Review of Earth Thirst by Mark Teppo

Title: Earth Thirst
Series: The Arcadian Conflict #1
Author: Mark Teppo
Published: 8 January 2013
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre: science fantasy
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 3/10

The blurb for Earth Thirst, with its emphasis on a dying Earth plagued by an overbreeding, over-consuming human race, and multinational corporations wrecking the environment in their blind pursuit of profit, led me to assume that this would be a dystopian novel set in the future. The scary thing – in reality, as much as in the novel – is that it’s a dystopian novel set in the present day. The things I mentioned from the blurb are true, of course, but when I read the word ‘dying’ I thought of future catastrophes to which we are no doubt headed.

In the novel, Mark Teppo gives the Earth a glimmer of hope by re-imagining vampires as eco-warriors. They’re still undead blood-drinkers, but their characteristics are explained according to their natural connection to the Earth: they sleep underground because the Earth heals and sustains them (they don’t even need to drink blood if they can bury themselves instead) and they dislike crossing the ocean, not only because it takes them far from the nourishing earth, but because salt water is dehydrating. They aren’t averse to sunlight so much as the pollution in the air. Although the term ‘vampire’ is used on a few occasions, they are better known as Arcadians, a reference to the utopian land of unspoiled wilderness where people live in harmony with nature. Their Arcadia is a never-seen homeland where they can return to “Mother’s embrace” by burying themselves in the rich soil at the roots of a great tree (who I think is Mother).

The story is narrated by Silas, a 33-century old Arcadian soldier who fought in the battle of Troy. When the novel opens, he and three other Arcadians are on some random mission aboard the ship of a militant environmental organisation that aims to stop whalers in the South Pacific.  The mission turns out to be a trap; when the Arcadians board a whaling ship, one of their team is seriously injured by a corrosive agent – a new anti-vampire weapon for which Silas and his companions provided unwitting test subjects.

Soon after, the environmentalist’s ship is captured and burned, and Silas is betrayed and left to die in the waters of the South Pacific. But he survives, and makes it to the mainland where he starts to investigate what happened. He tracks down and rescues Mere (Meredith) a journalist who was on the boat and with whom Silas has a vague history. Silas thinks of himself as a hard-headed soldier, and he hopes Mere can help him out with her planning and investigative skills. Together they uncover corporate conspiracies and travel from Australia to Easter Island and mainland Chile in the search for the truth, which undermines everything Silas blindly believes in.

I’m all for the eco-warrior theme behind this plot; some of my favourite stories involve humanity (or at most of it) getting wiped out in retaliation for what we’ve done to the planet. But Earth Thirst left me completely cold. It wasn’t a particularly bad novel, but it’s a novel I never managed to care about.

The vampire as eco-warrior sort of intrigued me for a moment, but I’m sorry to admit that I mostly just found it really lame. I’ve come to know vampires as monsters or monstrous figures of romance (which are lame in a different way) but there is so much vampire fiction on the market right now, I struggle to take any of it seriously unless, ironically, the book is meant to be funny. This new mythos didn’t work for me either. The corrosive agent that has been invented to take down the Arcadians is a weed killer that harms plants and vampires but not humans. When the Arcadians bury themselves, they become one with the Earth. They love organic fruit and vegetables. Silas might be a bad-ass, kick-ass vampire soldier, but he keeps whining about how much he wants to return to Mother and how he always serves her without question, even though she steals his memories to protect him.

Silas is also a dreadfully boring character. He keeps talking about all these things he’s feeling (most of it regarding Mother), but his emotions were no more than words to me. For someone who’s lived for 33 centuries, he really lacks depth. There is a series of flashbacks to his life before he became an Arcadian, when he was a seer (the kind who read the future in steaming animal innards) escaping Troy with Aeneas, but even this did nothing to make Silas’s character more interesting. Is it intentional, because Mother takes his memories (and with them his personality?) whenever he enfolds himself in her warm, nurturing embrace? Is it because he’s a soldier, whose purpose it is to fight and follow orders, not to think for himself? Not that those excuses would make me like the book more.

Mere is similarly dull as the investigator, love interest, or damsel in distress rather than an actual person. She and Silas have some kind of weird history that may or may not have involved romance, but did involve Silas saving her from a criminal who was busy cutting her throat. Now she has a scar and a crush on her rescuer, who decides to remain inexplicably chaste. I didn’t sense the slightest bit of chemistry between them anyway.

For equally inexplicable reasons, Silas sometimes withholds information from Mere, and slows the plot down. One the whole, I found it to be complex in a tedious kind of way, and there were times I lost my grasp of the details in the same way I would if I were reading legal documents. The plot didn’t really focus on the environment as much as I thought it would either – it’s more about corporate schemes and certain aspects of Arcadian society, with a few moments of almost-romance between Silas and Mere. The other ‘eco’ stories I’ve read, from boring to brilliant, generally got me all riled up about protecting the Earth, or deeply saddened at what we’ve done or could do to it, but this time the eco agenda seemed negligible. One of the few things I did enjoy were the plentiful action scenes (where Silas becomes mildly alluring), but as I read them I kept thinking how good they would look on film, rather than just appreciating what they offered on the page.

