damn perfect. Grabbing the right hormones from his pituitary and his adrenal, pulling proteins from his blood to make love potions would've been so much fun.
Bonegeek: "Because biochemistry makes her hot."
The Anthropologist: "And makes us bleed."

Now I neede to make a new flier.
The Pedant: "Is it going to be described all over again?"

The Loinfire Club doesn't read... About that Night

2008-09-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

About that Night, by Jeanie London

The plan is simple. Julienne Blake will use self-hypnosis until she's discovered the sexy woman inside, then she'll seduce Nick Fairfax during an unforgettable night. And with a tantalizing performance for an audience of one, she does just that. But her sensual plan seems to have worked just a little too well, because Nick is begging for a return engagement.

Nick has never met a woman who could capture his attention so completely as Julienne has. Her risqué moves have him pursuing her all over sultry Savannah just to be alone with her. But he's not a long-term kind of guy, so his desire to extend this passionate affair has him completely baffled. Somehow he has to convince her there's more than that night between them....

The Chronicler will get back to the joys of My Fair Viking, no doubt, but first just a brief summary of the horrors of About that Night.

The Chronicler admits the use of the word "horror" is largely unjustified; the book was by and large quite s quite dull. The sex scenes were tepid, the choice of words routine (pebbled, check; turgid, check; suckled, check; use of sex to mean cunt, check) and really, even at less than two hundred pages, the London is distinctly running thin of ideas. The book smacks of the sort of three-year-old naughtiness, back when it's edgy to say "damn" when no one's looking.

But a reader who buys a book marketed containing hot, steamy sex (it is a "Blaze," after all) should really be less easily shocked.

(Or perhaps this all speaks of the youth of today being rubbish. Who knows? But Description Inflation is always a problem that haunts us all...)

London is far too fond of the word "naughty." It comes across as childish, especially from a woman who is three decades in age. Admittedly, that's her theme, but the words "naughty boy" elicits not a the mental image of some unrepentant playboy, it reminds me only of bad governess fantasies and that scene in Child in Time. Really. There is nothing remotely sexy about "naughty boys."

Jules (or Julienne) self-hypnotises. Yes. She repeats uninspiring phrases to herself repeatedly to condition herself to be more "naughty", and the reader has to suffer with her as London threads these phrases in italics throughout the narrative.

Naughty girls feel good about being naughty.

The Anthropologist thought this was a novel about a really sexually repressed woman discovering herself, fighting the expectations of a sexually conservative (probably quite religious, this being set in Savannah, Georgia) society around her. But there is no evidence of this. If anything, the heroine (or the author) has so completely internalised her "nice girl" attitudes that there are not expectations for her to defy and confound besides that of her Uncle Thad (but we'll come to that.) No one even raises an eyebrow over Risqué Theatre, a building allegedly festooned in plaster phallus-wielding cherubs (also an unsexy image, seraphim maybe, but not cherubs. I'm not sure any world of politicians capitalising on the fundamental interest humanity has in sex can really justify government funding for this. Is there no one who thinks its tasteless and pornographic in all of Savannah? In a society so comfortable with its own sexuality, why is Jules so very uptight about hers?

The Chronicler also categorically state here, dear reader, that there is nothing remotely sexy about winged children with erections.)

Where is she getting her "good girl" ideas from? Maybe it's just Uncle Thad and she really has no other friends, thus giving him plenty of space to instil his ideas of womanhood into her. Jules doesn't need to escape the judgement and hypocrisy of the tag "good girl", there simply isn't the chorus of condemnation needed to create that atmosphere. Jules' friends and students and colleges all cheer her on and even the scandal that looms towards the end of the book over her sleeping with Nick is really rather tame. Hardly anyone is scandalised by it; instead the campus coos over how sweet and wonderful it all is. I suppose London has to construct and environment that Jules can later be comfortable in, but it results in creating a heroine with seemingly completely groundless neuroses.

Naughty girls feel naughty.

Jules is, frankly, stupid, when it comes to trying to self-hypnotise herself into self-confidence. For starters, she decides to unleash her inner sex kitten on one man and only man – Nick Fairfax, the man she has stalked for years (technically she's only obsessively read all his articles, books, theses and know about all his projects). This plan is ever so doomed to trample on her poor, poor ego if this book was set anywhere other than RomanceNovelLand. After all, whilst he has a "naughty boy" reputation, he might not be into her type. He might be having a bad night. He might have already made plans. Who knows? But the point is, it opens her up to the very real possibility of rejection and rejection for reasons that have nothing to with her. Hanging all her hopes of self-confidence and self-discovery on Nick flirting back seems unwise, to say the least.

Naughty girls talk the talk.

She is naive to the point of oblivious, especially since she allegedly regularly visits the Risqué (for architectural appreciation, I'll have you know) and has a saucy-speaking stylist. She is ridiculously surprised that phone sex involves masturbation:

"Touch yourself, Jules." [...]

Julienne lost her fragile hold on her growing confidence. Poof. [...] She supposed she should have seen it coming. After all, she was playing naughty with a man who'd honed the concept to a science.

Phone sex really isn't that scandalous. The whole business of Jules running into something and getting entangled deeper than she expected is tedious and rather insulting. I suppose it boils down to "nice girls don't ask for sex", but this never played with in the novel. It really just reinforces the ideas, if anything. "I dress in really provocative clothing and then flirt with a man with a reputation, after a sex show might lead to him trying to get me in bed? I couldn't have guessed." "You mean trying to arouse someone by talking sexy to them on the phone might lead to masturbation? I'm so surprised I get shocked out of my self-hypnosis!"

"I don't see what can be accomplished by making our relationship public? What's the point?"

"To broadcast we like kinky sex."

Dear reader, you misled by the above throwaway line that there is anything other than vanilla sex between the protagonists. There is talk of exploring fantasies about halfway and the Chronicler thought we might dabble in... no, just no. There isn't. London has no idea what she's writing. Maybe she thinks "kinky" means "really hot." The closest they get is the use of a sex swing, which whilst unconventional doesn't qualify as "kinky."

Nick wonders about women-who-you-marry and women-who-you-shag-and-leave. Whilst I'm really not that keen on secret-identity plots this book could actually have benefited from one, because his wondering over the woman is silly when he knows, frankly, both Jules (the naughty girl) and Julienne (the unsexy professor). He knows both of them and sees them work in their capacity, both inside the bedroom and out.

Most of the self-agonising comes from Jules wondering about how to reconcile the fact that she's now self-hypnotising herself to be with Nick. She thinks that it's a Deception and it makes her an evil woman. Equally she's lying to Uncle Thad as he disapproves of any possible relationship between Nick and herself (EVIL!)... but the argument that self-hypnosis is an external force that obscures the "true self" is somewhat odd. As the Anthropologist pointed out, that makes sentences like this possible: "Oh, I started going to Yoga class and then I met this guy. But he doesn't know the real me, the pre-Yoga me that isn't as calm and flexible. I'm deceiving him!" or the more extreme: "I'm bipolar and I take mood-stabilisers, but I shall never know True Love and no one can possibly know the Real Me that I'm suppressing!"

Incidentally, these neuroses over her own are cured by Nick telling her (talking to her ex, who's the a professor of hypnotherapy) that hypnosis can't make you do anything that isn't "in you" already.

