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Book Review: Ever After (2013)

Urban fantasy is a minefield full of mind-numbing exposition and ridiculous ideas. Even authors who develop a compelling mythologies – and keep those mythologies straight over the course of several books – can still fail spectacularly. Maybe reader demand keeps the story going long past it’s natural conclusion. Maybe one or more of the characters contracts Anita Blake Syndrome (a fictional STD in which formerly interesting characters are reduced to gooey, sticky piles of sex organs and hormones). Maybe Deus Ex Machina ends up saving the day more often than the hero.

Ever After, the second to last installment in Kim’s Harrison’s Hollows series, veers very closely to a number of these pitfalls but remains a solid installment of the series that I will be genuinely sad to see end.

The series follows Rachel Morgan, the now-infamous witch/demon, and her business partners in Vampiric Charms. Ivy is the prickly, tortured vampire best friend who lured her away from her lackluster government job at the IS (non-human, or “inderland,” law enforcement) and Jenks is the sarcastic pixie sidekick. They set up shop as runners – a job that is part detective and part private security. At least that’s what they used to do before bailing Rachel out of trouble became a full time sort of thing.  Although the story takes place in present day, it’s established that the long-hidden existence of supernatural creatures was revealed when genetically altered tomatoes wiped out a substantial portion of the human population. Stepping on that particular butterfly has altered things just enough to create a Cincinnati that is charming in it’s mix of the strange and the hey-I’ve-been-there.

In this installment, Rachel has been framed for disturbing the ley lines which is causing the Ever After to shrink in such a way that it will leave the demons no place to go. She also discovers that Ku’Sox, a lab created demon that is more psychotic than most, is trying to use human babies to create new demons. Can she fix the lines and clear her name? Can she save the babies? Will she win the romantic interest in the end? Well, she’s  Rachel fucking Morgan. By book eleven then you already know that the interesting part is not the outcome. She’ll skid into the end of the book by the skin of her teeth like a redheaded Harry Dresden. The part worth reading is how she gets there.

Rachel has always been the main draw of the Hollows series. By this point in the series, she ought be insufferable. She ought to be the Wesley Crusher of Cincinnati. In addition to being a super special one-of-a-kind magical being, she’s the daughter of a famous rock star. The most powerful man in Cincinnati casually invites her for tea. Former presidents drop by her kitchen. The scariest demons grant her audiences. She’s recognized in the street in both the real world and the Ever After as the famous/infamous Rachel Morgan. She uses black magic with impunity. She can be a hypocrite and sometimes kind of an ass. Yet, Harrison writes her in such a way that she remains mostly relatable if not likable. Sure, 90 percent of her problems are her own damn fault but I’m still rooting for her.

Harrison’s supporting characters is equally well-written. The cast has grown substantially since Dead Witch Walking, and she wisely takes regular opportunities to clear the decks. Some exits are jarring, but never in a way that feels inorganic. The ebb and flow of Rachel’s relationships is realistic, and the way Harrison handles this is probably one of my favorite things about this series. The ongoing friction in Ivy and Rachel’s friendship is a nice change from the tired instant-best-friends trope that appears in so many female centric series. Alliances in the Hollows universe are rarely easy. Case in point: Al and Trent teaming up against Nick would have seemed ludicrous early on in the series, but since both characters have made the transition from one-off villain to beloved regular it seems entirely reasonable and plausible.

Even though Harrison’s characters have all grown, it’s becoming clear that The Hollows can’t continue this way indefinitely. In some ways, the air is already starting to feel stale. Ivy has been spinning her wheels for awhile now. Rachel’s continued protests about her moral integrity are exhausting. It’s obvious she’s meant to end up with Trent. Frankly, Rachel is lucky more often than she is good and the fact that she continues to save the day is starting to get ridiculous. It’s time to wrap things up.

Rating:

****

Harrison, Kim. Ever After. 2013. HarperCollins, New York, NY.

