Dracula by Bram Stoker

I've read Dracula many times, but not recently. I picked it up this week to reread.

I'd forgotten what a remarkable book it is. It's an epistolary novel, told mostly by entries into various characters' diaries, and by letters between the characters. I watched the 1931 film version last night with Bela Lugosi, which was a lot of fun but no closer to the story than any other film version I've seen; so if you haven't actually read the book, you don't really know the plot.

Solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to finalize the sale of a London residence to Count Dracula. Dracula is creepy as hell, incidentally. He keeps Jonathan a prisoner once the papers are signed and sent back to England, but Jonathan escapes--but not before Dracula has left for England along with fifty boxes of graveyard earth. Meanwhile, Jonathan's fiancee Mina goes to visit her friend Lucy in Whitby, where a ship runs ashore in a storm--a ship with no one left alive except a large dog, which flees in the night and is never seen again. Lucy begins to sleepwalk at night, to Mina's distress, and to lose health and vitality, growing paler and paler. Also, Renfield the madman who eats flies; Van Helsing the Dutch doctor who is first to accept what's going on; and a cast of millions, including wolves, bats, and rats.

The first part of the book is my favorite, where the characters are still figuring out what Dracula is and how much danger they're in from him. The characters talk way too much, as was the style of writing in those days, until I get impatient and start to skim. But the plot is fascinating and creepy. I've never been all that fond of the last third of the book, which is basically a slow-motion chase, but the ending is satisfying.

I own two editions of Dracula, the nice hardback illustrated by Edward Gorey that my mother gave me, and a battered Wordsworth Classics edition published in 1993, which is the one I actually read (it's lighter and I don't care if it gets torn up). The text is in the public domain, so you can find copies everywhere.

New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear

I'm in the mood lately for denser fiction, which makes Elizabeth Bear perfect. She packs a lot into her sentences, and they take concentration to unpack.

Until this one I've never been able to finish a book by Bear, actually, because I just don't like her characters and she's so damn depressing. The main characters in New Amsterdam are more likable than I expected, although I never felt very close to any of them. And I admire her often-elegant prose enough to overlook the grim tone of her writing in this book.

Each chapter of New Amsterdam is more or less standalone, with a murder to solve in each and bigger events that arch from chapter to chapter and tie the book together. There's a term for this kind of novel, but I'm damned if I can remember it. It's set in the last year of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, in an alternate history where magic exists--as do vampires and other such creatures. The vampire Sebastien de Ulloa whiles away his empty years by helping solve crimes; sorceress Abigail Irene Garrett is a magical crime investigator for the crown in New Amsterdam.

Despite the murders and solutions--which get more complex as the book progresses--the book is not at all plot-driven. Its real purpose is to explore the meanings of love and loyalty. Sebastian is old enough that he's lost all purpose in life (or undeath) except his love for his protege Jack Priest; Abigail Irene has affairs with married, and powerful, men who don't deserve the loyalty she offers them. It's bleak, frankly. Bear's characters never feel joy.

I appreciated the writing, as I said, and the story kept me interested. I didn't love the ending, which felt abrupt--the book didn't so much end as just stop. There's a sequel, Seven for a Secret. I might read it.

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Vicious Circle by Linda Robertson

I hated this book.

I started off not hating it. I just didn't like it all that much, but there were bits of it that I found interesting--enough that I kept reading. I liked main character Persephone's relationship with Johnny the werewolf, and I liked that Persephone wasn't afraid to get mad at people who deserved it (although she never followed through with her anger, which was frustrating). I even liked that she had a small obsession with the King Arthur myths, even though it was a teeny tiny part of her character that was never developed enough to be truly interesting.

But the plot, forgive me, is utter shit. I am so tired of this kind of book. For one thing, it's a prequel to the sequels that I will not be reading. Nothing's resolved, and the big climax of the book consists of Persephone essentially deciding not to act, presumably so she can have those sequels. I usually wait a little while to write my reviews, but I just finished reading and I'm still in the white-hot fury of a reader who was denied an ending.