The best thing I can say is that Earth Thirst isn’t an especially bad book. I didn’t laugh at it, even when the vampires were eating organic melons or being defeated by weed killer and salt water. I didn’t yell at it for being ridiculous or badly written, because it’s not. But the fact that it barely evoked any reaction in me at all is bad enough; I will barely remember this novel by the time its sequel comes out.

December Round-Up

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you’ve all had a great holiday season, and are continuing to enjoy it if you’re lucky

Without a festive season to enjoy (I really hope I’m not stuck in Addis for December again next year) I managed to get a fair bit of reading done.

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill was a reading challenge book I read with a friend. It was recommended to us as a particularly scary horror novel. I didn’t find it all that scary, but Joe Hill has clearly inherited some storytelling genes from his father Stephen King and I thought it was a good read overall. 7/10.

Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches on the other hand, had very little in terms of story and rather a lot (often too much) of random meandering and weird sex. I think this is the kind of book you’re likely to enjoy only if you feel some kind of kinship with the narrator, a sixty-something bitter writer who drinks women’s blood and functions as a fictionalised (well, I assume) version of the author. While I admired a few things about this novel, it was mostly pretty boring.

Kraken by China Miéville was, to my unhappy surprise, a total disappointment. It is officially my least favourite of Miéville’s novels, and I’ve read all of them except Iron Council. I expected to finish it within a week, but I ended up taking more than two to slog through it. I was bored, easily distracted and, worst of all, I was at a loss to explain why I didn’t like it. It had all the kinds of things I usually love about Miéville’s novel, but this time it just didn’t work for me. Since I didn’t really have anything interesting to say, I decided not to review it for now. I’ll give it another chance some day, but for now it’s a 4/10.

The Constantine Affliction by T. Aaron Payton (Tim Pratt) was a much more enjoyable metafictional mash-up of all sorts of entertaining genres – crime and mystery, steampunk, sci fi, and horror. It’s set in Victorian London, where the titular Affliction causes victims to change sex – a catastrophe for such a prim and prudish society. With lots of gender play and outlandish plot, it’s a really fun read. Review to follow soon.

Earth Thirst by Mark Teppo is an upcoming publication from Night Shade Books. Vampires are re-imagined as eco-warriors (for example, they sleep in the ground because the Earth nourishes and heals their bodies). They lament the damage that humanity has done to the Earth, and although the blurb gives the impression that this is a post-apocalyptic novel, it’s set in the present day. Devious corporate plots that threaten the vampires make up the story, and it’s got loads of action, but I found it forgettably average.

The Uninvited by Liz Jensen was my last read for 2012, and it was a good book to end the year, despite being a rather tragic one. In a disturbing global phenomenon, young children start killing their parents. The narrator, Hesketh [?] is investigating a series of workers around the world who sabotaged the companies they loved. Hesketh is very good at his job, partly because he has Asperger’s Syndrome, gifting him with an incredible talent for spotting patterns. He sees the connection between the saboteurs and the child murderers, but although this makes for a good story in itself, it’s Hesketh himself who really made this a great book for me. Jensen goes into the details of Hesketh’s psychology and daily life as someone with Asperger’s, and for me he became one of the most likeable and memorable characters I’ve come across this year. I recommend the book for that alone, but I’ll tell you what else I liked about it in my review.

Before The Uninvited I re-read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis for a reading challenge. I don’t think I’ve read this since childhood, when I fell in love with it and wished very hard that my cupboard could also be a portal to another world. In my childish innocence I didn’t even notice the Christian allegory, which was so grotesquely obvious this time around. But although I dropped my rating from four stars to three, I still like this, and it still made me long for Turkish Delight. It might just be nostalgia working its magic, because I don’t really like such childish books anymore. 

January has gotten off to a slow start. I’m trying to catch up with my reviews of The Constantine Affliction, Earth Thirst and The Uninvited, so I haven’t finished any books yet. But I will have to get cracking – I’ve set myself a reading goal of 85 books for the year, and I’m planning to read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon, which means I’ve got some dauntingly long books ahead of me.

Up for Review: Earth Thirst

What is it with 8 January? So far I have five review copies of books that will be published on that day, and I’ve now banned myself from requesting any others (unless I really, really want them), because I’m already going to have to pull a masterful feat of organisation to get all these reviewed in time.

It’s been a while since I read anything about vampires, but I need a vampire book for a reading challenge, so Earth Thirst will most likely be one of the first 8 January novels that I read. It’ll be my first piece of fiction by Mark Teppo, although I already known his name from the Foreworld Saga.

Earth Thirst by Mark Teppo (Night Shade Books)

Marketing copy from NetGalley:

The Earth is dying. Humanity–over-breeding, over-consuming—is destroying the very planet they call home. Multinational corporations despoil the environment, market genetically modified crops to control the food supply, and use their wealth and influence and private armies to crush anything, and anyone, that gets in the way of their profits. Nothing human can stop them.

But something unhuman might.

Once they did not fear the sun. Once they could breathe the air and sleep where they chose. But now they can rest only within the uncontaminated soil of Mother Earth—and the time has come for them to fight back against the ruthless corporations that threaten their immortal existence.

