I'm starting to wonder if series of vampire books all turn insane by the end. I only have three series to judge on, but let's look at them:
The Anita Blake novels, by Laurel K. Hamilton
These started out sort of interesting. The main character was a reluctant necromancer, accidentally dating a vampire and a werewolf at the same time. For the first two or three books it was sort of interesting and sort of diverting, and then the sex kind of took over. A lot of sex. So much sex with werewolves, vampires, werepanthers, regular humans, and other supernatural creatures that finally, in one book, they never resolved the plot. There was an opening chapter, a dozen or so chapters of creature sex, and then the bad guys just left town with a note that they'd be back.
The Twilight novels, by Stephenie Meyer
I freely admit that I have read all six Twilight books. If you didn't know there are six, I understand. Most people think there are only four, based on the movies, but there really are six, and they're all terrible. A whole chapter where Bella fills out college applications! Buildups to big fights that happen off the page! Vampire baseball! And sparkles! SO MANY SPARKLES! When I was reading the first four I was also carpooling with my friend, Jeannie, and every day I would update her on the new insanity.
"They're immortal, so they keep going to high school, over and over!"
"There's something called imprinting, and it makes werewolves mate for life with toddlers!"
"Their wedding night is so hot that he tears up all the pillows so he doesn't hurt her, and she ends up all bruised and in pain but it's somehow romantic!"
"THE VAMPIRE BABY FRACTURES HER PELVIS FROM INSIDE AND A FOUNTAIN OF DELICIOUS BLOOD SHOOTS OUT OF HER MOUTH!"
Batshit crazy, those books.
Also, there are actually seven, but one was only partially published online because it leaked and then Meyer stopped writing it.
The Vampire Chronicles, by Anne Rice
Oh, Anne. I liked you for so long. I discovered you in college and read you voraciously. I even read The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy and Exit to Eden (which, oddly, became a sex comedy starring Rosie O'Donnel). The longer the Vampire Chronicles went on, though, the worse they got. Lestat, the protagonist, met Satan. Every supporting character got their own book, and only some of them were interesting. She tied the series into her Mayfair Witches series, which had also degenerated into nonsense by only the third book, and the result was almost unreadable.
I'm serious. Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle were so awful that I can barely remember what they were about. All I remember is that they were so bad, and so poorly received, that Anne Rice stopped writing about vampires. That was fortunate because I was ready to stop reading about vampires for a while, and I say that as a person who wrote a senior thesis on vampirism in popular modern American fiction in undergrad. Anne Rice made me love and eventually hate vampire books, but this month I gave her another chance.
The results were mixed.
In Prince Lestat, Rice kind of catches us up on where almost everybody has been. I say "almost everybody" because there are two notable exceptions that I'm calling notable because they had their own books: Vittorio and Ursula aren't mentioned in this book or the next one, and neither are Merrick, Mona, Quinn, and the rest of the Mayfair Witches and Blackwood Farm vampires, although their absence is eventually explained in the second book. Aside from checking in on everybody, there's a mysterious Voice urging old vampires to burn up young ones, and all the vampires have to come together to discover the source of The Voice and confront the danger to them all.
"Prince Lestat" is Queen of the Damned all over again. Cast of thousands, powerful but previously unknown old vampires, everybody coming together to defeat an ancient threat, etc. If you liked that book, you'll like this one, too, and (spoiler) it ends with Lestat as official Prince of the Vampires, with Amel, the spirit that created and animates all vampires, housed inside him and communicating with him.
And then in Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis things go all the way insane, because it turns out that not only was Amel a ghost, not just a spirit, but he was the ghost of the ruler and creator of Atlantis.
And also he was sent to Earth by aliens.
Yup.
Not only that, but the aliens, an avian reptilian race that feeds on suffering and watches Earth from afar, sent other immortals to Earth, too, to stop Amel and destroy Atlantis, and now those immortal humanoids have read the Vampire Chronicles and know Amel is still around and they're coming for him for unknown reasons that may destroy all of the vampires and also all of humanity. And there are lots of other ghosts, too, and some of them wear clothes and talk to vampires. And it's right in the middle of all of this that Anne Rice reveals that she hates "Blackwood Farm" and "Blood Canticle" as much as I do. How do I know?
She reveals that the entire cast died horrible off-panel deaths, in less than two pages of discussion.
Two vampires are discussing the humanoids, and both say, "I've never seen a creature that looks human but isn't human, not in thousands of years", and I'm thinking, "Wait, what about the Taltos monsters from the Witching Hour books?" but no one ever mentions them. They do mention Merrick, though, for a minute. "She burned herself up." Oh, no. Well, what about Quinn and Mona? "Oh, they burned up, too. It was really quick, but sounded horribly painful."
So all of the other characters from all of the other books survived, more or less, except for the casts of the two really awful books?
OK, then. Back to the aliens, ghosts, and vampires. And Atlantis.