Seriously. It's at the beginning of every book of the subject. A big warning sign to all who think they can use hypnosis to convince a stranger to kill their enemies for them. It's all about giving the control back the patient, not taking it away, accessing inner selves and resources and all that. How can she miss it?

And having sex. Which proves she's actually a passionate woman, deep down. The Anthropologist thinks she's really just a very lazy woman and blames the whole nice/naughty dichotomy for her failure to quite a dull five-year relationship and actually do anything worthwhile with her time.

There are minor wtf?! moments that reminds the reader that this book isn't set anywhere near reality. This is a world that takes active tabloid-sprawling interest in the love lives of its preservation architects. This is a world where it's unusual for graduate students to be used as a source of cheap labour (seriously, ever spoken to an archaeologist? A biologist?) and instead they hire random, seemingly untrained, locals. This is a world where a radio play called Hush Hush Honeys about an illicit, yet idyllic, love affair is the most popular thing on a student radio station named "Rebel Radio." This is a world where nepotism is perfectly acceptable and normal. This is world where snogging behind the bleachers qualifies as a naughty high school fantasy, where no one complains about students being made to work in a cock-studded theatre (seriously, it's America. Land of Abstinence Education. Surely some interest group will pick up on it.) This is a world without standardised data sheets (yes, this surprises us). This is a world where your professor's uncle can hijack the lecture and tell instead a random unrelated, but cute anecdote about your professor as a child (without anyone complaining that they'd really rather things went back on track. Like really. It might be useful.)

But really, what gets me the most the Great Plot Revelation: the hero and heroine conduct their super secret torrid affair, really rather badly. There is then the radio sensation that is Hush-Hush Honeys, about a pair of illicit lovers named Darling and My Love that seems eerily akin to their affair.

"Damn. That sounds like a guided tour of our weekend. We should check our clothes for surveillance equipment."

Who would go to such efforts to tacitly expose (or threaten exposure) their rather sedate sexual escapades? Is it the desperate debt-worn student who runs Rebel Radio and can benefit from the programme's phenomenal success? Is it Jules' bitter ex who wants to tear apart the couple by threatening exposure and thus shaming the hussy into getting together with him again?

No, it's Uncle Thad. The man who raised Jules himself. His source was listening to their phone conversations which he taped. He didn't just listen to some idle chatter and suggestive weekend plans. He was spying on their phone sex. And he didn't just end up listening to them out of a morbid and masochistic curiosity, a sort of inability to press the stop button when realised what the voice mail accidentally picked up. He listens to all their conversations, repeatedly to write the scripts of Hush Hush Honeys.

And instead of being horrified and saying something along the lines of "I understand you did this because you care. I love you, but I really don't think I can face you right now. And I'm moving out," Jules swiftly reconciled herself (after a brief bout of shame and mortification) with Uncle Thad and is understanding of his motives. He made her fling all about him and his relationship with her (as though everything in her life was about him) and then claims that he's actually letting her go.

His admission filled the ensuing silence with such richness of emotion that Nick had never before seen the like. Jules seemed to melt before his very eyes, her gaze suddenly bright with tears. She lifted trembling fingers to her mouth and blew her uncle a kiss. With a wink, he pretended to catch it in some private game. A charming little girl and her devoted uncle.

The whole confrontation scene is riddled with unintentional creepiness.

...as long as his dating Julienne hadn't harmed her relationship with her uncle...

No, Nick. Your dating Julienne doesn't and shouldn't harm her relationship with her uncle. His listening to the two of you having phone sex repeatedly, however, is a different matter altogether.

I can't really explain as well as Uncle Thad himself why he did it:

"I didn't write the serial to throw you to the wolves. I wrote it because I couldn't see another way of getting you both to wise up. You seemed quite content to treat your relationship with very little respect, like you were conducting some sort of sordid affair. I hoped if other people vied it with an equal lack of respect you might just come your senses."

And at the end of the day, the book doesn't celebrate "naughtiness," all it does is tell us what we all know already. Good little heroines are allowed to have good sex with the hero, but they must buckle down, get serious and get married at the end of the day. And it's not an affair coming maturity (forgetting to end, even) so much as showing how very damaging the assumption of no-strings-sex can be and that a Conscious Decision must be made before a relationship can be truly considered "serious."

Afterthought: Why is it that heroines are almost inevitably in the careers of their fathers/mothers/uncles? There's a creepy little bonding moment between Nick and Uncle Thad as Nick tells him that he'd always admired and been inspired by the veritable Titan of preservation architecture that was Uncle Thad, even from a young age. And Uncle Thad confesses that he greatly admired Nick even though he disapprove of his personal life. Now, Uncle Thad alo has a protégé in Jules, who admires and is inspired by Nick... There is something to be said for male bonding through an exchange of women.

Not to mention he plans her future life and job with Uncle Thad before he consults her about it.

"As much as I enjoy our sexy phone conversations, I want to be with you, which is why I spent the afternoon talking to your uncle about a solution."

Unsure whether to smile or cringe when she imagined Nick and Uncle Thad with their heads together over a drafting table, Julienne braced herself for the worst.

Seriously, if you're searching for a solution as to how to best avoid a long distance relationship with the woman you love, shouldn't you talk to her instead of anyone else? Even if he is her respected and revered uncle who spies on your phone sex?

My Fair Viking, continued, part two

2008-09-25T06:20:00.000-07:00

Part one of this masochistic dissection was here.

Clash between slapstick and gritty plot

My Fair Viking strains between gritty realism and wacky matchmaking-driven slapstick. The result is a book that jumps from one to the other in no logical emotionally true order, trying to elicit sympathy for one thing that is later laughed off as inconsequential.

Here, the winters were long and bitter, often with only one or two hours of daylight; survival took precedence over all else… or it should have.

No one at Stoneheim cares about survival. But more to the point, the slapstick: we're treated with a scene intended to elicit heart-wrenching grief, the scene that should be setting up Adam's inner turmoil and reasons why he doesn't easily open up to people anymore.

Adam the Healer dropped to his knees and beat his breast.

It is the Big Reason why he doesn't want to ever heal again, why he is willing to just sit on his estate and write his book... but then we leap straight into a scene of Rashid (the wacky, comical relief Muslim) pestering to have a harem. The change is simply too abrupt.

And this happens repeatedly. Bolthor (the comedy relief skald) entertains us all with a terrible, terrible poem about how Trya captured Adam and hurled him over her shoulder (in order to get him to save her father, of course):

Now, some say she needed his talent,
That a miracle in him the gods sent.
That very well may be true,
But on this idea you should chew:
Exactly which talent of the knave
Did the fair maid crave?

But this is whilst Thorvald is still in a coma, his life still at risk and no one knows whether or not he'll survive. If he dies , the succession will be in question; whilst Tyra is supposed to take over and has been groomed to take over by her father, but the reader is given no indication that she is capable (because the narrative is too busy grooming her to be Adam's bride and helpmeet, see below) of that responsibility. But more to the point, it's fundamentally tasteless to be suggesting that an action done out of filial piety is done for sexual desire when the fate of her father is still unknown, when in theory they're all bracing themselves for his possible death and consequent political turmoil. Perhaps afterwards there can be some ribbing about it, when the danger has passed (not all danger, of course, that would be silly)but joking during, and especially when everyone knows Tyra is uncomfortable with the idea of being with Adam, it seems... yes, tasteless.

Tykir and Alinor declared it the best poem Bolthor had ever created.