I had lots of other problems with the book too. Like, why bother to spell werewolf 'waerewolf'? Also, the pacing was glacial, slowed even further by extended meditation scenes, magic rituals with doggerel poetry, and an endless chapter that consisted of one character having his Tarot cards read. No one will remain seated during the Tarot card explanations! I skimmed and skimmed and still feel like I've been reading for a hundred years. Most of the action--and I use that word very loosely--takes place in Persephone's house.

As for the plot: Persephone is a witch who's sympathetic to werewolves and lets them kennel in her basement on the full moon (this means she locks them in dog crates, because otherwise I guess they'd go out and kill people). When a werewolf friend is murdered, Persephone is contacted by the leader of the local coven to hunt down and kill the murderer. She gives Persephone the killer's name and a lot of cash; Persephone asks another werewolf friend to research the killer, I guess because she doesn't know how to use Google. Then the research friend is attacked and nearly killed. Persephone takes the woman into her home to recover since the hospital refuses to treat werewolves.

This is approximately the first half of the book. I kept wondering when Persephone would start earning the money she took. She doesn't actually do anything. Other people find out stuff and tell her, and their revelations astonish her because she has the brain of a titmouse and the gumption of a small rock. At almost exactly halfway through the book, the characters start telling Persephone she's the Lustrata, the Chosen One who will either kill all the vampires or unite the vampires and werewolves and witches, or something. It's not clear. Persephone spends the next 5,000 pages of the book not wanting to be the Lustrata. At the end--sorry, spoiler alert--she decides she'll be the Lustrata after all, because apparently that means she doesn't have to do anything! Hooray!

I liked a few of the characters. Johnny the werewolf was interesting and probably the most well rounded. The subplot of the murdered werewolf's daughter was at times moving and felt more realistic than anything else in the book (even if the girl seemed much older than nine years old). However, all the other characters were either interchangeable--all the other werewolves, whose names I couldn't even keep straight--or cliches, like the hypocritical TV preacher, the friend-who's-found-Jesus-and-won't-tolerate-anyone-else, the superpowerful megasexy vampire lord (oh, how I loathe that particular cliche), the wise-but-annoying grandmother.

So yeah, I really hated this book. What makes me particularly bitter is that I picked this book up after I got partway into a very similar book and gave up on it because I hated the vampires; I didn't realize this one would have the same issues until the vampires turned up halfway through. At least that other book had some action scenes.

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Moonshine by Alaya Johnson

Everything about Moonshine hits my personal likes--the 1920s and an exploration of otherness and social stratification, in particular--so I'm not sure why I didn't like the book as a whole. It wasn't terrible, but it felt unfocused, with so many themes and subthemes that the book wallowed along instead of moving at the brisk pace that's really needed.

Zephyr Hollis is the suffragette main character, and I think she's a big part of why I didn't like the book very much. I found her weak and bland. She teaches night school to immigrants in New York City, which seems to take her about an hour or two a week; certainly it gives her lots of free time to join every cause going (except the prohibitionists, and good thing too since she manages to get drunk every time she's given access to booze). Oh, and she also sings in a nightclub, because it's the 1920s so you have to include jazz and gin joints. (Not that I'm complaining, mind.)

Zephyr has Issues. Her daddy is a famous demon-hunter in Montana and trained her to follow in his footsteps, but instead she's helping vampires and fighting for Other rights. She doesn't eat meat (or much else) for reasons that change from the start of the book to the last--first she seems to be atoning for past sins, but then later she just says she's seen inside slaughterhouses. And she's so ready to help others (and Others) that she neglects herself in a way that seems frankly over the top, like giving away all her money in response to a sob story and then having no way to pay the rent. Dumbass. I wanted to smack Zephyr constantly.

Her love interest, Amir, is just as vapid. I never found him very attractive, and certainly never felt much of a spark between him and Zephyr, even when they were breathlessly tumbling into bed--although they always manage to get interrupted before anything happens anyway.

