I am ashamed. Udolpho has been shelved. I might have made it if, upon arriving in Venice the trips up and down the alps weren't traded for gondola rides up and down the canals. By the time I decided to spare myself I was convinced that when Emily and her aunt were imprisoned at Udolpho the majority of their captivity would be spent walking up and down the tower stairs, complete with descriptions of every brick. I shall have to be content to be one of those people who has never read the Grandmother of all Gothic fiction because I'm pretty sure that doing so will kill me.

However, Anya Seton has pretty much succeeded in seducing me away from Daphne Du Maurier.

Dragonwyck

Holy S&M, Batman! Dragonwyck is from the same school as Rebecca. Dragonwyck is the hardened bastard child of Jane Eyre and Tess. I couldn’t possibly recommend a book more, and for so many reasons. In the afterword, Phillipa Gregory points out how utterly cliché Dragonwyck is, and she’s right. A naive girl from a poor background has the opportunity to live the life with a wealthy relative. Of course, one of them is the handsome master of the house.

I’ve never met a leading man like Nicholas Van Ryn before. I’m usually the one who’s rooting for the Byronic hero no matter how twisted he gets. This is Heathcliff’s legacy to me. With Nicholas Van Ryn I had no idea what to do about him. Maybe it was because his perspective was shown from the offset, but he just struck me as wrong. He looked at Miranda as though she were nothing more than a thing, which was how he regarded everyone around him. He had no passion, no fire. He didn’t act on impulse. He was as well ordered as the world he created.

He gave me the heebie jeebies.

He also had the perfect foil. Jeff Turner didn’t jump out at me as a love interest for Miranda, not when he was just a country doctor. No, in spite of Nicholas being wrong, Miranda was going to save him and Jeff was going to get in the way. Not until Nicholas commits murder in order to keep his world as he saw fit did I start to get the “Uh oh …” vibe. Jeff took over my perspective as a reader and in a few pages had me screaming at the vain and frivolous Miranda “NooooOOOOOooo!!! Run!!! You gonna die!!!”

And now for the S&M. Having cleared the way for his marriage to Miranda, Nicholas gets her, and the skin starts crawling. While Seton doesn’t go into much detail about the loss of Miranda’s virginity she also doesn’t skimp: it ain’t pretty. In fact, it’s downright terrifying, and as I read on it was clear why – Nicholas likes it rough.

I’m enough of a pop culture whore to make the connection to HBO’s Rome where Octavian speaks to his future bride:

You should know that when we are married, I shall on occasion beat you. With my hand... A light whip... When I do so you must not think you have offended me. I do it because it gives me sexual pleasure. So remember that and don't be upset.

This could very well have been spoken to Miranda by Nicholas, and surprisingly Miranda begins to experience sexual pleasure, referred to as her ‘dark pleasure.’ Yes, she's into it.

As the novel continues the squicky feeling Nicholas inspires doesn’t go away. To my astonishment I eventually began to hate him. Sticking out in my mind is a scene in which he is explaining something to Miranda and she agonizes over the fact that she doesn’t understand the words he speaks. The word is voluptuous. The way she struggled over trying to decipher this made me want to cry. She remains a country girl, subservient to him, and this is the way he likes it.

In the end, as clichéd as this book was, I loved it. For one, it wasn’t European. This was an American tale, set in New York state, and its characters were richly American. I was one of those confused kids who by the time she reached school had imbibed so much American culture and history it came as quite the shock to learn that I was from a place called Canada, that Ronald Regan wasn’t my president, and that the second language of my nation was French (and not Spanish, as Sesame Street would have led me to believe.) My interest in US history has remained, conflicting with my inherent colonialism that growing up in what for centuries was a major British port town has hammered into me.

The most intriguing cameo appearance by far was from Edgar Allan Poe. I missed the appreciation boat when it came to Poe during my university years but in recent months my interest in the man has me rethinking getting my hands on a Poe anthology. It’s because of Poe that Nicholas becomes a drug addict, that he rapes Miranda and ultimately drives her away, and that he can’t save himself. Phillipa Gregory muses that Nicholas stays with you long after you’ve put down Dragonwyck. He does. He’s the type of character you find yourself thinking of as you sit at a stop light or are waiting in line at the coffee shop.

Have you ever bought a book based entirely on the cover and a brief glimpse of the back? I bought two yesterday.

