Dean Kun…Nope, Sorry, Too Obvious

I like Stephen King’s books. A lot.

I’m aware that the above statement disqualifies me from ever being allowed to talk about the genius of James Joyce while I empty my fifth bottle of champagne for the evening at a get together of the ‘Literary Pricks Society’, but I’m not too concerned about that. A little bit of Joyce goes a long way.

So, I like Stephen King. He’s imaginative, evocative, and worthy of several other high-minded adjectives. ‘Inspired’ might even be among them. It’s understandable, then, that I would eventually be tempted to try a book by the man often hailed as ‘the other Stephen King’ (or even ‘better than Stephen King’). I am of course talking about Mr. Dean Koontz.

Koontz’s books are easy to be drawn to. They have attractive covers (in my part of the world, anyway) and the blurb on the back makes them sound just fantastic. A man’s dying relative foretells five days of disaster in his future? Hot damn! I bought Life Expectancy, one of Koontz’s newer tomes, expecting to spend a few days wrapped up in a spooky mystery story.

Things started out promising. Our protagonist, James Tock, is born on a stormy night just as his grandfather is dying. There’s a weird clown in the maternity ward, waiting for his wife to give birth. And now the dying grandfather is making bizarre predictions about his soon-to-be born grandson’s future! The clown goes nuts after his wife dies and starts shooting people! Whee.

Unfortunately, things go downhill fast after that. James Tock grows up to become a baker, something that he talks about at great length very often, usually for no reason. He’s a bit obsessed with pastries. His family all know of and joke about the predicted ‘five terrible days’, and as the first approaches treat it as something interesting, a bit odd, but nothing to worry all that much about. That pretty much kills any suspense the story might have had. Imagine if the family in the The Shining treated their first inklings of the hotel’s ghosts as nothing more than a joke, something to chuckle about over dinner – it would kind of take the scary away, wouldn’t it? Of course, the characters in the The Shining aren’t maddenly vacuous cardboard cut-outs, which helps some as well.

Anyway, the first ‘terrible day’ rolls around, and it turns out that James gets stuck in a hostage situation by an insane man with a gun. But wait, this isn’t any old man with a gun! No, it’s the insane clown’s son! If you didn’t see that one coming, beat yourself into unconsciousness with something heavy. Go on, you deserve it.

What follows this little revelation is the most awkward, stupid and unrealistic hostage scene I’ve ever read. The gunman is not threatening in the least. James fluctuates between frightened and bored (yes, really) for no apparent reason, and things come to a dire head when a second hostage, his future lover interest, is introduced. James, because he’s baker, starts describing her in terms of various baked desserts. She was as beautiful as a lemon-drizzle turd with peanuts on top (not really, but you get the idea). This goes on for some time. It’s about as painful as it sounds. There’s actually a part where James wishes the gunman would just shut up so he could ogle and talk to this beautiful, cake-like woman.

I don’t know if this whole scene was supposed to be funny or charming or both, but it comes across as moronic. I’m pretty certain that, under those circumstances, most people’s attention would be focused solely on the man threatening to kill them and not on some random woman, regardless of how much her eyes resembled a pair of chocolate soufflés.

I stopped reading shortly after that. But wait, I hear you cry! (In my schizophrenia-addled brain.) That happens near the start of the book! Surely your journalistic integrity drove you to give it a fair chance and read all the way through? My reply to that would be ‘Have you still got that heavy object handy?’

To be fair to Koontz, I’ve heard that this is one of his worse books. I’ve also seen it described as a ‘warm, fuzzy package’, so it probably wasn’t a good choice for someone in the mood for a horror story. I intend on trying another one of his books (and that’s journalistic integrity! What? It isn’t? Shut up) as soon as I can find one that I can be certain will be more bearable than Life Expectancy. Any recommendations?

All Roads Lead to Viewpoint Abuse

Romanitas, by Sophia McDougall, is the very definition of ‘wasted potential’. The story is centered on the fascinating alternate history premise that the Roman Empire never collapsed; instead it went on to thrive and grow and exist into the modern age. McDougall isn’t the first one to think of this idea, but her book is the only one about a modern day Roman Empire that I’ve actually read, which automatically makes it the only one worth considering. Unfortunately, she doesn’t even begin to do the idea justice.

