The Dead Walk -- er, Post!

Happy New Year one and all!

This is just a quick announcement: I have no intention of abandoning this blog. I was temporarily caught up in literally everything else, but I'll make an effort to keep updates from slipping.

I've read the dreaded Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance, though I doubt I'll write up the review for it. It'd be a lot of incoherent key-smashing, let me tell you -- but maybe. Maybe!

Instead, I'm going to tackle something. A theme from now until, well, whenever I finish. I'm sure you'll love it.

This theme, dear readers? Nostalgia. That's right. I'm going to re-read and review (IE. tear apart) all the books I loved as a child/young-teen. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Inkheart, The Seven Towers Series, Mister Monday -- the beginning of The Keys of the Kingdom series -- or whatever else strikes my fancy. Who knows, there might even be some manga mixed in there.

So keep your eyes peeled, because it'll be kicking off soon.

This is Contemptus, the Stone Cold Critic, signing off. I’ll see you when I see you, gentle readers.

Guilty Pleasures ... How apt.

Published: Originally – 1993; my copy – 2003.
Publisher: Jove Books – Penguin Putnam Inc.
Read On: March 15^th-April 1^st, 2012.


Hello and welcome to another segment of Stone Cold Critique, where bad literature is given the cold shoulder! You’ve probably not noticed, dear minions, but I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus since March. Why? Mostly because college kicked my ass to the curb and back, and now that it’s summer I actually have time to read and bitch about terrible books (and dig into some really great ones; The A Song of Ice and Fire series is gorgeous!).

Now, I’ll have you know that I’ve heard of the infamous Anita Blake series; who hasn’t? From the New Powers as the Plot Demands to the anime-esque man-harem to the Mary Sue protagonist, trust me, minions, I’ve been warned. But does the first of this series foreshadow such eye-gouging atrocities?

Let’s take a look at Laurell K. Hamilton’s first Anita Blake novel, “Guilty Pleasures.”

The Gist

This is part supernatural-myth and part thriller/crime novel, to be honest. The story follows an unpleasant woman named Anita Blake, a woman who raises zombies for profit, and hunts vampires deemed criminals by the police, with police support. She’s been doing this for a while by the start of the novel, and she has the scars to prove it.

 Of course we rarely see her zombie-raising, and it’s all about her being a Badass Vampire Hunter. Naturally, she gets dragged into a plot involving the vampire heads of the city, as well as a vampire religion, a carnival, and a strip club. Oh, and people trying to kill her, but that seems sort of standard in this genre. It’s a book filled with Anita’s unsavory narration and judgements superimposed over the events and characters. But I’ll get into that later.

 What I’m getting at here is that the plot was very standard. Not cliché, but well-worn. There weren’t any surprises, really, and the one surprise was my fault – I should have seen it coming. This type of fiction really likes its Mauve Shirts.

The ending – the prologue, really – gets bonus points, though, because through the novel, Jean Claude, a powerful vampire, has been trying to court Anita, and she shuts him down thoroughly in the end. It’s a refreshing turn of pace.

The Bad

Let’s run through the laundry list, shall we? The pacing, for one thing, is very rushed and there is very little character development for anyone; our narrator is a terrible, judgemental harpy who shows a great deal of racism towards an established community of people – not humans, but still, they’re people.

But what really gets me – other than the terrible narrator, first-person perspective – is the fact that the pacing was so quick. I mean, there’s a light beach-novel, where you don’t have to think about much, and then there’s this complex world that LKH seems to be trying to make, and then never elaborating or dwelling on some of the moral dilemmas or how the characters reactions are not out of place compared to an outsiders (ie. The readers’) balking.
 
Which is another thing that got me – this was a very action and plot-based novel, and that’s fine – but the fact that moral dilemmas or third option-plans are never even mused on annoys me. I tend to like character development, and characters that have some depth, some conflict to them. I like grey areas, I like when characters really have to think about right and wrong and if they’re going bad things for good reasons – or visa versa. Having a character –our narrator no less – that sees things in such stark black and white doesn’t jive with me; it comes off as unsavory. In Anita’s world, all vampires are parasites, and all those that want to be vampires, or have joined the Church of the Undead (a vampire church) are idiots. There is no empathy, no inkling that people might be scared of death, or that there might be mitigating circumstances.