Two White Writers Discuss VIDA, With Alcohol

Over at The Missouri Review‘s blog, I talked about VIDA’s annual Count with my friend and sometime contributor to this blog, Alison A. Balaskovits. The Count, if you’ve never heard of it, is VIDA’s annual reckoning of the vast divide that exists between men and women when it comes to getting their work published or reviewed in top literary magazines like Granta or The New Yorker. Alison and I go all over the place in this discussion, talking about The Count in terms of what it does well and what could be done better, and why the yearly numbers are always so damn depressing, even though they’re known quantities. Read it here: The Missouri Review

Comic Book Review: Young Avengers #1-3

As it would turn out, graduating from college and applying to jobs takes up a lot of time, especially when punctuated with episodes of crying and wondering what the hell you’re going to do with your life. However, I have been able to keep up with some of Marvel’s new series, and few series got me more excited than the new Young Avengers. For the first time in the series’ relatively brief history, the title is under a creative team other than Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung. One of the biggest complaints about Young Avengers arcs in the past has been the delay in their publishing. Due to Heinberg’s outside writing commitments, Young Avengers was an infrequently published title, and there was usually a two-month wait between issues. This time, the title is headed by writer Kieron Gillen (Uncanny X-Men, Journey Into Mystery, Iron Man) and artist Jamie McKelvie (Defenders, X-Men: Season One), who worked together prior to their Marvel days. Read more

Book Review: Monster (2012)

Most postmodern retellings of the classics involve injecting gray into formerly black and white scenarios. The Wicked Witch of the West is more idealistic and tortured than she was wicked. The ugly stepsister isn’t quite so mean. Dracula was totally just trying to help defeat the other evil vampire or something – I admit I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.

Frankenstein, however, already had plenty of gray to it so Frank Zeltserman gave Monster some color.

Zeltserman’s Victor Frankenstein is a wizard and a bastard, rather than a passionate man of science. Frankenstein murders chemist Freidrich Hauffman’s fiancée, Joanna, and frames him for it so he can steal Freiderich’s brain after the accused criminal’s inevitable execution. He deposits Frankenstein’s brain in a patchwork corpse and brings his monster to life with the aid of some chanting and well placed candles.

Freidrich awakens confused and weak, but fortunately Charlotte – the animated severed head that serves as the prototype for Frankenstein’s monster – is hand to deliver valuable counsel and exposition when Frankenstein’s back is turned. Freidrich is just teaching his new body to walk and talk when he Frankenstein’s benefactor shows up in the lab. The Marquis de Sade shows up to see what exactly he’s been paying for and borrows Charlotte for use as a sex toy as a bonus, just in case you weren’t convinced that Frankenstein and the Marquis are really, really evil.

Freidrich takes this as his cue to leave. He breaks out of the lab and travels to visit his beloved Joanna’s grave. After paying his respects, he makes it his mission to keep tabs on Frankenstein. Freidrich hits the road again, encountering a cast of Satanists, vampires and monks. He finds Victor and, to his surprise, Victor makes him an offer he can hardly refuse. Freidrich can be reunited with Joanne, just as long as he allows one more innocent person to die.

Monster shares some similarities with its source material, but not many. They share a few characters. They share the theme of exploring what it means to be a man or a monster. Interestingly, however, they exist in completely separate universes. The introduction of magic into what used to be a tale of science gone too far was initially jarring (Although, to be fair, Frankenstein’s monster also hung out with Dracula in Hotel Transylvania but in that case both characters had been so twisted by popular culture that it hardly matters).

Yet the combination works. Magic adds an element of an uncertainty to a story almost everyone already knows well. The new characters are interesting and the story moves along at a fast clip. It also serves as quiet acknowledgement that, despite the great leaps in medical knowledge that scientists have made since Frankenstein was published almost 200 hundred years ago, we’re not any close to reanimating a blob of stitched-together dead tissue than we were back then. Based on what we know now, creating Victor Frankenstein’s monster would quite literally require sorcery. And according to Frank Zeltserman, it did.

Rating:

*** & 1/2

Zeltserman, Frank. Monster. 2012. The Overlook Press, New York, NY.

Comic Book Review: The Amazing Spider-Man #700 (Series Finale)

There’s something about the good guys that people want to break. These days, it seems like every hero from our time has earned themselves an anti-hero streak, more gray to their character than before. Of course, some of that comes with the time. We’re living in an age of more complex writing, more artistic freedom. Writers want to add more complexity to characters to keep them interesting, and that sometimes having them do things that maybe they wouldn’t have done twenty years ago.

