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

The book has an overarching storyline about a writer’s retreat gone horribly wrong. Interspersed with this main story are a host of short stories recounted by individual members of the retreat, all of them borderline (or outright) sociopaths and murderers.

The first short story, “Gut,” is really fun. As a teenager, the narrator for this story masturbated in his swimming pool while sitting on the inlet port of the circulation pump, which resulted in, erm, a rather visceral experience. That part of the story I had no problem with. It made me cringe and howl, but I bought it. One of the finest examples of making shit up I’d ever read.

Then at the end of the story, his young sister found out she’s pregnant, presumably with his child. How? Because of the sperm he blasted into the swimming pool while whacking off.

Now THAT gave me pause. First of all: the dilution factor would be immense. IMMENSE. Yes, there are billions of sperm in semen—but they’re contained in, what, a couple teaspoons of fluid? And it’s hard enough for a woman to get pregnant when the all those billions of spermatozoa are deposited DIRECTLY in the vagina. Disperse that sperm by many, many, many gallons of water and figure out the odds of somebody becoming pregnant because somebody jacked off in the pool. Answer: not bloody fucking likely.

Second of all: the chlorine in the pool would kill off a lot of those suckers. Not all, but a lot.

Third of all: The narrator noted that he removed much of the semen from the swimming pool after his aquatic jack-off sections, which means the vast majority of sperm would’ve been removed anyway, further decreasing the numbers of spermatozoa present in the swimming pool.

Fouth of all: Sperm can live outside the body for a maximum of 96 hours, but that’s assuming a friendly, stable, moist, pH-balanced environment like the Cowper’s gland of the penis, not a chlorinated swimming pool with water that’s constantly being circulated and filtered.

Fifth of all: Unless the sister liked to swim nude while douching herself with spermed-up swimming pool water, I find it difficult to believe that what few swimmers remained were hardy enough to penetrate her swimming suit and make it all the way to her uterus.

When ONE sentence in a short story makes a reader bust out a detailed five-point list on why she finds it highly implausible, I’d say that would be an example of making shit up that has failed, and failed rather spectacularly.

On to the “getting shit wrong” part of this rant: About 50 pages into the book, I started feeling bored, so I flipped way ahead and skimmed to see if the stories got any more interesting. I came across this sentence near the end of the book:

Among the dead celebrities roamed animals extinct on earth: passenger pigeons, duck-billed platypuses, giant dodos.

Wait a fucking second. What in the hell? The duck-billed platypus is extinct?

Such was my faith in Palahniuk that I actually looked this up. Hey, it’s not as if I’m a zoologist specializing in monotremes or Australian wildlife; maybe it had become extinct in recent years and I hadn’t heard about it.

No, the platypus is still alive and well and frolicking in the waters of the antipodes.

OK, fine. It’s an honest mistake, though one that a decent editor should’ve caught (a decent editor would’ve also caught and corrected Palahniuk’s tendency to switch from past to present tense for no discernible reason, or addressed why all these different stories narrated by extremely different people all sound as if they were being told by the exact same person, but those are other issues and beyond the scope of this particular rant). At any rate, shit happens, so while this mistake was startling, I didn’t hold it against the book too much.

I flipped back to where I was and continued reading. Ooooh, the people were being fed nothing but freeze-dried food at the writer’s retreat. A bit eccentric, but hey, the whole book’s eccentric. Then I came across another example of Getting Shit Wrong. The bags of freeze-dried food were filled with nitrogen to “keep the contents dead.”

Actually, that’s untrue. Nitrogen is often used in food packaging to keep oxygen out, certainly, but the lack of oxygen doesn’t necessarily retard microorganism growth. Freeze-drying does that much more effectively. Keeping out oxygen prevents spoilage by preventing the oxidation of nutrients, especially fat. Oxygen and light contribute to make fats rancid, which in turn affects fat-soluble vitamins such as A and D. Other vitamins are also notoriously sensitive to oxygen, such as vitamins C and E, which is why they’re such effective antioxidants.

Besides that, many, many pathogenic organisms can multiply and spoil food just fine in the absence of oxygen, thankyouverymuch—that’s why bacteria and other microorganisms can be classified as “aerobic” (requires oxygen), “anaerobic” (requires absence of oxygen), or “facultative” (able to function with or without oxygen). Clostridium botulinum is anaerobic, for example, while salmonella, listeria and staphylococcus are generally considered facultative species.

Mind you, I’m not and have never been a biology major; I took two years of biology classes in high school and one 100-level biology class in college, and I managed to pick up enough knowledge to de-bunk THIS bit of bullshit.

