Today's post is a review of two vampire series titles released on the same day. The latest Sookie Stackhouse novel, Dead Reckoning, the eleventh book in the series, and Hard Bitten, the latest installment of the Chicagoland Vampire story. Most of the time my reviews are detailed but not spoilery. This time, I'm spoiling all over the place.
If you haven't read them and plan to, go away! Come back after you finish and tell me what you think.
If you haven't read these stories at all, go start at book one. Also, go away or you'll get all spoiled!
If you watch True Blood but never read the Sookie books, you can stay. They may or may not use the plot line or character development and really, 11 seasons? Doubtful. Meanwhile, 7 years from now you won't remember this blog post, so feel free.....
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Dead Reckoning: Sookie Gets Mistreated, and I Feel Bad About Ever Liking Any of These Characters
I think this book made me do something I never thought I'd do: get back on Team Bill. Can't believe it! Don't even feel comfortable here on Team Bill. Of course, where else to go? Oh yes, Team Sookie. I have many fantasies for the future of our dear Ms. Stackhouse. Most of them involve leaving Bon Temps and trying to make her way in the world under an assumed name. I picture her perhaps teaching English in some country where the buzz of other minds is practically gibberish and thus soothing. I see her getting a job in an office or at a library, getting a little apartment, having a cat. Maybe she meets a vampire turned after the Great Revelation, you know, someone who fulfills her guy qualifications, but isn't as ridiculous with the chivalry and politicking. Really, what would make her awesome is if she became a demon or something. Something where she can just say, "You know what guys, back off. I'm watching Golden Girls right now, and I'm going to eat this pizza, and if you don't like it, I'm going to fire blast you out of my house with my magical demon hands. Sookie needs a goddamn break."
This book is about Sookie's history, her lineage, and (yet again) a bunch of really blatant reasons why she can't trust any supe but Sam Merlotte (who I'm still mad at over his tryst with Callisto. Yeah, I've got old grudges).
Fairies: Untrustworthy Jerks
First off, the fairies: Her new roomies are her fairy cousins Dermot and Claude. They are comforted by being around other fairies, and she feels the magical comfort feelings as well. They admit that they are drawn somehow to her house. Turns out, there's a fairy trinket hiding there that belongs to Sookie. It was given to her by her grandmother, and it is like a 1-free-wish magical thingamabob. Typical Sookie, she gets a gift and its something that probably people will kill her over.
Sookie's grandmother, as it turns out, totally knew she was cheating on her husband with fairy Fintan. In an old letter hid in the attic, Adele Stackhouse admits to Sookie that she had children as a result of her liason with Fintan, and that the Stackhouse children since then have been visited in their youth by their "sponsor," Mr. Cataliades (the demon lawyer). It's revealed that Mr. Cataliades gave Sookie her telepathy as a gift because she's more fairy than the rest of her kin. Yeah, a great gift for a baby, right? How was Adele able to keep this immortal sin a secret from a telepathic child? If this tryst was at once the most amazing and awful thing she ever did, how did she keep it from Sookie? And how could she live with herself when she realized that Sookie was telepathic and yet never clued her in to any of this crap?! Adele Stackhouse, no longer awesome. Thanks. Really, that's just great. Now I have to be mad at a nice grandma whose only sin in life was wanting to have kids.
In this novel, her fear and caution around her cousins is palpable. Since she was gnawed on for hours by freakish homicidal fairies who filed their teeth into points, she's got good reason to be wary of all things fairy. She starts to think that Claude, Dermot, Niall, and the random assortment of fae creatures hanging out at Hooligans are not her people. There's a lot of groundwork laid for a bunch of fairy bullshit in the future. The fairies shut out of Faery (ugh) are trying to get back to their homeland. It's not going to be pretty.
Vampires: Not Immortal After All
So Victor bites the big one in this novel, and he reaches a bunch of new lows beforehand, making just about everybody wants to see his ashes. Not only does he buy two bars that directly compete with Merlottes and Fangtasia, he prevents Pam's girlfriend, Miriam, from being turned even though she's dying from leukemia. Poor Miriam, her existence served nothing more than to illustrate Victor's depravity. Truly, we get no depth to this character at all. And the idea that Pam could fall in love with someone so much that she wants to save them by making her own vampire child? And that this happens off page? It's pretty much cheating me out of important Sookieverse stuff. Pam's a central character! Her disdain for humanity and love of vampire life was tempered by this frail gal? I want to know about that! Pam herself gets throttled and choked by Eric. He also prevents her from saying/doing things with his master-commands-it mojo, which is dickish behavior if your vampire child is over a century old, in my opinion. I mean really, at this point, disobeying your commands to tell your secrets are her decision. Your job as a daddy is done.
