Bad Moon Rising
Jan. 4th, 2010 12:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynI am reading Sherilyn Kenyon's Bad Moon Rising. I know, I said after Acheron that I wasn't going to read more of her stuff.
The library gets them in hardcover. They're shiny. Someone actually spellchecks her books and the grammar doesn't suck. You can tell she did a boatload of research... I name knitting things from obscure mythology, I can tell she isn't just making shit up from whole cloth.
Unlike her earliest fiction books, a lot of the latest ones focus on people who are royally buggered by their gods. A lot of the Dark Hunter series, which are romances, have the couple getting their happy ending at the cost of Acheron being tortured. Reading Ash's book kind of put me off having the "and they lived happily ever after"... What I like is that in order to get together all these couples have to overcome actual obstacles. It isn't your standard Harlequin where the sole conflict is generated because the main characters are too embarrassed to actually say anything to their new partner.
In this book, the main female character is a werebear. The main male character is a wolfwere. There is huge discord between the types of were... the ones who are animals first and humans second; and the ones who are humans who can become animals. And obviously there's an animal mismatch.
It's really easy to see all they have to overcome just with that. But Kenyon's added plot too. And the plot is horrendous.
There has been a move in American literature (and I'm not sure when "fiction" is distinct from literature, but it's definitely true in literature and in fiction authors with pretensions) toward the bleak and hopeless situation. It's the Russianization of literature. Where things suck so much for the everyday man or woman that fiction cannot have characters who aren't suffering or no one makes any emotional connection. If the characters have even worse problems than you-the-everyman do, then you can have schadenfreude.
Kenyon's books all lean on this tendency. All her books are set in New Orleans. It just convinces me that we should have bombed it after the hurricane and chalked our dominion over the region up to a bad idea. It wasn't Seward who had the folly, it was the assholes doing the Louisiana Purchase!
I'm about 2/3 finished. I have no idea whether I will like it when it's done, but I can say that I don't think reading books that are intentionally depressing is good for my psyche and I should probably start by resisting shiny books by Kenyon. When there were happy endings, the author was secretly torturing one of her characters to "pay for them"--- then a decade later she wrote his book and spent almost a thousand pages detailing what exactly everyone else's happiness costs. Now none of the endings feels very happy. It's very obvious to me that the evacuation order for New Orleans should never have been lifted after Katrina. Everyone who went back is miserable and a lot of them seem to have the ears of publishers who make a bundle off sharing that misery with the rest of us.
I should know better than to read a book set in the middle of hell by someone who had the chance to leave and didn't.
_________
ETA: the next day. I finished it. These are nearly immortal characters, so they have completely unreasonably fucking huge families (what do you expect when they don't have "a baby" but "a litter"?) and my rough estimate is that they're down something close to a decimation by the time the HEA hits. If you count collateral damage, hundreds of people died for these two people to get their HEA. If there was ever a reason to kill yourself just because you survived, these people are the photographed entry in the Physicians' Desk Reference.
ETA: Book 1 in 2010
The library gets them in hardcover. They're shiny. Someone actually spellchecks her books and the grammar doesn't suck. You can tell she did a boatload of research... I name knitting things from obscure mythology, I can tell she isn't just making shit up from whole cloth.
Unlike her earliest fiction books, a lot of the latest ones focus on people who are royally buggered by their gods. A lot of the Dark Hunter series, which are romances, have the couple getting their happy ending at the cost of Acheron being tortured. Reading Ash's book kind of put me off having the "and they lived happily ever after"... What I like is that in order to get together all these couples have to overcome actual obstacles. It isn't your standard Harlequin where the sole conflict is generated because the main characters are too embarrassed to actually say anything to their new partner.
In this book, the main female character is a werebear. The main male character is a wolfwere. There is huge discord between the types of were... the ones who are animals first and humans second; and the ones who are humans who can become animals. And obviously there's an animal mismatch.
It's really easy to see all they have to overcome just with that. But Kenyon's added plot too. And the plot is horrendous.
There has been a move in American literature (and I'm not sure when "fiction" is distinct from literature, but it's definitely true in literature and in fiction authors with pretensions) toward the bleak and hopeless situation. It's the Russianization of literature. Where things suck so much for the everyday man or woman that fiction cannot have characters who aren't suffering or no one makes any emotional connection. If the characters have even worse problems than you-the-everyman do, then you can have schadenfreude.
Kenyon's books all lean on this tendency. All her books are set in New Orleans. It just convinces me that we should have bombed it after the hurricane and chalked our dominion over the region up to a bad idea. It wasn't Seward who had the folly, it was the assholes doing the Louisiana Purchase!
I'm about 2/3 finished. I have no idea whether I will like it when it's done, but I can say that I don't think reading books that are intentionally depressing is good for my psyche and I should probably start by resisting shiny books by Kenyon. When there were happy endings, the author was secretly torturing one of her characters to "pay for them"--- then a decade later she wrote his book and spent almost a thousand pages detailing what exactly everyone else's happiness costs. Now none of the endings feels very happy. It's very obvious to me that the evacuation order for New Orleans should never have been lifted after Katrina. Everyone who went back is miserable and a lot of them seem to have the ears of publishers who make a bundle off sharing that misery with the rest of us.
I should know better than to read a book set in the middle of hell by someone who had the chance to leave and didn't.
_________
ETA: the next day. I finished it. These are nearly immortal characters, so they have completely unreasonably fucking huge families (what do you expect when they don't have "a baby" but "a litter"?) and my rough estimate is that they're down something close to a decimation by the time the HEA hits. If you count collateral damage, hundreds of people died for these two people to get their HEA. If there was ever a reason to kill yourself just because you survived, these people are the photographed entry in the Physicians' Desk Reference.
ETA: Book 1 in 2010