Moving right on. Just thinking on it now, I just … disliked a lot of the characters. Anita was unsavory, Anita’s human friends were plot devices that rarely got mentioned, the one decent character got killed off – after a couple hundred pages of Anita judging him for his occupation(male stripper at a vampire club) and his past (he used to be a fangbanger; that is, a human who was addicted to being bitten by vampires [something that is treated in the book as a fetish or odd kink]) – and the OTHER decent character was a sociopath, the Death to Anita’s Executioner, and undoubtedly bad ass, if only for the way he got in and got shit done, even if he was a terrible human being who kills people for money. The cherry on this terrible-character-soufflé is the main antagonist, Nikolaos. I’m calling her Nikky from now on, because it’s easier to type. Nikky is not an original character In the slightest. She’s a very, very old vampire that’s main character trait is being a Creepy Child of the highest calibre. That’s it. She mind-rapes and terrifies Anita, and she’s not ever a teenager by rights. There is no depth, there is no conflict. It’s been done, LKH. It’s been done.  

Oh! Now that I’m editing, I want to mention one more bad thing in a list of Bad Things: I’d heard in various other critiques of the series that Anita gains a reputation as gaining more powers as the plot demands, with little thought or reasoning as to why. I’d like to report that, to my recollection (it’s been three months, roll with it) that tradition has its roots in the first book quite firmly. And that annoys me more than you can comprehend, though, to the book (and author’s) credit, Anita’s super special awesome powers are explained – vaguely – and are not wanted by Anita, as the edge comes from being tied to a vampire as a human servant. So there’s that.

The Good

For all that was wrong with this novel – and there was a lot of it, trust me – the one thing that I particularly liked was the amount of world-building that went into it. And it was presented in an organic way, not just shoehorned in to be oohed and ahhed over. The premise of this series is that there are supernatural beings, creatures, that live alongside humans, and there are facets that spring up because of that: strip clubs and new kinks, a new religion for those that fear death and want to live forever, even a new division in the law enforcement community. It’s all presented in this really off-hand, natural sort of way. Anita doesn’t balk at it (mostly) because it’s not a new thing. She doesn’t have to harp over every little thing we as readers might find odd, because it’s not odd to her and therefore not worth going into detail.

 If anything, I’d say that the novel could use more of that, and more depth, rather than bam-bam-bam, plot point after plot point.

That being said, there was a couple of characters that I enjoyed, if only because they actually were mentioned and I found them interesting. Phillip, the stripper, for example, has a history, has a past that has influenced his present, and despite what Anita thinks of him, he’s willing to help her. He’s willing to walk into a vampire party – where humans will be willingly bit and drunk from by vampires – to help her get the information she needs. This, for those of you keeping score at home, is sort of like a recovering addict wandering into an opium den, or an alcoholic hanging out in a bar.

Edward, our sociopathic supernatural killer, is also interesting for all the wrong reasons. It’s said that he as a human assassin before he got bored and moved to supernatural creatures for fun and profit – this is a name who doesn’t like being bored, and really, really liked a challenge. He sets his sights on Nikky early in the novel, and I spent most of his page-time rooting for him to get his wish and kill the Creepy Child. He was blunt and no-nonsense, and didn’t seem to care about those he was being paid to kill past their skills, powers and challenges. It was interesting to see how that sort of character reacted with the world around him.

Conclusion

This was … okay? I mean, I could see that it was a fast, light read, something to be flipped through in an airport lounge, or on the beach. It wasn’t mean to provoke serious thought, it was meant to entertain and kill a few hours. And that it did – it accomplished its main goal, even if I was annoyed by a great deal if it, it was an interesting read. It had me commenting “that was a decent bit of world building right there” or “oh, hey, that was sort of neat!” even if the narrator had be groaning and grinding my teeth.