Erin McCarthy’s My Immortal and Fallen snagged me while browsing Chapters last night. I was meandering around with a copy of an obscure Mary Stewart novella I had found when I had to pause next to the HOT STEAMY ROMANCE table for someone to pass me in the isle. I don’t usually shop in-store for romance & erotica. I prefer to peruse my smut from the comfort of my living room, cross-referencing reviews and learning as much as I can about a romantica book without being leered at by the people in the adjacent horror section. However, I looked down and there was the cover you see here. Oh holy Jesus, that’s awesome, I think, and completely unabashed I pick it up. I see the words angel, absinthe, and New Orleans.

SOLD.

Not only that but I hightail it to the romance section and grab the predecessor, My Immortal. After hitting Starbucks for something full of caffeine and sugar I drive to the local park, light a smoke, and start reading My Immortal.

I highly doubt I’ll be disappointed. In fact, I think that Erin McCarthy is going to fill that gaping void the cancellation of Hex left in me. I refuse to even google these books, I’m so determined to enjoy them.

I was going to wait until I read all three books in Elizabeth Hoyt’s trilogy before I commented on it but as I’ve bitten the bullet and gotten back to Udolpho it might be a while before I get to the other two books, and so here I go, gushing about The Raven Prince.

Right around here is where I would start squealing, because this book was just that good. I usually find myself disappointed by romances, as some authors are still afraid of calling a cock a cock and a pussy a pussy, but not Ms. Hoyt. Not only was this unfuckingbelievably erotic but it left a huge smile on my face.

Synopsis:
A widow takes a secretarial position to an elusive country Lord. He yells a lot, has pockmarks on his face, and he’s looking for a wife who will provide a child and is not grossed out by his face. Insert sexual tension, blackmail, scandal, and melt-your-eyeballs fucking.

Sex:
The last romance I can remember reading was by Liz Carlyle. I was shocked when the hero started masturbating before fucking the heroine in the barn. Don’t ask me why, I seem to be under the impression we don’t live in a world where I can see James Purefoy’s penis while watching The History Channel and I can buy Emma Holly in Walmart. The word cock is not so much shocking anymore, but if I see the word pussy in a romance I’d floored. Wet pussy, I’m out for days.

The first love scene between Edward de Raaf and Anna Wren has her disguised as a prostitute. Hoyt is very descriptive without being either flowery and boring or clinical and crass. It takes a lot of talent to describe the inner muscles of the vagina contracting without sounding like someone writing bad Hermoine/Malfoy fanfic. And later during a fellatio scene I was literally sitting there, jaw hung open, thinking, No, she’s not … oh my god, she’s not … no way … she is! It was so erotic and startling that days later I realized I had been so floored I never noticed whether the heroine spat or swallowed.

Story:
Usually when you throw blackmail into the mix you get a weepy heroine who has to be saved. I won’t spoil you, but Elizabeth Hoyt turned this standard on its ear. Anna Wren is no one’s little victim and because of this she might just be the most adorably plucky heroine I’ve encountered in a long time. And Edward … as I said he yells a lot. I love cranky heroes, and Edward was good and cranky. Pairing him with Anna was perfection. Just the back and forth between them regarding the naming of Edward’s dog will make you smile.

There’s nothing I don’t like about this book and its characters, main or secondary. For a less talented author, cramming so many characters into a story would be a disaster but for Hoyt, each enriches the story in a way I would have thought impossible, and I’ll be very pleased to see at least some of them again in the sequels.

Awesomesauce:
So I get to the end of book and I’m all giggly, yet I’m not off the hook yet. Turn the page and there is Romance Hero Rule Book, in which Edward de Raaf, hero of The Raven Prince, responds to ten rules:

6. Heroes always keep their temper

Edward: I do not have a temper and anyone who says so—(censored)

Pure win.

So in closing – read this! Even if you cringe when you read romances, read this!

Labels: reading

I always feel guilty when I buy new books and read them immediately, like I'm some cad stringing along the other books in favour of something new and shiny.

This is what I did this week. Upon turning 30 I decided 'fuck reality!' and went shopping, and then turned myself into something resembling Jabba the Hut while I hunkered down.

Though Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears was non-fiction, I'm pretty sure I can still claim that 'fuck reality' statement from above because this was a bit of a surreal experience. When Grizzly Man aired on Discovery I got a little obsessed with it. I thought that Timothy Treadwell, a bear activist who was eventually killed and eaten by bears, was a total nutjob. He didn't deserve to die but he sure as hell got himself killed by being a complete and utter twit about conservation. If you haven't seen Grizzly Man, the jist is a Blair Witch style look at Treadwell's interaction with the bears (using Treadwell's own footage) in which Treadwell comes off as an escaped mental patient prancing around singing to bears.

