Oh, Mercedes Lackey.

[snarp]

Originally published at I Am Completely Serious. You can comment here or there.

I’m re-reading Mercedes Lackey books. This is how you can tell I’m tired.

Somehow I always forget how stupid Vanyel is. He’s pretty stupid.

Spoiler cut in case there is a person out there who can’t guess what sort of stuff happens in Magic’s Price:

So Vanyel is the greatest wizard in the world, and has a magical telepathic white horse, and he is also rich and the heir to someplace, and he has raven-black hair and silver eyes, and he was bullied as a child for being different from the other children, and his telepathically Life-Bonded true love committed suicide, and did I mention he’s gay and his family cannot accept that, and he has sworn never to love again because, as the greatest wizard in the world, he has many enemies, and those he loves only become targets for destruction. I hope you got all that, I’m not going over it again.

Vanyel’s teenaged nephew Medren spends like the first third or so of this book trying to set Vanyel up with his similarly teenaged friend Stefen. Vanyel is at least thirty? And Stefen used to be homeless and shows classic symptoms of sexual abuse. Epic Mercedes Lackey romance!

Ridiculous passages noted down thus far (I’m still only like half-way through):

Stefen - or rather, Stefen’s appearance - came as something of a surprise to Van. Vanyel had been expecting something entirely different - a youngster like Medren, but perhaps a little plainer, a little taller. At some point he’d formed a vague notion that people gifted with extraordinary abilities tended to look perfectly ordinary.

I - what? No. You have silver eyes. So do a lot of other people. Shut up.

[and then there are five paragraphs about how hot Stefen is, the word "angel" comes up a couple times]

-

He stopped dead in his tracks, suddenly, and stared out the window for a moment. “I’m never happier than when I’m around him. I sometimes wonder how long I’m going to be able to stand this. There are times when I can’t think of anything but him.”

Medren stared at his friend, wondering if Stefen had really listened to himself just now. Because what he’d just described was the classic reaction of a life-bonded…

…Or. Like. Maybe a human person who has a crush on somebody. Maybe?

-

“We tried getting him drunk again. He didn’t cooperate. We tried that trip to the hot springs. That almost worked, except that we got company right when it looked like he was going to break down and do something. We tried every variation on my hurting myself and him having to help me, and all I got were bruises in some fascinating places.” Stefen gritted his teeth. “We tried my asking him for a massage for my shoulder muscles. He referred me to a Healer. The only thing we haven’t tried is catching him asleep and tying him up.”

“Don’t even think about that!” Medren said hastily. “Listen, first of all, you won’t catch him asleep, and secondly, even if you did - you wouldn’t want to be standing there if he mistook you for an enemy.”

Like the last time he was home, when that idiot with the petition tried to tackle him the bath. Medren shuddered. I know Grandfather said he needed to replace the bathhouse - but that wasn’t the best way to get it torn down.

See, that first paragraph’s okay! It’s structured like it was written by, you know, someone who knows how to write! It has sort of a rhythm to it, and it ends on a slightly humorous note! And then she just beats the joke to death. And being Mercedes Lackey, she makes it creepy in the process, by invoking Vanyel’s PTSD as a source of humor.

Comments

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

It was a sign of my gradually developing maturity as a reader and a person when I first began to suspect that, though occasionally fun, Mercedes Lackey is an awful, awful writer. A really awful, self-indulgent writer who only approaches readability when she's co-writing with someone more talented than she is, but even those books are really not winners, because, as with so many Anne McCaffrey books, poor characterization, unsubtle social/political agendas and ridiculous plots torpedo whatever premises bad prose doesn't.

I wish I'd read the magic horse books when I was a teen, and would have been able to appreciate them. Instead, I only read the elf books, and the ones about the sexy witch detective, which for some reason, filled me with deep loathing at the time, I can't even remember why. I'd like to say it was that slowly developing maturity, which eventually became the reflexive rage I now feel whenever I encounter really bad art, but I actually still remember Piers Anthony fondly (!), so probably not.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Lackey is one of the writers I love to hate, because any time I read something by her, I end up screaming I CAN DO BETTER THAN THAT and get inspired. So I do periodically read her books, although the last one was a few years ago when I read a trilogy in which the main characters were never in any real danger at all. Ever. Every plan they came up with worked, every relationship was happy, every misunderstanding was worked out with a minimum of drama.

And then I read an anthology because janni had a story in it, and whoever allowed Larry Dixon (I think he was the author) to write all the gryphons' dialogue in his story with ssssssibliant sssses like thisssssss the entire ssssstupid sssstory should be beaten to death with a copy of Sssssstrunk & White.

[snarp]

Is that the Owl series? Where he's an orphan and he gets taken in by the Native American stereotypes and they avert war by making friends with the Northern Barbarians and everything's basically always completely fine?

The gryphons always talk like that. It is infuriating. And there are three books where they're viewpoint characters!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

YES it's that trilogy! I kept waiting for something to happen! And it never did!

I have managed to avoid the gryphon books. And rightly so, it seems.

[snarp]

I really have no excuse for unironically continuing to read the horse books as long as I did. Or for reading all of the Acorna: The Unicorn Girl series. I just... had this sort of inertia going on!

(I'm thinking next I'm going to re-read the ones where Princess Elspeth discovers she's a wizard and falls in love with the stoic Native American stereotype.)

It amuses me now how though Lackey's clearly pretty liberal, her contemporary fantasies are mostly retellings of far-Christian-right myths. Satanic-cult child abuse (Wheels of Fire), minions of Satan secretly controlling Western civilization, secret nationwide kiddie porn kidnapping rings (Born to Run), deranged bad-PSA-ideas about drug dealers (at least one of the Diana Tregarde books had, like, Satanic drug dealer psychic vampires). I think the kiddie-porn ring was so lucrative and secret it had an invisible jet?

And her interior design for the bad guys seems to have come from the housewares sections of those catalogs with the crazy-looking knives and self-defense videos and phone-tapping equipment.