They are the last guardians of paradise, more than human but less than angels. They call themselves the Arcadians.

We know them as vampires. . .

Earth Thirst will be published on 8 January by Night Shade Books. It is the first novel in a series known as The Arcadian Conflict.

Links:
Add it on Goodreads
Buy it at The Book Depository

About the author:
Mark Teppo suffers from a mild case of bibliomania, which serves him well in his on-going pursuit of a writing career. Fascinated with the mystical and the extra-ordinary, he channels this enthusiasm into fictional explorations of magic realism, urban fantasy, and surreal experimentation. Recently, he’s been building franchises and writing historical fiction. – from the author’s website
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List of works on Goodreads

 

The Passage by Justin Cronin

Title: The Passage
Series: The Passage #1
Author: Justin Cronin
Published: First published 8 June 2012; this edition published 17 may 2011
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Genre: horror, post-apocalyptic, science fiction, fantasy
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 4/10

The Passage is an excellent reminder for me to be wary of bestsellers. Some are just as wonderful as the hype suggests, but most end up being dull, conventional blather that is simply easy for a lot of people to like. If your idea of a really good book is something that surpasses the norm in terms of writing, characters, or ingenuity, then don’t read The Passage.

The plot is familiar. The military experiments with a virus that’s supposed to create supersoldiers, but creates monsters instead. The monsters escape and start killing people while infecting others. Soon, North America, and possibly the world, is overrun, with small groups of humans trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Humanity’s only hope lies in a unique test subject who got all the benefits of the virus and none of the human-devouring aggression.

Well thanks, but I’ve seen all the Resident Evil movies. They’re fantastically stupid, but it’s much more fun to watch Milla Jovovich kick zombie ass than slog through 800 pages of unnecessarily detailed, slow-paced pseudo-horror.

Like many readers and reviewers, I only enjoyed the first 250 pages, in which Cronin sets up the main plot (yes, it takes that long). Through a series of emails, we learn that a scientist named Lear to the jungles of Boliva, hoping to find the cure for all human ailments. He’s accompanied by soldiers and researchers, almost all of whom die horribly when attacked by vampire bats. However, the mission achieves its goal when Lear returns with a man infected with the virus they were looking for.

Thus begins Project Noah, so-named because Noah lived for over 900 years in the bible. The virus is supposed to make people similarly near-immortal, and because it’s a military initiative, the main, narrow-minded goal is to “weaponize” the human form, accompanied by a vision of “the American Way as something truly long-term. As in permanent”. To test the virus, twelve death-row inmates are recruited with the promise of immortality.

So we’ve got jingoistic hubris, twelve murderers who get eternal life instead of death, and a virus from crazed vampire bats. Obviously things will go horribly wrong. The test subjects are turned into sparkling bioluminescent vampires with skin like diamonds “so hard it made Kevlar look like pancake batter”. One of them also has psychic powers that he uses to manipulate the guards into letting them out, and thus begins the vampire apocalypse.

Unfortunately it takes almost a quarter of the novel for us to get that far, or even encounter a scene that you could actually call horror, because there are parallel plots telling the detailed stories of Wolgast, Carter, and Amy. Brad Wolgast is an FBI agent whose job it is to recruit the death-row inmates for Project NOAH. He and his partner Doyle head off to pick up the last of the inmates – Anthony Carter, a small, shy, and slightly retarded black man, who is actually innocent of killing the rich white woman whose lawn he used to mow.

After recruiting Carter, Wolgast and Doyle are sent to pick up (ie. kidnap) Amy, a six-year-old girl recently abandoned at a convent by her destitute mother. How Project NOAH found out about her or why exactly they want her is left to your imagination. Amy has been taken in by a nun with some sort of psychic power who just knows that their destinies are entwined. Amy herself has a special power, but we’re never told what it is. Wolgast and Doyle nab her, and although Wolgast tries to escape with her, she ends up at the NOAH base where she’s infected with the virus, shortly before the vampire apocalypse begins.

I enjoyed the novel up until this point. It’s very slow, and you get far more detail about the characters than you need, but it was interesting enough. It takes a long time for the main plot to get going, but with 800 pages and two sequels in the works, I figured Cronin could take his time. Then, to my dismay, the plot jumped forward 92 years and completely failed to ever be quite as interesting as the first part.

A tedious series of diary entries explains that a colony of survivors was established in California, forming a society that has lived there ever since. There are a lot of subplots involving families, friends and romantic attachments, as well as a lot of information about how the colony is run, but the gist of the story is that the machinery supplying the electricity is getting worn down and when the lights go out the vampires will come and everyone will die screaming. Amy eventually comes back into the story, having wandered alone for almost a century. She holds the key to ending the vampire apocalypse, and a group of young colonists embark on a journey to take her to Colorado, following a faint radio signal asking anyone who finds Amy to take her there.