The story focuses on three main characters: Marcus Novius Faustus Leo (take a breath), heir to the Emperor and inheritor of a dubious family history involving hereditary insanity, and Una and Sulien, a pair of slaves with supernatural abilities. No, I’m not sure how that fits into the alternate history milieu either. Marcus’ parents are assassinated, leaving him next in line to become Emperor once his uncle kicks the bucket. Since people related to him die at the drop of a hat, it probably won’t be long before this happens. At the tender age of ‘not yet an adult’, he’s not quite ready for the responsibility, especially when it emerges that his parents were killed over their highly controversial anti-slavery stance.

There are a whole lot of secondary characters connected to Marcus, but to be honest I can’t remember much about them. The book is constantly divided into two halves: one involves Marcus fleeing for his life, afraid that he’s next in line to be killed, and reads like a young adult adventure novel. The book as a whole would be far better if this was given center stage, instead of having to share time with the excruciatingly boring political machinations going on in Rome in his absence.

Una and Sulien fare slightly better, in that their respective back stories are actually interesting: they were separated at a young age, Sulien to become the almost adopted son of a wealthy doctor thanks to his ability to heal people by touching them, and Una to be the book’s resident Tragic Young Girl. being able to read people’s minds and influence their thoughts apparently didn’t help her much. Things turn bad for Sulien when he’s caught getting it on with this adoptive father/owner’s daughter, the hilariously named ‘Tancorix’, and accused of raping her. Una sets out to rescue him hours before he’s due to be crucified.

That all sounds interesting enough, and it is. The fact that the three main characters are teenagers leads me to believe that McDouogall actually did have a young adult book in mind when she started writing Romanitas, but decided to muddy the waters with all sorts of slow paced bullshit sometime during the creative process.

Even without all of that fat on the turkey, there are other, more serious problems here: McDougall has no idea how to use viewpoint properly. Either that or she’s tried to be ‘different’, a tactic that fails nine times out of ten and has done so predictably here. Usually when writing in the third person, an author will restrict the viewpoint to a single character per scene or chapter, so that we see things from one character’s perspective for fairly long stretches at a time. In Romanitas this rule is tossed out the window in favor of a system where the viewpoint flies in and out of character’s heads like am omniscient, metaphorical serial rapist. It’s not uncommon for the reader to be shown a scene from the point of view of every character involved, and the switch from one person to the next is not always easy to detect, which left me fairly confused on a number of occasions.

On top of that, McDougall suffers from what I like to call ‘Stephen King Syndrome’, and has the habit of dumping large chunks of backstory on the reader right in the middle of a scene. While Stephen King can usually pull this off fairly well, so that his character’s seem to be remembering their past rather than throwing us into a full-blown flashback, McDougall seems to have no awareness of when it’s appropriate to wander off into a five or six page story about what a minor character was doing the previous year.

The present day Roman Empire is a compelling place to set a story, but we never actually get to see that much of it. Things like slavery and crucifixion still exist, and it’s mentioned several times that the old pantheon of gods is still worshiped, but none of this feels very important. God knows the book doesn’t need more exposition padding, but it would have been nice if more details about the Empire had been slipped into the story of our three runaway teens. (The details I’m talking about might have appeared in some of the aforementioned political scenes, but there are large, boredom-filled holes in my memory where those should be).

Overall, Romanitas is more frustrating than it is bad. I wanted it to be good because I liked the idea behind it so much, but the bewildering viewpoint shifts and sluggish story hampered my enjoyment so much that I had to struggle through the last hundred pages or so. It might interest you more if you’re an ancient history buff, but the average reader will find little to like here.

Literary Self-Flagellation

If you’ve read the first post on this blog, you’ll know that I dislike Twilight just a bit. A few days ago I picked up its sequel, New Moon, just to see if Mrs. Meyers improved any between books. (Note that by ‘picked up’ I mean ‘read the first few chapters in the store for free’).

New Moon actually starts off in a semi-promising way, with our lead lady agonizing over the fact that she’s turning eighteen that day. Typical teenage melodrama? Well, not really; Bella is well aware that she’s going to grow increasingly old while the man/boy she’s ridiculously in love with, Edward Cullen, is going to stay seventeen forever. It’s a really good thing sex is a no-no in these books, or else that dream sequence at the start could have been all kinds of creepy…

Unfortunately, the book turns to crap several pages in. I’m going to confess here: I never finished reading Twilight. Unfortunately, because I would have had an absolute field day with the revelation that, in direct sunlight, Edward Cullen’s skin basically takes on the same properties as diamond, in that it reflects sunlight in a sparkly, magical way that makes Bella swoon and me want to retch. This is alluded to early on in Twilight, but I had hoped Edward’s reason for staying out of sunlight was because it made him look hideous or turn into a skeleton or something. Instead it just makes him more attractive. (In theory; I’m not sure why Meyers thinks having sparkly shit coming out of every pore would look all that great).

