And the award for “Most patriarchal teen vampire romance I’ve read since Twilight” goes to…

It looks kind of gothic and cool.
It is not.

EVERNIGHT, by Claudia Gray (the pen name, evidently, of someone named Amy Vincent), was highly disappointing.

For starters, it opened with exactly the kind of prologue I find most off-putting, namely, one that seems to exist only because otherwise the first several chapters will be too boring, so the author wants to assure us that something suspenseful is going to happen later on. The problem? I don’t usually feel any suspense during action sequences unless I’m already invested in the characters, which, almost by definition, I’m not by the time of a prologue. I gathered from EVERNIGHT’s prologue that someone would wind up in some danger and feeling some guilty anguish, but nothing made me really care.

But I’d heard good things, so on I went to the actual book. Throughout the early chapters, I kept trying to like it, and almost managing. I thought the premise — a school for vampires suddenly opens itself to human students — had definite potential. Character-wise, Gray did something I really liked:

It’s funny — when people call you “shy,” they usually smile. Like it’s cute, some funny little habit you’ll grow out of when you’re older, like the gaps in your grin when your baby teeth fall out. If they knew how it felt — really being shy, not just unsure at first — they wouldn’t smile. Not if they knew how the feeling knots up your stomach or makes your palms sweat or robs you of the ability to say anything that makes sense. It’s not cute at all.

– but then undermined it by never having her character actually think or act like a shy person, just telling us a lot of times that she was. I felt like I would’ve wanted to read the book Gray told us she was writing.

On a sentence level, EVERNIGHT vacillated between incredibly pedestrian, generic prose and the sort of quintessentially young adult cadence I really like, where really long and really short clauses mix together; you can see all of this in this short paragraph from early on:

Until that moment, I hadn’t known what fear was. Shock jolted through me, cold as ice water, and I found out just how fast I could really run. I didn’t scream — there was no point, none, because I’d gone off into the woods so nobody could find me, which was the dumbest thing I’d ever done and looked like it would be the last. [...] I had to run like hell.

There was also a lot of sloppiness on little details (like, no one in high school is old enough to drink legally!), which was distracting, but I dutifully moved along in the book, waiting for the plot to develop. And then it did, and I was sorry.

(Vague but important spoilers below.)

The entire first half of the book is playing an absurd trick on the reader, which is then revealed. It’s a trick in the tradition of Agatha Christie’s THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, which I thought was very clever when I read it as an eleven-year-old; it here has the effect of just undoing any investment I had in the character I thought I was reading about. Seriously, there was absolutely no reason to have kept the crucial information from readers except for the author to revel in how “clever” the trick was, except it… really wasn’t. EVERNIGHT is trying to be “Enemies” from Season 3 of BUFFY, and ending up more in the territory of “And it was all a dream!”

And speaking of gratuitous choices, here’s my fan letter to the author:

Dear Claudia Gray,

Please don’t spoil Hitchcock movies I haven’t seen since I was a small child and don’t remember the big plot twists in, just so you can have the characters discuss them to establish that they both like old movies. Thank you,

Love,
Elizabeth

As blog readers will know, though, I can overlook a lot when I really get into a teen romance. Which is why the final straw for me was that the protagonist and her love interest are the most codependent creeps since Meyer set the trend in this genre. Seriously, our heroine Bianca goes on, and on, and on about how much the sniveling hero Lucas just wants to protect her. If I could’ve believed in these characters and their allegedly undying love for one another, I would’ve been really frightened for them.

My last complaint, I swear: EVERNIGHT flagrantly violates the Chekov Rule (“If there’s a gun in the first act…”) with the most blatantly dropped plot point this side of BUFFY’s seventh season. (And by that, I do mean every damn week of season 7, but that’s no excuse; if it was real bad when Joss did it, it’s certainly no good when this lady follows suit.) It’s possible this is just setup for some sequel, but I’m sure as hell not reading any more to find out.

TWILIGHT, VAMPIRE ACADEMY, now this… Why can’t I find a damn vampire romance that’s any good? In book form, that is.

Friday “Why?”: Why vampires?

I happened to be staying with a friend while furiously (pun?) reading BREAKING DAWN, the fourth and final book in the Twilight series, which meant I didn’t really see much of my friend. In one of my brief pauses in reading, though, at about 4 AM, he asked me why I thought vampires are all the rage.