Showing posts with label vampires. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vampires. Show all posts
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Sunday, November 1, 2015
The Month in Books: October
If I'd given October a little more thought, it would have been a great month to read ghost and monster stories in honor of Halloween. I didn't plan that far ahead, but I did end up spending the last half of the month in a state of "vampire madness", a condition I haven't suffered from since I read most of the Twilight saga back to back in 2010. Vampire Madness is the state of mind when you read books about vampires that slowly move from "just a little weird" to "batshit crazy" over the course of the series.
Before I fell into Vampire Madness, a state that I am half a book from getting out of, I read some other things. I also embarked on a major project regarding my books: getting rid of them.
I'm not getting rid of all of my books. There are sentimental books that I want to keep, but lately I've been looking around my apartment and wondering what I'm going to do with all these books. There are ten bookcases in my living room, stacks of books under all three end tables, a stack of books in the bedroom, a stack of books on the kitchen counter, a stack of books on the counters in both bathrooms... there are a lot of books in my apartment. I will reread some of them, but the rest? I just keep looking at them and wondering why I'm saving them. I'm not having kids. I don't have nieces or nephews. I don't have rare first editions or a valuable library that may sell well at an estate sale when I'm gone. With that in mind, I've been slowly evaluating and clearing out books this month, and anticipate that it will be a continuing project for a while. Eventually, it will have some definite benefits:
1) Fewer books in my house. Anything that makes me less of a hoarder has to be a good thing.
2) More books for me to read. Unless I'm giving them to someone specific or donating them to The Pride Center I take my books to McKay's for credit, which I can then use to buy more books, DVD's, and CD's. McKay's also has a donor bin for books they don't take, and people love picking things out of the free bin, so I'm still getting books out of the house and giving them to a stranger is better than throwing them away.
3) Eventually I will open enough shelf space to start putting my cookbooks on a shelf, rather than stacking them in multiple places around my apartment. This will let me use them more.
With all of that in mind, here are the books I read this month, and their final fates.
1) Erin Kelly's The Burning Air tells a story of revenge against the MacBride family. Privileged and comfortable, the three MacBride children were raised by their father, the headmaster of a private school, and their mother, a magistrate and social crusader. When they gather to spread their mother's ashes, together as a family for the first time since her death, the family immediately unravels as they discover a stranger in their midst and a master plan of revenge that someone has been waging against them for decades, convinced that their mother was a murderer who escaped justice, determined to right the wrong. Unfortunately for the reader, the twists and turns of the revenge plan turn out to be much more exciting and satisfying than the novel's conclusion, which seems rushed and falls a little flat.
I was so annoyed at the lack of actual revenge, and then dumb last minute "shocking twist" that I not only sent this book to McKay's but pulled both of her other books from my shelf and sent them, too.
2) Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls is the story of Harper, a killer of women who moves throughout time thanks to a House that opens onto different decades at will, and Kirby, the girl who survived a serial killer that no one else believes exists. Troubled and bitter after barely surviving her attack, Kirby and newsman Dan Velasquez are trying to track down a killer who shouldn't exist, chasing clues scattered across decades and women with no links between them except the man who killed them. Even if they find him, how do they stop him when he can step away into their past or their future? And how will they see him coming when he sets his sights on finishing what he started with Kirby? This book was tense, gripping, and a really good read.
I read it on my kindle, so nothing went to the bookstore.
3) Chris Beckett's Dark Eden introduces us to The Family, a collection of a few hundred people living on a faraway world known as Eden, a cold place of eternal night where they huddle in a village beneath the light and warmth of the Forest's glowing trees. Surrounding the Forest are the dark frozen wastes of the Snowy Dark, a place they never venture into as they wait for the travelers from Earth, a legendary planet of brightness, to return to them in boats that sailed the skies. John Redlantern is different, though. He wants to know what lies beyond Snowy Dark, and as food becomes scarce and the Family begins to fight among themselves, John will venture where none of them have gone before, and will learn the shocking truth about their world.
This started out interesting, but ultimately turned into "Lord of the Flies" in space. I probably will not pick up the sequel, and I took it to the bookstore.
4) Douglas Coupland continues to trick me in Generation A. I'm sure I've explained this before: once I read a Douglas Coupland book and really liked it, and I continue to read his books with the assumption that I will find another that I enjoy as much as that first one. Once again, it hasn't happened, and I had to force myself through this unsatisfying story of five strangers in the near future, who are all stung by bees long after bees are declared extinct.
I was so enraged at being tricked, once again, by Douglas Coupland that this book turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back. I took all of the Douglas Coupland books on my shelf, including Girlfriend in a Coma, the one that I read once a really long time ago and enjoyed, to the used bookstore. Not only did this fill me with momentary joy (almost as much as when I threw Jonathan Franzen's books in the bag later in the month; I thought I understood the true meaning of Freedom when I finally turned the last page and escaped that dreary paper doorstop, but it turns out that turning a profit on getting that thing out of here was even more uplifting), but I also discovered that Coupland didn't even write one of the other books that I was counting in the "sometimes he's not terrible" pile. I love Dictator Style, but somehow it's escaped me for the past eight years that Coupland only wrote the introduction.
