Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I tried, for example, one of the Argeneau books, and I had to stop reading it. One, the one I picked featured a heroine with absolutely no personality, who turned into a most irritating Mary Sue at the end (she adjusts to vampirism effortlessly and faster than most, and SURPRISE she’s a NINJA! Ok, not a ninja. A martial artist. But still. No conflict + Mary Sueism + Surprise Ninja? COME ON NOW.) And two, every time the explanation of vampirism was given by one of the vampiric characters, which, if you’ve read the books, is predicated on the existence of “nanos” in the bloodstream, I had a most disturbing mental image: how DO Nanos fit in one’s capillaries? What about headphones or an attachment to play the Nano in your car? Or a case to keep it from getting scratched? What then? If your vampirism is based on millions of little iPods flying through your veins, wouldn’t that get a little painful? I love me some Macs, too. I’ve personally lusted in my heart for an iPhone, despite my unwillingness to tie myself for two years to a sub-par wireless carrier, and I’ve been a faithful Mac laptop user for years, but give my bloodstream over to Steve Jobs? I don’t think so.

And despite the presence of hippy colored iPods dancing through their bloodstream, it seemed, despite the comedy of the plot itself, many of the vampires in that series as well take themselves entirely too seriously. Hence I was light-my-panties-on-fire excited to meet a happy vampire. Gleeful undead! Whee!

In fact, I was SO eager to get me some giddy vampire action that I was willing to spend a healthy portion of my normal limitations of belief. Here is the receipt for my purchase:

No, I’m not kidding. Their quest: to seek the Crystals of Change. NOT because Trevor wants to return to mortal status, because he doesn’t – and has a marvelously sound reason for not wishing to do so. They seek the Crystals of Change because it would tip the balance of power in Trevor’s favor, as he is the current elected president of International Vampires, or IV, for short.

No, I’m not making that up.

If IV possesses the Crystals of Change, then anyone who doesn’t want to be a vampire, happy or otherwise, anymore can change back, presto crystally-like. I don’t know how it works; I didn’t read that far because once Trevor and Kay started jetting around the world questing after the Crystals of Change and staying at luxury hotels all over Europe, and Kay started putting her life on the line because she loves him, even if he won’t return to mortality for her, and they started saying “Crystals of Change” with great emo-rific earnesness, the whole damn illusion of happy vampire staked itself and crawled off into the sunrise to die in a sound of death that can best be described as “Pfft!” The minute they started Crystal of Change hunting, the emo, it was back. It was back and bigger and badder than ever. Gone was the silly air-guitar playing, the references to his ponytail, his joie de un-dead-vivre. It was emo-city, with dark, longing looks and much angst and I developed a major case of the “Oh, fuck its” and stopped reading.

It was almost like there were two books, one featuring an off-the-wall vampire who’s the administrative head of an international unifying body of vampires (one that makes them promise not to feed on mortals) and another featuring a questing emo-riffic vampire atoning for his own immortality and seeking the power held in the mythical Crystals of Change.

And COME ON NOW. Crystals of Change?! I was so willing to toss most of my insistence on at least a moderately close parallel to reality until the hokey name kept reappearing.  What’s next, Skeksies and those loafy mammoth harmonizing creatures from The Dark Crystal? Does Kay have wings?

So needless to say, this book isn’t graded. However, even though I didn’t finish the book, I have been ruminating on the topic, and asking the types of questions I usually don’t presume to ask. Is it possible to have a character who is a vampire who isn’t maudlin, depressive, emo and angsty? Is a happy vampire possible, despite the necessary questions of immortality, bloodsucking, and the frailty of mortal existence? I don’t know. I’ve been pondering it, and maybe the idea of vampirism and an immortal life as a parasite is just too much emo to ever get over emotionally. As one character in this book says, vampires either outlive those they love, or out live the love itself.

However, I can’t give up my secret hopes for a happy, or at least mellow and positive vampire hero.

It’s so awful I can’t even finish it. I already need some kind of mental restoration for having introduced the story into my head. If only I could return my brain to ‘last known good’ configuration, because my memory at present contains the following details:

Wilbur and Homer are best friends. Wilbur drives a garbage truck in Humper County, Oklahoma, and dreams of driving a gold-plated garbage truck while wearing a white Stetson and a red bandanna and some clothing of some sort. He prefers to drive said truck while high or drunk or both, and shoot the reflectors off the road signs and pepper the anatomy of billboard models with bulletholes from his handgun. At the start of our story, he runs out of bullets and goes home to find Homer boinking Wilbur’s wife, Emily.

Emily, it should be noted, is referred to repeatedly and I assume ironically as innocent, sweet, delicate and pure by Wilbur, the narrator, despite the numerous times he comes home to find her naked with some dude sneaking out the trailer door.

Homer takes off running because he thinks Wilbur’s gun is loaded and aimed at his ass, leaving Emily naked on the floor to explain what was going on. It certainly was what it looked like so at least she didn’t attempt a lame defense.

Instead, she attacks Wilbur’s manhood, tells him he doesn’t sexually satisfy her, and furthermore, she’s right pissed at him for not shooting Homer when they were both caught bareassed on the floor: “I’ll tell you what the matter is. You come waltzing in here with your truck pistol in your hand and catch me bare ass naked with another man and you don’t shoot him? I mean, even if he is your best friend, you should of shot him, at least once, somewhere.”

You can read more of the first chapter here. Bring painkiller. Or vascodilators. Or both.