Eric really took a backseat in this novel in terms of page time, but for me he hit center stage in a show called "Asshole". He was keeping a lot from Sookie (nothing new there), he was very tense, he seemed to have his usual arrogance about him, but he was being bested for a majority of the novel by Victor, who was taking away his Fangtasia revenue with his competing vampire bar. So he didn't get to be BMOC the whole time, which I like. Eric's love for Sookie was supposed to be transformative, getting him closer to humanity than he has been in a thousand years.
That's, I think, what draws people to the vampire-human love story. The idea that someone so hard and cold and calculating could be melted by looooove. It's a typical romance trope, adapted for the supernatural circumstance of immortality. Usually these guys have outdated views of gender roles, superiority complexes up the wazoo, and the obligatory giant penises. Not sure if this would work well in reverse. Powerful female vampire with outdated ideas about masculinity courts a human man who shows her that vulnerability and emotions are also male qualities. He tames her beast within and they fight important battles together. She learns to love him even though she must be the protector, not the protected. Also, her vagina sometimes squeezes his penis so hard that he needs to put frozen peas on his junk for 20 minutes after each session of lovemaking (yes, this is taken-in reverse-from the latest Sookie novel). Yeah, that story sounds like it sucks. The Pam-Miriam story would be much cooler.
So anyway, Eric. Not only do we find out that he's been betrothed to some vampire queen and must give up Sookie to be with this new broad, it is revealed that he fucked up Sookie's life royally years ago by connecting her with Niall, paying Terry Bellefleur to spy on her, and spying on her himself well before they became "friends." He also spends a good deal of time preventing Pam from telling Sookie anything about his upcoming nuptials. Oh, and to top it all off, one of his last scenes involves him feeding from her and making it more painful than necessary! This is an abusive relationship, folks, and I'm officially out of love with Eric. Sookie manages to get the guts to break the blood bond, but feels bad about it. She feels that she should have consulted with him first on a decision that affects them both. Which would be true, if the decision wasn't "whether or not I should be magically tethered to your emotions based on a decision you made in secret and imposed upon me without my consent in the first place." Thankfully this blood bond is gone. Hopefully she'll see this Eric stuff in a different light without it. I don't think he's her
Witch Match Makers
Amelia comes into play in this book in order to break the blood bond. She finds out a spell that can break the bond and gets Sookie to agree to it pretty quickly, which I enjoyed. It's something Sookie would do, it was her instinct to be free of Eric, and it was nice to see someone specifically in Sookie's corner. Amelia's a bit tactless, and she hates learning from past mistakes, apparently. This is big magic, something that is going to piss of a very old, powerful vampire, and she's like "let's do it!" She also goads Alcide into seducing Sookie. Remember when she was all interested in setting Sookie up with this really cute guy and it turned out to be Dermot? WTF Amelia!? Stop setting Sookie up with horrible matches.
Shifters: Not Great Decision Makers
Alcide returns to make his play for Sookie's affections. How does he do this? He sleeps in her bed in what he thinks is sexy underwear, hoping she'll come home and take him up on the offer. She's pissed about this, obviously, but it made me laugh. Then I thought, what if that happened to me? What would I do? I'd be so livid! Not only do I have shitty roommates and a house guest who felt this was appropriate (they'd all be in the house, I presume when this impromptu sex-fest was going on, by the way, which, eww), but this dude has some real cojones to think that his mere presence in bed can make her forget about her vampire lover. I'd do just what she did. Kick the whole lot of them out and then begrudgingly let Dermot back in because he's kind of slow.
Sandra Pelt gets out of a jail we didn't know she was in and goes after Sookie in impersonal ways until all the loser assassins she paid don't do the job right and she has to actually do the job herself. You can tell she's a crafty adversary when she decides to hijack Sam and Janalynn (a shifter and a werewolf enforcer) to get to Sookie. Not surprisingly it takes them like 5 minutes to kill her and shove her body into the fairy portal, where she's eaten presumably by black dogs/hell hounds. So glad to put the whole Pelt family in the ground. It seems like this book was all about running things into the ground. It's like reading about a plane crash, only in the middle of the plane crash there's a kindergarten open house and a baby shower.