5) Is Bruce Wayne doing the most good possible by being Batman, or could he help Gotham City more in other ways? Is it morally wrong to turn your ward into a crimefighter? Is Batman really any different from the Joker, or are both compelled to follow their absolute truths? Is Batman more heroic than Superman? And can Batman and Superman ever have a friendship of equals? If you've ever wondered about these, or a dozen or so other philosophical questions about Batman, then you might enjoy reading Batman and Philosophy, in which twenty authors dissect the ethical, moral, and philosophical implications of Batman and his actions through the writings of history's greatest philosophical minds. For the most part, I enjoyed this, except for one chapter that asks, "Could Batman ever be the Joker?", walks us through a dozen or so densely written and sometimes confusing pages, and then says, "Well, we didn't even really need to ask because it happened in this issue."
I got this from McKay's and it went back to McKay's when I was done.
6) In Lexicon, Wil is on the run from a mysterious organization. Wil has seen something that has killed three thousand people, and somehow he's survived. He is the outlier, immune to the effects of glimpsing a forbidden word that drives people to murder everyone around them. Emily is a Poet, trained by the organization chasing Wil. She can use language to confuse, mislead, or outright control people, and she and Wil are now on a collision course. They may not survive, and the world may not, either. This was a good read, fast paced and sometimes surprising.
I've read some of Max Barry's other work and enjoyed it, and I enjoyed this, so for now his books remain in the apartment.
7) V. E. Schwab's Vicious introduces us to Victor and Eli. Ten years ago, they were college roommates working on their senior thesis projects, Victor's on the body's adrenaline response and Eli's on the aftereffects of near death experiences. When they get the idea to combine them, the results are immediate and catastrophic. Ten years later, Victor is a convicted criminal, rumored to be superpowered and considered extremely dangerous after escaping prison. Eli is a hero, lauded in the newspaper for stopping a bank robbery. Victor is coming for Eli, to settle old scores and new ones, to determine once and for all which of them is really the hero and which is really the villain. This was a fast read, but entertaining and at times rather tense.
I read this on my kindle, but would probably have sent it to the used bookstore even though I liked it.
And then... VAMPIRE MADNESS!
8) I thought "Twilight" was the most batshit insane vampire series I've ever read, but apparently that was only because I somehow forgot about reading Christopher Pike's "The Last Vampire" series when I was younger. Thirst: Book 2 finishes the reprint of the original six book series, with the three final books of Sita's story. For those who don't remember, the first three books introduced us to Sita, a five thousand year old blue eyed, blond vampire from India (she's ancient Aryan) who was the last vampire in the world, pursued by Yaksha, the first vampire and her creator. In the last book she fought Yaksha, went back to high school for some reason (why do vampires do this?), detonated a hydrogen bomb outside of Las Vegas, and the book ended when she used a mysterious alchemical process invented by her lover from the Dark Ages to change herself back into a human.
In this book, she gets impregnated by a ghost, gives birth to an Indian death goddess' human avatar, saves a reincarnated Baby Jesus from being eaten by lizard aliens, becomes an even more powerful vampire, then travels back in time to kill the first vampire before he can make any others, erasing herself from history. You'd think erasing herself from history would be the end, but no, there are somehow three more books after this one.
9) In Christopher Pike's Thirst 3: The Eternal Dawn it's been 15 years since Sita, the last vampire, went back in time and erased herself from history, except that it turns out she didn't! Like many time traveling vampire ladies, she telepathically commanded the author of her previous adventures, her friend Seymour, to believe that she was a figment of his imagination and that she'd erased herself, when in reality she went back in time to defeat alien lizard people working with the Moors to invade ninth century Europe through Sicily, and then she retired to a quiet life in an unspecified state to stalk Teri, the college athlete descendant of her daughter from before she became a vampire. After killing a rapist who is stalking Teri, Sita ingratiates herself into Teri's life, befriending her and Teri's sexy boyfriend, sexy Matt, who Sita cannot stop thinking sexy thoughts about even though she would never do anything to hurt Teri.
Meanwhile, Sita is being stalked by an evil corporation called the ICC, whose telepathic Array is letting them take over the world. Sita is also being stalked by an ancient race of Egyptian immortals, the enemies of the ICC. Both sides want to recruit her for reasons which are never specified, and their pursuit of Sita endangers her, Seymour, Teri, sexy Matt, all of humanity, and the reincarnated Jesus from the last book, who is now a video-game obsessed teenager. Can Sita protect herself and those she loves? And does sexy Matt hide a sexy secret? And, also, can Teri win gold in the Olympics because there isn't enough happening in this book already?
10) In Christopher Pike's Thirst Book4: The Shadow of Death, Sita and her friends are still fighting the mysterious IIC, the corporation bent on psychic manipulation and domination of the world's governments and financial markets, and the Telar, the race of Egyptian immortals determined to wipe out humanity with their genetically engineered supervirus plague that's also a toxic poison, because science works that way. At the same time, though, everything has changed! At the conclusion of the last book, Sita turned Teri into a vampire, but then Sita was killed... OR WAS SHE?