It was a bit jarring to jump from one set of characters to another, with a completely different plot that’s even slower than the first. I also found that I didn’t care much about these new characters. Cronin gives us lots of details about their backgrounds and current situations, and yet most of them remain dull. I got very impatient waiting for Amy to come back into the story, but when she did I was disappointed. She barely speaks and is mostly passive, just like her six-year-old self in the first part. She’s a century-old woman in the body of a child, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she behaves. Amy is potentially the most interesting character, but she’s kept in the background and is unable to answer any pressing questions for either the reader or the new characters, who know nothing about how the vampire plague began. She’s supposed to be the “girl who saves the world”, but not because of any action she takes. Her power lies only in what she is or what she’s made to be, and it’s the other characters who must take action and manoeuvre her into position like an inanimate tool.

I wasn’t too impressed with the vampires either. They’re more like vampire zombies, because they become mindless bloodsuckers. The first vampires are known as The Twelve (which is also the title for the second book), while the rest are their descendants, a hoard known as The Many. None of them manage to be particularly scary. I was really hoping that Amy at least would be creepy, but she is consistently bland.

By the last quarter, I was getting very tired of the whole story, which started to feel increasingly random and chaotic, like a mad dash to the finish. Perhaps Cronin had been losing steam too. The worst part was the way the novel went from being light sci fi to some kind of spiritualist fantasy at the climax. For so long I’d been waiting patiently for proper explanations of how the virus worked, what made Amy special, and why the virus reacted differently to her. The novel has the opportunity to provide all of this information but gives none of it. We do find out what role Amy has to play in the vampire apocalypse, but it’s not a scientific explanation – it’s a vague, semi-Christian phenomenon with no connection to what we know about the virus. In fact, by this point in the novel, we frequently see science or sci fi falling away to be replaced by fantasy, spiritualism or general vagueness. The most annoying example is when an important ‘scientific’ character dies and allows a religious one to live so that we end up being given the latter character’s Christian interpretation of events instead of a detailed technical one. It’s extremely frustrating and totally unsatisfying. If Cronin is holding back all the interesting information for the sequels, then he’s doing this novel a huge disservice.

Why the hell is this so popular?  I kept asking myself this as I trudged on, and came up with a few guesses. It’s pretty easy to read, despite its length. With all the travelling the characters do, it functions as a kind of epic American novel, exploring the country’s landscape. The content focuses on domestic drama more than it does on horror or science, which I think makes it appealing to a wider audience. I dislike all the spiritual/religious stuff particularly since it doesn’t suit earlier parts of the novel, but I know I’m probably in the minority there and for some it probably makes the book more meaningful.

I have to admit that, for some stupid reason, I feel an urge to read The Twelve. I think my brain is still being manipulated by all the hype that surrounds The Passage. I better set it straight before I spend another week reading a boring novel that’s twice as long as it needs to be.

 

Buy The Passage at The Book Depository

Review of God Save the Queen by Kate Locke

Title: God Save the Queen
Series: The Immortal Empire #1
Author: Kate Locke (pseudonym for Kathryn Smith)
Published: 03 July 2012
Publisher: Orbit Books
Genre: science fiction, urban fantasy
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 6/10

It’s the present day in an alternative vision of our world. History took a different turn in the 19^th century when a mutation of the bubonic plague – known as the Prometheus Plague – turned Britain’s aristocrats into vampires, werewolves and goblins. Apparently they really did have better blood, because the rest of the human population died by the thousands. Society is now divided according to the level of plague in your blood – there are the aristos (fully plagued), the halvies (half-plagued hybrids born of human mothers and vamp or were fathers), and humans. Queen Victoria, a vampire, is about to celebrate 175 years ruling the still-powerful British Empire.

At both the top and the very bottom of the social ladder are the goblins. Technically they’re the most ‘aristocratic’, since they’re the most plagued, but as the most bestial of the races they’re hated and feared by all. They live underground and feed on any flesh, be it aristo, halvie or human.

Alexandra (Xandra) Varden is a member of the prestigious Royal Guard, a security force sworn to protect the aristos. Like most halvies, she was trained to fight in order to provide security services to the aristos, and Xandra was at the very top of her class. She’s an ass-kicking, corset-wearing, vampire halvie with hair as red as blood. Her father is a duke, and she’s unquestioningly loyal to queen and country. Her comfortable view of English society begins to crack and crumble when Xandra learns that her sister Drusilla (Dede) committed suicide after being sent to Bedlam, a notorious insane asylum. Refusing to believe that Dede would do such a thing, Xandra investigates the highly suspicious circumstances surrounding her ‘death’.

Nothing she finds puts her mind at ease. Conspiracies roil beneath the surface of British society, implicating the aristos in horrific crimes that Xandra cannot believe them capable of committing. A rebel group fights for democracy, denouncing the superiority of any race, calling the aristocracy a dictatorship. Such treasonous ideas go against everything Xandra believes, but in her stubbourn search for the truth she’s slowly forced to rethink her view of the people she loves, the races she’s judged and the ideals she’s based her life upon. She runs headlong into danger, romance, and an unbelievable new life.