Of course, some may find it amusing, this undermining of their commander's power in a time of potential invasion. The humour isn't even potentially bracing or encouraging. Bolthor is singing this to Tyra's family (all about to suffer personal loss) and the three hundred fighting men of Stoneheim. These men are about to put their lives on the line to defend the place; they need to be utterly confident that Tyra is the best warrior to lead them.

The second day, she'd taken a bath, willingly, in a marble tub big enough to hold twelve people. Then it took eight eunuchs of considerable size to hold her down while every single hair on her body was plucked off.

Tyra is plucked clean of hairs at the harem where she was held captive. This is clearly quite a traumatic experience for her since she was held down during it and afterwards her shaved crotch is enough to drive her to run away from Adam so that he won't see it.

"They plucked all the hair off my body. So there! Now you know." She started to weep again, this time with mortification.

But this incident isn't treated as a violation of her, only actual rape counts as that. Adam reacts violently to the possibility that Tyra may have been raped during her stay at the harem:

He immediately stiffened. "You were raped? My God, I will go back and kill the old buzzard. I thought you said you had not been touched."

However, having hairs plucked from her body, is something to be laughed off until the woman realises she's being silly. It surprises him that the experience bothers her. That being held down by burly eunuchs and plucked, chicken-like, is a physically painful and traumatic experience whilst being held captive in a land where no one speaks her language surprises him. He does not even bother assuring her that she is still attractive without hairs and simply wouldn't stop the stream of chicken-jokes – under the impression, no doubt, that such humour will shame her out of feeling violated. Hill seems to share this opinion as Tyra's mortification is played for laughs and it really doesn't make me feel inclined to like Hill.

My Fair Viking is simply surreal in the characters' inability to react to the gritty reality around them and the author's refusal to acknowledge that the reader may find some of these details harrowing. There isn't even a show of stoical survivalist ethic against the hardships. They are simply forgotten within the chapter. No one remembers the women and children who were taken in the raid. Dagma's rape, difficult labour and consequent stillborn child is brought up in the middle of a sex scene. (I know Hill's going for unsexy, irrelevant conversation to contrast with the "sexplay" but it's unpleasant to point of reminding us of... well, see below)...

The Rapist Hero

It's often the case that one hero or another is described as having dubious ideas about consent (Decadent's hero comes to mind) or is a little too forceful for one to be actually comfortable with him.

"Nay, I will not kill you immediately. [...] I have other plans for you first. [...] First, I intend to tup you till your toenails curl.[...] Then I will tup you again till your eyes roll up into your head. [...] And then I will make love to you again and again till you beg for more. That should take, oh, a sennight or two… or five. [...] Then… and only then… will I kill you," he concluded, and grinned mirthlessly at her.

Azrael: "It is creepy. It is not a piece of hero dialogue. That is cheap villain dialogue. Normally, in this genre, I would expect that paragraph to be eventually followed by a revelation that the speaker is secretly an evil gay paedophile."

After he is captured by Tyra, he is tied to the mast and part of their merry banter includes his threats of raping her when he gets free. Now, granted, he's held captive against his will and there is some obvious physical attraction between them – but attraction is certainly not consent. And from his point of view, without the aid of an omniscient narrator, he's just issuing threats of repeated rape that ends in murder. That's neither sympathetic, justified nor sexy.

The dialogue must also be placed in the context of a world in which rape is a very real threat. Dagma, a fourteen-year-old girl, we are told, has been raped by a passing tradesman. Women and children were captured by Danes and you can imagine what will follow. Tyra is held captive in some sultan's harem and whilst not actually raped, felt violated and it was a distinct possibility in her time there.

When he was done stitching her wound, he acted quickly. Grabbing her by the waist, he tossed her onto the table face down and flipped up her tunic. She was screaming like a banshee and trying to rise, but he had one hand firmly on her neck and the rest of his body weight pressed over her bottom. Leaning back, he noted that she was not wearing a codpiece, but she did have on some kind of loin cloth. He ripped it off so that he could examine her arrow wound.

For a bit of context, this takes place right after Tyra has claimed she word a codpiece under her clothes. Tyra had specifically stated last time he offered to look at the wound that she doesn't want his hands on her. Adam is "examining" the arrow wound her on her ass (from Alrek's careless bowmanship; because Vikings never bother teaching their children the common sense of not firing when there's someone between you and the target) without her consent. I really don't care that he's a doctor and is more qualified than the blacksmith. He simply didn't even bother asking her to show it him before flipping her over and ripping her loincloth off. As Azrael put it, "Well, he's clearly a cock."

Chronology and Internal Inconsistencies

It's October throughout the book. Despite constantly being informed that sennight after sennight has past in the italics before a chapter, it's always, always October. Adam arrives in Norway in October, sees "Butchering Day" (early October, we're informed) and after the wacky adventures in the Byzantine Empire (taking at least seven sennights of travel or something like that, it's still October.

Exactly when does Adam earn his fame as a healer? I know people have long memories, but he was in the East learning medicine from "the world's best physicians" (but not a university the way a real medieval physician would have) for several years, during which he wasn't practicing and therefore can't be reputation-earning. After returning and finding Adela dead, he hides for two years – It's upwards of five years he spends away from the West. How is it that he is still the most far-famed and allegedly best Healer in the West? Is his absence making him into some sort of living myth? Have people forgotten about his failures? Is it because he's related to Rain?

Also, why does Adam have a dozen changes of clothes, his sword, his books and his shield with him at Stoneheim? He was kidnapped and wasn't exactly given any time to pack for his trip and his captors are hardly the considerate sort that would helpfully gather his belongs for him. Even if they gathered whatever looked like medical equipment, why would they pack his weapons? He's not going to need it on a trip to heal the king of Stoneheim.

Ingrith sniffed the air that morning, noticed the frost on the herbs in her kitchen garden and a few snow flurries in the sky. Clear signs that winter was almost here.
Satisfied, she gave a hearty shout of "Butchering day!" in the great hall where everyone was breaking fast.

Yes, but different cattle and pigs were butchered at different times during the year. Given that we're in October, it should be cattle and sheep that meet the fatal knife, not pigs. Swine get butchered later, somewhere in November, usually.

Wacky Muslims

"Nay, master, do not speak such sacrilege. Only Allah, or your Christian God, should make such destiny-decisions," his assistant Rashid cautioned softly, putting a comforting hand on Adam's shoulder.

Rashid is the wacky Muslim sidekick of Adam. He specialises in obsessing over harems and doling out Arabic proverbs. It's a walking, talking insultingly simplistic stereotype. He's also really, really annoying.

To all of these, Rashid nodded and replied, "I swear on the feet of Allah!"

Islam is an iconoclastic religion. Among many other things, it doesn't do humanoid depictions of its deity. Allah doesn't have feet. Even a quick swing onto The Godchecker could tell you that.

The odd thing about Rashid is his sheer inability to get along with anyone. He cites his god Allah with great frequency, he tries to get every attractive woman to join his harem and generally makes a nuisance of himself by offering unwanted advice. The real question is, why hasn't he been chased out of whatever settlement he's in with pitchforks? He's obviously foreign, speaks in some unknown language (possibly of curses) and keeps calling on his heathen God. The Norse might put up with him, what with being polytheistic and quite far travelled (the men, at least), but why are the Anglo-Saxons putting up with him? It's mind-boggling how no one regards him with even the slightest bit of suspicion. Especially since he's doing a lot of dodgy things: he utters a constant stream of blasphemy; he almost certainly doesn't attend church and he's been hitting on all the woman.