This wasn’t the dumbest bit about the freeze-dried food, though. The worst part came when some people decided to deliberately sabotage the food supply by cutting open the Mylar packaging. Within days, the food was rotten, stinking to heaven and leaking pools of noxious fluid.

Excuse me? I thought the food was freeze-dried.

1. How in the fuck did it get bad so fast? Dehydration is one of THE most effective protections against food spoilage. Forget oxygen; water is one of the biggest (and most consistent) requirements for microorganisms to flourish—mostly because cells consist primarily of water.

Want to know how effective dehydration is in retarding spoilage? Just look at your average bag of dog or cat kibble. The moisture content can vary a little bit, but generally speaking, they contain less than 10% water (from the figures I’ve seen, 4-5% seems the average). Think of how many months you can keep that bag of kibble after breaking the seal without it going bad.

Or if you want another demonstration: How many of you have gone on weekend trips and just dumped a bunch of kibble into bowl or a timed feeder and called it good? When you came back, was the kibble rancid, stinking and dripping?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

2. Where in the hell did the fluid come from? Oh sure, freeze-dried food will absorb some atmospheric water, but so much that the bags actually leak and drip stinking fluid? Bitch, please. Here’s an experiment: leave out a small amount of freeze-dried coffee in a saucer on your kitchen counter and see how long it takes for it to gather discernible amounts of water from the atmosphere. Don’t have any freeze-dried coffee? That’s OK, leave out a bowl of cornflakes, which is basically dehydrated corn. See how long it takes before ANYTHING happens, aside from the flakes losing some of their crispness.

But then having the freeze-dried food remaining good for the duration of the story would not have served, because the story required the writers to starve and do drastic, gruesome things to stay alive. Why the hell Palahniuk didn’t just go with canned or frozen food instead is beyond me, because canned food that had its seal broken or thawed-out frozen food WOULD spoil quite spectacularly in a short amount of time. Maybe because canned corn, Hot Pockets and TV dinners aren’t as weird and cool as Mylar bags of freeze-dried space-age kibble? Who the hell knows?

I guess the point is: I am so much easier to piss off when an author gets science shit wrong vs. history shit wrong because I know more about science than I do about history.

No, wait, that’s not it. The point is: if you want to make shit up, make sure you do it WELL. I can buy into a story about a dude who has multi-colored chimps flying out of his ass, as long as I’m given sufficient backstory to explain the simian presence in his rectum. A genetic experiment gone wrong, an ancient gypsy curse, hey, sure, whatever—make it convincing. Make it detailed. Make it consistent. In short: Make it GOOD.

Most important of all: don’t get shit wrong. Especially basic shit.

Hmmm. Maybe I should re-title this essay and call it “Chuck Palahniuk’s Literary Offences.”

The Demon’s Daughter is set in a parallel universe to Victorian England. By “Victorian” I mean that Victoria is the queen, but there are demons living alongside the humans, everyone is aware of this fact, and life proceeds as one might expect, with, as expected in Victorian society, a very strict and curious balance of power. Seems there are outcast demons who are crapful and take advantage of the human’s energy so as to fuel and better themselves, and certainly there are humans who are willing to pay for the privilege of a demon’s protection. Very similar to a vampire/voluntary donor relationship.

Then there are the daimyo demons, who are upper crust, and look down on the low class demon outcasts. Add to that the strata of rank at work in the Victorian human society, and you have one very confused Sarah. The only thing I could get straight about this universe is that there were more than the normal social levels of peers and undesirables to be dealt with.

I have not had much experience with Holly’s efforts at world building, but I have read several fantasy books and series wherein an entire universe was created that I could access and explore easily. But I could not for the life of me figure out some of the key elements of tension in this book.

First, there’s Adrian Phillips, a policeman who has been physically “enhanced” by the demons, who put implants in his wrists to give him a short period of superhuman strength with which to fight the demons. His decision to accept these implants put him on some kind of universal shit-list, since the demons look down on him as a mere human, and the humans think he sold his own humanity for his ambition. I think he wanted a fair fight, but what do I know? He’s uninteresting to me because he bemoans his exiled status, but then never really wants human contact anyway, diagreeing with the social restrictions standing between him and the heroine, yet never really indicating that at any time prior he gave much of a shit about what people thought of him anyway. He got those implants, he’s dismissed as less-than-human (or more-than-human) and he doesn’t much care, so why should social acceptabilty give him pause? No clue.

His partner in this confusing erotic romance is Roxanne McAllister, daughter of a departed and rather promiscuous opera singer. Roxanne has peculair strength and a gifted talent with painting. They meet because Adrian gets in a fight, gets the crap kicked out of him, and collapses in her backyard unconscious. She brings him into her home - literally lifts him basket-catch-style from the ground and walks into her house with him - to have him stitched up and nursed back to health.

