The Lost (Celestial Blues #2) by Vicki Pettersson

 

The number one question in Griffin Shaw's life is who killed both him and his wife Evie fifty years ago.  Though he has found new love with rockabilly babe Kit, Evie continues to haunt his dreams.  It's been four months since he saved Kits life and returned to the mudflat (read: earth) but he is no closer to solving this extremely cold case.

Life keeps moving and the pures keep sending him souls to guide into the Everlast.  He may be part human now, but his duties as a centurion continue.  It is these duties that force him to do a take for Jeap Yang - a drug addict.  What he does not know is that this take will be different because not only will Kit involved, she will be introduced to a fallen.  This alone would be bad enough, but it will lead them on a trail to investigate a horrible new drug flooding the streets and confront both the Russian and Cuban mafia. Will Griffin and Kit manage to survive unscathed and can their fragile love survive all the forces which seemed aligned against them?

In The Taken, Pettersson included a strong message against violence aimed at women but The Lost, is absent such a message. Instead it seemed to fixate on fighting the subjugation of sexist patriarchal beliefs by showing women in charge of organized crime.   These women were strong but incredibly cold.  In Kit she did decide to show a softer kind of strength however but she was one person against two very domineering and angry women.  The difference between Kit and the two antagonists is that Kit is never really portrayed as having to battle sexism.  It seems to imply a sort of revenge fantasy rather than women being in control because they are powerful, organized and capable.

There was certainly more racial inclusion in The Taken but not only inclusion is good inclusion.  Once again,  Lil and Fleur made an appearance but their sole purpose was to educate Kit about Latino culture. 

"Shit, girl, he probably ain't Mexicano." Screwing up her beautifully painted mouth, Lil drew back to regard Kit with disdain. "You think us Latinas all look alike."

"No I don't," Kit said defensively, but the two women gave her matching stares, arms folded across their chests, perfectly plucked eyebrows raised in identical doubt. "You two, for example, look better than anyone I've ever seen in my entire life." (pg 89)

This was a salient point for both Lil and Fleur to make.  Despite being a good friend to both women, Kit remains clueless about Latino culture.

Fangs for the Fantasy Episode 90

This week we discuss the new series of American Horror Story and the major twist direction the series have taken. We also discuss the Walking Dead and the way this season has massively improved over the last season and discuss the way that Rick has changed. We look at the Vampire Diaries and how Damon has changed. We also look at Haven, Grimm, 666 Park Avenue and Once Upon a Time

Our book of the week is Holidays from Hell, by Kim Harrison, Lynsay Sands, Vicki Pettersson and Marjorie Liu.

22/10-29/10:Grave Dance by Kalayna Price

29/10-5/11: Dark Descendant by Jenna Black
5/11-12/11: Runelight by Joanne Harris

12/11-19/11: Her Own Devices by Shelly Adina
 

We will discuss each book on the latter date – so on the 29th October, we will discuss Grave Dance by Kalayna Price

 

Review: Holidays are Hell: Anthology by Kim Harrison, Marjorie Liu, Lynsay Sands and Vicki Pettersson

 Like all anthologies review, we’re going to look at the stories in this separately and then consider the book as a whole.

Two Ghosts for Sister Rachel by Kim Harrison

This story follows Rachel Morgan from the Hollows series, as a teenager before she joined the IS. This is the moment, mentioned in the book, when the young Rachel accidentally summons the ghost Pierce  when trying to summon her father and with him manages to foil a crime for the IS. This is where Rachel’s path is set where, still recovering from her illness, she begins to see what she wants to do and why.

I had read this book in a book of short stories so already knew the plot. I think this is one of those anthology stories that perfectly hits the balance between having something for readers familiar with the series while, at the same time, providing enough information to get new readers interested in the world.