"Perhaps you could travel partway with me… you and Rashid. He speaks often of a yearning to return to the warmer clime of his homeland."

And why does Rashid return with Adam to Hawkshire at the end of the book? He's been trying to get Adam to travel back with him home for most of the book, but then when he's in the East... he comes back?

Names, oh, the names!

Yes, England has shires, Sandra Hill. Well done. But none with names like "Hawkshire" and "Ravenshire." They stick out like sore thumbs and in a bad way. Shires, sorry to disappoint, don't have romantic names like that. Just to name a few: Bedfordshire (Shire of Beda's Ford), Legeceastershire (Shire of the city of legions), Grantbridgeshire, Wiltonshire (shire of Wilton, name of town, which is named after the river Wylye), Hertfordshire (Shire of hart's fjord), Buckinghamshire (Shire of Bucca's home), etc, etc...

Stoneheim's keep was a wood fortress, like most others throughout Norway. But that was the only way in which it was similar.

Stoneheim. What sort of a name is that? Heima is Old Norse for "home," which is why it appears in mythological place names like Jötunheimr (home/homeland of the giants). The settlement of Stoneheim is certainly not made of stone and the fields of its holdings are stone-studded. Are the people of Stoneheim made of stone? Where is the stone? And why mix an English word (Stone) with an Old Norse one (heima) in this jarring way? What reason has she to do so?

Dragonstead. Stead is English. Staðr, however, is Old Norse, meaning "place" or "stead," so pretty much the same thing. But why mix it with "Dragon"? (The Old Norse word would be Draki.) Dragons aren't really a good thing in Germanic myth and legend. You put it on the front of your longship because it's fearsome and scary, not because it's cuddly and lovely.

Fagrfjord. Here, we have an Old Norse word. But Fagr? Fair Ford?

Now, not all places in Norway or England or the rest of the world have prosaic names. After all, there's a Ravenswood and a Seven Oaks... but there's also the places in Iceland named by Ingimund when he got there: Saudadal (Sheep valley), Svinavatn (Swine lake), Hunavatn (Cub's lake), Hof (Temple), Stigandahrof (Stigandi's Shed), Hrutafjord (Rams' fjord), Vididal (Willow valley), Bordeyri (Plank headland) and Thordisarholt (Thordis' wood).

In fact, all of Tyra's sisters were legitimate. Her father had a tendency to marry his women, even more than one at a time.

Breanne, Drifa, Vana, Ingrith, Tyra. All legitimate daughters of Thorvald.

That makes no sense given the Germanic alliterating naming traditions for royal families. That's all I can say. They should all begin with same letter, if not the same component.

To be continued...

My Fair Viking... let me count the ways

2008-09-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

My Fair Viking, by Sandra Hill

The captain is everything a Viking warrior should be -- tall, fierce, blond, and curved in all the right places. Hold it -- curved in all the right places? That's right. This Viking captain, Tyra, is a woman, and a lovely one at that. For years her height and strength and sharp tongue have daunted any Norseman with marriage on his mind. But now, faced with her ailing father's vow that her sisters (all smaller, sweeter, and younger than she) will remain maidens until Tyra weds, the bold captain decides it's time to find herself a husband. That's when she meets Adam the Healer, the twofold answer to this maiden's prayers. The skilled physician can use his expertise to cure her father, and Tyra's more than willing for the tall, handsome man to warm her marriage bed as well. There's just one problem. It seems that Adam isn't inclined to take orders from anyone.... But Tyra isn't the first Viking captain to kidnap a likely-looking mate -- though even she admits it's generally the groom who wears the armor on such occasions. My Fair Viking is fun and fast-paced -- and, when Adam finally realizes what he's being offered, things get even funnier and faster.

It is hard to describe everything that's wrong with My Fair Viking, (the book that the Chronicler, the Anthropologist and the Balance ended up reading one day) but the Chronicler will valiantly try. These points are roughly – very roughly – organised in terms of their jarring and irritating nature.

Adam's Priority Chart

The characters have very bizarre priorities that boggle the mind and strips the reader of any sense of sympathy for them. What is more jarring is the way Sandra Hill seems utterly oblivious to the phenomenon of her characters behaving like... well, bastards.

Adam realises his calling in the field of medicine as he, at the age of ten, watches in amazement at his stepmother-to-be help a woman give birth (by making "a small cut in the place between her woman-folds"). He decides that it was his destiny to become a doctor and that was that.

(The use of the word "doctor" is jarring in and of itself, as it wasn't until late 14th century that it was used to mean a medical doctor rather than a learned man or teacher - some four hundred years after when this book is set.)

Of course, the hold this destiny has on him is weak, at best, as at the death of his sister, Adela, he decides he to give up medicine forever: "One thing is certain. No longer will I answer to the name of healer. I am forswearing medicine." He says this as he cradles his dead sister (he seems to care little for his step-parents) and as hundreds more lie dying around him. Now, I understand that he's really distraught and that his sister means a lot to him. However, it seems callous to the point of inhumanity that Adam could just walk away from these people dying of the wasting sickness.

Over and over, the sufferers called for Adam and his healing skills, but he had nothing left to give.

I could but assume he's collapsing out of exhaustion, but how about tomorrow and the day after? It's an epidemic. "The toll in lives thus far was horrible to contemplate," we're told. Doesn't Adam want to anything about it? If he went into medicine for more selfish reasons (like a fascination with the subject) rather than a desire to help people, it might have been more sympathetic, but now it seems only to highlight his lack of conviction and the sheer shallowness of his calling. He doesn't doubt his skill in healing or find it traumatic to deal with patients... he just stops, abandoning hundreds to their fate. He doesn't even try to console himself that there are monks and priests aplenty to deal with the dying, or that most are too far gone to be tended and need divine intervention and peace rather than a healer. He spares not a single thought or a smidgen of guilt to " the rows of pallets where dozens of people lay sick and dying of the wasting disease" when he renounces medicine.

(Incidentally, not to undermine the tragedy, but 27 really isn't that young for a woman to be dying in the early middle ages. Considering the very real threat of death that comes with pregnancy. Another question is why in the world isn't she married? Was she really that ugly? Also, we never find out why Adela was still in Jorvik when the epidemic hit, since most rich people knew to evacuate to the country when things look a bit sickly. Rain, "far-famed healer", may have felt compelled to stay, but Adela could have left.)

Arguably this isn't exactly distant from the expensive and elite medieval physicians that Adam may have been modelled on. University-educated and very rare, a physician could only be afforded by the very rich during the middle ages. Most simply sought out the local midwife, monks, nuns, folk healers and saints, which were cheaper and more widespread. But then, as pointed out, his calling was to heal and not to covet.

"Don't you want to know about my father's illness… so that you may be prepared to cure him when we arrive at Stoneheim?"

"Why should I inquire about his symptoms when I do not intend to treat him?"

Even as Tyra kidnaps him in hopes that he will save her father, Adam maintains that he has renounced medicine and he would do the dying comatose man no good, which at least shows he is committed to his cause and will not be swayed by tales of dying men. However, when Tyra is shot in the behind with an arrow (really, really stupid slapstick, I refer you to that section), Adam offers to remove it and Tyra is shocked and horrified at the concept.