I’m tempted to say that this crap is the series’ ‘jump the shark’ moment, but to be honest it jumped the shark as soon as the vampires were introduced and it’s been gaining altitude ever since. I only made it a short way through New Moon before hurling it across the room in disgust (read: putting it back on the shelf where I found it), but much like someone with acute radiation poisoning, this short exposure was enough to leave my imagination a barren wasteland for several days. That’s right, these books actually kill your mind.

Why am I ragging on the Twilight books so much, you ask? It could be that they’re just that bad. (And they are). It could be that their author has made a whole lot of undeserved money from them, which just tends to rub me the wrong way. And it could be that not enough people are calling them out on their glaring flaws, even though, based on the search strings people have been using to find this blog, I’m not the only one who thinks they’re shit.

That’s why I would like to call upon you, my noble, selfless reader, to go out and bash these books at every opportunity! Form an anti-fan club, if you will (or at the least direct me to where someone else has already done the same thing). Let’s not give atrocious fiction a free pass.

Sex And Swords

Today’s offering is the ridiculous, misogynistic, and downright stupid The Ninja, by ‘Eric van Lustbader’. You know what? A name like that deserves some sort of formatting. Henceforth, I shall refer to our author du jour as ‘Eric…van LUSTBADER‘.

(NOTE: There’s a fair amount of ‘mature content’ in this one. You’ve been warned).

Mr. LUSTBADER specialises in the ‘crappy thriller’ genre. I would go so far as saying that he’s mastered it, since somebody thought he was worthy to take up the ‘Bourne’ mantle from Ludlum, the series’ original author, and unleash two more of those deformed horrors upon the world. But this is about older deformed horrors. Deformed horrors that I have, unfortunately, actually read.

The Ninja is an exciting, semi-erotic tale that caters to the ‘I’ve never been outside the USA’ market. Eric…VAN LUSTBADER shamelessly exploits a culture that he knows almost nothing about to lend a veneer of the oriental and mysterious to an otherwise boring as fuck thriller about a man being raped by his cousin. Hang on, I’m getting ahead of myself here…

Nicholas Linnear is a man conflicted over his past. As a boy he was instructed in the ancient and mysterious (not really but we’ll get to that) ways of various Japanese martial arts. He’s apparently managed to master several of them, which in real life would be downright miraculous. As an adult, his dormant skills are needed to combat an equally deadly murderer terrorising his home.

So, The Ninja is about martial arts, right? Well, not quite. It’s about martial arts and sex. Lots and lots of sex. Nicholas meets a messed-up young woman who he quickly falls in love with, then proceeds to have sex with multiple times over the course of, oh, thirty pages or so. Seriously, he must be popping a viagra every twenty minutes. Prior to this, our leading lady went swimming and, apparently, got fingered by the ocean. Or by a ninja swimming underneath her – take your pick.

But our mysterious pyjama-warrior doesn’t just sexually assault women in bizarre ways! Oh no, he also kills people with his oh-so exotic katana and fancy poisoned throwing knives. There’s a rather ridiculous scene where Nicholas, pre-eminent expert in all things Eastern, describes the properties of the katana as if it’s a warp drive instead of a very sharp piece of metal. This book stretches ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ to the absolute breaking point.

It’s not long before Nicholas realises that the serial-killing ninja, who bumps off several of his friends, is actually his cousin, come to haunt him from the depths of a long, boring and very confusingly written flashback about his childhood in Japan. (Apparently growing up somewhere east of Europe gives you super powers, since practically every Asian character we meet is either a god-like fighter or ‘wise’ in that generic Hollywood way so beloved of hack writers everywhere). While still living in Japan he fell in love with a woman (who he had sex with a lot) and developed a deep, burning rivalry with his cousin, who went off to study the dark arts of ninjutsu. And then raped Nicholas.