Demons & Telepaths
Cataliades comes by to let Sookie in on her fae heritage and to explain the Cluviel Dor. It's a magical fairy trinket that gives her one wish, but it can't be used to wish away her telepathy (lame). She decides to hold of on wishing, and gives Cataliades a stern rebuke for all the "gifts" he has bestowed upon her. He leaves her house in a rush because something is following him. And he is later seen zipping around the yard being chased by..things...it seemed like a big deal to me, but it was given two sentences of page time, so maybe in the next book he'll make a reappearance or he'll be dead and leave her his demon estate. Missed Diantha not being there. I liked her insane club-kid outfits and machine-gun fire way of talking.
Hunter also enters the story here. As a side-note, how many damn characters can be shoe-horned in to this story?! Geez. Anyway, Hunter's about to go to kindergarten and Sookie goes with Remy to his school's open house, giving us a peek into teachers' minds, which now adds elementary school teachers to my list of creeps. Sookie seems to be helping Hunter deal with the telepathy in a group setting, trying to prevent him from making the same mistakes that led to her legacy in Bon Temps as "Crazy Sookie." I think this Hunter thing seemed like it was going to lead to Sookie possibly having a family. It really would be the only way she could have a child and have a vampire husband. But now I'm not so sure that's the direction the story is going. Poor Hunter, he might have to get killed in book 12.
In conclusion:
You know when you finally realize that a friend you've had for a while isn't really your friend? That there was some ulterior motive for being around you? Yeah, so Sookie pretty much only has that going on right now. The most telling and poignant line in the entire novel was when she's riding in the car with Sam and tearily realizes, "I've been a fool." It's an indication that Sookie's growing up. I can't wait to see how grown-up Sookie deals with the bullshit coming her way. I think it's time to put Eric out to pasture. He was an important step in her life, and a relationship that she can use to understand herself a little better, but in the long run, I think she'll end up with Sam.
Hard Bitten
I've been reading the Chicagoland Vampire Series since book one. This is the fourth entry, and its gone to places I didn't expect. I liked the idea of a grad student who gets turned and has to traverse a whole new universe of vampire politics and super strength. I also liked that the vampire universe is a little different in these novels. Vampires are organized into houses, kind of like fraternity houses. You get turned and become part of a vampire family of sorts. Merit, the central character, is a little different than other vamps in that she was turned in what seemed like a last-minute decision. She was dying and the head of the Cadogan vampire house, Ethan, turned her. So she didn't choose this life (or unlife). The writing is good, the character is fleshed out, and the love for Chicago in the story is palpable. Chicago is almost another character in the novel. Merit takes us through a lot of Chicago landmarks and helps us understand the local cuisine and culture.
This installment does some pretty gutsy things. It puts some things out there that I wasn't expecting. The mayor isn't human (but we don't know what he is yet), Celina takes a stake to the heart, and oh my god, Merit's love interest, the leader of Cadogan house, Ethan, dies. Since his relationship with his child/novitiate/underling/employee is totally inappropriate, I was cool with it. He will magically resurrect in future books, I'm sure, because his character arc is not complete and in a 7 book series, I doubt at the end of the 4th they'd trade in one soul mate for another. But in my fantasy universe, I'd have him resurrect as human, so Merit would be superior in terms of vampire hierarchy. It would be better if they were on equal terms, but these books hate that, apparently.
There was no sex in this book, but really, there was no time! Merit was on the go the entire book and manages to not only solve the mystery of the V trade, she also learns about her own history. Turns out her dad wanted to pay Ethan to secretly turn her, so she'd never die. Micromanage much?! Ethan declined the offer, but Celina decided to do it anyway. Once the offer was made to Ethan, he decided to protect Merit (secretly, vampirily, like they do). But he was really bad at this, and when she got mauled by one of Celina's vamps, Ethan had to be a big boy and decide whether she died or undied.
I liked the book, because it did make some abrupt and confusing changes to the story I wasn't expecting. That's a rarity in a genre book. But I'm always concerned about books that make the hero transform into a marshmallow of love and devotion. Ethan dies taking a stake meant for Merit, which only means he's coming back. I wonder what hot beefcake body he'll return in?
OK, folks, reviews are done. I know I'm a bit all over the place, but the books were both released Tuesday and I had to get something down. I'm sure I'll settle down and rethink a lot of this stuff, but this is my first reaction.
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