It was a decent set up for the rest of the series – it helped set the world in stone, it helped the reader get a great idea of what the setting would have in store, and kept the ending open enough that the verse could be continued. It’s a pretty solid beginning that acts as a decent start to a series, letting the audience know exactly what they’re getting into – they’ll know the setting, the narrator, and the general pace that the others will be set at.
 
This is a book you’ll want to read when there’s nothing else, or you want to be entertained for an afternoon. It’s short, it’s simple, and it’s fast-paced. It’s mediocre for me, if only because I’m so intrigued by the characters, and the characters’ stories, not necessarily the plot of a book.

Does this book deserve the cold shoulder? Well … not really. It stands on its own as an alright book, and isn’t so terrible that I feel I need to warn you away. If you like black and white narratives, and unlikeable protagonists/narrators, with a dash of crime/thriller/supernatural tossed into the mix, this is for you.

As always, if you have a book you think deserves the Cold Shoulder, let me know and drop me a line.

This is Contemptus, the Stone Cold Critic, signing off. I’ll see you when I see you, gentle readers.

Bad Behaviour: Bored Blogger

Published in: 2007
Publisher: Harlequin Press.
Read on: Feb –March 8^th, 2012.

Hello and welcome to the Stone Cold Critique, where bad literature is given the cold shoulder! I am your host Contemptus, and today I’m taking a look at – gasp – a Harlequin novel in honour of St. Valentine’s Day. Well, I started reading it before V-Day, so it still counts. This one, oddly enough, is the sixth and final installment of a series called “Sex & The Supper Club,” which focuses on a group of six friends on a rotating cycle of main-characters. As I haven’t read the first five books, I’m going into this blind.

So let’s see if “Bad Behaviour” is more foreplay than follow-through, shall we?

The Gist:

I’ll be honest, folks. Harlequin novels aren’t particularly well written. They’re mostly dialogue and light on (believable) plot, metaphor, and depth. Oh, and the sex can, in some places, have prose so purple you start puking eggplants. Because that’s a thing, right? Right.
 So with that in mind, we can continue.

We start with our main characters: Immature McFreespirit and her trusty cardboard love-interest Hunky von Workaholic. Our introduction, I’ll give the author this, is actually pretty decent at setting up our characters’ personalities. Freespirit blows off an important meeting at work for a vacation to Mexico already bought, planned and paid for. Workaholic is in Mexico with a long-time work friend on a vacation as a way of blowing off stress before a huge work project comes up.

They meet in a bar (of course), and surprise of all surprises, they already know one another! Apparently, these two dated in middle school before breaking up to go to separate high schools. Yeah, two 14 year olds were so awesome at kissing that they still remember it 16 years later (no, seriously, FS tells us as such over drinks with her girlfriends) AND think fondly about it. They end up clicking instantly and having a fling for the duration of their vacations – three days, for him, before he leaves back to LA.

Naturally – because this is a romance novel, after all – they don’t just let a fling be a fling, and spend the next hundred or so pages in a relationship that no one actually calls it a relationship. After all, FS doesn’t want to be tied down and thus grow up, and Workaholic has a big merger-meeting thing and can’t be distracted. And they have lots of sex. So of course this culminates to FS sending Workaholic a dirty text in a meeting and distracting him enough to completely fuck up the presentation and put the company expansion in jeopardy. This leads to a huge fight wherein Workaholic says he needs a break because it’s a really complicated time and he’d like not to fuck up his future and his dreams because some chick was in the way sexting him thanks.

All of two pages later they’re back together and going steady just in time for the Contractual Happy Ending ™. And end scene.

Let’s get right down to the nitty-gritty, alright? 

The Bland:

Let’s get one thing straight right now, gentle readers: This books is, more or less, an awesome example of So Okay It’s Average – to steal from TVTropes. It’s not horrifically, eye-scarring bad, but it’s not amazing either. It’s a mediocre Harlequin romance novel. I went into this knowing the quality wouldn’t be astounding, so there isn’t a whole lot to get worked up over.

