American Horror Story, Season 3, Episode 7: The Dead

Opening flashback with Kyle before he was zombiefied and his not!dead rapist frat mates in a tattoo shop. His friends are arseholes, which is no surprise to anyone, and Kyle wastes time telling them his dream of becoming an engineer and why that’s important. Ultimately we see that Kyle adamantly refused to get a tattoo because it could ruin those hopes while the rest of his fratmates got them.

And back to the present with Zombie!Kyle chained up – and because his is frankenzombieKyle he has his friend’s tattoos on the limbs Madison and Zoe replaced. Zombie!kyle cries and screams incoherently – and Zoe watches from a distance with a  gun hidden behind her back. She goes to him and tells him she should have let him go, she shouldn’t have brought him back – he killed his mother and there’s only one way to fix that (dance on her grave?) all while Kyle cowers away from her – until he grabs the gun off her. He puts the gun in his mouth…

And she runs over, takes the gun and throws it away, shooting out a window and then holds him. Zoe, you need to make your mind up because you’re giving some seriously mixed signals here.

On to Madison with a surprisingly good monologue. How she spent her life trying not to feel pain, to ignore pain, how she threw herself into her raucous lifestyle so hard and so strong to try and stop feeling any pain from her broken movie star life and terrible parents. How she was so driven to avoid anything like a negative emotion that she was gang raped and the next day pretended nothing had happened.

And now, as a zombie, she is drinking every spell component Cordelia has to try and feel something, anything, even pain. She tried to burn herself to feel something other than the “eternal silence inside of her”.  She talks about her eating disorders and how even they are not evoking anything in her.

Queenie goes to the kitchen to find food but, of course, Madison has cleared the place out. She’s joined by LaLaurie who is also hungry so they decide to go out and get drive-through. Seriously, LaLaurie and Queenie are going on a food trip together? Please reverse this budding friendship before I have to vomit on my screen. Despite being slightly confused by the recorded voice, LaLaurie even makes a friendly joke about supersizing the order. Over their food they joke and Queenie does have some good lines when LaLaurie makes a crack about her weight and says she doesn’t mean to give offense Queenie replies that “but she always does.” Her not meaning to doesn’t matter. And when LaLaurie falls back on the whole being out of time excuse Queenie hits back then – she’s confused, well so is Queenie: “I come from Detroit to join my sister witches and instead is sitting in a fastfood parking lot at 3:00am with an immortal racist.”

So very true.  LaLaurie also tells Queenie the other witches will never accept her as a sister to them because she’s Black “black as coal”. Which doesn’t anger Queenie, but it does sadden her.

Abusive Tropes are not Romantic

Though each book is supposed to be new and unique, invariably paranormal romance, like it’s bigger cousin conventional romance often ends up following the same patterns. Obviously all fiction has its tropes and there are certain patterns which, while they may be overdone, are not necessarily damaging. For example, there is the obvious boy meets girl, girl hates boy, problem arises, they overcome the misunderstanding and live happily every after screwing their brains out for eternity

These books are meant to sell us on the idea of romance and the inevitability of true love. However, some of these tropes are less benign and that path to true love can often be highly misogynist which is either expressed through characterisation or placing the female protagonist in untenable situations, even outright abusive situations - where she should be calling the police while running away screaming. Yes, these are not meant to be more than fantasy but this does not excuse the horrible messages that are repeatedly sent.

While we have addressed many individual elements that uphold abusive relationships, it is when we see several of these troublesome elements come together that the full scale of the problem becomes clear.

1) The Inexperienced/virginal woman is an absolute favourite. This places the man in dominant position because he is more sexually experienced and inevitably suggests that the perfect woman, is the woman who is pure. Let’s have a look at a few characters which we were introduced to as virgins: Sookie Stackhouse (Charlaine Harris) Bella Swan (Stephanie Meyer) Cassandra Palmer (Karen Chance) Clary Fray (Cassandra Clare) Chrysabelle (Kristen Painter) Cindy Spencer Pape - 4 out of 5 of the female protagonists, Damali (L.A. Banks), many of the female love interests in Lyndsay Sands Argeneu series. This long list of doesn’t even include the penchant for the gently used protagonist, who has had few experiences and is, of course, tortured to some degree over it (see Anita Blake before Laurell K Hamilton discovered that porn sells). The woman must always explain why she has not saved her virginity whereas this is an acceptable status quo for the man and any sexual experience she has had will have been deeply inferior and unsatisfactory (as if bad sex gives one honourable virginity). Virginity or little experience is always stressed and yet these women moan and carry on (supposedly in pleasure and not pain) about being penetrated with 12 inch penises as round as tree stumps.  