"Nay, I do not want you touching any part of my body, and certainly not that part. Besides, I thought you had given up medicine."

"For this, I would be willing to make an exception." He was still grinning, but he meant it. For a view of her naked backside, he would do just about anything.

This exchange undermines any credulity that Adam has as a virtuous and selfless healer. He is later reluctant to treat the many who flock to Stoneheim to be healed by him, but leaps to the chance of seeing Trya's ass. It really isn't encouraging or endearing an action. It seems to show that he puts the chance of seeing an attractive ass above his solemn vow to his dead sister on his list of priorities, which is above healing the sick and weak. I would really be more suspicious of a man who's more concerned with seeing ass than healing head wounds.

More work for him, though, he presumed.

At the sight of the dying, all Adam could think of is that. More work for him to do. More bodies to operate on. He doesn't even wonder at the attack or what may have transpired.

Even Adam's book, his great legacy, he forgets soon after he puts down his quill.

More on Medieval Medicine and Midwives

The thing that enthralled Adam was what Rain was doing inside the hut. She was a healer, apparently. Not just a midwife, as some old crones were, but an actual trained physician.

I hated every word of that sentence. Mostly because the likelihood of Adam having seen "an actual trained physician" in his lifetime to know what one looked like is unlikely to the point of impossible. Him being a street urchin and physicians being part of the elite. In the 13th century, there were only 3 in all of Worchester. Secondly, counting on Adam's ingrained medieval misogyny in later chapters, women were never physicians. They were midwives, folk healers and nuns, but not physicians as a physician implies a university education (that was where the training comes from) and that required one to be male. A woman being a physician is about as preposterous as her joining the Varangian Guard – an idea that Adam finds so ludicrous he laughs for hours. Literally.

Of course, he might not have meant university-trained with those words, but rather some sort of folk healer, but then, what would the difference be? Both were trained as apprentices by masters, so it seems bizarre to privilege one over the other. Especially insulting is the way midwives are described as "just a midwife" and described as old crones. Where is he getting this inane prejudice from?

And how many times has the young boy seen midwives at work? Did he think Rain wasn't one simply because she wasn't old and ugly? How did he know most midwives didn't work with such magical efficiency? Episiotomies were first used in the 18th century, so is rather anachronistic in and of itself, but on top of all that, it also seems odd that Rain comes from the 20th century where the practice has been falling out of use and questioned since the 1960s.

The Cheerleader Attitude

"Cheerleaders" is what Mrs Giggles calls them in her review, and I think it's a good term for what the character do. They are all – yes, all of them, from Tyra's sisters to Adam's uncle to the precocious children – obsessed with getting Adam and Tyra, the hero and the heroine, together. Nothing is more important than scheming to get them into each others' "bed furs," as Hill puts it. Not only is this annoying, but the matchmaking shenanigans is set against the backdrop of Danish outlaws pillaging village outposts.

"Unless my father awakens soon and begins to show his face in public, this will be the first of many such strikes, and not just by Ejnar, either," Tyra told Rafn. "Every malcontent from here to Birka will be on the move, sniffing out any weakness in our flanks."

The Danes can smell weakness like a shark. Which is all well and good. But no one seems to care much. The matchmaking continues at Stoneheim. The sisters gossip exclusively about Tyra and Adam; nary a word about their dying father or worries about his comatose state crosses their lips. There are patrols, but only after the attack, which seems silly since they all know of the perceived weakness and should have been working hard to counter it.

They'd burned some timber longhouses, stolen cattle and sheep, taken a few women and children who were unable to run to the mountains, and killed a half dozen fighting men.

This is serious business. If one worries not about the lives that were lost, the captives that have been taken, then surely one must worry about the valuable cattle that were stolen. But the inhabitants of Stoneheim are above such petty cares.

"But we caught this raid early on. Now that we are forewarned, we will send reinforcements to man all of our vulnerable border lines."

Lies. Rafn says "we caught this raid early on" as though that piece of intelligence made any difference to the dead fighting men, the captured women and children and the stolen cattle. It didn't. The Danes had come and gone by the time they arrived. Incidentally, just before she departed Tyra ended up in a long and protracted discussion with Adam about Alrek's annual pay, their relationship and him wanting her to not go. It is utterly irresponsible that she delay going

...she turned and walked stiffly toward the groups of men and horses waiting for her.

It is made clear that her men were ready and waiting for her, but she feels that talking to Adam is more important than the possibility of a burning village. Again, she does not reprimand herself for delaying setting off. Though arguably, it's only ten, twenty minutes, it may be enough to see away the Danes, to engage them in combat – vengeance is better than nothing, after all.

The king was especially engrossed by the events surrounding Tyra and Adam, but he was also more than interested in the outlaws who'd attacked his holdings the night before.

It really reads as though he finds Tyra and Adam more interesting than the outlaw attacking his holdings. Despite having been informed that attacks have been made, and presumably, being the wily old king he is, Thorvald would know that a show of strength in his recovery is essential at this point. He feels no guilt for keeping his recovery a secret from the world because he's too busy perusing some "mush-brained" plot to get Tyra and Adam together. That this very secret is costing him the lives of his people and cattle from his holdings. Though arguably, him making a show of awakening a couple of days earlier might not have made a difference (as the news would not travel as fast) surely he feels the responsibility of his kingdom keenly enough to be ashamed of putting such a petty thing above his people.

Furthermore, he had already trained Tyra to be the warrior that succeeds him. Why does he need her to get married?

After Tyra runs away with her hesirs (further weakening the defences of Stoneheim), Thorvald insists on making the journey to go after her. A rescue and all that. Whilst his kingdom is still under the Danish threat. Whilst it is rather late in the season for an attack, but it seems foolish to underestimate the people who've dealt you a near-fatal blow and successfully raided your village.

The matchmaking plans are not even slightly dented by the attacks or the possibility of more attacks. Especially when the plans seems to involve undermining Tyra's authority as head of the hesirs (see below). It is inane to think making this match is worth undermining the authority of their father's successor in protecting them all. Have they really so much faith that their father would recover and thereby make Tyra's rule redundant? Or do they really have no understanding of how authority works?

All of the secondary characters sound the same after a few chapters as what little personality they have (usually a hobby that borders on obsession) is soon eclipsed by the all-consuming desire to see Adam and Tyra get it on. The stability of the realm, international relations, politics, the safety and wellbeing of others, all rank after.

Inexplicable Wandering Accents

Sandra Hill cannot do accents, so she should have just given up on them. The characters wander Cockney Street Urchin to Somerset Pirate to Yorkshire Farmhand to Modern American. The children, especially, are susceptible to this. The accent won't stay still halfway through a sentence. The uses of the "dost", "nay", "mayhap", "methinks" all sound as though she went through with a find and replace. These pseudo-Shakespearean words are used willy-nilly with less than archaic words like "barmy." The result is a mess and the sentences simply don't scan.

Women! 'Twas hard to figure them out.

The usage of "dost" makes even less bizarre since Hill uses it in the place of "do you", so "Do you think she would consent to wearing pierced bells on her breasts?" becomes:

Dost think she would consent to wearing pierced bells on her breasts?

But "dost" is the second-person singular simple present form of do. It's used with "thou". Dropping the "thou" consistently makes no sense. It's like saying the "do" without the "you."