NOPE.
Teri died, but Sita is still alive in Teri's vampire body, because teenaged reincarnated Jesus stuck her in there for reasons! Some sort of mysterious reasons, because tennaged reincarnated video game playing Jesus works in mysterious ways. Now she has to continue the fight even though she is a newborn vampire and plagued by the thirst for blood for the first time in thousands of years. Also, she has to keep Sexy Matt from discovering that she's not really Teri, because she figured out that she and Sexy Matt can have sex now since he won't think he's cheating on Teri, and she gets right to the sexing even though the fate of the whole world is at stake. Now, can Sita use the IIC to destroy the Telar before the IIC betrays her? And even if it succeeds, can she also defeat the IIC? And keep Sexy Matt from discovering the unsexy truth? And also survive her trip to the Greek underworld? And defeat a surprise last minute villain: LUCIFER HIMSELF?
Despite this being marketed as thelast final Last Vampire book, I'm currently halfway through the sequel, which has Sita fighting Nazis, Lucifer, a malevolent computer artificial intelligence, and her continuing sexy desires for sexy Matt.
Vampire Madness is real, and it's insane.
Before I fell into Vampire Madness, a state that I am half a book from getting out of, I read some other things. I also embarked on a major project regarding my books: getting rid of them.
I'm not getting rid of all of my books. There are sentimental books that I want to keep, but lately I've been looking around my apartment and wondering what I'm going to do with all these books. There are ten bookcases in my living room, stacks of books under all three end tables, a stack of books in the bedroom, a stack of books on the kitchen counter, a stack of books on the counters in both bathrooms... there are a lot of books in my apartment. I will reread some of them, but the rest? I just keep looking at them and wondering why I'm saving them. I'm not having kids. I don't have nieces or nephews. I don't have rare first editions or a valuable library that may sell well at an estate sale when I'm gone. With that in mind, I've been slowly evaluating and clearing out books this month, and anticipate that it will be a continuing project for a while. Eventually, it will have some definite benefits:
1) Fewer books in my house. Anything that makes me less of a hoarder has to be a good thing.
2) More books for me to read. Unless I'm giving them to someone specific or donating them to The Pride Center I take my books to McKay's for credit, which I can then use to buy more books, DVD's, and CD's. McKay's also has a donor bin for books they don't take, and people love picking things out of the free bin, so I'm still getting books out of the house and giving them to a stranger is better than throwing them away.
3) Eventually I will open enough shelf space to start putting my cookbooks on a shelf, rather than stacking them in multiple places around my apartment. This will let me use them more.
With all of that in mind, here are the books I read this month, and their final fates.
1) Erin Kelly's The Burning Air tells a story of revenge against the MacBride family. Privileged and comfortable, the three MacBride children were raised by their father, the headmaster of a private school, and their mother, a magistrate and social crusader. When they gather to spread their mother's ashes, together as a family for the first time since her death, the family immediately unravels as they discover a stranger in their midst and a master plan of revenge that someone has been waging against them for decades, convinced that their mother was a murderer who escaped justice, determined to right the wrong. Unfortunately for the reader, the twists and turns of the revenge plan turn out to be much more exciting and satisfying than the novel's conclusion, which seems rushed and falls a little flat.
I was so annoyed at the lack of actual revenge, and then dumb last minute "shocking twist" that I not only sent this book to McKay's but pulled both of her other books from my shelf and sent them, too.
2) Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls is the story of Harper, a killer of women who moves throughout time thanks to a House that opens onto different decades at will, and Kirby, the girl who survived a serial killer that no one else believes exists. Troubled and bitter after barely surviving her attack, Kirby and newsman Dan Velasquez are trying to track down a killer who shouldn't exist, chasing clues scattered across decades and women with no links between them except the man who killed them. Even if they find him, how do they stop him when he can step away into their past or their future? And how will they see him coming when he sets his sights on finishing what he started with Kirby? This book was tense, gripping, and a really good read.
I read it on my kindle, so nothing went to the bookstore.
3) Chris Beckett's Dark Eden introduces us to The Family, a collection of a few hundred people living on a faraway world known as Eden, a cold place of eternal night where they huddle in a village beneath the light and warmth of the Forest's glowing trees. Surrounding the Forest are the dark frozen wastes of the Snowy Dark, a place they never venture into as they wait for the travelers from Earth, a legendary planet of brightness, to return to them in boats that sailed the skies. John Redlantern is different, though. He wants to know what lies beyond Snowy Dark, and as food becomes scarce and the Family begins to fight among themselves, John will venture where none of them have gone before, and will learn the shocking truth about their world.
This started out interesting, but ultimately turned into "Lord of the Flies" in space. I probably will not pick up the sequel, and I took it to the bookstore.
4) Douglas Coupland continues to trick me in Generation A. I'm sure I've explained this before: once I read a Douglas Coupland book and really liked it, and I continue to read his books with the assumption that I will find another that I enjoy as much as that first one. Once again, it hasn't happened, and I had to force myself through this unsatisfying story of five strangers in the near future, who are all stung by bees long after bees are declared extinct.
