Already Dead, Charlie Huston

February 9th, 2010


Already Dead by Charlie Huston is a noir detective novel as well as a vampire novel. Joe Pitt, a Vampyre (infected with a virus that makes him need blood in order to survive) must deal with the warring Vampyre gangs of New York City while attempting to figure out who is turning people into zombies.

The book is told in the first person by Joe. Parts of the book are narrated in the tough-guy detective style, but Huston seems to let that style slip around the middle of the book, then resumes it near the end. The book has plenty of fistfights, swearing, roughing up and getting roughed up; the staples of hard-boiled detective fiction.

The theme of child abuse is present throughout the book, so if that disturbs you, you might want to pass on reading this book. However, the novel clearly denounces child abuse. It uses the idea of monsters like zombies and vampires to make points about humans who behave in monstrous ways–child abusers in particular.

I think that the point that Huston is trying to make with this particular theme is that people turn into monsters when they have a need that harms others and that they can never fully satisfy. Vampyres have to have blood in order to keep the Vyrus from killing them, but getting blood means hurting people. While Vampyres don’t exist in our world, there are plenty of real-world monsters, like child abusers, who similarly have a perverse need that they have to hurt people in order to satisfy.

The solution of the mystery was pretty obvious to me mid-way through the book. I couldn’t tell if this was on purpose or not. Were we meant to be guessing until the end? There were too many clues.

The main Vampyre gangs that Pitt deals with are the Coalition, which holds the most power, and the Society. The Society’s leadership consists of the no-longer-aging aging hippie Terry Bird; a young, paranoid anarchist radical type named Tom; and the butch feminist Lydia. The characterization isn’t that strong in Already Dead, and the Society’s leadership is, I think, where this shows most. I’m sure that there are organizations with this type of leadership, and I’m sure that there are people who act much like this, but Terry’s patient, mellow approach to Tom’s paranoid accusations, and Lydia’s militant efforts to enforce respect of minority groups (including the obviously lost-cause zombies), are not convincing. It’s almost as if Huston made a list of clichéd actions that this hippy, anarchist, and feminist had to perform, and then he had them perform those clichéd actions without really coming up with more plausible contexts for them.

However, this is mainly a story about Joe, and his character is developed reasonably well. Joe Pitt is somewhat heroic, but somewhat not. At times, he thinks only of his own needs. At other times, he shows tenderness and mercy. He doesn’t like dealing with people, but he looks out for the more vulnerable ones.

His girlfriend, Evie, hardly appears in the book at all. She has HIV, so to be safe, she and Joe don’t have sex. There really isn’t much more to her character than that. She seems to only be in the book to give readers something to want to continue reading the series for, or maybe she’s just there because a hardboiled detective always needs a dame to have a rocky relationship with? I don’t really know.

The book only barely keeps up its momentum, making it pretty easy to put the book down and not feel inspired to read more for a while. It’s not that I don’t care what happens to Joe; it’s that there isn’t enough action to make me all that worried about him.

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The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan

February 8th, 2010


To give you an idea of what you’re getting into when you start in on Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, here is some information: the first novel of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, was first published in 1990, and now, twenty years later, in 2010, Robert Jordan is no longer with us, having passed on in 2007, and the series hasn’t even been finished yet, with two books left to go that are being written by Brandon Sanderson.

The series follows Rand al’Thor, a young farmer from a sheltered village who, along with his friends Perrin Aybara and Mat Cauthon, must flee their village when they learn that they are being hunted by agents of the Dark One, a malevolent being that is the source of all evil in their world. With the guidance of Moiraine, an Aes Sedai trained to wield her inborn ability to channel the life force known as the One Power, Rand and the others attempt to avoid continued threats from the Dark One, and discover that the course of their lives may have already been chosen by fate.

There is much about the Wheel of Time series that is not so great. For one thing, Robert Jordan’s writing is overly mannered. He tries to go for a writing style that evokes the voice of a storyteller who narrates ancient legends with reverence, but he falls short of the mark. This is in part a result of plentiful grammar errors throughout the book that would make even the laziest English speaker do a double-take. Indeed, the grammar issues in the book make the writing hard to understand at times. Jordan’s use of sentence fragments to more accurately depict characters’ thoughts is just confusing.