But I will say this: most of this novel was made up of dialogue – not just dialogue, but banter. Now, compared to the last Cold Shoulder book I read, banter was a breath of fresh air. Too bad it went stale by the fiftieth page or so. Seriously, it was like these characters couldn’t have a serious conversation unless it was some sort of relationship-ending fight. It grated after a while; became cloying and annoying. Too much of a good thing, I suppose.

One thing that I didn’t think that would annoy me but did was the lack of character development. I mean, I knew there wouldn’t be much, but the utter lack of depth to all of the secondary characters annoyed me. The Sex and Supper Club members got one brief introduction and weren’t really focused on when it wasn’t to play the sympathetic ear for FreeSpirit and her bitching—

Which leads me to my final complaint. As a female reader, I am forced to assume that the female protagonist and primary narrator is the one I’m supposed to be empathizing with. This is not the case – not in the slightest. I found that I had more in common with the love interest – the serious, workaholic ith a dream and a goal and a lot of pressure/ stress to deal with – so that when the couple was fighting by the end of the book, I was completely on his side. As it turns out, Workaholic has this big work project, he needs to do presentations and win people over to expand his garage business, and he finds that he can’t juggle his relationship, his job, and a billion other things. So he asks if he and FS might be able to take a break, just until the pressure let off a bit and he could breathe.

Naturally, FS freaks out, and it’s up to Workaholic to come crawling back.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

The Okay:

Well, I’ll say this, at least: the relationship between FS and Workaholic was … healthy. They communicated, they set limits on what was acceptable behaviour, and they actually seemed to like one another. They played off one another quite well, and that made for an enjoyable read, even if the majority of their conversations were mind-numbing banter.

For once in a Harlequin novel, there wasn’t any rape or dubious consent. That was a treat. Actually, the only mildly dub-con sort of situation happened in the first few chapters, and it was FS groping Workaholic in public when he just wasn’t into putting on a show. It was a refreshing change. 

As a side note, the actual sex in this book was … mediocre. The prose wasn’t ridiculously purple, and the only snickering came from the situations. At one point, the couple knocks boots in the ocean, and all I could think was, “Yeah, enjoy the infection, lady; that’ll be pleasant.”

 Sadly, no infection – and thus, a dash of realism – was mentioned.

So, to be short (a bit late for that, I know): this was a very safe, cookie-cutter romance novel. The characters were everymen (and women) and there was a dash of fantasy-wish-fulfilment, which is a given in this genre. The conflict at the end wasn’t an accusation of cheating – which is way over-done, if you ask me – but the more realistic ‘time crunch’ idea, and it was solved easily enough with a talk and a compromise.

My final word on the matter? Don’t read it. If things can be damned by faint praise, some should be left alone strictly by how bland they are. This book at the oatmeal of the literary world: mushy, tasteless and a staple of the genre (as it were).

As always, if you have a book you think deserves the Cold Shoulder, let me know and drop me a line.

This is Contemptus, the Stone Cold Critic, signing off. I’ll see you next month, gentle readers.

The Midnight Guardian (AKA Vampires killing Hitler)

  Published in: 2009
  Publisher: St. Martin’s Press.
  Read on: December 2011—February 17th, 2012.

   Hello and welcome to The Stone Cold Critique, where bad literature is given the cold shoulder! On the altar today we have Turning Midnight Guardian, written by Sarah Jane Stratford, the proud owner of a Master’s in Medieval History. Since the publishing of this novel in 2009, she has written and put out a sequel, The Moonlight Brigade. Weep for me, gentle readers; I’ll be getting to this one eventually.