Nick Jans book did what the documentary didn't do for me - it made me feel awful for laughing out loud whenever Treadwell did something stupid on camera. Poor guy, I thought, He just wanted to be loved, and I was haunted when I thought of Treadwell's last moments (even more so when I thought of the other victim, his girlfriend, who essentially had to wait in the dark surrounded by bears for her time to come - you don't get that kind of horror in even the goriest Hostel-style film.)

At one point in the book, however, Jans yanks the bear-skinned rug out from underneath me and made me loathe Treadwell. This wasn't Jans' intention, but it happened. Here is a guy who was so into his own fantasy that he was a bear whisperer, that the bears were benevolent, that they were actually doing more than merely tolerating him (to paraphrase one of the interviewees in Grizzly Man, they probably thought he was just 'retarded'), that he set it up so that he would be killed by one. He acclimatized the bears to human contact, so much so that one he had actually known and named was shot when the rescue party perceived it was showing a little too much interest in them (though Jans contends that this is probably the bear who did the killing and not the older, more ferocious bear who did the eating.)

As are most people, I'm an animal lover, but even more so I'm against stupidity. When the head of the Sea Shepherd society recently claimed that the deaths of four sealers in Canada wasn't as tragic as the seal hunt itself it was no wonder tempers on the ice flared so quickly. Not that I'm advocating the slaughter of baby seals for fashion but these sealers aren't exactly rolling in diamonds and rubies at the end of the day - sealing makes the difference between meat & potatoes and No Name brand macaroni and cheese for a lot of kids and puts them in winter boots, so I advocate changing the rules to make the hunt more humane for the seals.

Cruel remarks aside, activists unintentionally hurt the animals as well. It's fine while they're trying to free baby bears from circuses in Russia but when you have these activists breaking laws meant to protect the animals it amounts to the same thing as walking up and shooting them in the head. A seals that gets too comfortable around humans is less likely to have that trigger go off that tells them move when they see a human approaching them. It's the same with any animal. In my own back yard I have a trio of deer who have taken to eating our bird seed and are so used to the suburban pace they actually start to approach me as I get out of my car to see if I have anything for them, and this is just plain sad.

It's the same with Treadwell's bears. Because of him, how many bears in his favoured locale don't have the fear they should have? Though I disagreed with much of what Jans said about Treadwell I wholeheartedly agree that humans and wildlife should keep their distance from one another. There may be such a thing as friendship in the human world but in the animal kingdom instinct is what rules over all.

Once I turned myself into a total Debbie Downer I turned to Gods Behaving Badly. It's very light reading - I finished in a day. It follows a premise similar to a short story I once read about Greek Gods in modern times. The short story was much more serious, looking at Hera as a middle-aged woman pondering her tragic marriage to Zeus and also her son, Hephaestus's love for Aphrodite (and vice versa, which was very touching.) In the end we discover that the rapist-at-large she had been following in the news is actually Zeus.

GBB isn't as serious. I bought it expecting something of the Sophie Kinsella fare before putting it in the same category of Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer (coming eventually to a theatre near you!). Then halfway through I realized that it was reminding me of neither - this book is more akin to Shaun of the Dead. In the book Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator, Apollo is a TV psychic, and Eros has subscribed to Christianity. It wasn't so much ha-ha funny as it was snort-worthy. I loved Apollo to pieces in spite of his, "So ... If you won't sleep with me I'd rather rape you, if that's ok" moment.

But at the heart of this story are Alice and Neil, who are meant to be together. Alice is so sweet and charming she had me smiling with every line, and the way she and Neil are happy just to play Scrabble together melts my heart. In their first scene in the book, Neil thinks to himself that while Alice has never given him a kiss the fact that when he gave her a gift, she pushed her favourite knick knack aside to display his gift and that was like a kiss made a sound come out of me reserved only for the sight of pink hamster feet.

Last night I discovered that I was past the 100 page mark for the full length story I’m working on. This is usually my milestone. If I get this far and I feel like I want to keep going I’m in a pretty good place. It’s also when I start to think about what just slid off my brain and onto the computer screen and I either cringe and put it aside or I keep plugging away.

At this stage the characters are pretty much operating without any help from me. They’ve spent months or years bobbing about in my brain waiting for me to find somewhere to put them and either it’s a success or it’s a giant fail. They’ve probably gone through 10 career changes before popping out of the end of my fingertips or they just appeared in a place I had no idea what to do with, but either way they've found their home.