The plot is pretty simple. Amir asks Zephyr for help finding out information about a notorious mob boss named Rinaldo, a vampire. Since Zephyr has just given away all her money (not for the last time) and Amir is offering to pay her for her help, she agrees. Then she proceeds to careen from coincidence to coincidence while picking up clues. The book would be half as long if only characters would stop being coy with information for the sake of prolonging the suspense.

I don't want to come down too hard on the book, because it has a lot going for it too. It's solidly written. While the plot relies heavily on coincidence, it held my interest. I picked up on more clues than Zephyr did and had most of the big reveal sussed out ahead of time, but I didn't figure it all out. And the historical details felt natural and never jarred, which is a real trick when an author has done as much research as Johnson must have--it's always a temptation to keep infodumping, but she's a light touch with the facts. The slang felt right, too.

But...the vampires. The vampires are way too powerful, particularly since it only takes the merest nip for a vampire to turn humans into more vampires. There shouldn't be any humans left. And although Zephyr kept going on about how vampires are just regular people with jobs and families, the action shows a very different story. Even vampires who were meant to be sympathetic acted like monsters. I frankly thought Zephyr's dad had the right idea about what vampires actually are; he shows up partway through the book to call Amir a wog (repeatedly) and sneer at Zephyr, but he by God gets out there and kicks vampire butt when it counts. I would much rather read about him than his pasty wimp of a daughter.

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Death Blows by DD Barant

Death Blows is the sequel to Dying Bites. This is a series of books with the most generic titles imaginable. Fortunately, the books are much more memorable.

In the first book, FBI criminal profiler Jace Valchek was yanked into an alternate world to help track down an insane serial killer. The population of the world she's been brought to is 99% vampires and werewolves, 1% humans. In this book, she's got another serial killer to track down--a murderer who seems to be connected with magic-enhanced comic books, a band of superheroes who turn out to be real, and not one but about 500 secret societies.

Seriously, there are so many secret societies that I stopped being able to keep them apart. I also had trouble keeping track of the conspiracies and counter-conspiracies. About halfway through the book, my interest sagged so much I almost just gave up. By the time I got to the two separate instances of (to paraphrase) "it's time you were told the real truth," I was just annoyed that the real truth had been held back for so damn long. It doesn't help that, yes, this book is in present tense like the first one was. It continually threw me out of the story, particularly when I came back to it after setting it aside for a while.

The world Barant has built is fascinating, but it's not a lot of fun. Humans are an endangered species, preyed on by vampires and werewolves--the insulting term for humans is "OR," original recipe. Barant does a great job building the tension between Jace's professional responsibilities and her personal difficulties adjusting to a world where she's considered prey or someone to be pitied; the professional and personal overlap a lot, causing even more tension. Jace has made a few friends in her new world, but ultimately she just wants to get home again.

But. The last paragraph? Those issues do not resolve or change in this book, and indeed barely apply to the plot at all. While Death Blows is mostly entertaining, I dislike having to essentially march in place, with the real plot--Jace tracking down the one person whose arrest can get her a ticket home--sidelined for an entire book. I dislike even more that the major theme of racism--because that's essentially what this is all about, except that it's more species-ism in this case--isn't given more than a quick stir before being left to simmer some more. I know this is a series and the overarching themes can't be resolved in one book or even a few, but I'd like some hint that Barant intends to resolve them at all, and that she has plans to that effect. Oh, and she can stop writing in present tense whenever she likes.

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The Good, The Bad and the Undead by Kim Harrison

I'm falling behind, having read about a zillion books since my last post. So to help catch up, this review's going to be a twofer covering both Dead Witch Walking and its sequel The Good, The Bad and the Undead.