I was so enraged at being tricked, once again, by Douglas Coupland that this book turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back. I took all of the Douglas Coupland books on my shelf, including Girlfriend in a Coma, the one that I read once a really long time ago and enjoyed, to the used bookstore. Not only did this fill me with momentary joy (almost as much as when I threw Jonathan Franzen's books in the bag later in the month; I thought I understood the true meaning of Freedom when I finally turned the last page and escaped that dreary paper doorstop, but it turns out that turning a profit on getting that thing out of here was even more uplifting), but I also discovered that Coupland didn't even write one of the other books that I was counting in the "sometimes he's not terrible" pile. I love Dictator Style, but somehow it's escaped me for the past eight years that Coupland only wrote the introduction.
5) Is Bruce Wayne doing the most good possible by being Batman, or could he help Gotham City more in other ways? Is it morally wrong to turn your ward into a crimefighter? Is Batman really any different from the Joker, or are both compelled to follow their absolute truths? Is Batman more heroic than Superman? And can Batman and Superman ever have a friendship of equals? If you've ever wondered about these, or a dozen or so other philosophical questions about Batman, then you might enjoy reading Batman and Philosophy, in which twenty authors dissect the ethical, moral, and philosophical implications of Batman and his actions through the writings of history's greatest philosophical minds. For the most part, I enjoyed this, except for one chapter that asks, "Could Batman ever be the Joker?", walks us through a dozen or so densely written and sometimes confusing pages, and then says, "Well, we didn't even really need to ask because it happened in this issue."
I got this from McKay's and it went back to McKay's when I was done.
6) In Lexicon, Wil is on the run from a mysterious organization. Wil has seen something that has killed three thousand people, and somehow he's survived. He is the outlier, immune to the effects of glimpsing a forbidden word that drives people to murder everyone around them. Emily is a Poet, trained by the organization chasing Wil. She can use language to confuse, mislead, or outright control people, and she and Wil are now on a collision course. They may not survive, and the world may not, either. This was a good read, fast paced and sometimes surprising.
I've read some of Max Barry's other work and enjoyed it, and I enjoyed this, so for now his books remain in the apartment.
7) V. E. Schwab's Vicious introduces us to Victor and Eli. Ten years ago, they were college roommates working on their senior thesis projects, Victor's on the body's adrenaline response and Eli's on the aftereffects of near death experiences. When they get the idea to combine them, the results are immediate and catastrophic. Ten years later, Victor is a convicted criminal, rumored to be superpowered and considered extremely dangerous after escaping prison. Eli is a hero, lauded in the newspaper for stopping a bank robbery. Victor is coming for Eli, to settle old scores and new ones, to determine once and for all which of them is really the hero and which is really the villain. This was a fast read, but entertaining and at times rather tense.
I read this on my kindle, but would probably have sent it to the used bookstore even though I liked it.
And then... VAMPIRE MADNESS!
8) I thought "Twilight" was the most batshit insane vampire series I've ever read, but apparently that was only because I somehow forgot about reading Christopher Pike's "The Last Vampire" series when I was younger. Thirst: Book 2 finishes the reprint of the original six book series, with the three final books of Sita's story. For those who don't remember, the first three books introduced us to Sita, a five thousand year old blue eyed, blond vampire from India (she's ancient Aryan) who was the last vampire in the world, pursued by Yaksha, the first vampire and her creator. In the last book she fought Yaksha, went back to high school for some reason (why do vampires do this?), detonated a hydrogen bomb outside of Las Vegas, and the book ended when she used a mysterious alchemical process invented by her lover from the Dark Ages to change herself back into a human.
In this book, she gets impregnated by a ghost, gives birth to an Indian death goddess' human avatar, saves a reincarnated Baby Jesus from being eaten by lizard aliens, becomes an even more powerful vampire, then travels back in time to kill the first vampire before he can make any others, erasing herself from history. You'd think erasing herself from history would be the end, but no, there are somehow three more books after this one.
9) In Christopher Pike's Thirst 3: The Eternal Dawn it's been 15 years since Sita, the last vampire, went back in time and erased herself from history, except that it turns out she didn't! Like many time traveling vampire ladies, she telepathically commanded the author of her previous adventures, her friend Seymour, to believe that she was a figment of his imagination and that she'd erased herself, when in reality she went back in time to defeat alien lizard people working with the Moors to invade ninth century Europe through Sicily, and then she retired to a quiet life in an unspecified state to stalk Teri, the college athlete descendant of her daughter from before she became a vampire. After killing a rapist who is stalking Teri, Sita ingratiates herself into Teri's life, befriending her and Teri's sexy boyfriend, sexy Matt, who Sita cannot stop thinking sexy thoughts about even though she would never do anything to hurt Teri.