The world was presented ideally without overwhelming excess knowledge, just enough to keep people informed and understanding what’s happening and why it matters. It can be hard in any kind of fantasy short story to get across a sense of the world and all the relevant information without infodumping huge chunks of world building on people. I think here you can see what the Hollows is about, get a brief introduction to the main character and still have a story that is fun and engaging. Had I read this book first, I would have picked up the Hollows

For people who have read the story, well as I said in the review of In The Woods, there’s nothing here you need to know. You don’t need to read this to learn everything about the Hollows and it doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know. But it does add  emphasis and depth, I think Rachel becomes a much more understandable character – especially her reckless behaviour and need for challenge and need for validation – when you see this snap shot of what her life used to be like. It doesn’t develop the character per se, but it adds an extra shading – it adds some “why” to the “what”.

Six by Marjorie Liu

Six is a Chinese secret agent, raised from childhood to be the best of the best and to hunt down and defeat terrorists and other threats to the nation. She is skilled, competent and dedicated but completely unprepared for a world of necromancers and Jiangshi vampires. She has to run with a strange foreigner who has powers she doesn’t understand or trust to try and eliminate a threat that was far larger than she imagined – and one that means she cannot trust any of her usual resources. While running with him she re-analyses her life and what she wants from it – and finds there is more to her existence than duty and service.

It is nice to see a story that didn’t follows the same myths and legends of the west we’re so used to – the Jiangshi are a very different creature and a story set in China – without trying to exotify the country. I liked the characters, who were Asian, and I liked the setting as pretty original and, above all, I liked the story. It was fast paced, action packed and didn’t spend pages after pages dwelling on internal monologue and world building. It was quickly, concisely presented and that was it, we were into the action, the world unfolding as it was needed. Even the romance was presented in a relatively brief, concise fashion – not rushed or hurried or abrupt, but without excessive rumination and monologues that is so common.

As a short story it was tight, self-contained, precise. I don’t think this is part of any world of the authors, but it did show off a very clear, well paced and fun writing style.

Run, Run, Rudolph by Lynsay Sands

After being caught up in an accidental science experiment, Jill finds herself hunted by a scientist, a former colleague of her brother’s, who is determined to examine her and find out exactly what she is and what she can do.  She runs through the town during the Christmas parade, trying to find the man who seems to always be able to find her – aided by her long term crush, Nick who has an awful lot dumped on him awfully quickly. They run a cat and mouse through the city, while trying to keep their Christmas celebrations – and their first date – alive.

Unlike many short stories in anthologies, this story doesn’t seem to be part of a world or ongoing series, rather being a short story in its own right. And, I have to say, I wasn’t enamoured of this story and won’t seek out more.

The relationship isn’t awful, since it rests on 6 months experience rather than being a love at first sight - but the story and, especially, the paranormal elements of it just fall flat for me. She’s running here there and everywhere to escape someone trying to kidnap her - but she takes time to go to a Christmas parade and go to a Christmas party? And she shapeshifts constantly in what seems mainly to be a ploy for her to get naked again and again.

And him? She suddenly reveals 1) she likes him, 2) she’s being chased by a violent kidnapper and 3) she’s a shapeshifter in about 10 minutes and he completely takes it in his stride. It’s like she just told him she dislikes chocolate – a little surprising, perhaps, but in a second he adapt and joins in the stalker-hide-and-seek. Will someone please call the police – and no, the whole “he will expose us” doesn’t make sense because what he’s saying makes no sense. For that matter, he managed to get in a science lab? He tries to abduct people on the street and doesn’t see why a room full of nice people would object to him talking about slicing bits off someone! How can a man that divorced from reality even walk down the street without being stopped, let alone work in a major science laboratory?

Also, one line about everyone laughing because they think a guy is gay is not great and pretty immature. Struggling, desperately, to maintain it through the story is just ridiculous. Are these characters teenagers or the adult shop owners and scientists they’re supposed to be?

Frankly, it felt beyond contrived, the characters were ridiculous and it wasn’t much fun to read.

The Harvest by Vicki Pettersson

Zoe Archer has given up her place as the Light’s Sagittarius and has been reduced from powerful super-hero to mortal. It’s a drastic come down for her, but just because she is human now doesn’t mean she can rest. She became mortal to protect her daughter and now her granddaughter needs her help, to get the baby out of the hands of the Shadow Agents and their leader, the insidious Tulpa and into safe, hidden hands. That means reconnecting with the agents of the Light she has ignored for 6 months, including her ex-lover Warren, and returning to the Tulpa – to his home, to his side and to his bed, which she infiltrated 16 years before for the sake of the Light. She has to save her granddaughter, and prove that a human mind still has surprising power.