I had about three false starts as I tried to get into the first of these. On my initial attempt I made it through two chapters before I got bored and quit the book, re-reading an old favorite instead. A few weeks later I re-read the first chapter ("why is this still in my to-be-read stack? Didn't I read it? The cover looks familiar") and put it back on the stack again as soon as memory caught back up. Some time later I restarted yet again, this time making it through four chapters before deciding that although the book wasn't hopeless, I still had better things to read.

Fast forward another month, and I'd just put down something truly dreadful and grabbed the next book on the pile--Dead Witch Walking again. Fourth time lucky, right? I picked up where I had left off earlier and this time it stuck. I started carrying the book around, reading a page or two during free time, putting off chores to reach the end of a chapter. And when I finished the thing, I dug its sequel out of my to-be-read stack and started on it.

Reading these two back to back, I was particularly struck by the differences in character development. In the first book the protagonist Rachel is almost entirely a self-obsessed, whiny, ineffectual non-entity, while her "friend" Ivy is a moody goth Mary Sue non-entity with no real personality other than generic menace. The author forces the characters through scene after scene where they play out their precisely defined personas regardless of whatever motivations might be appropriate, and the resulting dissonance prevents you from ever really being absorbed. Or at least, not without a lot of effort, which kind of defeats the point.

In the second book, though, every single character (even the pixie--which the author always writes as "pixy", thereby bugging the hell out of me) has become more complex. They demonstrate varied emotions, their behavior is appropriate to a particular scene's motivations, and each of the characters has picked up both weaknesses and strengths--and I don't mean like "Ivy can now eat steel and spit nails," but rather that there are histories, emotional motivations and goals for all of them. It's a big and a welcome difference, but it does kind of highlight a problem in the first book. Thinking back, I'd have to say that the plotting is marginally improved as well: the first book is pretty linear, while the second--while still a far cry from a murder mystery--at least tries to throw a spin or two in.

Out of curiosity I popped briefly through Kim Harrison's web site, and from the looks of it Dead Witch Walking was her first published work by a couple of years. If so then she's managed to fix some big flaws in her writing pretty quickly--that's impressive. Her baddies are still kind of cookie-cutter (I need to pull out the Vampire Evaluation Sheet to find out where these score) but overall she's done a reasonable job at world building, and with characterization and plotting fast getting fixed that leaves her looking reasonably strong in the field.

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Dying Bites by DD Barant

I ordinarily don't read books written in present tense. I can think of only one book (Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman) where it worked for me. In the case of Dying Bites, the book is good in spite of being in present tense, not because of it.

Dying Bites is a richly layered book, just perfect to really dig into. It starts off fast and doesn't flag. Stuff just keeps happening, which I love--and it's not just action scenes that move the plot forward, but the interplay of characters and the slow revealing of background and history of this world. The downside to this is that the main character, Jace Valchek, seems to drop into the story with barely any past of her own.

Jace works for the FBI as a profiler, helping track down psychopaths, but she's pulled into an alternate reality where vampires and werewolves are common. There's a human serial killer murdering vampires and werewolves; since the supernatural species are mostly mentally stable, they don't know how to deal with the killer. Jace has been brought in to help track him down.

That alone would make for a fun urban fantasy, but that's just the surface. Jace has to get used a world in which humans make up only 1% of the population; she's got a golem for a partner, no one knows what guns are (and the bullets don't do much damage to the locals anyway), and as the book progresses, she becomes more and more certain that her new bosses are holding back vital information about what the serial killer is actually up to--and why.

The plot is solid and clever, and I love that Jace is an intelligent character. The writing is good too--despite its being in present tense. The present tense doesn't make the story more immediate, incidentally. It even seems to do the opposite: in several cases, important events take place offscreen. I don't have a problem with cutting away modestly from a sex scene (although I'd have liked at least some buildup so I wasn't so surprised, after the scene break, to find that Jace had indeed done the nasty), but it really feels like a cop-out when important conversations, fights, and explosions are treated the same way.

On the whole, though, the awesomeness of this book far outweighs the few drawbacks, even the present tense. But just think how awesome it would have been if it didn't continually draw attention to the mechanics of the writing.