Also, she uses "methinks" as a cipher for "I think" rather than "it seems to me", which is telling in certain sentences.

Incestuous Overtones

The Chronicler would be the first to admit that we are all too ready to read these into texts, but Adam the Healer's relationship with his sister is rather alarming:

Despite her being covered with filth from bare feet to lice-infested head, as he was, too, Adam thought she was more comely than a harem princess... not that he'd ever seen a harem princess, but he'd heard sailors speak of such.

Arguably, Adam has never seen a harem princess and doesn't know that they are objects of sexual beauty, despite listening in on the talk of sailors who would hardly be reticent about such things. He could have chosen other things of beauty – such as a memorable statue of the Virgin Mary, perhaps, or a folktale princess – which would be less inherently and blatantly sexual. Hill made a conscious decision here to compare the young Adela to a harem princess, in a book which features harems as a prominent fantasy, seems rather alarming.

Small Precocious Children

The Anthropologist and The Chronicler are hardly the sort to go cooing over small children, but they are quite confident that even the most soft-hearted of women would be repulsed by the sheer cutesiness of the children in My Fair Viking. Alrek, aged ten, is at the head of his tiny household, all of whom are younger than him.

Ten is not considered adulthood in Viking terms. Somewhere between fifteen and eighteen is the age most heroes in sagas (both legendary and historical) start out and that seems to be a good age. Puberty should be well underway (though bearing in mind it happens later in ye olde times) and they can handle adult-sized sword and armour. Ten, however, is nowhere near this and Alrek is described in especially tiny and undergrown terms.

As such, Alrek is not only too young to go aviking, he is also too rubbish. He is a walking hazard. No self-respecting captain would let him onto their ship and they would especially not give them special attention the way Tyra does. He isn't trained with a sword and is unable to row. He isn't used as a cabin boy or equivalent, so why he's allowed on is beyond the Chronicler.

"Me father left when I was five. Some say he is a fighting man in the Rus lands; some say he is dead." He shrugged with indifference. "Me mother died last year of the childbed fever. She were a kitchen helper. Two sisters and a brother I have back at Stoneheim. I am the oldest, so I mus' support them with the silver coin King Thorvald pays me each year."

(The Chronicler also wonders how in the world the littlest, Besji, who is two survived her mother getting "childbed fever" since there is no alternative to breastmilk. What was the little tyke drinking all the time its mother was lying dying?)

Furthermore, the idea of Alrek as head of his family is stupid given the communal living arrangements of Stoneheim and Viking society as a whole. They all lived in an enormous longhouse, ate together in the one enormous room and slept in the same enormous room. The idea that he is alone responsible for his siblings is preposterous. This is a society that is knit together with hand-me-downs. Soldiers aren't paid predominately annual fees but live off their lord and are given gold at his will ("ring-giver" and all that) and portions of booty.

If he's being trained to be a Viking warrior, then he should be trained with all the other children at Stonehiem. There are three hundred fighting men at Stoneheim, at least some of whom are married. I could but assume some of them have sprogged and want their offspring to follow in their footsteps. And if I recall correctly, they would be trained by the women when the men are away.

Alrek and his brood already have a family. The women of Stoneheim should be taking care of them along with all the other children. Especially given that they are increasingly incompetent as the story goes on. At first, they are described as clumsy but able to fend for themselves – tough, even – since, they've survived this long. And yet, they're not. At first, Alrek claims Besji is toilet trained and that they used to have to change her linens ever five minutes (incidentally, why are they using linens?!) but later they are shown unable to cope with Besji soiling herself and are harassing Adam to do it.

The children's shenanigans are supposed to be humorous, but it's annoying. Really annoying. And at times, very disturbing as we hear Alrek talk all sorts about virgins and sex. He peers into the room as Tyra and Adam have sex in an obviously supposed-to-be-funny way, but all it elicits in this audience is horror. The communal living should have made it into a matter-of-fact issue, but he gawks at it all in an annoying way.

Also, "youthling" is a stupid, stupid word. Worse than "youngling" and that's saying a lot.

To be continued...

(The Horror is not over Yet.)

Moon Shadow, continued, part three...

2008-09-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

Part One, Part Two.

The countertop was hard and not quite big enough...

The Anthropologist: "Is that some kind of Freudian slip... His insecurity over his cock coming out and being embodied by the tabletop."

"Love me, Gage. Hard and fast. Right now."

... I set myself at her entrance and asked, "Are you sure?"

The Chronicler: "Didn't she just tell him to do it? Is it really necessary to ask again?"

The Anthropologist: "He's read the new laws on consent."

My cock jerked...

The Balance: "Is that what he's doing in reality? It that why his box is in such a sad state of repair?"

The anecdote of the Box the Pillywiggin tried to live in was told and it was amusing.

One Thrust. My breath burst from me in hot gasps. Another thrust...

The Pedant: "I have the Count song in my head now..."

Bonegeek: "Lyric! I shouted... Oh, he's a man... (deeper) Lyric!"

She came with a primal screm: "Gage!"

Bonegeek: " I'm not going to scream it..."

Her feminine scent mingled with my strong one...

The Pedant: "Her scent of bread with his..."

The Anthropologist: "He smells of stilton, clearly, that's strong."

The Pedant: "So together they smell like a sandwich."

The Balance: "So they should have a threesome with someone who smells of pickle."

The Anthropologist: "I wonder if their children will smell of mayonnaise or some other condiment."

I traced her velvet ribs with my fingertips.

The Pedant: "Velvet ribs? What?! And how does he have access to them?"

...as my finger memorized the groove...

The Anthropologist: "Well, clearly, he's been working at it. He's got all the necessary holes prepared for easy rib-access, back during the honeymoon, things were less simple..."

The Pedant (singing): "Into the groove..."

And then my stomach gave a wretched gurgle.

The Pedant: "Medical complications! He's going to vomit in her."

"Hand me my panties, please."

I retrieved them from the floor, inhaling their scent as I gave them to her...

The Loinfire Club: "Eeew!"

The Chronicler: "He is hallucinating all of this. "

Bonegeek: "Why did he need to cast the spell?"

The Anthropologist: "Pink elephants."

Damn reality.

A steel-tipped, patent leather boot just missed my face...

The Chronicler: "So there are the witches!"

"Look at all these low-life homeless men," I heard the cop mutter to himself, slamming box after box with his heavy boots.

The Anthropologist: "Kill him! You have magic."

The Pedant: "He only has six bullets, you know."

My hands were sticky with come as I pulled them from my trousers. Lyric!

Big L: "So he was doing it with the box..."

The Chronicler: "Why in his trousers? Surely with no way to clean himself..."

The Balance: "Because it was really fucking cold?"

An I scrambled to my feet, the cop aimed for my balls, coiling his leg to unleash his worst.

The Anthropologist: "Oh, the cop is so going to wish he didn't do that."

The Balance: "The cop is mistaking him for someone else?"

The Anthropologist: "A slightly more sane hobo who has a better understanding of public decency."

A heartbeat before tasting pain, I Grabbed the man's ankle with my mind and twisted...

(The Chronicler notes that Grabbing works not only on a molecular level.)

I spared a moment to gloat. I might only be a Brown but my magic kicked ass – literally – when I need it to.

The Pedant: "Brown?"

Big L: "Brown, some sort of colour mage thing."

The Anthropologist: "Still, we've only seen the two characters do spells: he has had 100% success rate and at least two of hers have failed miserably."