Roxanne, she’s a seriously annoying paragon of virtue. She takes in stray children, finds jobs for them (and of course they are also miraculously talented individuals as well!) and accepts easily that her lover, the man to whom she is effortlessly attracted, has demon technology strapped to his wrist tendons. Further, she finds out that her father is a very prominent upper-class Demon, and an ambassador to the city they live in. She’s conflicted about this information about herself, but she confesses her half-demon status to her new bouncing partner, and he’s like, “Well, ok, shall we go back to bed?”

Now, half-demon status is something that no one thinks is biologically possible, and given the fact that demons feast on the energy of humans, particularly humans in orgasm, one might think he would have more concern over her ability to drain him to the point of needing a few day’s sleep. Certainly she is a little cautious and afraid of how she might inadvertently use him for his energy. Adrian? He’s all, “Please, ma’am, may I have some more of that splendid boinking?”

There are several sources of tension that I’m not going to read any further to see how they are resolved. She’s unacceptable as a mate for him, as her class level is a detriment to his social standing and even his supervisor tells him not to be seen with her. He’s a half-human demon-altered mega cop who is shunned my most human society, though evidence of this shunning is hard to find in the beginning. Seems he just doesn’t like people and wants to hunt down additional criminals in his time off. So what’s the problem? Shouldn’t being an outcast serve him in that endeavor?

Meanwhile, she’s half demon, but rather uncurious about whether that means she can bench press her house, or whether she’s just the same as she ever was, except that she knows who her father is.

But what gets me is how poorly the sexual elements and the tension fit together. It’s so jarring, like the paranormal plot starts up and then Holly grabbed the crowbar to wedge some hot-n-heavy erotic moments in there. To me, they didn’t seem to fit and were too abrupt to be truly erotic. They seemed more like paint-by-numbers elements: “It has been 20 pages and now we must fuck like bunnies on cialis. Let us begin!”

Moreover, Roxanne is a virgin, yet she displays an astonishing amount of sexual knowledge and technique. How did she acquire such a sexual repitoire? She paints erotic portraits, and her mother was a ho, but what does she know about blow jobs? How does she know the perfect manner for giving a hand job? Is this a latent strand of ho-knowledge suddenly becoming wantonly active?

Further, the pacing is so confusing to me: drama drama, world building details guaranteed to confuse the hell out of me, drama drama, hello, let us make the beast with two backs! Let us do it like the madness!

Then, what’s worse, they separate for a time, and then, for some undeveloped reason he takes her to dinner, whereupon he tells her he can’t be seen with her. Her reaction: she’s going to order something deliciously expensive on his tab (I’m down with that) and… change the subject entirely to get him all turned on so he can’t resist her. She punctuates her effort by sticking her foot in his crotch and threatening to go under the table and hoover down his traitorous wang.

Sadly, a good number of the Amazon reviewers are unable to see past the erotica elements to evaluate the plot, so I couldn’t point to anyone else who agreed with me here. Anyone who posted a bad review said it was porn and porn is bad, so of course I give their opinion about as much weight as a cold fart. But the good reviews went on about the fantasy of this world of demons existing alongside humans and I could not get into it.

To be brutally honest, it reminded me of the movie “Underworld,” which Hubby and I call “Underwear.” Vampires hunting demons? Whoo! Hot interspecies love between undead death hunter and hot sexy man-wolf? Whoo! Actual movie? BLEU DONKEY KOCK. Oh, it was awful. It had such potential and was beyond boring. And the sexual tension between the protagonists was so underdeveloped and flat that when the time came for them to get their kissy kiss face on, the entire audience groaned. A hundred people collectively groaned, having realized that this movie sucked.

The Demon’s Daughter had the same amount of erotic tension between the protagonists - that is, none that I could discern. Further, the areas of exploration that I thought were obvious - what does it mean that she’s a demon’s daughter? What can she do with that? And what does it mean for him whether people think poorly of him for his implants and think worse of him for being seen with her? - were left in favor of plot developments I couldn’t bring myself to care about. There are all these alleged forces working against two people who already live on the fringe of acceptable society, and yet he cares desperately about his own reputation enough to insult her to her face about whether he can be seen with her, even while he himself is desperate to be with her. This man is not worthy of her, super human strength or not.

She’s a remarkable balance of fragility and strength, and I was intrigued by her character, but I was so bothered by the scene where he announces his inability to be associated with the likes of her that I closed the book.

And this, dear reader, is where I stopped reading. So this will be where my review ends as well.