2) Centuries Old, Powerful Love interest: To contrast with the virginal purity of the protagonist, her love interest will have been around for years, sometimes centuries, boffing away at anything that moved. He will be experienced, he will be skilled, sometimes supernaturally skilled, he will teach her and show her and open her eyes (and other places). Yes, this fits the usual fantasy elements of the romance story - shouldn’t the love interest be the epitome of excellent sexual prowess? But it’s a power imbalance - his experience, his skills contrast sharply with her complete “innocence”. Her ignorance and sheltered life leaves her prey to being coaxed into “expanding her horizons” whatever reservations she may have and inevitably puts him in the driving seat of their love life.

And he will often be more powerful than her as well, especially if he is a supernatural creature. The power imbalance is pushed wide open by centuries old, supernatural monsters seducing inexperienced teenagers in school, women - or girls - who are utterly helpless and dramatically fragile in contrast.

3) The Woman is Isolated: This common trope in a lot of Paranormal Romance (or Urban Fantasy with strong romance elements) repeatedly brings us women who have few people in their lives. It’s a running joke that parents are an endangered species in the genre - given the number of orphans running around (Sookie in the Sookie Stackhouse Series, Elena in The Vampire Diaries, Nikki in the Nikki and Michael series, Elena - in fact, a number of female protagonists, in Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series, Tessa in The Infernal Devices, Gaby in Hopeless - the list goes on) and an equal number of characters who have either absent or inadequate parents (Bella Swan’s absent mother and out of depth father in Twilight, Clary’s comatose mother in The Mortal Instruments).

Similarly, many of these women do not have friends or many friends (many of the female characters in the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and many of the female characters in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter Series) - they are often considered outcasts or freaks (like Sookie) or don’t fit in to their respected worlds (Sookie, Elena from Women of the Otherworld).

These isolated women are inherently vulnerable - they lack protectors and advocates, they lack people who are ready and able to warn of dubious behaviour, they lack second opinions and they lack safety nets.

Jinx by Alice Rozen

10 year old Jinx is just that - a jinx, terrible bad luck follows her around and leaves her very much the outsider.

When her long lost mother – her long lost demonic mother – arrives so much more comes clear for the young witch as she’s gifted with her grimoire and good friend and bodyguard (alas, no broomstick). Things are looking up this Hallowe’en.

Such gifts were just in time – because there’s dark magic afoot this Hallowe’en and the whole town is left in an enchanted sleep; it’s down to Jinx to save the day.

I made a mistake accepting this book for a review. I read over the email a little too quickly and focused on the GBLT character and said yes. Then the next day I looked back and realised I just accepted a children’s book.  Oh dear. Well, I’d agreed and I don’t go back on that – so I took a deep breath and turned to the book

I wish all of my mistakes could end so fortuitously.

It is a children’s book – meaning it is accessible to children. Parts of it are pretty simple and simplified, it’s not long and it’s not too twisty. But nor is it patronising, simplistic or boring – in fact it’s more than passable as a YA book or more, if it weren’t for the protagonist being 10. I think it’s accessible for children but unless you went in expecting a children’s book you wouldn’t know it.

And I enjoyed it.

The plot was fun (if a trifle unbelievable in places – like how quickly Jinx accepted her heritage or her random exploration of someone’s house). It was funny, it was witty, it was clever and it had some interesting original elements and plenty of imagination. The word use was excellently chosen and still very accessible and the whole thing was a joy.

And I love Jinx, I would read more of this series for Jinx. I would read a YA series with an older Jinx. I would read an adult series with a still older Jinx. I love Jinx.

Almost Human, Season 1, Episode 2: Skin

A man and a beautiful woman are together in a hotel room – she in her underwear and, as the conversation progresses, it’s clear she’s a sex worker. She keeps offering to have fun but he seems more interested in testing her, using devices to check her mouth and a light to scan her skin (she assumes for STDs). There’s a camera in the room and at the other end a man is watching several monitors showing men and women together (presumably other sex workers) and his attention is drawn by the man’s scanning her (not by the other… more distracting images). He turns up the audio and blows up the image. He calls his boss, Andrei, and shows him the video –speaking in what seems to be an Eastern European language.

Andrei makes a call, two men arrive at the hotel, spraying themselves with an aerosol that makes their faces appear as white cut-outs to CCTV. They go to the room and kill the man with the sex worker; scanning and taking hair samples is a big no-no it seems. They check his ID - the driver’s license on the dead man says Sebastian Jones – and then leave with the sex worker; leaving behind a device the explodes and coats the room in stranger, white-green light.