Meanwhile, Sita is being stalked by an evil corporation called the ICC, whose telepathic Array is letting them take over the world. Sita is also being stalked by an ancient race of Egyptian immortals, the enemies of the ICC. Both sides want to recruit her for reasons which are never specified, and their pursuit of Sita endangers her, Seymour, Teri, sexy Matt, all of humanity, and the reincarnated Jesus from the last book, who is now a video-game obsessed teenager. Can Sita protect herself and those she loves? And does sexy Matt hide a sexy secret? And, also, can Teri win gold in the Olympics because there isn't enough happening in this book already?
10) In Christopher Pike's Thirst Book4: The Shadow of Death, Sita and her friends are still fighting the mysterious IIC, the corporation bent on psychic manipulation and domination of the world's governments and financial markets, and the Telar, the race of Egyptian immortals determined to wipe out humanity with their genetically engineered supervirus plague that's also a toxic poison, because science works that way. At the same time, though, everything has changed! At the conclusion of the last book, Sita turned Teri into a vampire, but then Sita was killed... OR WAS SHE?
NOPE.
Teri died, but Sita is still alive in Teri's vampire body, because teenaged reincarnated Jesus stuck her in there for reasons! Some sort of mysterious reasons, because tennaged reincarnated video game playing Jesus works in mysterious ways. Now she has to continue the fight even though she is a newborn vampire and plagued by the thirst for blood for the first time in thousands of years. Also, she has to keep Sexy Matt from discovering that she's not really Teri, because she figured out that she and Sexy Matt can have sex now since he won't think he's cheating on Teri, and she gets right to the sexing even though the fate of the whole world is at stake. Now, can Sita use the IIC to destroy the Telar before the IIC betrays her? And even if it succeeds, can she also defeat the IIC? And keep Sexy Matt from discovering the unsexy truth? And also survive her trip to the Greek underworld? And defeat a surprise last minute villain: LUCIFER HIMSELF?
Despite this being marketed as the
Vampire Madness is real, and it's insane.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Back to the Old Gray
A couple of years ago, I went to Knoxville's historic Old Gray Cemetery to walk around and take pictures, and I decided that I wanted to again this weekend. I'm still working on my black and white photography, and it's the only place nearby that I know of with a lot of sculpture. I was leery of going by myself, though, since last time I got chased away by goth vampire cultists, so Kristin agreed that she would go with me.
Then this morning she stood me (but had a really good excuse; stupid work), so I went anyway, and that's how I ended up starring in "The Blair Witch Project Part III". OK, maybe not. The place was pretty much deserted this time, so I didn't get Blair Witched or Friday the Thirteenthed or even Prom Nighted, and instead I got some decent photos.
I stopped on my way there to take a picture of the MAC Auto Loans sign:
That sign is on the way to Bryan's apartment, and is another one of those things that I always said I would get a photo of when I had more time. Every time I went past it, though, we were always on the way to Bryan's for something, and usually running late, so there never seemed to be a good opportunity to pull over for a minute and snap a shot. I guess I should have made a special trip.
After I stopped at the sign, I drove the rest of the way to the cemetery, pausing to get a shot of part of the church across the street:
There are a number of interesting and intricately carved tombstones in the Old Gray, especially for local history buffs, but I ignored them for the most part since my goal for today was to get statues with shadows on them. I made an exception for this carving, though:
It caught my eye, so to speak.
The rest of the photography went well enough, I think:
This lady makes me think of the Vanderbilts for some reason. She just looks like someone you'd see strolling the gardens of a gigantic mansion in 1920's Newport, sighing over the lack of cucumber sandwiches:
I think the pictures came out ok, but there's nothing there that really wows me, and makes me look at it and say, "Oh, hey, that's a good photo." This one intrigues me:
The slight blurriness adds something, but I'm not sure if "interesting photo" is the same as "good photo". Still, I didn't get carved into pieces and fed to vampire brides, so I'm going to count it as a good day.
Then this morning she stood me (but had a really good excuse; stupid work), so I went anyway, and that's how I ended up starring in "The Blair Witch Project Part III". OK, maybe not. The place was pretty much deserted this time, so I didn't get Blair Witched or Friday the Thirteenthed or even Prom Nighted, and instead I got some decent photos.
I stopped on my way there to take a picture of the MAC Auto Loans sign:
That sign is on the way to Bryan's apartment, and is another one of those things that I always said I would get a photo of when I had more time. Every time I went past it, though, we were always on the way to Bryan's for something, and usually running late, so there never seemed to be a good opportunity to pull over for a minute and snap a shot. I guess I should have made a special trip.
After I stopped at the sign, I drove the rest of the way to the cemetery, pausing to get a shot of part of the church across the street:
There are a number of interesting and intricately carved tombstones in the Old Gray, especially for local history buffs, but I ignored them for the most part since my goal for today was to get statues with shadows on them. I made an exception for this carving, though:
It caught my eye, so to speak.