I have read the whole of the Zodiac series which made this short story a much better book for me. If you hadn’t read it, I think you’d probably be lost. There are just so many concepts and so many abstracts in this series that I don’t think it lends itself to short stories without lots of info-dumping or lots of concepts only half explained.

The same goes for choosing Zoe as a protagonist was an awkward choice- while she’s not a main character, who she is, what she’s doing and why is all really tied up in the series protagonist, I’m not sure how much impact anything in here would have on someone without the back knowledge. I can’t see this story drawing you into the series because there’s just too much to absorb.

As someone who has read the books it didn’t add anything in particular except further cement the my dislike of characters I already disliked. With an extra bonus of portraying Warren, a man we’re supposed to see, at least partially, as a force for good or Light, merrily slaughtering Mexican immigrants. It would have sat better if he were just hunting rogue agents, but the way it was presented is hard to see outside the context of persecuting immigrants.

In all, I wouldn’t say it was a bad story per se and, as someone who read the books, it added some interesting concepts to the strong themes of human imagination and malleable reality that the main series has established – but I wouldn’t call it a must read for people who have read the series, nor would it have pulled me to the Zodiac series if I hadn’t.

On the whole I think this book had one good story, one decent story, one fairly poor story and one pretty dreadful story.

The Taken by Vicki Pettersson Book One of the Celestial Blues Series

Griffin Shaw is a very haunted man.  Fifty years ago, he was murdered along with his wife, whom he loved with everything that he had.  Unable to get over the grief of being unable to protect Evie, instead of passing into paradise, Grif becomes a centurion.  His job is to ferry souls who have died as a result of violence into everlast. 


In what should have been an ordinary take, Grif displays empathy for a murdered woman by allowing her to inhabit her body briefly to change her clothing and fix her hair.  To do this, he has to enter her body briefly.  This means that Grif has participated in the sin of taking on flesh and it is compounded by the fact that his actions end up marking Kit for death.


Grif is told that in order to learn to do his job properly, he must watch as Kit is gang raped and murdered and then bring her over to Everlast.  He waits in her bedroom and watches as the attack begins, but quickly discovers that he cannot watch as an innocent woman is violated and murdered.  Thus begins the search the person who is responsible for the attempt on Kit's life, as well as the person who 50 years ago brought an end to Grif's life. 


The Taken has a very interesting organizational structure for heaven and the angels.  I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the difference between the Pures (those who have always existed as angels) and imperfect humans.  Existential conversations have been popular as of late in the genre and Pettersson managed to pull it off without giving the feeling like a philosophy 101 lecture.


One of the universal themes in this book was challenging gender based violence and misogyny.  Too often in the media, there is much slut shaming, and victim blaming.  Though the story involved sex workers, who clearly would have what many have socially determined to be spoiled identities, we were clearly meant to sympathise with them and to understand the actions which forced them into sex work. Women in this case were strong not because they were badass gun toting vigilantes, but because they refused to turn away from the ugliness of the world and sought truth.   Even when Kit was demeaned for having a mind of her own and for daring to express her opinion, she continued to do so.

Cover Snark: I See You Heroine, Shakin' that Ass.

Many covers show an engaged heroine on the front. She’s stood in an action pose (or crouched in one anyway) but there’s another trend which bemuses me - the heroine apparently losing interest and walking away. 

  It makes them highly anonymous, very impersonal and pretty hard to engage them as characters. It also means that we’re basically focussing on her ass. Yes, let’s be honest here, these covers are all about the ass.

Urban Fantasy: Escapism When the Real World has too Many Minorities

Erasure is one of the more prevalent phenomenons in urban fantasy. Many times we hear the excuse that because a book is set in a rural town that the percentage of the population comprised of historically marginalized people is so insignificant as to make inclusion pointless. We want to make it utterly clear here that this is not an excuse either and any erased book can be extremely damaging. Inclusion is never pointless, and even in rural areas, marginalized people live and prosper. 