Another problem with the book, and the entire series, really, is that the characters are very poorly developed, to the point that we don’t really understand what makes them tick. We come to know characters more by their actions than by their feelings. When their feelings are presented, it is usually just one defining emotion, leaving all other traits to the imagination. As a result, the characters are terribly one-dimensional. It is hard to like any of the characters, because they all end up being very annoying as they express the same personality trait over and over and over.

That is a major issue that I have with Jordan’s writing–a problem that persists throughout the series: he focusses so much on action and dialogue that the world in his series feels very empty and flat, consisting of a few, brief, mostly fact-based descriptions of locations and characters. What is lacking here is emotion: while telling us about the appearance of buildings or the facial features of a character, he rarely describes the emotions of the narrator as he or she describes those things. This is what gives his characters and settings such a flat feel.

The book is pretty hokey in a lot of places. Jordan’s world is full of people who seem not to actually go to church or have any religious doctrines or tomes, but who use silly, religious-seeming phrases as oaths and curse words. There are plenty of other sayings that Jordan created to give character to his world, but most of them don’t really work well, and come across as silly.

The overall plot, however, is interesting enough that I have kept reading it, even though the writing is so bad and the characters are so annoying. The idea of everyday people being thrust into the heart of a battle between good and evil is fascinating. As the series progresses, we witness the characters being destroyed, in a sense, and replaced with what their fates demand that they become. If you can give the series a chance, you might find yourself wanting to keep going just to find out how the battle turns out.

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Twilight, Stephenie Meyer

February 7th, 2010


Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, the first book of Meyer’s four-book Twilight series, is largely a teen romance novel, with thriller and drama elements.

The story’s protagonist, Bella Swan (who never goes by her full first name Isabella), moves in with her father in the rainy town of Forks, Washington, to give her newly-remarried mother, Renée, the freedom to travel with her husband, a minor league baseball player. Bella is initially pessimistic about life with her gruff father (who happens to be the sheriff of Forks) in a small, dreary town where she doesn’t know any of her high school classmates. Her life changes forever when she encounters the Cullens, a mysterious family whom much of the town regards with suspicion.

Of particular interest to her is Edward Cullen, whom she finds unbelievably handsome and charming (just as she does the other Cullens), but he seems to despise her from the moment that he first sees her. (Spoilers ahead.) Bella is persistent with her interest, however, until Edward is forced to reveal the real reason behind his behavior: he and the Cullens are vampires, and he doesn’t want to endanger Bella’s life. The Cullens are a rare exception among vampires, however, having vowed to only drink the blood of wild animals, and never human blood.

Twilight follows Bella as she becomes acquainted with the Cullens and develops a relationship with Edward. Her life is threatened when a small group of Canadian vampires passes through Forks–a group that does not have the same stance against drinking human blood as the Cullens.

Primarily a romance novel, Twilight is far from action-packed, instead focusing on the relationships between the characters, and on Bella’s thoughts and emotions. As a romance novel, Twilight does not disappoint. The novel also presents more thought-provoking themes, which might redeem the book for those readers who are neither into vampires nor romance.

One of the primary themes of the novel, as well as the rest of the series, is the struggle to abstain from something that one has a strong desire for. Edward’s self-control with Bella, and the Cullens’ decision not to drink human blood, are the areas where this theme is most prominent.

The novel also deals with the theme of overcoming prejudices, noting the fact that sometimes, groups that harbor prejudices toward each other must go to great lengths, and sometimes must make a constant effort, to overcome them. This is explored in the Cullens’ desire to co-exist peacefully with humans through the renunciation of drinking human blood, and in the attempts by the Cullens to co-operate with vampires who do drink human blood. Bella also becomes the target of prejudice once she befriends the Cullens, and must cope with changes in her friendships with her classmates.

The story is told in the first person from Bella’s perspective. Bella is somewhat more introverted than her peers, but is insightful, self-confident, and conscientious. Meyer’s straightforward writing style makes the novel easy to read, and helps the reader understand the novel’s themes from the perspective of an adolescent.

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