With its cute, bold cover and enticing blurb, God Save the Queen gives a good impression of being loads of fun and just really cool. And when you read it you can’t help but imagine how awesome it would look as a movie because it really is full of cool, fun stuff. Xandra is a very sexy heroine with great hair (one of the advantages of being a halvie or aristo) in a rare, bright red colour (all halvies have colourful hair – indigo, pink, blue, etc.). She can rock a corset and kick ass in an evening gown. With a talent for violence and a wicked temper, she’s always getting herself into action scenes, often with a frock coat swirling stylishly around her. And speaking of action and style, Xandra also hooks up with Vex McLaughlin, the ultra-sexy Scottish alpha werewolf, who I imagined being played by Joe Manganiello (Alcide from True Blood) in a gorgeous tailored suit. Yum. God Save the Queen hits plenty of the right buttons with a bit of sex, lots of violence, alternate history, vampires, werewolves, corsets and really awesome hair, so it would have been a really great novel if it wasn’t so damn sloppy.

My first issue – it’s supposed to be very English, but it feels very American. It might take place in London in a world where the sun hasn’t set on the British Empire and an iconic English queen holds the throne, but it reads like it was written by an American, for other Americans, based on an American idea of England (although apparently the author is Canadian). Xandra uses words like “bollocks”, “knickers” and “fag” (as in cigarette), but it’s not going to fool anyone when ‘lieutenant’ is spelt “leftenant”, presumably to force American readers to use the English pronunciation. I think it’s weird to say “leftenant” too, but that just made me cringe. The novel lacks the right feels for its setting, and it doesn’t help that Xandra keeps making comparisons with American things (action movies, their eagle), as if to help US readers relate to this foreign fantasy setting. Is that necessary? And why would Xandra’s character be thinking of America? In this world, the British Empire reigns supreme; it can’t be assumed that the USA would have the same cultural dominance that it has in our world.

This brings me to my next issue – world-building with an alternate history. There are many interesting if awkward info dumps to explain how this science fantasy version of London came about – the biology of the plague, significant historical events, contemporary social structures, law, tech, etc. – but it’s not thorough enough. Locke devotes about half a paragraph to mentioning how the rest of the world looks, although Africa is entirely forgotten. Rather odd, since Britain has kept most of its colonies, but apparently a few extra decades of British imperialism and slavery aren’t worth any ink. London appears to be a multi-species but mono-cultural city where the aristocracy are so old-fashioned they hold balls every week and use horse-drawn carriages. Not that there’s any shortage of modern technology; humans and halvies use all the conveniences we’re used to – cellphones, cars, computers, tracking devices, DVDs. These things have different names and aren’t quite as slick as our own, but it’s hardly worthy of the term ‘steampunk’. Neither of the two World Wars happened, so why has technology advanced as if they did, especially when many aristos shun such things?

Look closely, or just attentively at God Save the Queen and you’ll notice that it’s rife with holes, inconsistencies and absurdities. How does Xandra ride a motorbike while wearing an evening gown with her hair pinned up? How does she manage to be stealthy with that striking red hair? If halvies and aristos age very slowly, then why have all the halvies in the novel aged like normal human beings?

Locke also commits many mystery-plot sins, making her characters ignore the obvious or suspicious, avoid pressing questions, withhold information or suddenly turn into morons, all to prolong the suspense. In the first chapter, Xandra goes to the goblin prince for information about her sister, because somehow the goblins know about everything that happens topside. If the novel stuck to that premise, it could have been a lot shorter. Dede commits suicide by setting herself on fire, which is such a dumbass way of killing yourself that I couldn’t believe Xandra was the only one to consider the possibility that her death was faked and a body burned to make identification difficult. Their brother Val is an investigator for Scotland Yard, but he just runs with the theory that Dede was “hatters”.

Xandra is right, of course, but she’s not always that sharp. Like when she sees a woman who looks exactly like her, but just can’t put her finger on why she looks so very familiar. Yes, really.

The novel seems to improve in the second half, perhaps because some secrets are revealed so there are fewer investigative shortcomings. Once the plot gets going there’s less opportunity to dwell on problems in world-building, and it probably helps that there’s lots of action and that Vex is so incredibly hot.

I also appreciated Xandra’s character, to an extent. OK, she’s a temperamental bitch, but intentionally so, and she has to deal with some major life changes. At the beginning she’s blindly patriotic and openly, unabashedly prejudiced. She tends to jump to conclusions and cling to them, so on the whole she’s rather close-minded. She’s clearly being set up to have her mindset challenged if not bludgeoned, and it’s pleasing to see that happen. She’s still a bitch at the end, but that’s ok. Good girls are overrated.

If you can avoid being fussy or demanding, God Save the Queen is a decent entertaining read. It’s annoying at the start, but it gets better and there’s a wonderfully satisfying demise for one of the villains. I like the ideas at the core of the novel, I just wish they’d been properly fleshed out. And yeah, I’d read the sequel, The Queen is Dead, due out in 2013. I like a good American action movie as much as the next person.

Buy a copy of God Save the Queen at The Book Depository.

Review of Carpathia by Matt Forbeck

Title: Carpathia
Author: Matt Forbeck
Published: 28 February 2012 (USA & Canada); 1 March 2012 (rest of the world)
Publisher: Angry Robot
Genre: fantasy, horror
Source: eARC from the publisher
My Rating: 4/10

The first thing I need to tell you is that the official Angry Robot blurb for this book is misleading. This is what it says:

When the desperate survivors of the Titanic were rescued from the icy waters of the North Atlantic by the passenger steamship Carpathia, they thought their problems were over.