I’m a control freak, so sometimes when the characters start exercising their independence it leaves me flailing, but in a good way. An example of this is the last full length I worked on, still trapped on a Kensington flash drive waiting for me to put on my Really Serious and Ambitious Editorial Hat. This was one of those flukes where I didn’t actually write anything down before hand but just came up with a first line that really worked, but nonetheless I developed an outline in my head of what happens. Things are moving along swimmingly until I shocked my own pants off. Heroine is off somewhere crying in the middle of the night and realizes she’d gotten herself lost. “OHNOES! HALP!” she cries, and to both our astonishment the guy who comes to rescue her is the Sniveling Little Fucker I had intended to be only a piece of furniture with a talent for cunningulus. Is he there to fuck her? we both wonder, and again are knocked on our arses when he makes a genuine attempt to help her.

It’s quite the experience when you’re as startled as one of your characters and doing the whole WTF-face along with her and I burned through the next 100 or so pages just to see what he would do next.

Ok, I sound like a raving lunatic, but it’s true. This character railroaded me so much that I wondered if it would even make sense for the heroine to find her way back to the hero. On one hand I thought, “You know what? It’s your bloody story, and it’s porn. So long as someone’s coming …?” But on the other hand I remembered how I felt when I had the rug pulled out from under me by a couple of authors.

About a year or so ago I read Cleo Cordell’s Senses Bejeweled and before I say anything more let me just say that this was damned hot and I’m sorry I didn’t read the first book before picking up the sequel because I might not have been so harsh in judging it if I had known that these characters already had a bit of a history and it wasn’t a big, “Oh, by the way, this happened ...” Nonetheless, something about this book irked me in a big way – Cordell pulled a literary cock-tease on me. She introduced a character who was enigmatic and sexy as hell, flawed, somewhat deformed, and a real mean fucker when he needed to be. I waited and I waited and I waited for the heroine to finally fuck this guy, even though his deformity affected him sexually (didn’t stop him from getting a blowjob complete with money-shot, though …) Then, all of a sudden, he was gone. Gone where? He went away on business.

The fuck?!?!?! He creates this elaborate plot to lure the heroine’s lover to his palace and make him his sex slave, and then he just leaves. Poof. Gone.

I’ve been trying to find out if there was a point to this but I can’t find enough about Cordell’s work on the internet to get a blurb for her later publications and see if there’s a third book. If this was it, if Hamed the … pirate (is that what he was? I totally should find the first book …) just took off, I remain ever so pissed. I felt like she got me all worked up and then left me hanging with a “Oh, he’s gone, but here’s a couple of people fucking up against a tree …” It had me worried enough that when I picked up another Black Lace title and started to get into it I flipped to the back to see if there were any loose ends that would drive me crazy, and which point I’d probably have sent it back to the publisher with a nasty note. Just because it’s erotica doesn’t mean you can get away with big giant plot holes of doom.

Aside from that snag in an otherwise decadent book, Cordell did a good job. Unlike a popular fantasy author I’ve read … Sara Douglass. She was poised to be one of my favourite authors. I read Hades Daughter and I was probably one of the only people not outraged by the fact that the pissed off Trojan raped the Greek princess and two chapters later she was seriously into him (one, if she was going for an authentic mythological fantasy she passed, if you examine the love-lines of someone like Achilles; two, it set up the mother of all I’m-gonna-fuck-you-up moments by the heroine at the end of the book.) Then I made the mistake of beginning The Wayfarer Redemption.

I hate like hell to bitch about what an author does or doesn’t do with her own characters, since as I just explained they tend to get away from you, but this was just too much. The book seems to center on two characters, Axis & Faraday. Faraday is supposed to marry Axis’ half-brother, but of course falls in love with Axis, and vice versa. Because of a prophecy, Faraday comes to the conclusion that loving Axis would lead to his death and goes ahead with her marriage to the brother. She sacrifices her happiness for the man she loves. He moseys off into the sunset in search of his real family (weird-looking winged creatures or some such shit) and thinks about Faraday, worries about Faraday, and still loves Faraday. I’m convinced that love will conquer all. After all, what would be the point of putting me through Faraday’s sacrifice if she wasn’t going to find happiness with the man she loved?

At this point in the book Douglass makes my fucking list of people I’d like to hit in the head with a sock full of pennies. She introduces this completely unlikeable character by the name of Azure. She kills someone and is dragged off by Axis’ real mother to the land of the freaky angels so she doesn’t get lynched. Now, if Douglass had explained right off the bat that Azure killed because she had been horribly abused for years she might have won me over but she didn’t. Instead she drops Azure into the action halfway through the book and decides that she’s going to be awesomesauce.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Axis gets a raging hard on and MUST FUCK AZURE BECAUSE IT IS HIS DESTINY? Ok, fine. I’ll go with this, because Faraday is still waiting for Axis to come back and in his defense, if I remember this correctly, he thinks she’s dead. I was literally in the middle of the sequel to The Wayfarer Redemption when I realized Axis and Faraday were never going to be reunited and I’d been screwed by Douglass.