Mixed in with the decidedly un-erotic content is a plot that somehow details how Wilbur, Emily, and Homer become country music stars by playing in a bar, which upsets poor Wilbur because he’s neglecting his trash collection duties. Emily gives birth to a baby that looks like neither Homer nor Wilbur, and they start calling themselves co-husbands since both of them like to boink Emily. Connie, Homer’s ex, is in there somewhere, too. And there are other ancillary characters, like some religious nutjobs who want to shut their act down. And here I am, siding with the religious right - these characters should be stopped.

Now, I’m fully willing to take a good number of romance and erotica plots with a great heavy grain of salt, most notably those that mix camp and sex for really off-the-wall erotica. And when reading erotica, I am also fully willing to read through scenes that don’t do it for me personally, but may engage some fantasies of other readers, such as watching a spouse do the carpet burn-and-roll with someone else, or catching someone in the act of poopchute lovin’ in a cop car. Whatever. People get their jollies from all manner of sexual content, and most of the time, I’m not judgmental about varying sexual proclivities.

However, this story isn’t erotic. It’s not even sexy. It’s just bad. Despite being categorized as “erotica,” with warnings that the content of the eBook is meant for mature audiences there’s really no erotic content. It’s just… lame. Lame lame lame. There was plenty of room for mixed-partner sex scenes, but Allen describes the sexual interaction in one sentence. There’s no description. At one point, Wilbur decides that he likes what-what-in-the-butt with Homer’s ex-wife Connie, so he grabs some butter, slaps her on the butt with it, and engages in some back door lovin’ on the hood of a car. This is described in fifteen to twenty words, tops. My description here? Longer than the actual scene. Allen has the same problem Wilbur has: “crawl on, stick it in and shoot it off.” This is the first erotica novel I’ve read that has its own case of sexual dysfunction.

Another example of potential erotic content that suffered total melting of the man cannon: during a brawl, Connie gets hurt on her breast, which she shows to the two arresting officers who report to the scene. Medical attention is needed - from both officers! In the squad car! And Connie decides to engage the car’s radio so the boinka-boink in her badonkadonk is broadcast to every listening officer AND every person tuned into the police scanner. It’s like the cop-car-in-the-woods version of having the pool boy visit the cabana. Imagine the sexual comedic potential of writing a scene like that.

What happens?

Connie goes off to the squad car, comes back a few minutes later, and tells Wilbur she turned the CB radio on before they got busy. That’s it. That’s all the reader gets. There’s no show, no tell, and really, no damn point to the whole thing. How is this erotica? It’s not. It’s merely rot.

In the hands of a writer who could craft a sensual or even a raunchy sex scene, the rural ramblings of Wilbur (the story is told in first person, heavy on the rural vernacular) could have resulted in something spicy and sexy, if not at least entertaining. The story itself could have been an erotic romp between bizarre characters, or a journey toward ignominious stardom, or even a lot of backdoor buttered sex, but the plot deflated every time it got close to being something other than tawdry, lame, and altogether stupid.

In short: this book is instant, complete, and total bonerdeath. Stay far, far away.

1. Writing such as the following:

The duchess was as responsible… for Mary’s desperate predicament. Jared could not forget that, no matter how bloody innocent she seemed.
No matter how much he wanted her.

Just hit me over the head with it. That same sentiment is expressed repeatedly. Just in case you forget. Calantha = scheming whore who caused the death of Mary, and Jared is angry about that, except that he also wants to bone Calantha into the middle of next week. Such a predicament.

2. At one point, Calantha debates with herself furiously because she is jealous that Hannah, the little girl, is Jared’s daughter by adoption: “The child that should have been Calantha’s.”

This is so fucked up on so many levels I don’t know where to start. Calantha just learned that her late husband raped Mary, begetting Hannah and prompting Mary to run away from their household to the safety of Jared’s estate. And Calantha has spent many, many pages wringing her hands and attempting to preserve her icy reserve and detachment because the abuse of that late husband has left her unable to trust men, or people in general.

So thus Calantha weeps that Hannah should have been hers… instead of the bastard daughter of her late husband, who raped his defenseless employee. Never mind that her husband HELLO RAPED YOUR SERVANT but the child that resulted from that assault, that child should have been Calantha’s.

Oh holy shit. This woman is batshit.

3. Precocious child alert! Seriously, nauseating child who I felt sorry for, as she’d been orphaned, but had a hard time tolerating when she says stuff like the following passage:

“Papa said that you are going to be my mama, and he is my papa. I want a mama again, but I still love my first mama. Papa said that was all right.”

3.5 And what precocious child would be complete without a Virgin Widow?! Calantha? Untouched? Like, duh. And guess why? Her late rapist husband said she was too frigid. Funny how wood can be frigid.

4. But oh, Lord have mercy, then there’s my very favorite part of this book. Blissfully for me, it came early on, and it was so funny I had to bite my lips to keep from howling out loud on the bus:

Calantha watched the huge man cross the small ballroom toward her with both anticipation and dread. His black and white evening clothes clung alarmingly to his well-muscled, oversized body.

His clothes clung...alarmingly? What the almighty hell? His shirt is screeching at him?

I asked Candy, and she and I immediately identified the need for a terror alert level associated with just how alarmingly the hero’s clothing might be clinging. It really is a pubic, I mean public service, should you, the reader, be unaware of the danger of a hero’s alarmingly clinging clothing. Think of the children.