But something was sleeping in the darkest recesses of the rescue ship. Something old. Something hungry.

The lucky ones wished they’d gone down with the ship.

Based on that blurb, I assumed the plot went something like this: Titanic sinks. Survivors are rescued by the Carpathia. Unknown monsters start preying on the passengers of the Carpathia. Survivors must find out what the monsters are and kill them or be eaten. Reader gets to enjoy a combination of mystery and horror.

Lies!

Firstly, it’s only about a third of the way into the novel that the survivors actually board the Carpathia. Until then, you have to spend an unexpectedly long and boring amount of time with characters on the sinking ship and in the icy water, waiting for the rescue ship to arrive.

Secondly, the monsters don’t even wait for the Titanic to finish sinking before making a meal of the passengers. Soon after the distress call is sent, they hurry over to the vessel to feed on the poor survivors, who everyone will just assume drowned.

Finally, there’s no mystery about what the monsters are. They’re vampires. “[S]omething…sleeping… Something old. Something hungry” – that’s just marketing crap to build tension that the book wastes little time in dissipating. And I’d really been looking forward to that mystery.

To be fair though, this is a criticism of the blurb and my interpretation of it rather than the story; it doesn’t mean the book itself can’t still be good. Except it’s not. It’s lame. I wish Angry Robot had given Matt Forbeck that blurb and told him to write a story that fit it, because I found the blurb pretty enticing in a pulpy sort of way.

So what’s wrong with the novel? Well most of my issues with it are actually linked to the ways in which it departs from assumptions I made based on the blurb. It takes too long for the Carpathia to pick up the passengers, and in the meantime we’re treated to something that feels a like a novelisation of James Cameron’s movie after they hit the iceberg, with the addition of vampires who feed on the passengers. Instead of Jack, Rose and that other guy, you’ve got a love triangle between three lifelong friends, Lucy Seward, Abe (Abraham) Holmwood and Quin (Quincey) Harker. Hint fucking hint. Forbeck obviously wasn’t trying to write a mystery novel, or he wouldn’t have named all three of his leads after characters from Dracula. At first this seemed like a reference gone too far, but it’s later revealed that Bram Stoker is actually a friend of the Seward, Holmwood and Harker families. And *gasp!* it appears his novel was as much fact as fiction.

Even though you know what the monsters are the novel could still be tense, but again it’s not. Of course there’s danger, and plenty of gory action, but somehow there’s no sense of urgency. It’s just not gripping enough. One reason might be that instead of one main plot you have several subplots. There’s the sinking Titanic, a strand that ends a third of the way in. There’s a love triangle – Lucy is dating Abe, but Quin is in love with her. The vampire leader, Dushko, is in conflict with a younger vampire, Brody, who wants to do things differently, with the result that a fight between the vampires is as much of an issue as a fight between vampires and humans. Finally, there’s the plot that gets marketed as the main one – vampires killing passengers and crew. However, it’s not even all the vampires who try or even want to do this. Dushko had planned as discreet a journey as possible; it’s Brody who starts all the mayhem. Also, most of the vampires remain hidden in the ship’s cargo holds and don’t get the chance to attack anyone. There’s too much going on here, but none of it is quite exciting enough.

Another reason for the lack of tension is that the vampires were kind of lame. They’re the old-school kind who are vulnerable to garlic and crucifixes, have to sleep in coffins lined with the dirt of their homeland, and can turn into mist, bats or wolves. Shape-shifting abilities are awesome, but the rest amounts to weakness, much more so than in Dracula. One slap in the face with a crucifix and Carpathia’s vampires run screaming as their flesh boils away. The use of these traditional weapons is made even more disappointing by the fact you’re led to expect something more modern and innovative. Dushko is extremely concerned about the progress made by modern science, warning that humans are not as vulnerable as they once were. This sounded to me like the foreshadowing of some awesome steampunk weapons, but NO! – that might have been fun, so the humans stick to their stakes and crucifixes.

All this is bad enough, but there are also some glaring inconsistencies and oddities to annoy you just in case you might somehow start to enjoy the book. For example, when the Titanic sinks, the passengers swimming in the freezing water continue to converse as if they were still enjoying cigars and brandy in the smoking lounge. They keep talking about the cold, but they speak in calm, full sentences; no chattering teeth or any real sense that they’re at risk of freezing to death. The vampires on the Carpathia are moving, en masse from New York back to Europe because some of them were careless and and their killings risked exposing the whole group. I don’t know why they have to leave the entire continent and couldn’t just move to another city or state, or why they have to live in one large group instead of splitting up. When gearing up to fight the vampires, Quin goes to get the large crucifix that his mother insisted he pack – a miracle, since his luggage went down with the Titantic.

How could Forbeck (and the editors) be so sloppy and waste so much potential? The only thing he does satisfactorily is to depict the culture and sensibilities of 1912, at least for readers, like myself, who would only notice the most heinous historical inaccuracies. A lot of time I actually felt like I was reading some obscure pulp fiction that had actually been written in the 1910s.