John and Dorian arrive on the scene and a group of kids are impressed to see a “bot”; Dorian impresses them by showing the lights on the side of his face. They seem pretty disappointed by boring old human John – who tries to impress them by stabbing his synthetic leg. Yes, that doesn’t go down well, with all the screaming. Community policing isn’t his strong point. As Dorian points out, he hasn’t even been a child and he knows that would scare one and tells John he has negative energy that kids can sense (and cats). Leaving John having to defend his issues with cats.

Banter aside, they reach the room and that bomb was apparently a DNA bomb, tainting any evidence in the room – along with special silenced bullets and “flash masks” for the CCTV. Examining the footage they do have, Dorian sees that the woman is an android.

Back at the precinct they join Detective Valerie and Captain Sandra to look up Sebastian Jones – he’s a sexbot maker (engaging in industrial espionage it seems) with no criminal record and Dorian and John keep up the banter – that’s definitely beginning to grow on me. All sexbots have to be registered, apparently but the woman in then hotel room isn’t on file. Sebastian is apparently a pioneer at his trade and Richard-the-always-awful praises his work, Valerie tries to shame him by suggesting he has experience but Richard has no shame about it and sees no reason to be ashamed. According to Sandra, violence in the sex trade is down considerably since the sexbots had been introduced.

Despite that success, Sebastian is bankrupt, his company bust and all his assets are in storage by a repo company – next stop, that storage unit where they find a number of deactivated sexbots and plans for more as well as papers showing that Sebastian was being sued. John gets a call from Valerie – while the guys left no DNA, every surface the sexbot touched left the DNA of a woman called Nicole who was kidnapped in a car park.

Supernatural, Season 9, Episode 7: Bad Boys

Opening in rural New York with some kids playing in a barn at night before an old man tries to get them inside to bed; only the dark barn suddenly becomes extremely cold. His torch stops working and his tractor starts up by itself and runs into him, impaling him on the spikey bits at the front (what? Like I know anything about agricultural machinery!)

At the Winchester cave Sam is trying to get a private moment to read an Oz book when Dean gets a call from someone called Sonny calling him “D-Dawg”. Turns out when they were kids, Dean once farmed Sam off on Bobby and disappeared for a while when he was 16 – not on a hunt: but he’d lost the money their dad had left them on a card game and resorted to stealing which ended up with him being caught and him being sent to a boy’s home. Sonny looked after him and he knows what Dean does – and has called him with a problem. It was John, their dad, who decided to keep it secret from Sam.

Which he has – so it’s off to the Catskills. Dean also backwards checks to see if Ezekiel is ok with this – and if he keeps this up there’s no way he’s going to keep this secret.

They arrive at the place and Sam is surprised that their dad couldn’t find Dean there – he could, but because Dean lost the money if he left Dean there. As ever, Dean rushes to his dad’s defence while Sam finds this behaviour highly dubious. They go into the house with a strict woman demanding they remove their boots and Dean has a flashback to his arrival there as a teenager in handcuffs. For stealing peanut butter and bread – and his dad telling the police to let him rot in gaol.  (And Dean gave the cop a black eye, of course he would). Sonny notices bruises on Dean’s arms and asks him about them – and young Dean snarks “werewolf did it.” Which doesn’t get any reaction – Sonny seems pretty immune to snark and sass.

Back to the present Dean greets Sonny and notes that the farm is rather run down: the system isn’t interesting in working to turn boys’ lives around any more, it’s happier to just throw them in prison. He tells them what’s been happening – including the tractor running the old man over, lots of flickering lights and noises.

Sam checks the house and finds Dean’s old bed (his name under several layers of labels – and a pentagram carved into the bedpost) and finds Ruth, whose role is rather unspecified, praying for the ghost that is haunting them to leave. She tells Sam the history – the farm used to be owned by Howard and Doreen and Jack (the dead man) worked as a farmhand. Howard got drunk and believed that Jack and Doreen were sleeping together and tried to kill them – Jack escaped, Doreen didn’t and got chopped up with a meat cleaver. Howard recently died – but he swore “revenge” on Jack

In the barn, Dean’s little electronic thing finds a ghost in the area (we haven’t seen that thing in seasons! It’s been a while since ghosts and spooky things were the enemies) and he runs into a boy called Timmy (who I half suspect is a ghost or psychic or something) and he tells Dean he didn’t see anything but how cold it got.

Haven Sneak Peak and Shinies

We have some shinies to whet our appetites for next Friday:

A sneak peak at the next episode:



As well as a Behind the Scenes of the last episode



And a sneaky look at the Darkside Seekers

Cold Steel (Spiritwalker #3) by Kate Elliott

Cold Steel is the last book in the Spiritwalker trilogy. Those who have read Cold Magic and Cold Fire are by now well acquainted with the alternate earth imagined by Kate Elliot. In her world, the Roman Empire is still in existence and people live in a feudal state with Princes and Mage houses controlling them.  People are extremely aware of the spirit world, which once a year unleashes the wild hunt to gather the souls of those who are going to die in the following year.  Nothing is stable in this world, as the people are trying to overthrow the regimes which rule them. Cat, the protagonist, must not only deal with the political upheaval and war but the legacy of her heritage as the daughter of the Master of the Hunt.