I ended up surfing the net to find out what the hell happened and as it turns out a lot of people were just as pissed as I was, and after getting a rundown of the whole series from someone I discovered that Axis & Azure have freaky angel babies and that Faraday not only continues to get screwed but when she dies she’s reincarnated as Eve (you know, as in Adam and Eve—yes, it’s more irritating than The Da Vinci Code), thus dooming her to be scorned by a whole new set of assholes. At one point someone directed me to the FAQ on Douglass’s website. Among other things, she talks about why Faraday was made to suffer so much. This is an excerpt from the FAQ:

Is Faraday ever going to have a happy ending?

I would dearly like to squash her under a huge pumpkin studded with rusty twelve-inch nails so that she dies a lingering, painful death from blood poisoning and a badly leaking belly, and I reserve the right to do so any time I feel like it. (Of course, by the time you get to the end of "Crusader" you'll see that that is not quite the fate I've given her ... nevertheless, I've been nasty enough ...)

I say for the second time in this post – the fuck?!?!?! What is the point of creating a character as sweet and as benevolent as Faraday, make your readers sympathize her, root for her, set her up as the main character and then continue the rest of the series with a completely insane attitude like this? And it is insane, not to mention insulting to the reader because it comes with no justification other than “because I can.”

Yeah, because you’re a Mary Sue writer, Miss Douglass. Azure reminds me of those non-canon characters that get stuffed into fan fiction all the time. She’s the poorly explained new castaway that makes Sawyer forget about Kate. She’s that girl Mulder meets in a bar and takes home to get over his burning loins for Scully and ends up falling in love with. She’s the meat in the Sam and Dean sandwich. She’s the sub that finally allows Dr. House to reach his full potential as an S&M god who spanks his woman with his cane before telling her that her love has made him complete.

I was going to point out Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and how Louis ends up meeting Lestat again instead of staying in Armand’s Theatre of Sexy Emo Vampires as an example of resisting temptation to make the story work, but then I remembered she Mary Sued me in the Mayfair Witches when Michael screwed 13-year-old Mona and everyone was cool with it, including his crazy wife. I was also going to use Bridget Jones as an example but in case you didn’t know this, in the unpublished continuation Bridget breaks up with Darcy, gets pregnant by Daniel and they end up raising the baby together … I’ll so I’ll shame Douglass by using some other popular fiction examples. I’ve only read two of the In Death books by Nora Roberts (writing as J.D. Robb) but this I know: Eve Dallas is going to be with Roarke for the rest of her life. I know this because Roberts is a smart cookie and she knows that if she fucks with her own canon her readers will tear her apart. Similarly, in the Stephanie Plum books it’s clear that in spite of constantly making out with Ranger, Janet Evanovich’s heroine is OTP with Morelli. If Evanovich kills Morelli in the line of duty and Ranger steps up her devoted fans, while a little tickled that Ranger will be doing all the good touch/bad touch from here on out, will be nonetheless be left going, “Wait, what? He’s dead? No, seriously, he’s going into hiding, isn’t he?” (meanwhile, Morelli/Stephanie shippers will Dixie Chick Evanovich’s ass …) Don’t believe me? Look at Laurel K. Hamilton. I’ve only read one of her books so I don’t really care, but there are some pissed off Anita Blake fans out there lately and she really has no one to blame but herself.

… ok, that was a bit of a rant but I do think I’ve made my point. Letting your characters exercise a little independence does wonders, but at some point you have to bring them back and tell them, “Um … hello. Remember me?” So even though I dreamily imagined OHNOES! HALP! Realizing that the Sniveling Little Fucker is actually a good guy and makes her happy I’ve made a commitment to get her back with the hero. With the 150 or so pages that came before SLF I set it up—she has to be with him, it's mean to be, it's fate. It’s canon. I maketh be, peons. Everyone learns something, everyone grows, and if this book is published and read I won’t be screwing over the reader by having the hero conveniently die or become Lord of the Assholes in order to make way for SLF. Screw him. If he wants it bad enough he can pretty-please me into a short story to wrap things up for him.

This is what I’ve learned from other authors about writing. For the most part everyone gets it, but occasionally you get some dickhead who breaks tradition and has to suffer the wrath of their readers. Not like they care, since by this point they’re rolling in a big heap o’ money first thing in the morning, but it makes it no less insulting to the readers.

Labels: reading, writing