"Stop, Pike," a woman cop said, making the cop skid to a halt... The planes of her cheekbones were interesting...

The Anthropologist: "Her face has Non-Euclidian geometry! She comes from Lovecraft!"

but her lips were toothpick thin...

The Anthropologist: "She's evil."

I wondered how the fat-assed cop liked having a woman for a boss.

The Pedant: "Or cum in his face. I thought he should have used that to his advantage in the fight. This cum has aids!"

"One of these is the rapist," Pike muttered. "Probably this one. He smells like sex."

The Balance: "He is covered in cum."

Big L: "Surely a rapist doesn't need to masturbate.

The Anthropologist: "All those lonely nights between rapes, when it's raining and you can't be bothered to go out and stalk another teenage virgin..."

Big L: "That's what your basement is for."

So the cops were hungry for roasted scapegoat, but I had no desire to be cooked...

The Anthropologist: "We're backed to the cooking metaphors.... And I'm adding a Homemaking fetish."

The Chronicler: "Sarah Palin!"

The Anthropologist: "I'm way ahead of you, Chronicler. "

I'd been sleeping rough for days now, maybe even weeks, not wanting to spend my last talens...

Big L: "I assume that is a currency. No idea what it's worth..."

...and my shelter had been beat to shit by a cop on a mission.

Big L: "It was a cardboard box, dude."

The Anthropologist: "Maybe it was a really good cardboard box. Though it is presumably quite soggy by now what with his cum and everything."

I could say I was innocent until the Star Goddess walked the earth again...

The Pedant: "She can't really walk the earth being a celestial being and all that."

They were going to cook me over the metaphorical roasting pit, marinated in fear.

The Balance: "Marinating in fear and cum... for salty goodness."

faced with Pike and his mistress...

The Anthropologist: "Pike... Even his name is food!"

Drooping my shoulders into the picture of humility...

The Anthropologist: "It probably not very difficult to look humble in these situations."

...followed the detective past huge harnessed Percherons, black as pitch, into the police cab.

The Chronicler notes that a Percheron is a powerful breed of draft horse.

No one said a word the entire ride.

The Anthropologist: "He's going to have to pay to have that cleaned."

Clapping hooves provided the only sound.

The Pedant: "Clapping isn't a very hoof-like sound.... Maybe there's a goat in the back clapping."

Big L: "Or a monkey."

The Anthropologist: "But everyone knows those have cymbals."

The Balance: "Maybe it's like in Monty Python with the coconuts."

Sitting in the stale-smelling office, I wished for any veneer of civility.

The Pedant: "You haven't washed your hands yet."

Couldn't someone offer me a coffee? A cigarette? An ale?

Big L: "Or somewhere to wash his hands!"

The Anthropologist: "How much do you be that he doesn't wash his hands for the entire book?"

There occurred a conversation here that is off the record in which it was discussed what should be kept on record.

"I'm Detective Habit," the cool woman said in an emotionless voice.

The Anthropologist: "She's not going to be wearing sensible shoes, is she?"

But I had no alibi for anything – I lived on the street.

Big L: "Surely there are other hobos who have wandered in and noticed you in your cardboard box."

The Anthropologist: "Maybe they had him beaten up and kicked him out of their alley because of his masturbating in cardboard boxes."

There was something about vibrating mascara at this point. The Chronicler doesn't really remember exactly what.

"Where were you three days ago?"...

I couldn't be sure, could I? My life didn't have the usual rhythms of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Showers in the morning and reading the paper at night...

Big L: "But surely he notices things like darkness at night and not darkness during daylight?"

The Anthropologist: "He's too busy in his box, he never looks outside."

I cringed in embarrassment. Was it that obvious I'd been homeless for so long? I'd had a nice job, a wonderful wife, and a great home...

Big L: "My other cardboard box is a Porsche."

The Pedant: "It was a box which had a Porsche in it once."

The Anthropologist: "What other excuse can he have? I was playing a hobo in a play..."

"Have you earned any money lately?... Panhandling, maybe?"

Big L (scenting a euphemism): "Oh yeah!"

The Anthropologist: "Panhandling, eh?"

"Not too long ago a man I knew had a cow having trouble with calving. I helped him."

"With magic." It wasn't a question. She'd seen me Grab her cop.

The Anthropologist: "This is the stupidest magical metaphysic ever."

"You trying to rise in rank?"

Bonegeek: "You've had no trouble rising before."

"So you' helped the farmer with his cows.... And he paid you?"

There is some confusion and debate over the setting and where this farmer lived in relation to the cardboard boxes.

The Chronicler: "I think it's meant to be a pseudo-medieval setting..."

The Balance: "But the brownstones in the beginning chapter. They're very specific sorts of houses that only occur in east coast America..."

The Anthropologist: "But there's horses pulling the police cab. Police aren't very medieval."

The Chronicler: "But it's got cows in it."

The Anthropologist: "Unlike today.... where we are devoid of cows."

"Yes, ten talens." I saved the cow and the calf, and the cheap bastard paid me nearly nothing.. cow and calf safely stabled in a warm barn, munching hay. I envied the cow.

The Anthropologist: "I should have gone back in there and eaten them..."

"So, when was this?" the detective asked through her razor-thin lips.

The Balance: "Have they gotten thinner now?"

"So, you know another woman was raped three days ago in Tar...

Bonegeek: "Tar.. tar... Big L, help me with the pronunciation?"

Big L: "No idea."

Tarawa

The Chronicler notes that the reader has no idea what this word denotes, be it district, city, street, province or even country.

I'd known it'd come to this. That's all anyone talked about. People acted like the end of the world was approaching. No girls on the street, and no women either.

The Anthropologist: "I feel it really hard to find sympathy for people who get raped."

Bonegeek: " Stupid woman getting raped..."

And everone looked at everyone all suspicious like.

The Anthropologist: "Or maybe they were just looking at you all suspicious-like? What with you being a hobo with cum on your hands."

"How should I know? You haven't told me her name."

The Anthropologist: "Isn't it kind of suspicious that he doesn't know anything about the rapes if it's all anyone talked about for days?"

"Melisandra Rockwater."

Big L: "What the fuck?"

The Balance: "It's a bad taste naming setting."

Bonegeek: "There's no connection or pattern between these names at all."

Before I'd lost my life, I'd had a job with clients.

The Anthropologist: "Clients, eh?"

The Chronicler: "Unnecessarily unspecific... The setting is vague enough to begin with."

"Did you rape her? Or any other woman?"

Big L: "Yes, yes, I did."

The Anthropologist: "Did she really expect him to say yes to that?"

"No! I'm a drunk, not a criminal."

The Anthropologist: "No, I'm a drunk public masturbator, not a rapist!"

They're often the same thing."

Big L: "I'm a sex offender, not a rapist."

"I've never forced myself on anyone."

The Anthropologist: "That's a suspiciously roundabout way of putting it."

"Hmmph," said Detective Habit, which could've meant anything.

The Anthropologist: "Perhaps you're being a suspicious bastard, that could be what it could mean."

Detective Habit returned in the company of a familiar face.

The Chronicler: "Just the face, nothing else."

Recognising his mossy beard...

The Anthropologist (twitching): "Moss..."

...my fists itched to hit something. Maybe his face. Hard.

"This is Wizard Uriah,Chair of the local Wizard's Guild..."