The rest of the photography went well enough, I think:
This lady makes me think of the Vanderbilts for some reason. She just looks like someone you'd see strolling the gardens of a gigantic mansion in 1920's Newport, sighing over the lack of cucumber sandwiches:
I think the pictures came out ok, but there's nothing there that really wows me, and makes me look at it and say, "Oh, hey, that's a good photo." This one intrigues me:
The slight blurriness adds something, but I'm not sure if "interesting photo" is the same as "good photo". Still, I didn't get carved into pieces and fed to vampire brides, so I'm going to count it as a good day.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Albany, I do actually love you kind of a little bit
The other day I was talking to someone about things to do and places to go in Knoxville, and they said, "You really love it here. Like, you really are excited about the Sunsphere and the gardens and stuff. You never talk that way about Albany, though. Did you hate it there?"
This is kind of a complicated answer. I was very happy to leave Albany when I did, as I was not happy working there. When I left, it was in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness less than 24 hours after my going away party, and I was 100% certain that there was nothing in town I would miss besides my friends and my comic store. It wasn't until I drove back for summer vacation a couple of years ago that I remembered that there were a few other things there that I appreciated:
1) The giant statue of Nipper:
I lived there for a couple of years before I even knew that this existed, and actually thought it was a hallucination the first time I saw it and had to be convinced by my friend Tiff that it was real. The conversation went something like this:
"OK, so last night Rich and I were leaving Jillian's, you know, after it closed, and we split a cab with these girls that Rich was trying to hook up with, and we were, like, all over downtown where all the warehouses and stuff are, and I was so drunk that I looked out the back window of the cab and I thought there was, like, a giant puppy on top of one of the buildings! And it was staring into the cab!"
"There IS a giant dog on one of those buildings."
"...What?"
The warehouse that Nipper sits on top of used to be an RCA distributor, which is why the statue is there. He weighs four tons, has an aircraft warning light on top of his ear, and there are only two of him in the whole world (the other is in Baltimore). He's no Sunsphere, but I guess he's still kind of cool.
2) Random vintage signs:
There are whole sections of Albany that don't seem to have changed since the 1960's and 1970's. Driving through them is like taking a brief trip back in time.
3) The Egg:
That's an amphitheatre downtown. Over the years, I successfully avoided attending a number of performances of "The Vagina Monologues" there, but the downside is that I never got invited to anything else there so I've never been inside. It is an interesting building to catch glimpses of from the outside, though:
and is near a random gigantic hole in the ground:
After six years of living in Albany, I still have no idea what that is.
4) Pride Fest:
Albany Pride Fest is the first one I ever attended. It's also the only Pride Fest where I've spilled wine on myself:
At least it didn't stain.
5) The SUNY Albany campus:
When I interviewed with the staff of the soul sucking vampire pit of a department where I used to work, I fell in love with their main campus, which was designed in the early 1960's by Edward Durell Stone and built on the grounds of a former golf course. It was unlike any other campus I'd ever visited or worked on because, being conceived all at once, everything matched:
In the minds of many of the students that I spoke to over the years the endless expanse of concrete (allegedly the largest poured concrete structure in the world) and tall, narrow windows:
(that one with the plywood in it was one of the bedrooms in my apartment) made it kind of prison-like, but to me the campus always looked kind of like dated sci fi:
It's the kind of setting that you would have seen Captain Kirk and the original Enterprise crew beam into on a random "Star Trek" episode.
I kind of forgot about how pretty it was while I worked there, but now that I'm gone and familiarity isn't breeding contempt, I see it again.
Albany, I kind of wish we'd been better friends, but yeah, I kind of love Knoxville more.
This is kind of a complicated answer. I was very happy to leave Albany when I did, as I was not happy working there. When I left, it was in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness less than 24 hours after my going away party, and I was 100% certain that there was nothing in town I would miss besides my friends and my comic store. It wasn't until I drove back for summer vacation a couple of years ago that I remembered that there were a few other things there that I appreciated:
1) The giant statue of Nipper:
I lived there for a couple of years before I even knew that this existed, and actually thought it was a hallucination the first time I saw it and had to be convinced by my friend Tiff that it was real. The conversation went something like this:
"OK, so last night Rich and I were leaving Jillian's, you know, after it closed, and we split a cab with these girls that Rich was trying to hook up with, and we were, like, all over downtown where all the warehouses and stuff are, and I was so drunk that I looked out the back window of the cab and I thought there was, like, a giant puppy on top of one of the buildings! And it was staring into the cab!"
"There IS a giant dog on one of those buildings."
"...What?"
The warehouse that Nipper sits on top of used to be an RCA distributor, which is why the statue is there. He weighs four tons, has an aircraft warning light on top of his ear, and there are only two of him in the whole world (the other is in Baltimore). He's no Sunsphere, but I guess he's still kind of cool.
2) Random vintage signs:
There are whole sections of Albany that don't seem to have changed since the 1960's and 1970's. Driving through them is like taking a brief trip back in time.
3) The Egg:
That's an amphitheatre downtown. Over the years, I successfully avoided attending a number of performances of "The Vagina Monologues" there, but the downside is that I never got invited to anything else there so I've never been inside. It is an interesting building to catch glimpses of from the outside, though:
and is near a random gigantic hole in the ground:
After six years of living in Albany, I still have no idea what that is.