When the story moves from a rural area to a larger city, there is even less justification for exclusion and, at times, it becomes nothing short of farcical. If you have a story and choose to set it in a place like Toronto, Chicago, Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Manchester, Brighton etc., population demographics quite obviously indicate the presence of historically marginalized people.  To some degree to read and enjoy urban fantasy, one must suspend belief, however to be expected to just accept that marginalized people don’t exist is not about suspending belief; it’s an exercise in privilege.

Atlanta appears in several books and series, it’s one of the Urban Fantasy hubs we’ve noticed. Now, real world Atlanta has a whole lot of POC, and specifically a large African-American population. There are also a significant number of GBLT people, yet on The Walking Dead, we are presented thus far with complete GLBT erasure and two token men of colour. This is made problematic because we are dealing with dystopian fantasy and this then suggests a genocide.  Ilona Andrews’ wonderful Kate Daniels’ Series? Again, token inclusions. What happened? Do zombies love the taste of black people? Did the magic wave decimate GBLT people and POC?

Las Vegas also makes a regular appearance in Urban Fantasy - Vicki Pettersson’s Zodiac Series is entirely in Las Vegas and how many POC? Well, in the real Las Vegas, that would be more than half the population. In fiction? Let’s just say you won’t need to use both hands to count - and you don’t have to worry about holding your breath for their complete screen time.

Review of Unbound by Kim Harrison, Melissa Marr, Jeaniene Frost, Vicki Pettersson and Jocelynn Drake

 

We don't normally read anthologies here at Fangs for the Fantasy, but having read many of the authors in this book, I decided to give it a chance.  

Ley Line Drifter by Kim Harrison

In The Hollows series, Rachel is the protagonist, with Ivy and Jenks forming her version of a scooby group.  Ley Line Drifter takes a different approach because Jenks is the protagonist and Ivy and Bis are his backup.  He is approached by a Pixie named Vincet for help.  Vincet's children are being attacked by  a statue in his garden and he has already lost one of his newlings. Jenks is originally surprised that he has been approached to do a run all by himself, but he jumps at the chance to prove what he can do.  

He takes the time to think about his actions determined not to leap head first into things the way that Rachel does but inevitably makes the same mistake, with Bis having to save his life twice.  Jenks is excited to take his son, Jumoke on the run because he understands that because the young buck has brown hair and brown eyes, that he will have difficulty finding a wife and tying himself to the land.  This means that Jumoke must develop some sort of skill/trade in order to feed himself. I loved their interaction because often in the books, all we see is Jenks yelling at his children, and in this short story, we really get to see him as a parent, and his love and concern for his family.

We learn more about Pixy society and how a short hard life, makes every single victory important.  There isn't anything that Jenks won't do for the stability of his family but now that he has everything he finally wanted, he begins to question the wish he made for sterility.  He and Matilina can have no more children, though this wish has probably extended Matilina's life, he still misses the joy that comes with an infant.  This is something that I can relate with as mother who no longer has any babies in the house. 

Reading this story, for the first time in a very longtime, I didn't find Jenks irritating.  Most of the time he is busy ranting on about Tinks panties that it is hard to take him seriously. I really feel as though Harrison invested in making Jenks a fully fleshed out character for a change, and it saddens me to know that she didn't carry this through the rest of the The Hollows series.  

Reckoning by Jeaniene Frost

As someone who is not familiar with Frost's work before this short story, I feel that it was a great introduction to what her world might be like.  It was a touch cliche in that it was set in New Orleans and had a British vampire but I can forgive her because at least Frost manages to avoid the tell tale bleedin' and bloomin' nonsense that writers normally use to ensure that the character is read as authentically British.

Bones, a vampire, took the job of killing two ghouls under the false assumption that he was hired to do so by the voodooo vampire queen of New Orleans.  Marie is strong not only because of her age as a vampire but because of the fact that in life she was a voodoo princess.  In many ways, this once again constructs voodoo as a dark force behind power.  Vampires themselves are descended directly from Cain, which not new origin myth for them.  This was not expanded upon so I have no idea how Frost differentiates this from similar vampire stories with the same origin myth. I assume that this is something that she delves into further detail in, in her series.  In this story ghouls are created simply be drinking a vampires blood before they die.