The Gist:

   I’ll be the first to admit that a catchy premise can lock my interest on something that otherwise I wouldn’t give a second glance. This is completely the case with this book. I usually don’t read historical fiction because I’ve never really found a premise I’d like. But the minute I picked up this book in Chapters? I read “London’s ancient tribunal of vampires… resolve to send five of their most formidable vampires to Berlin … to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the Nazi war machine,” and wanted to see what kind of hot mess this would be – I thought it’d be like a terrified B-movie, with cheesy gore and hilarious acting.

   How does that not sound awesome, I ask you? It’s like the "Inglorious Basterds" of print, or so I assumed. Vampires hunting down Nazis and crackin’ wise, I thought it’d be. Not so much. See, our narrator and main character is Brigit, and she is loathsome. On the dust jacket, we get her main conflict of the novel: being separated from her lover and fledgling, Eamon. She just can’t bear to be away from him. And in the chapters that centre around him, we find out that it’s quite similar. As in, he spends 95% of his time whining about how he isn’t with Brigit and he wants to go to her and help. He’s stuck in London because he isn’t old enough to go Nazi-killing. Never does he try and help out on the home front. The time span of this novel is 1936-1940, though the novel doesn’t kick off proper until 1938. Our dashing love interest does nothing for the war effort back in England the entire time he’s there. Jesus, at least the women in that time period were working in factories and knitting socks!

   Deep breaths, deep breaths. Right. So the story follows Brigit and Mors and three other vampires that never get any sort of character depth – and Mors barely squeaks by on that, too – and how they travel to Berlin to try and stir the pot and confuse and take down the Nazis. They do this with espionage and going to Nazi parties, instead of just killing as many of them as possible, as you would think vampires would be cool with. No, I don’t understand it either. I’m sorry to disappoint, but Hitler never makes an appearance in print, he’s only mentions. They never kill him. I lied.

   But enough about that. Let’s get into why this novel reduced me to angrish and hate every thirty pages or so, like clockwork.
 
The Oh-God-WHY:

    I will admit that the main beef I have with this novel isn’t the writing – which is … decent, nothing spectacular, mind you, but decent – but the characters. Now usually, I’m a character-girl over a plot-girl. If the characters are interesting, relatable, or awesome enough, I can overlook a lot when dealing with a shoddy plot or terrible prose. But when that’s reversed, and the writing is decent, but the characters are terrible? It’s like grinding glass into my eyes for all the enjoyment I’m having. And I don’t even mean, like, evil characters. I like the bad guys.  I mean terrible like non-relatable, unrealistic, unredeemable characters.

   And herein lies the problem with The Midnight Guardian: I hated our narrator and protagonist, Brigit. She is, to me, a complete Mary Sue, around only for the author to live through.  Though she has her character flaws: wrath, hypocrisy and conceit being the most blatant, but they’re looked over and overshadowed by what we as the readers are supposed to like about her: her mouthiness, her beauty, her viciousness and love for Eamon.

   I can tell you right now that every action this character committed, for the most part, left me wanting to punch her in the mouth. There’s something about her contempt and dismissal of every other character she has to work with that really grinds my gears. For instance, there’s a couple being sent along with her, named Meaghan and Swefred. Our Brigit dislikes them because they’re “humourless,” though we never get a display of this; as well, Meaghan is one of the only characters in the novel to disapprove of Brigit. At one point, she gets so tired to Brigit’s whining that she punches her in the face. It was amazing. Sadly, no one else sees it that way, and Meaghan is chewed out for her action against Queen B and the proper order is restored.

   It doesn’t help that this character has Special Snowflake Syndrome. At one point, it is revealed that because Brigit was so angry during her turning that anger manifested as a physical trait in her vampire form: fire. She can make herself into a torch when she's angry enough, and has no control over it, with smoke bleeding from her eyes and flames shooting from her nose, mouth, ears and hair. Also, there’s some sort of lava oozing from her nipples. Which, for the record, isn’t terrifying. It’s hilarious. I read that line and laughed for a solid minute, picturing this character lactating magma. But yes, digressing, it is revealed after this trait that Brigit is the only vampire ever to have that power.   As a side note, this character is cold – like, emotionally – to the point where she let her sire (who she never really liked) get killed, something that you aren’t supposed to do in this universe. She is never called out on this, and though her actions horrify her, she never shows remorse for it. It’s disgusting, and any sort of empathy I had for this terrible character was lost the minute I read that passage.