4) Pride Fest:
Albany Pride Fest is the first one I ever attended. It's also the only Pride Fest where I've spilled wine on myself:
At least it didn't stain.
5) The SUNY Albany campus:
When I interviewed with the staff of the soul sucking vampire pit of a department where I used to work, I fell in love with their main campus, which was designed in the early 1960's by Edward Durell Stone and built on the grounds of a former golf course. It was unlike any other campus I'd ever visited or worked on because, being conceived all at once, everything matched:
In the minds of many of the students that I spoke to over the years the endless expanse of concrete (allegedly the largest poured concrete structure in the world) and tall, narrow windows:
(that one with the plywood in it was one of the bedrooms in my apartment) made it kind of prison-like, but to me the campus always looked kind of like dated sci fi:
It's the kind of setting that you would have seen Captain Kirk and the original Enterprise crew beam into on a random "Star Trek" episode.
I kind of forgot about how pretty it was while I worked there, but now that I'm gone and familiarity isn't breeding contempt, I see it again.
Albany, I kind of wish we'd been better friends, but yeah, I kind of love Knoxville more.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
The Old Gray Cemetery
I got bored sitting around the apartment, and didn’t want to do laundry even though it desperately needs to be done and I have to step over a pile of it to get from the bedroom to the bathroom, so I decided to procrastinate by going to see the historic Old Gray Cemetery. It’s the final resting place of governors, senators, other congresspeople, mayors, industrialists, and other famous Tennesseans.
It says so on the sign:
I didn’t realize when I decided to head down there that it’s not in the best part of town. There were a lot of homeless people resting on the benches and outside the gates, and a couple times I felt a little unsafe because some of them looked a little spooky, but some of that might have been because cemeteries are always a little spooky to me.
There were a lot of statues:
This one, I thought, was the most striking:
If you click on it and go to the big size, you can see that the eyes even have irises and pupils sculpted in. I don’t really know who Horne was, but I’m willing to bet that the statue is a really precise likeness.
I also want to go pick up a book on cemeteries or tombstones, because I don’t understand a lot of the symbols, and feel like they’re important:
I know at least one of those stands for the Masons, but have no clue on the rest, and that’s not even counting the indirect, sculptural symbolism:
I’m sure the shawl/shroud, hand, and flower all mean very specific things, but have no idea what those things are.
There were also some signs of the cemetery showing its age, as some of the stones and statues have broken due to elements or vandalism:
Overall it was a really peaceful afternoon, until I got spooked by the cultists. Or goth chicks. Or vampire wedding. I don’t know what it was, but I passed a group of really tall girls and a couple guys in suits, and at first I thought they were at a funeral, but didn’t see one anywhere. I lost sight of them for a little while, but then I saw them again and they’d all put on black capes and were circled around a grave with a bouquet of white flowers:
At first I wondered what they were doing, and was about to walk closer, and then I remembered the hundreds of movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read where people make just that kind of stupid mistake. One minute you’re approaching a strange caped group in the back of an isolated cemetery, and the next minute you’re on the six o’clock news tied to an obelisk with your bowels disemboweled and pentacles drawn on you with your own blood.
I beat a hasty retreat to the car. Somebody else can get Blair Witched, thanks, but it won’t be me.
It says so on the sign:
I didn’t realize when I decided to head down there that it’s not in the best part of town. There were a lot of homeless people resting on the benches and outside the gates, and a couple times I felt a little unsafe because some of them looked a little spooky, but some of that might have been because cemeteries are always a little spooky to me.
There were a lot of statues:
This one, I thought, was the most striking:
If you click on it and go to the big size, you can see that the eyes even have irises and pupils sculpted in. I don’t really know who Horne was, but I’m willing to bet that the statue is a really precise likeness.
I also want to go pick up a book on cemeteries or tombstones, because I don’t understand a lot of the symbols, and feel like they’re important:
I know at least one of those stands for the Masons, but have no clue on the rest, and that’s not even counting the indirect, sculptural symbolism:
I’m sure the shawl/shroud, hand, and flower all mean very specific things, but have no idea what those things are.
There were also some signs of the cemetery showing its age, as some of the stones and statues have broken due to elements or vandalism:
Overall it was a really peaceful afternoon, until I got spooked by the cultists. Or goth chicks. Or vampire wedding. I don’t know what it was, but I passed a group of really tall girls and a couple guys in suits, and at first I thought they were at a funeral, but didn’t see one anywhere. I lost sight of them for a little while, but then I saw them again and they’d all put on black capes and were circled around a grave with a bouquet of white flowers:
At first I wondered what they were doing, and was about to walk closer, and then I remembered the hundreds of movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read where people make just that kind of stupid mistake. One minute you’re approaching a strange caped group in the back of an isolated cemetery, and the next minute you’re on the six o’clock news tied to an obelisk with your bowels disemboweled and pentacles drawn on you with your own blood.
I beat a hasty retreat to the car. Somebody else can get Blair Witched, thanks, but it won’t be me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)