This is one of the few stories in the genre that I have read that actually includes a disabled character. Jelani is a ghoul who had his arms and legs eaten by a ghoul before transition.  His body has the ability to heal; however, injuries before transition are permanent.  Apparently during life he was a slave, which judging from where they are located he is a man of colour; however, other than this fact, Frost did nothing else to make this clear.  Jelani contracted Bones to kill the ghouls because he wanted revenge on those who had killed his wife and turned him against his will.  Even though he knew the cost for this betrayal of Marie would mean his life, he was determined to act.  I liked the fact that Jelanie was given the agency to act but I don't like the fact that he was still described as helpless relative to the able bodied characters in the book.  A great deal was made about the fact that he could not defend himself and that without Marie's protection he would be vulnerable.

Cover Snark: Oh The Thigh Muscles!

We are introducing a new feature on Fangs for the Fantasy - cover snark. Some of covers on even our most favourite Urban Fantasy books, just beg to be giggled at. We realise authors that don’t necessarily have a lot of power in choosing their covers nor would we judge the content of the book on this basis, unless of course the book has a protagonist of colour but the cover portrays a White person - but we will enjoy a good snark, yes yes we will.


One thing we do see a lot of is similar poses on covers - especially the ridiculous ones that make us giggle.

This one we have to call the “sexy leg cramp”. In theory, these women are aggressive and violent hunters and are ready to leap into action, probably to stake or stab something. Instead I think their legs have gone to sleep trying to hold that pose (and display said legs as much as possible). Their thigh muscles must be killing them and they’ll probably need a hand up to their feet again. Looking at them; it is impossible not to picture a massive cramp that would require hours of massage to alleviate.

Review of The Neon Graveyard by Vicki Pettersson

The Neon Graveyard is the last book in the Pettersson's Zodiac series.  I didn't feel any sense of sadness when I finished reading and perhaps because by the time this book ended, I was more than ready for this series to come to an end.  What started off as an amazing idea with a unique and a large world ended up being tired and overly drawn out.  Having read all six books, I think that this series could easily have been reduced to four books.  A book for each sign just dragged out the inevitable end of the series.  Honestly, from book one, was there ever any doubt that this series would end with the death of the Tulpa?

The Neon Graveyard could easily have been renamed to everyone gets theirs in the end.  In The City of Souls: The First Sign of the Zodiac much time was spent confronting the issue of absolutism.  It was clear that for Warren the means justified the ends in every situation and if someone had to suffer or die, then so be it.  This made him no different than the Tulpa and so basically from that point on it was clear that though Warren was official a member of the Light warriors that he was closer to a Shadow warrior.  In The Neon Graveyard Warren's hatred of Joanna/Olivia was a driving force.  He threatened several times and made it clear that it was his goal to see her dead.  

Ultimately what Warren wanted was power.  When he realized that Joanna/Olivia may not be the Kairos he was determined to cross over the Midhaven to steal away Hunter and Solange's child and raise her as light.  So wrapped was he in this mission, that he did not care about his troop's reaction to Felix's death.  I was Joanna/Olivia who recovered his body.  When Vanessa sacrificed herself so that Joanna/Olivia could escape Midhaven with Hunter, Warren once again ignored the pain that his troop was feeling because he saw an opportunity to kill Joanna/Olivia.  In the end he was trapped in Midhaven and Tekla became the new leader of the light.  

To Warren, Joanna/Olivia's greatest fault was her refusal to obey his commands and sacrifice herself to his every whim regardless of what this cost her.  It seems that what Warren forgot is that in a matriarchal society, women have power and do not necessarily have to submit to a man.  In the end, Joanna/Oliva, Chandra and Tekla, the three women whom he had wronged imprisoned him in midhaven.  I suppose one could see this as an empowering act but it still does not explain how it is that a man became leader of a matriarchal society to being with.