Book Review: Marked by P.C. & Kristin Cast

Let me preface what you’re about to read with the admission that I have already bought Betrayed AFTER reading 90% of Marked, and in spite of everything I’m about to write, I fully intend to read the next book in the House of Night series. Part of this is because in spite of this book’s many, many, MANY flaws, it is still entertaining. And I mean that in a guilty pleasure, “I totally love to hate you” kind of way.

This is a fan fiction that somehow got published anyway. I’m not saying it’s a lousy fan fiction, and for many years, I was a regular in newsgroups reading anime fan fiction not too dissimilar to this. So I was willing to stick with it, even if many times I rolled my eyes hard enough to see my own brain.

Marked is a story that came about after a Harry Potter fanfic and a Twilight fanfic got drunk and played seven minutes in heaven in J.K. Rowling’s walk-in closet. These vampyres (note the spelling) don’t sparkle, but their clothing does, a lot. And all vampyres, except the red shirts, are pretty and perfect. They don’t have fangs, and the sun just makes them woozy. In this world vampyres make The Change, which is foreshadowed by A Tracker showing up to totally humiliate you in front of all your old friends. Seems like Trackers might show up at home, like, before school. Or after. After’s good too.

But no, Zoey gets Marked at school, which means she has a crescent moon on her forehead to show off to her friends and make them run away. In The Change, this is the first vampyre zit. So embarrassing! Like, ohmygod!

Zoey soon runs away from home and thumps her noggin, and then meets the Goddess of night, Nyx, who at this point should have just said, “Zoey, I am Mrs. Cast, and I love you so much that I’m going to give you every gift you could ever possibly want, and then some.”

And then? Or: Where the hell do I send this shit now?

If you follow publishing news, you know by now that Dorchester is doing some desperate things in an effort to bring in new revenues and staunch the loss of income due to poor print sales.

This is not really a time to crow, even if I never submitted to Dorchester or Leisure, its dark fiction imprint. I have read Leisure books, and thought the quality of the books (construction-wise, I mean) was good. So to hear that they’ve done poorly and are showing signs of closing, I’m not really a happy camper. That’s another source of entertainment threatening to go out of business. No, sir, I don’t like it.

Editor Don D’auria is leaving Leisure, as are most of the editing staff. This is not a good sign, when the dude who really was the mover behind Leisure is shown the door, quietly. I’ll echo the thoughts of professional writers in saying I’m sure Don will have no trouble finding a house to work with, or a list of writers willing to write on spec for him.

But this story is also revealing an ugly truth that the industry has still been in denial about, and that’s how drastically we need publishers to get with the times. We need them to abandon a lot of old business practices and streamline their operations for the modern world. You know, the one that developed after the printing press was invented.

Completely Random Bad Poetry Day: Sarah

My name is Sarah and I’m here to stay
Don’t have much to say, but I’ll shout it all day
Don’t ask me questions, or get in my way
You do that pal, and there’ll be hell to pay

I resent people who come off as smart
I hate science, diversity, Democrats and art
I wrote a book and it shot up the chart
A miraculous feat for a book with no heart

Of course I don’t believe half the shit I say
But I say it and they clap, and I take home my pay
What harm did I do at the end of the day?
You can’t really change things with words anyway

But I would like more power, that would be nice
And next time, I’m thinking of dropping the vice
Next time I’ll wing it, but not skate on thin ice
For me that ivory post is worth any price

The one thing that keeps me awake at night
Is my quest to completely take over the right
Rub out the left, at least remove them from sight
But the media won’t help me, oh what a plight

I’ll write yet more books; yes, that’s what I’ll do
Rupert Murdoch will let me broadcast my view
With him I can do print books, and a Fox interview
And look, now I can also Twitter with you

I might have to shoot a few wolves here and there
Then bemoan my gun rights like I really care.
Shoot wolves from the ground? No I wouldn’t  dare
Get a chopper up there, where it’s safe in the air

My name is Sarah, and I won’t go away
I want to stamp out abortion, and spit on a gay
I want all of you to do everything I say
So make me your leader for eight years, okay?

Book review: Swarm of Flying Eyeballs by Gina Ranalli

Swarm of Flying Eyeballs is the second Gina Ranalli book I’ve read, with the first story being Suicide Girls in the Afterlife. While Suicide Girls was a visually intense bizarre story right from the start, Swarm starts off in very mundane circumstances. The arrival of a flying swarm of eyes does ratchet up the weirdness, but this is weird in the sense of a classic horror film. It’s not nearly the level of visual strangeness I’ve come to expect in most bizarro titles. But this isn’t a bad thing.

Swarm follows multiple perspectives in very short, fast paced chapters about Ron, Natalie, Travis, and Lisa, among others. As the kids from a summer school field trip go to the Berryville berry farm to pick (surprise) berries, they discovers that the farm is infested with a swarm of flying eyeballs. With tails. It sounds weird, but it actually works “in execution” rather well, pun intended.

The events that unfold follow the chaotic path you might expect from most basic horror tropes. People running, panicking. Some of them die horridly, and others have narrow escapes. During the setup and resulting frenzied escape from the farm, the pages fly by fast, and I ate this book up in the course of a few short hours.

Game review: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

I am a Starcraft fan, and have been since the very first release of the game. It’s the combination of the RTS stategy with an expansive and (gasp) entertaining story that made me an instant fan. Brood wars was like rekindling an old romance, and after so long without a fix, at long last Blizzard rewards my loyalty with a new Starcraft installment…or so it seemed.

What’s missing in this game is the classic multi-episode tri-species storyline. While Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty gives you plenty of story and action as Jim Raynor and his guys, Raynor’s Raiders, you don’t get nearly as much time playing the Protoss, and you don’t get to play the zerg at all.

The change is not entirely bad, but I was salivating about the chance to play the Zerg, and it never came. The Protoss “campaign” is a brief collection of memories from Zeratul stored in a memory crystal. Jim relives these strategic flashbacks, so this gives you a chance to play the Protoss. BUT it’s in some very limiting circumstances. So to my mind, it can’t be called a complete episodic experience. Instead, this is the Terran part of what Blizzard gave us previously in one box.

The Sole Survivors’ Club Crashes at Red Adept…

Red Adept has previously read and reviewed The Lesser of two Evils, giving is 4 1/2 stars. So I asked if they wanted to take a look at The Sole Survivors’ Club. In a word, they hated it. The final score was 2 1/4 stars. (*-_-)

Read the review here.

Well, not much else to add. Hopefully they’ll like Trail of Madness better when they get around to reading it.