If that sounds appealing, then you can order a copy of Carpathia, which is coming out on 28 February in the US and Canada, and on 01 March in the rest of the world. Otherwise, just ignore it.

Lauren & Lu review Spiral X by J.J. Westendarp

Title: Spiral X
Author: J.J. Westendarp
Published: 2010
Genre: Urban fantasy, crime, vampire fiction
Source: Pdf received from author for review

Plot summary
Cheryl Erickson is a sexy, wealthy 22-year old vampire hunter. She’s been staking vamps since they killed her father when she was 16 and now she’s part of an underground vampire-hunting force in Dallas with the help of her gay best-friend Virgil, who handles all the electronics. There’s a dangerous new drug on the streets called Plast, which awakens addicts’ most predatory traits, turning them into violent psychopaths. For some reason vampires are dealing Plast to humans, but no one has been able to find out why. Cheryl is determined to crack the case, but her investigation forces her to question and sometimes violate her own code of ethics.

General Impressions

Lauren: Spiral X  has all the right ingredients for an entertaining read – a feisty heroine, blood-sucking monsters, loads of action, and a rapid pace. But unfortunately it failed to interest me. Cheryl was hypocritical and far too cocky for me to like her or empathise with her, and all the action just didn’t do it for me. Clumsy writing dragged me down, and although it’s a short book I had to push myself to finish it. Read my full review here.

Lu: Never has a book deserved the words “action-packed” more! What a roller-coaster of events! What I enjoyed about this novel was the fact that it played in my head like a movie. The characters were believable, mythology understandable and there were twists and turns around every corner.

The author being male only helped this novel. He made fight scenes and car chases believable and understandable. How many times have you read a fight scene where you were unsure of what was happening and just got through it to see the end result? I’ve read too many to mention,  but not here!

Definitely a must-read if you are tired of paranormal romance and love triangles of which this book has none. Thank the heavens!

It has a kick-ass heroine that has lost some motivation along the way, which only makes her human. She makes mistakes, which is always a welcome change from the “I am the perfect heroine” scenario. Each character has depth and they are all fascinating! I can’t wait to find out what happens to Cheryl and I hope we get to see more of Rev.

Lauren: Hmm, are you saying only men can write good action scenes?

Lu: Lol I’m saying that so far these were the best action scenes other than Game of Thrones and Pillars of the Earth, which were also written by men. So maybe in my case it has just been a coincidence. Or maybe a lot of women who write young adult and paranormal fiction just don’t do action scenes well for me. But as I write this I thought of J.R. Ward. So maybe I have just broken my own stereotype

But what I do want to say is that J.J. Westendarp really writes kick-ass action scenes!

 

Cheryl

Lu: For once the main character wasn’t my favorite. I really liked all the supporting characters! Cheryl was kick-ass and all, but she was a bit inconsistent at times.

Lauren: Yes, I thought Cheryl was a hypocrite when she dumped her boyfriend for deceiving her in the same way that she deceives (and continues to deceive) him. I also disliked the way she implied that all women were weak and silly, but she’s like a guy and that’s why she can kick vampire ass instead of sitting at home like all the other “weepy little tarts” wondering why some guy isn’t calling her.

Lu: Hahah I didn’t pick up on this. You feminist you

But I do agree that Cheryl is a hypocrite and a bit hasty with some of her decisions. I think Thom was just a arb character that didn’t really need to be in the book.

 

Writing

Lauren: Westendarp almost always opts for telling rather than showing. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s terrible here. Every time a new character shows up, or Cheryl goes to a new location, we get an infodump about it. I found it extremely irritating and disruptive. It’s like watching a movie and having to pause and read a character history every time a new person walks on-screen. Why not weave some of that information into the narrative? For example, Cheryl explains how much she loves hot sauce; instead she could be described eating a meal and putting lots of hot sauce on it. Cheryl explains that she and Tank have a casual sexual relationship, but it would be so much more interesting if we could feel some of the sexual tension between them through body language and dialogue. Characters feel so much more real if we get to know them through their speech and behaviour. Here it feels like I’m referring to a profile in the footnotes.

Lu: Strange I didn’t even notice this. I like knowing little tidbits about characters. I would rather know details than try and guess.

Lauren: I like knowing the details too; that’s what makes a character interesting. And sometimes long explanatory pieces can be absorbing, because you’re curious about the information. But here it’s badly done and clogs up the narrative, distancing you from the story. It’s like you have to stop, pull back, and access an information file.

I dislike other aspects of his writing too – repeating phrases within a short space, and misusing the term “begs the question” multiple times. He also introduces surprising bits of information that should have been mentioned earlier. For example, you don’t even know that Cheryl has a boyfriend until she sees him. At one point, Cheryl states that her relationship with fellow vampire-hunter Tank is “strained to the breaking point”, but that was the first I’d heard of it. Almost halfway through the novel, Cheryl mentions (in an infodump) that she has psychic powers that allow her to detect vampires. You think this would have come up ages ago, but instead it sounds like Westendarp made it up on the spot and didn’t bother working it in.