But there are certain heroes who writers just love to outright fuck with. Those heroes that are just so goody-two-shoes you can’t help but want to mess with them. Sometimes it means having Superman wear a pair of Wranglers and walk across America. Other times it means having Peter Parker’s mind die inside the body of one of his worst enemies as that enemy now lives in the body of Peter Parker, and then goes on to continue being Spider-Man.

The final issue of Amazing Spider-Man is the latter. It’s as bad as it sounds.

Allow me to briefly recap while you pick up what remains of your brain off the floor before it stains the carpet. Y’see, Doctor Otto Octavius, who has been slowly dying for the past couple of years now, had managed to create a device that switches his mind and that of Spider-Man’s. With the switch, he learns everything about the man behind the mask, and has all of his memories. Peter Parker, meanwhile, is stuck inside of the dying body of Doc Ock. This sort of plot isn’t farfetched by any means, in truth. Maybe a little bit old school, maybe requires a little more suspension of disbelief, but it’s a storyline that could exist in the universe. The problem is, it’s the last storyline for Peter Parker. Ever.

Peter Parker dies, and now Doc Ock is Spider-Man. For real.

Let’s address some obvious questions that arise from this. Is Doc Ock still evil? Not really. Before Peter Parker died, he managed to use the device that made them swap bodies in the first place to allow Ock to experience all of Peter’s memories as if they were his own. So now Ock has a respect for what Peter accomplished, yet he still thinks of himself as the superior scientist. Also, he’s hooking up with Mary Jane, and he hates all of Peter’s friends. Mind you, he doesn’t have any of Peter’s personality, so how nobody has noticed that Peter has been extra serious and super-dickish lately is beyond me. Will this be addressed in Avenging Spider-Man? Will Doctor Strange or some psychic be all like OMG THIS AIN’T NO SPIDER-MAN as they are wont to do? I suppose that’s the allure.

I won’t lie, I have a morbid curiosity in seeing how Doc Ock grows into being Peter Parker/Spider-Man. But what I have a problem with is the fact that Marvel effectively took its most iconic, and more importantly, its most relatable character, and killed him. There is no universe in which Peter Parker, the kid who had great responsibility with his great power, the nerd-turned-superhero, the subject of two separate movie series, three cartoon series, and the longest-running comic book series in history, even exists.

Peter Parker was the most genuine superhero in history. Always quick with a laugh, he never shied away from danger, or from sacrifice. He was never the dick, though he wasn’t much of a boyfriend (too busy saving the world, knamean?) He always sought out Avengers for friendships, joked about himself, and was generally just really, really nice. You rooted for Spider-Man, even though he competed with Wolverine for the “In Too Many Issues to be Canonical” Award. You were happy when he showed up. I loved Peter Parker.

Now, the nicest, most-genuine guy in the Marvel Universe has been replaced with a sociopath mad-scientist who gets his jollies by asking the longtime on-off girlfriend of his arch-nemesis to deliver “Face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot.” A lot of editors at Marvel have commented that they liked how the finish “[brought] the Ock/Spidey conflict to a head after so many years.” What, like the conflict Spider-Man had with the ENTIRE Sinister Six? How about his conflicts with Venom, Carnage, and other villains? Was Doc Ock really that interesting of a character that he just HAD to stick around and be elevated? Why not go the Ultimate universe route? Peter Parker still dies, but so does Doc Ock, and now some new kid takes his place?

I didn’t expect to get so sad reading this issue. Like most readers, I was spoiled beforehand, and I came into the issue with white-hot fury, expecting to hate it. Instead, it’s mostly disappointment. The sadness mostly comes from the fact that, according to all of Peter’s dead loved ones, he failed. While in Doc Ock’s body, Parker died for about three minutes, and got to see a bunch of people in heaven, including Uncle Ben, who told him he couldn’t allow a heinous villain Doc Ock to live in Peter’s body. Bizarre violent character turn aside, Uncle Ben was right. Peter did fail. He died. Ock lives. The bad guy won, and now he gets to be the hero.

I’ll read the new Superior Spider-Man when it debuts in January. Let’s just hope Marvel has another semi-plausible Steve Rogers revival hail mary in them. Until then, rest in peace Peter Parker. You were amazing.