That scene really exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the book. It has no purpose at all other than to include yet more sex in a story already overflowing with cocks and vaginas, yet LUSTBADER threw it in anyway. It doesn’t even make the ninja seem any more dangerous or threatening, since he’s already killed and raped a truckload of people by this point and, to be honest, Nicholas isn’t that sympathetic a character to begin with. If you’ve shown us a woman get raped while being strangled with her own hair, you’d better make sure the next rape ups the ante if you want us to care. Just making it guy-on-guy isn’t going to cut it, I’m afraid.

Oh, and there’s a subplot involving a lesbian prostitute who gets off on having her lover stick an unloaded revolver into her vagina. In a bathtub. Shortly before being visited by the male child prostitute who the ninja later has sex with and then kills.

Yeah.

So, The Ninja isn’t really about martial arts or ninjas or any of that other stuff. It’s about sex. Exotic, Japanese-tinted sex, where anything goes and rape is an everyday occurrence. I think it’s safe to say that Mr. LUSTBADER (and god, doesn’t that name seem less innocently retarded now?) gets off on this stuff, since the other book in the series that I read contains almost as much sex, as well as a man with a super-strong bionic arm. Japanese made, of course.

The actual martial arts aspect, secondary though it may be, will make you cringe if you know anything at all about what’s being discussed. Japanese weapons and swordsmanship are elevated to a semi-mythical position, even before the super ninja powers come into play.  In real life, kenjutsu and iaido really aren’t all that mysterious. Sure, not many people actually practice them, but learning how to draw a sword properly isn’t going to let you take on armed police with ease. Your milage will vary, but this was one of the most annoying things about The Ninja for me, simply because the author obviously did a little bit of research and then just cranked everything up to eleven without any regard for factual accuracy at all.

Simply put, The Ninja is overwhelmingly stupid. The dark, often unsettling content masks a story that is as juvenile as anything in a 1950’s era comic book, filled to the brim with gosh-wow strangeness from those crazy Japs in the far East. If you’re looking for something to get off on, by all means pick it up; it’s probably better written than most ‘erotic’ fiction out there. If you know anything at all about Japan, martial arts, or common sense, avoid at all costs.

A Matter of Great Importance

Dear Oxford World’s Classics,

This may shock you (seriously, try to hold on to your monocle), but there are people out there who read books for the story. As in, they enjoy appreciating a well told narrative as it moves from one section to the next in a way that is coherent and entertaining. Yes, I know, you’d prefer to believe that those kind of people don’t exist. But we do.

As you probably know, one important aspect of enjoying a story is not knowing what’s going to happen next. The Sixth Sense is boring as fuck if you know the twist right from the start. Twilight is even worse when you know that it ends with (of all things) Edward taking what’s-her-face to the prom. (To the fucking prom). James Joyce may be the only writer in existence who’s entirely immune to this effect, since none of his ‘works’ make the slightest bit of sense in the first place. Well, some of them do, but they’re boring enough that knowing the ‘ending’ wouldn’t make much difference.

Keeping this in mind, could you tell me what jackass thought it would be a good idea to put a major plot point on the back cover of Dracula? I was quite looking forward to reading the book when I bought it. I wisely skipped the long, agonizingly boring wankfest that you insist on cramming into the opening pages of every book you publish, precisely because they always contain spoilers. But, curious and naive that I am, I decided to flip the book over to read the synopsis on the back.

There’s a mistake I won’t be making again! Needless to say, your shamelessly up-front synopsis/mini-wankfest has forever spoiled any chances I might have of reading a vampire story with some sort of literary merit. Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Vitamin Book

PS: ‘Vintage Classics’ books have covers that yours can only dream of while they cry themselves to sleep at night. So there.

Vampire Shenanigans

Welcome to Vitriolic Book Reviews, the blog that delights in ripping books apart (metaphorically; ever tried tearing up a 500 page hardback?). To ‘get things going’, I thought I’d review the two most recent books I’ve read, which, by startling coincidence, can be neatly divided into the categories ‘How To Do a Vampire Story’ and ‘How Not To Do a Vampire Story’. Ready? Off we go.

‘Twilight’, by Stephanie ‘Ann Rice Defanged’ Meyer, is the story of Isabella Swan, a shy, clumsy girl who moves to the small town of Forks, Washington. We’re told very early on that Isabella (or ‘Bella’) is about as normal as normal can be; she is, in fact, the very blueprint from which every ‘average teenage girl’ was created.