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The Hunt by Susan Sizemore

It pains me to say that I'm going to be unkind in this review. I heard Susan Sizemore on a panel at this year's DragonCon and was so impressed by her intelligence and wit that I picked up one of her books. I was not, alas, impressed by the book.

I chose The Hunt because it's the first in her Laws of the Blood series, which is more urban fantasy than paranormal romance. It was published in 1999, and one of my problems with the book is how dated it feels. All those pop culture references are about as current now as the faded Ziggy poster they still have up in my office at work.

I can get past dated pop culture references, although they're distracting. I found it a lot harder to get past that the book seems to be set in our world, even right down to the movies they were watching in 1999, but somehow the whole vampire fad seems to have passed them by--despite even having Buffy! At one point a movie producer tells one character that her screenplay with a vampire protagonist would never sell, because vampires are considered dangerous monsters and no one would find them sexy. Excuse me while I boggle in confusion. Why do Nicholas Cage and Shaq exist in this world but not Anne Rice or even Bram Stoker?

I spent most of the book boggling in confusion, actually. So many names are tossed around, so many subplots surface and disappear like breaching whales, that I found it difficult to figure out what precisely was going on most of the time. All the characters speak alike and Sizemore frequently doesn't tag lines of dialogue, which meant quite often I had to reread passages several times to figure out who was speaking. That most of the characters are psychic and communicating telepathically or having visions doesn't help matters.

I'll try and recap the plot, although I found it really hard to follow. Valentine is a screenwriter and a vampire reclusive of her own kind. She decides that what she really wants to write is a screenplay about vampires the way they really are. To do this, she listens in psychically to Selim the vampire's life. (None of this becomes clear until the book is half over or more, which meant that I kept wondering why Valentine was even in the story.) Selim is the Los Angeles Enforcer, a vampire who makes sure the local vampires don't step out of line. At the beginning of the book, he's arranging for them to have a Hunt; he's the one who orchestrates how many people they can kill and when and where. But Selim and his human-on-her-way-to-becoming-a-vampire-herself companion Siri are having relationship problems. That is, although Selim loves Siri dearly, he's stopped sleeping with her. It's been over a year and she's all hot for him and doesn't understand why he's doing this. (It was almost the end of the book before I understood that he was trying to prolong their companionship, since after she became a vampire they would have to stay apart because vampires aren't supposed to sleep together--although it was never explained why.) There's also an evil vampire named Kamaraju who seems to exist solely to give the book a bad guy--although he doesn't do much--and a baby vampire called a dhampir who becomes vitally important at some point to the plot even though he only gets a mention or two for the first half of the book, and there's an evil stalker who turns out to be a nice vampire, and an evil stalker who turns out to die--and lordy, was that scene confusing, because I hadn't figured out there were two stalkers showing up at once.

I don't know, it's impossible to recount the plot in any coherent form. It feels half-gelled, made up on the fly and not revised, messy and confusing. Worse, none of the characters are appealing. Sizemore seems to have great fondness for the characters, since she keeps referring to various of them with cuddly adjectives--if I never hear that Valentine is a "very small woman" again, I will not have to kill anyone--but none of them are pleasant to spend time with. Selim shows that he's a jerk over and over, but Siri just can't stay mad at him. Since she doesn't do anything herself except have visions, headaches, and arguments (when she's not being hunted or used as a catspaw), she's not my idea of a good main character either. Not that there's really a main character. The book starts out from Valentine's viewpoint in the short but unnecessary prologue, then goes to Selim's viewpoint in the first chapter, then ends up in Siri's viewpoint--and then it's anything goes, and we're headhopping all over the place.

I'd like to say there were parts of this book I liked, but I can't come up with anything. The action scenes are interesting, except that as soon as things finally get moving, Sizemore screeches to a halt and makes us read page after page of dialogue and exposition. It's frustrating. It's disappointing. I stayed up until 2am to finish this book and I want my sleep back.

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