  To add insult to the injury, Brigit reaches Mary Sue levels of gorgeousness. I don't mind an attractive character, but this is insane! Every single man in the novel either creeps on her, or admires her, or wants in her pants. Most women are jealous of her beauty. She thinks highly of herself as well, which really doesn’t help anything. There are pages and pages devoted to describing what sort of effect she’s having on the men. At one point, I did a tally, and it was...unpleasant. The woman had: her sire, her Eamon, Mors (her BFF), along with her prey, the German officer she'susing for information, the hunters stalking her, an Evil German Doctor -- it goes on and on.

   Which brings me to my next point. You know, one of the first things that my writing profs taught me was that if you were going to decide on a point of view. You should stick with it. If you had to change it up, you’d separate the chapters. That doesn’t happen here. The point of view switches every few paragraphs, so we can get into other characters’ heads, and that doesn’t work here when we’re usually reading along attached firmly to Brigit. It’s not a first person story – thank God – but it is told from a closely written third. It’s jarring to keep switching characters, and generally makes me think less of Stratford as an author.

    As a side note, if we’re going to touch on the actual mechanics of the writing in his … work: Show, don’t tell. Stratford spends far too much time “telling” us about her characters and the situations rather than “showing” and it is more than a little irritating. I’d like examples of why I should dislike characters, not you just telling me about them, thanks.

   And one more for the road: I hate filler in novels. It’s why I can’t read the Eragon series. This book, all 293 pages of it, manages to have filler. Sure, it takes the form of Eamon-chapters, but it’s still there. This man spends all his time sulking and whining, and it doesn’t make for an interesting read. It could have been trimmed down with nothing lost.

   Furthermore, the non-linear style of writing really got under my skin. I may have already touched on this, but it’s confusing as hell when a lot of the book takes place on trains. It’s easy to skip over the chapter title/ exposition fairy. As well, it leaves the reader with questions they probably shouldn’t be asking themselves. At one point, it is revealed that Brigit is smuggling two Jewish children away from German, and all you can think is “Why hasn’t she killed them? They’re German, after all.” As well, why she’s carrying them, and how they met isn’t explained until the tail-end of the novel. It’s not cute. It’s annoying.

  There is one more thing that bothered me quite a bit about this novel, that I’m pretty sure I didn’t know about myself before I read this. It was the utter lack of humanity in the characters. And I’m not talking about the Nazis. Some of the allure from vampire lore comes from the fact that they’re romantic monsters; take Anne Rice’s Lestat for instance. He kills plenty of people and doesn’t feel remorse for it (after he freaks out about being a monster), but the readers still like him as a character because there’s a point to his actions, and a deeper working under the surface – there are issues with his abandonment by his sire and the loneliness he feels, and he is called out on for his behaviour later on. To contrast, Brigit loses her temper (after witnessing two Gestapo going to arrest a family of Jews; she kills them on the spot) and slaughters 200 German men giggling the entire time. This happens a few chapters after she tells a German that she later kills, “Because until you humans, we [vampires] don’t inflict pain for fun.” (pg. 98) Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in that? Good. Me too.

  And finally, though I may be alone in this, I really disliked the amount of German bashing going on –don’t pull out your torches and pitchforks! What I mean to say is that every German man, woman and child in that novel, be when SS or just civilians trying to live their lives during a war, were scorned and looked down upon. It only makes me think of the German Resistance during the war, or Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz and Oskar Schindler – men who risked a lot in WWII German to rescues and smuggle Jews from German and into safer countries. What I mean to say is that while Germans in WWII were villains, not all of them were baby-eating, puppy-kicking evil. To simplify them in that way honestly just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

   At one point, the vampires discuss how terrible all the Germans taste when compared with the English or French prey they’ve consumed. It doesn’t help that this universe seems to operate under the “Beautiful People are Good and Evil people are Ugly” terms, a trend that has always annoyed me. So we have an entire story where every German person is “thick” or “piggy” or ugly, while our narrator is repeatedly described as beautiful. It’s heavy handed, bad storytelling, and I dislike it.