The Pedant: "Do they mean Urea?"

The Balance: "Brown is the hobo level mage."

Do you mind if he –

Big L: "...rapes you?"

"Gage Feldspar! Obadiah's pig!"

There is much speculation about Obadiah's Pig, be it some sort of bizarre fantasy-esque curse or reference to something we understood not.

The Chronicler: "There's an Old Testament prophet by the name of Obadiah."

The Anthropologist: "Does he have a pig?"

I'd rather chew off my foot than let this man help me again.

The Anthropologist brings us an incredibly rare disease involving lip-eating that was mentioned in an episode of House.

"If you don't object, he'll briefly scan your mind."

"And if I do mind?" Because I did .I didn't want this creep in my braid. He'd saved me once, unasked, at great cost to himself. I never wanted to see him again. I didn't want him crawling through my brain.

Big L: "So far, Uriah seems to have nothing but nice things to him. Why the fuck is he so suspicious?"

I needed ale more now than I'd had in weeks – maybe since Obadiah's pig.

Bonegeek: "What the hell did you do to his pig?"

The Anthropologist: "Could it be a code word for men of a certain persuasion?"

The Pedant: "Or some kind Gay bar?"

Uriah held out his hand expectantly, andI laid my palm in his.

The Club: "Eeew! Cum on hands!"

I'd met half-orcs I'd rather touch.

Big L: "And he's probably thinking that he'd touched better half-orcs."

The Pedant: "Where the fuck are the orcs coming from?"

The Balance: "And half-orcs, no less. I wonder what the other half is. It's probably human, like with all these settings..."

The Anthropologist: "But I have a mental image of half an orc wandering around."

I expected to feel something, his smarmy presence oozing though my thoughts... Even as I squirmed in my chair, I told myself that his power didn't intimidate me. I lied.

Big L: "Which he would know, as he's mind-scanning you!"

Despite the fact I'd love to punch this man to a bloody pulp, relief flooded through me. The cops wouldn't be roasting me tonight. Thanks to Guild Chair Uriah.

The Chronicler: "What did he do that was so bad it negates saving you at great cost to himself?"

How had I managed to rack up two debts to this oily man?

The Pedant: "By being incompetent."

Big L: "Apparently by hating someone who's done nothing but good stuff to you. Sure, he has a green beard and bad personal hygiene..."

The Anthropologist: "He probably got that by being the at the top of his field. Everyone is too polite to tell him that he's got yellow teeth."

Pike showed me – ungently – to the door. He opened it for me, with a mocking bow."

The Anthropologist: "Because he didn't want you to touch the doorknob."

Then I trudged toward the Slug and Garden, focusing wholly on how good the Brown Worms would taste.

Big L: "But you have cum on your hands."

An arctic dust devil swirled across the road and wrapped around my leg.

The Balance: "Is that a real dust devil or a metaphor... This being a badly defined fantasy setting, one really can't tell."

It crawled up to my balls, stealing all heat.

Big L: "It's like having a dog randomly humping your leg only colder."

The Pedant: "But not licking their hands."

The Balance: "I think that needs a picture."

I peered through the darkness, wondering where the shout came from. I didn't want to walk through an ongoing brawl... The rapist wouldn't be attacking someone this close to the cops, would he?

The Anthropologist: "But you have cum on your hands!"

"What're you doing to the lady?" I growled, letting magic make my voice deeper.

Big L: "That's a retarded waste of magic!"

But the thugs, both half-orcs, weren't attacking a woman – they were harassing a boy.

Bonegeek: "We may have gay, interspecies, paedophilic rape here!"

Big L: "We shouldn't have laughed that."

The closest half-cor towered at least a foot over me. His skin was gray, even for his kind, and his sloping forehead made him look really ugly.

The Anthropologist: "Yes, be a racist. That makes you a better man."

...using a subtle spell to give me the appearance of looking larger than I was.

Big L: "Oh no, I mistook that man for being a few inches shorter than he actually is!"

The Anthropologist: "The Magical Accordion Man!"

Even half-orcs had to think twice before attacking the man they thought they saw before. Half-orcs aren't known for their intelligence.

The Anthropologist: "Cum on your hands!"

I walked in like I belonged there, like the biggest rooster in the barnyard.

The Anthropologist: "...who has cum on his hands!"

And I kicked the closes bastard in the knee with all my strength.

Bonegeek: "I'm not actually bigger, that's all I can reach."

He howled in pain, and I snorted, knowing I'd busted the capsule of fluid behind his knee bone. It'd ooze liquid for days. His knee would swell to the size of a goose egg in a matter of hours.

The Chronicler: "Is that anatomically accurate?"

Bonegeek (who has a degree in that sort of thing): "It's layman's accurate, let's put it that way."

... so I slammed the ball of my palm into his nose slits, and he howled louder.

The Pedant: "Charge-spell, touch bukkake."

The Anthropologist: "I can spell bukkake."

Big L: "I feel morally superior for not being able to.

The Pedant: "Hayhever is Plant Bukkake."

... but then I just convinced the lurking rats that orc eyeballs tasted delicious, like farm-fresh eggs. I could hear the rats laughing as they launched themselves towards the villain's face.

The Anthropologist: "I'm drinking for the eye comment."

The Pedant (chittering): "Eggs, eggs."

There are reminisces of Pillywiggin's wererat character who chittered.

(The Chronicler notes, incidentally that the convincing there was magical.)

Ha! I punched him solidly in his solar plexus, knocking his lungs straight on, turning them into empty flapping sacks.

Big L: "Maybe half-orcs have external lungs. It doesn't say they don't."

I jerked my knee up...

The Pedant: "It's always jerking with him..."

... but blood poured from his nose slits as he collapsed to the ground in a fetal position.

The Pedant: "Are half-orcs scum in this setting or did he just punch the royal family?"

Big L: "They're probably scum."

Filled with adrenaline, I strode over and grabbed the kid.

The Balance: "But your hands are covered with cum!"

Both half-orcs writhed on the cold cobblestones...

(The Chronicler notes this for more patchwork setting mysteries.)

Two things...

2008-09-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

The Chronicler knows that she should be doing her reading, typing up the notes from last session and well, tidying the house, but she feels she must share the following two snippets of news:

Firstly, she has found a romance novel that meets her exacting standards: Jo Beverley's "The Shattered Rose". It is now officially her favourite romance novel. It is not perfect, but it felt right. If the Loinfire Club was reading this there would be few causes to drink save the odd reference to heat and perhaps a use of the word "sensual" or two and such things could but be forgiven in the wake of all the characters in the book being fundamentally sensible people who read their brief. Most of the romance is written in a rather understated manner - with some undue flourishes, but not too many - and that appeals immensely. Gushing - quite possibly of the unamusing variety - will appear in due couse.

Secondly, "My Fair Viking" is a terrible book. Really, really bad. The Chronicler was ready to declare Adam the Healer the most odious hero of all time when the Anthropologist reminded her of the Knight of Darkness. It is truly terrible. What is perhaps most remarkable is that it is Sandra Hill's eighth book concerning vikings and in all that time she had not managed to do more research. Rant will no doubt result.

(Given that the Chronicler spent last year chiefly scribbling about Norse and Anglo-Norman literature - also the Robin Hood rhymes, but that his hardly relevant here - she feels that it is not through unfamiliarity or overfamiliarity of period that she objects to one and not the other.)