Except (brace yourself)…she isn’t! We eventually realise that Bella is actually incredibly beautiful, extremely intelligent, and has every male student in the school drooling over her. Literally; one of the main characters, who can read people’s minds, tells her so.

What’s that? Read people’s minds? Oh yes, this book also features vampires. Supposedly it’s about vampires (a ‘vampire story’, if you will) but to be honest you could change them all to plain old humans without doing much damage to a lot of the plot. There are only a few things you need to know about Edward Cullen, our vampire leading man, to understand what kind of story this is:

1. He’s stunningly handsome. We’re told how stunningly handsome he is constantly. He doesn’t just look at people, he gazes at them with his eyes like liquid gold. He doesn’t speak, he utters his sentences in a soft undertone, sending a shiver down Bella’s spine. He doesn’t walk or, God forbid, just ‘go’ anywhere; no, he glides across the floor of the high school cafeteria with an unnatural grace that sends a shiver down Bella’s spine. Wait, did I already use that phrase? Screw it, that’s still roughly 498 times less than Stephanie Meyer. That girl desperately needs to put on a coat.

2. He’s ‘dark’ and ‘dangerous’. Or at least, that’s what we’re told. In reality he does nothing even remotely dangerous for most of the book and comes across as an egotistical jackass more than anything else.

3. He’s really good looking. Like, seriously.

Have you guessed that the purpose of this book is yet? That’s right, it was written so that teenage girls can insert themselves into Isabella’s clumsy shoes and imagine swooning over Edwards’s silken voice and high cheekbones. Okay, the cheekbones are never mentioned in the book (I think; it all sort of runs together eventually), but come on, he’s apparently going to look like this in the movie.

Twilight is, without a doubt, the most successful Mary Sue novel I’ve ever come across. It’s boring as hell, has cardboard characters who grate on the nerves constantly (Bella in particular is maddeningly stupid, and is apparently some sort of ‘trouble magnet’ to boot – which is supposed to explain why she’s so afraid of tripping over her own feet that she doesn’t try to run when a group of men surround her in a dodgy part of town) and doesn’t develop anything resembling a compelling conflict until well past the halfway mark. Ignore the fawning reviews from lovestruck teenage girls. While they might say ‘this book is incredibly deep’, what they actually mean is ‘Well…*blush* Edward Cullen :3′ And that’s an actual quote from a blog comment, folks.

Oh, and there are werewolves in the second book in the trilogy. Yes, really.

The next novel in today’s double feature is Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Unlike Twilight, which is about as frightening as a kitten playing with a ball of pink string, Let the Right One In is deeply unsettling and brilliantly plays to the traditional vampire story’s strengths while exploring new ground. Our protagonist, Oskar, is an odd twelve year old boy who’s bullied constantly at school and who cheers himself up by shoplifting and looking at his scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings about gruesome murders.

Eli, a two hundred year old vampire trapped as a young child, moves in next door and the two quickly become friends. When Eli’s ‘father’ starts killing local children in order to keep her supplied with blood, things start to get a bit difficult for everyone involved.

Is this book better than Twilight? Hell yes, and the comparison is valid even though they’re not written with the same audience in mind. Twilight is a cheap romance story dressed up as one about vampires, while Let the Right One In is a very unique story about what it might actually be like if a young girl was turned into an immortal being who needed to drink fresh blood to survive. All right, it’s not exactly realistic, but neither does it present a stupidly rose-tinted picture of vampirism. When Eli says that she doesn’t want to infect anyone else, you can see why. Twilight desperately needed some of that edginess.

Having said that, it’s far from perfect. Oskar goes from ’serial-killer wannabe nutjob’ to ‘a bit eccentric but overall a good guy’ in a few pages, and while this is probably supposed to show how meeting Eli changes him, it seems far too abrupt to be taken seriously. The ‘alcoholic losers’ subplot also starts to drag just as it becomes relevant, and the way characters tend to resolve to change their lives for the better just before they die is a bit over the top.

If you’re looking for something creative and original, and are willing to step outside your comfort zone, read Let the Right One In. If you want to read long, long long descriptions about a person’s fantastically handsome face, which features the phrase Greek God’ used earnestly, read Twilight. Then never set foot in a bookstore for the rest of your life, please.