The … Decent:

  Alright, terrible characters and telling-not-showing aside, this book actually has some high points. One of the most noticeable is the amount of research Stratford put into her work. The woman obviously put effort into nailing down all the little details, and it shows. Hell, it could stand to be shown a little more, in my opinion. It's one of the reaosns I like historical fiction, when I read it.

   Second, I really liked the premise, as I’ve already stated. It’s just the execution of it that was throwing me off. This could have been a great dark comedy, or even a spy novel, just as long as it didn’t take itself quite so seriously. Personally, I think I would have picked up this book if it had been just a group of British, human spies sent to do the same job. Hell, I probably would have liked it better, because at least then the characters would have been relatable, and I wouldn’t be asking myself, “So if you can kill 200 people no problem, why not just start slaughtering everyone en masse? It’s not like you have morals or hang-ups about that kind of thing.”

   It would have made for a more compelling read, I think, if it had been a group of humans trying to deal with how horrific the war is while juggling their duty to their country.

  Third: The fact that the monsters are monstrous. I mean, the vampires are terrible protagonists, but you don’t sympathize with them, like you would with Lestat. If Stratford was going for inhuman characters, ones that you couldn’t relate to, she found them. With this lot. In the very first introduction of vampires in this novel, it had the vamp in question ripping apart two young German SS officers new to the beat. And I have to say, when you make me feel bad for Nazis three pages into a book set in WWII, that’s skill right there.

   Fourth:  Believe it or not, I actually enjoyed a character or two. Meaghan, for instance, called Brigit out on her bullshit, and that was a refreshing change of pace, even if the woman was smacked down for such talk.Also, there was one character, unnamed, only showed up for a page to give Eamon something to angst about, I really liked him. He was this breath of fresh air is such a dull book: an underage British soldier chatting and generally being a friendly, warm presence in such a cold book. I found I wanted to know him more, or at least get his name.

   As a subset of that, I really enjoyed Eamon’s reaction to being turned into a vampire. We only get in as a flashback, but it’s also quite refreshing. He is seduced into it by Brigit, while the rest of his village and family is about to be killed for being Jewish (in the 12^th century). Once he realized what has happened when he rises again, he’s aghast. He’s horrified that everyone he knows and loves is dead, and he did nothing to stop it. He’s furious with Brigit for killing him, and the desire he felt for her when she turned him has disappeared because he realizes that she’s “just a dead thing.” It’s probably one of the most human reactions we get out of a vampire, ever. It’s a decent bit of writing.

  The final thing that I liked about this book was the ending. It’s so ridiculously bitter sweet and almost realistic that it nearly makes up for the rest of the piece. By the end of this novel, the vampires have been next to useless – they don’t get anywhere when they’re trying to scare the Nazis, they’re being hunted by the German vampire hunters, they’re generally just sort of flailing and incompetent for all their years and powers. To me, it was just showing that no matter how highly a supernatural creature things itself, humans are rat bastards who tend not to like being killed like cattle, and they will fight back. Even if the vampires are protagonists, after nearly 300 pages of listening to them lord over how superior they are than humans, it was nice to see their plans fall apart and their numbers cut down in a show of good, old fashioned human-style kill-it-with-fire.
 
   All in all, this book seems more like a cash-in on the vampire-trend that it does anything else. The characters are horrific, the writing is shoddy, and it’s generally sort of painful to read. However, if bittersweet endings (and amoral, ridiculously overpowered supernatural creatures) are your thing, this one is definitely for you.

   As always, if you have a book you think deserves the Cold Shoulder, let me know and drop me a line.

  This is Contemptus, the Stone Cold Critic, signing off. I’ll see you when I see you, gentle readers.