Photo from the West Warwick Public Library

I gave him a very supply-side answer: Parts of the publishing industry are in crisis, I said. October was the biggest month ever for bookstores returning stock to publishers.* Some small presses are folding altogether. Borders is bankrupt but still operational, and massively cutting down on the number (and hence, variety) of books it carries so it can face more covers outward on the shelf.

“Midlist” authors (i.e., everyone who’s not the big bestsellers — nobody ever talks about “bottom-list”) are getting fewer promotional resources; if you don’t happen to have the backing of an enthusiastic small press that pumps their efforts into it, good luck getting a book tour as a smaller-name author.**

In this context, I said, we should expect a lot more copycatting. Publishers are desperate to find the next big bestseller. So once TWILIGHT was such a hit, the incredible vampire glut we’re in now was inevitable.***

Fine, he said, but why was TWILIGHT such a hit? Why vampires? Is there something about the craziness of right now, with its wars and economic insecurity, that gives young people a death lust, or what?

For that, I did not have a good answer. Hence, the Friday “Why?”. What do y’all think?

* Here’s an explanation of the completely insane system of bookstore returns the entire publishing industry operates under. [Caveat: I hesitated to link to this blog because the blogger has written some posts I found really offensive; specifically, at least two where she labels any criticism of the Israeli state, or support for Palestinian self-determination, as anti-Semitic. But it is a good explanation of what happened to the publishing industry in October 2008, which was the first big wake-up call of how this current economic depression may affect publishing. (Not the last word, though; Amazon's sales are up 18% this month... cheap entertainment and all?) So I'm linking it with this caveat so readers can decide for themselves whether they want to click.]

** Incidentally, everything I said above is all the more reason to support independent publishers you like, if you value diversity of ideas. Myself, I work with Haymarket Books (which, by the way, is one of the enthusiastic small presses that does tour its authors). Among other things, on a project you’ll be hearing much more about on this blog soon.

*** Even if that means publishing endless terrible, terrible books. VAMPIRE ACADEMY, I’m still looking at you!

When does a book cross the line?

I was already not much enjoying Richelle Mead’s VAMPIRE ACADEMY when it crossed my line into unredeemable.

My initial complaints were pedestrian: the prose meant to evoke the characters’ deep lust for one another was so generic that it mostly provoked my befuddlement and laughter (“His hands and lips took possession of my body, and every touch was like fire on my skin”); I didn’t feel for the characters.

The entire book — its plot and any emotional punch it aspires to — is premised on your caring about the deep friendship between two characters, but since we learn little specific about either of them, I didn’t really see why they felt for each other. Rather, I kept being told that they did. A lot. More than any other friends in the history of human companionship. Memo received; motivation lost in the mail.

Nevertheless, I kept reading because the world was sort of interesting. Mead’s book has two kinds of vampires — one evil, one not, but with the potential to turn — and the half-humans who devote their lives to guarding the good ones. It’s an interesting social structure and I saw potential there, if unrealized by the actual book. Sometimes that’s enough.

But then! Our protagonist gets one up on her rival by circulating the news that said rival’s parents are — can you bear the horror? — janitors! And when this hasn’t completely vanquished the girl, our would-be hero clinches the rival’s social exclusion by spreading word of her sexual dalliances. Apparently the uppity slut had it coming. At least, that’s the message I took from Mead, who doesn’t seem to be exploring her protagonist’s dark side as much as cheerfully affirming it.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to root for an “underdog” who mobilizes the grossest elements of sexism and class snobbery to win her petty schoolyard disputes, without the slightest hint of either remorse or comeuppance. I lost all respect for the character and the book.

So, question for the readers: what does a book have to do to become unredeemable in your eyes? And does that mean you stop reading? (I finished VAMPIRE ACADEMY, but angrily.)

And now, to descend to a much pettier level of complaint: these books have a love interest named Dmitri who you’re supposed to believe is the hottest thing since ice caps started melting into the ocean. But the model they use on the second and third books (which I haven’t read, thank you) is just not hot. At all. Whereas the female model for the first book is, in that she looks exactly like Angelina Jolie.

Judge for yourself:

Vampire Academy

Vampire Academy #2

Vampire Academy #3