Like all novels in this trilogy, I firmly believe that Elliot could easily have dropped 100-150 pages and not lost a thing in terms of the story.  I often found myself wishing that she would just get to the point.  It also felt very disconnected, as the characters were repeatedly presented with problems to over come and then quickly did so, only to then be thrown into yet another issue.  These problems didn't really seem to connect and it felt like we moved from one action scene to another.

One of the things I love about this series is the fact that nearly all of the character are multi-racial in some form.  As a person of colour, I am used to seeing myself erased in science fiction and to see Elliot's passion for including us really did present me with some hope. This inclusion however did not extend to GLBT people, which while normal, is never acceptable.  We were introduced to a disabled character but because of her relative youth, she was never actively a part of the major plot and instead served to bind Vai to the Mansa. It was however encouraging to see Cat advocate that she should get a proper cane as befitting her size, as well as an education. 

Almost Human, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot

The nice exposition lady informs us that it’s 2048 and everything is grimdark and bad – with lots of organised crime, a huge crime rate, drugs, badness and mime artists roaming the street. Possibly not the latter. To help the beleaguered police, every officer now gets an Android.

From there we move to an outright war zone, police with big guns fighting a gang with similar big guns. The police are badly outnumbered and Detective John Kennex gets the call that one of their members are down. He wants to launch a rescue mission and overrules the android who tells him how silly it is to risk the lives of many for the sake of one man – they go in and that android gets shot in the head and destroyed. They get to the injured officer and the second android scans him and tells them that down police officer is basically bleeding to death – and there’s no point in trying to carry him out. Detective John has no patience with such a cold assessment and insists on carrying. The android refuses to stay and protect them when there are others who aren’t ignoring his advice and actually have a chance in hell of getting out of this alive (paraphrasing here).

They stand up to stagger away – and someone shoots John in the leg – well shoots his leg off below the knee. The man he tried to save is dead.

The moral of this story? Listen to the emotionless automatons! And that battle strategy shouldn’t be dictated by a man’s feeeeeeeels!

Shadowy figures converge on John and one throws a grenade (you’re going to use a grenade on him? Isn’t that overkill?). John puts on his angry determined face (this show isn’t 3 minutes in and he’s used that face 4 time or more) and tries to drag himself away before the big boom.

It’s apparently a grenade of making-out-with-a-hot-woman (amazing what technology can do in the future) because he is suddenly surrounded by white light and staring at the face of a beautiful smiling woman. Also, possibly, a hallucination, his life flashing before his eyes or desperate regrets of what might have been; since he wakes up considerably less pleasantly in a machine.

A man heads over to unhook him and apparently all of that action was a memory which the machine is helping him extract after his 17 month long coma. John shouldn’t be having these treatments yet since he hasn’t been conscious a year, but then his doctor is blackmarket from “sub Asia”. John wants to remember the people who ambushed him - and the doctor is a “recollectionist” who thinks he should let it go. John pulls out a clichéd angsty straight white male lead line in a voice that yells “tortured anti-hero”.  The woman was apparently his ex-girlfriend, Anna.

He heads back to his car, taking a pill and staring woefully at a necklace before an android police officer talks to him – with a strong suggestion of John not being the biggest fan

In case you haven’t got the hint yet, the next scene is John staring wistfully at a picture of Anna. Honestly, we get it, can we move on please? Apparently not, because he then uses the nifty future phone/computer thing to listen to a message from Anna which he’s kept for several hundred days (ok, this isn’t tortured and romantic – it’s creepy, obsessive and stalkerish). His angst is interrupted by Captain Sandra Maldonado who wants him to come in and is unwilling to accept that he needs more time – she convinces him by telling him there’s an armed robbery committed by Insyndicate (the gang that he fought in the opening credits). John spends a brief moment with angsty distant staring to properly express his deep and abiding pain before agreeing to come in.

He gets up and we see he has a bionic leg but when he takes a little box off it, it looks just like his other leg – though the box complains that his “synthetic calibration” is incomplete. Which is probably bad.

We get some nice aerial visuals of a nifty looking future city complete with hover discs as John arrives at the station. We get to see Detective Richard Paul – the arsehole who hates/envies/otherwise unpleasant person can’t bring himself to behave like a civilised human being over the return of a colleague after 2 years in a coma and detectives Vogal and Valerie Stahl. Richard blames John for the raid that went so badly wrong since he was in charge.