InsaneJournal

I read Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain a few days ago and appreciated it much more than the first time I tried it out--which was on my break during an overnight shift somewhere towards the end of a seventy-hour week. Before the minimalism was a little too much--this time I meandered on through, noted the basic brutality of the human condition, picked out the turns of poetic phrase that are basically like crack to me, and liked it better.


I also got into Anne Bishop's Tangled Webs, another book set in the Black Jewels Trilogy 'verse, and liked it way, waaay better than Dreams Made Flesh. Basically, one of the side characters from the BJT (Surreal) gets tricked & locked into a death trap of a house, & has to find a way out without getting herself, her friend, or any of the accompanying kids killed.

The story plunks along pretty slowly in the beginning and somewhat predictably towards the ending, but premise-wise it's a thing of shrieking hilarity. A raging Stuthor gets pissed off that people don't like his book and decides to take it out on the people he hears making fun of it (Surreal, Surreal's male friend), the person who "snubbed" him by not sending a thank-you note or dinner invitation after being given a book (Daemon), indirectly at the person he claims stole his idea for a haunted house (Jaenelle)(when it's mentioned that he snagged his "human with talking animal companion" story from another author after seeing her popularity), and . . . Lucivar. Apparently Lucivar's just guilty by association.

Does this sound like anyone we know?

No, seriously: I know Bishop is a snarky someone, but is she snarky enough to be pointing the finger at a particular author or authors? Her characters in the BJT have names that tend to indicate something about them. Landry Langston (the Stu's name) might just be a play off of Landen, the term for non-magical humans. Maybe. And Jarvis Jenkell (the Stuthor's name) . . .

Meh. Could be anything--though it would probably be good form of her to bury the reference so far in that only a few people would get it.

Otherwise: Bishop's characterization is much better here. Saetan gets fleshed out a lot more; ironically, he's more human a character after he's left the human world to become an especially heckled & cranky librarian. Lucivar becomes more sympathetic; Marian becomes a little less the stereotypical romance novel heroine (but only a little). Daemon . . . is Daemon, but shows some insecurities, gets rumpled by his new duties, and is run over by Jaenelle a few times. And Jaenelle is no longer all-powerful and has to deal with that. There's some logical/plot/wording things left to question--No one knew where the house was but Marian and Jaenelle? Why were so many demon-dead aiding the person who'd killed them? Dear God, do you really think people speak like that? Don't tell me you snarked the infamous weeping cock but left "milking" in a supposedly serious sex scene! And plz, plz stop using the phrase "chained sexual heat"--but by the time Lucivar went into action I was too busy cackling to care. Much.

Overall: Don't go in expecting literature--this is pure, unrepentant fluff. It's better fluff than the previous fluff but it's still nothing spectacular or really serious. If you go in with low expectations, looking for just a few hours of fun read, you'll be set.

ETA: The short story at the end was a different flavor than the rest of the book and would probably be worth reading even if the rest of the novel doesn't appeal to you.