Lu: Ah, I see what you mean. As if he thought of it at that point but didn’t bother going back to mention or hint at it. Maybe it’s meant to be a mystery, that at the point that you find out this information you also get the backstory. It’s a bit like real life in that way. You find out someone is allergic to milk after you have fed them milk tarts with their eyes closed. Then you find out the backstory about how it started when they were 5 etc.

I have read a few books like this where you are thrown into a story and only get info “dumps” when something happens. I don’t mind it at all, but I can see how it can be a pain.

Lauren: I can forgive Cheryl not mentioning her boyfriend, because it’s not essential at that point and you could say that it’s realistic for this to happen. But it’s unrealistic for there not to be much tension between Cheryl and Tank, just before she says that their relationship is under a lot of strain, and it’s even more unlikely that she wouldn’t mention her psychic powers in the earlier encounters with vampires.

Lu: Maybe the psychic powers were an afterthought. We’ll never know unfortunately.

 

Vampires

Lauren: Westendarp has created his own vampire mythos. Vampires are not undead humans; instead, demons from hell break through the fabric between worlds and possess the bodies of humans who have died from vampire bites. I want to talk about that in a moment, but first, how do feel about authors reinventing the vampire mythos? So many seem to do it.

Lu: I enjoy new takes on mythos. This one was particularly interesting! To be honest I don’t mind what an author changes or adds to a myth, as long as it is clearly stated and makes sense in the realm of the novel.

Lauren: I don’t mind either, as long as it’s not something totally stupid like sparkling. In Spiral X it has an important impact for the plot and Cheryl’s morals (a theme that comes up now and then). These vampires are completely inhuman, so Cheryl can draw a clear line between vampires and humans. Vampires are evil demons and that’s that, so Cheryl doesn’t have any qualms about killing them.

However, she does profess to have strict rules about not killing humans and trying not to hurt them. Her stance is a bit shaky though – as you said earlier, she’s an inconsistent character. In the opening scene she’s trying to get information by threatening a man with a knife. He realises she won’t cut him and refuses to talk, so she decides that her ethics are of less importance than information and shoots him in the kneecap. A bit much, wouldn’t you say? But then later, she’s explaining why she won’t tolerate any violence against the drug dealers supplying Plast:

These guys probably don’t know they’re supplying vampires with the drug, if they even know the vamps exist. For them it’s business. A dirty, filthy business that hurts people, but business all the same. That doesn’t warrant violence, not from us.

Why is it ok to shoot some random guy in the kneecap just for information, but it’s not ok to use violence against drug dealers and murderers?

Lu: Hahaha sparkling.

I think we start where Cheryl has come to a point and sort of loses it and shoots the guy in the kneecap. Then she sees how upset Tank is and her morals change/strengthen. She sort of pulls herself right. We all do it, lets say you steal a salt and pepper shaker at a restaurant. Someone tells you that you shouldn’t do it, so you feel bad and sort of go in the opposite direction. From then on if you see someone eyeing the salt and pepper shakers you get defensive and preachy about how it’s bad to steal. If that makes any sense

Sjoe I’m full of random examples today!

Lauren: Lol, where are you getting these examples from?

My problem is that she doesn’t only adopt the moral stance about not hurting humans after Tank gets upset with her. She’s got that rule from the start, which is why she wouldn’t cut that guy in the first place. It just seems so ridiculous that she’d go from not wanting to cut him to shooting him in the kneecap. Why not just cut him a little as she was actually threatening to do? Her character just baffles me sometimes.

Lu: Probably because shooting him looks cooler? Than some random cutting…

Lauren: Haha, that or shock value, but neither is a good excuse.

 

Christian Theme

Lauren: This got me a little worried as it became more pronounced. I thought it might turn into Christian fiction. The feeling of gratitude that washes over Cheryl whenever she sends a vampire back to hell was a bit silly too. How did you feel about it?

Lu: That’s the one gripe I have. I only noticed it now when you pointed it out. It was weird and unexplainable. I must add that the Christian theme didn’t bother me. Reverend and Father Harold were some of my favorite characters.

Lauren: Yeah, Rev and Father Harold were ok; there’s nothing wrong with religious characters. I just didn’t like the sense that it was becoming an overarching theme – the vampires being part of an eternal war between God and the devil, good and evil. It’s too simplistic; it lacks the moral ambiguity that made the movie Constantine so interesting.

Lu: I can only hope that the author is working towards another plot that isn’t so obvious.

 

Would you continue reading the series?

Lauren: No. This novel was self-contained, so there were no loose ends I want to see tied up. Cheryl is not a character I want to follow either.

Lu: Yes. Particularly because the next book is about a hunter named Erika and it’s set in New York. It’s set after the whole Cheryl saga. So this could be interesting. Maybe the characters eventually meet up!

 

Buy Spiral X

Smashwords
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

 

Lauren and Lu’s Reviews

Lu (from A Muggle’s Magical Book Blog) and I are very different readers. She’s easygoing, I’m demanding. She loves YA and paranormal romance, I don’t. I love sci fi and dark fantasy, she just dabbles. I want good writing and interesting ideas, while Lu is happy with a great story, interesting characters and a few twists. Together we’ll argue our conflicting points of view in joint reviews and you get the benefit of two perspectives instead of just one.