I Am Completely Serious

I am not really in Anne Bishop's target audience. I think that I usually have a pretty good idea what she's trying to achieve with a scene, but the effect on me is often quite different:

What Anne Bishop Wants: Our hero Daemon has undergone such hideous abuse at the hands of evil women that he has no choice but to lash out violently! Be shocked and repulsed by the cruelty of this depraved society!

My Reaction: Okay, but I don't really understand why it means he has to cover things with ice.

What Anne Bishop Wants: Our other hero, Saetan SaDiablo, the High Lord of Hell (yes, Satan is one of our heroes), takes a bloody revenge on a child molester! Haha! Take that, child molester! JUSTICE!

My Reaction: I cannot devise an appropriate adjective for that scene where he pretends he's a child molester himself, to trick the guy into coming into his bedroom.

What Anne Bishop Wants: Thrill at the forbidden romance of the several-thousand-year-old serial killer sex-slave wizard and the sexually-abused pre-pubescent girl! He dresses up for her.

My Reaction: Please don't do that.

What Anne Bishop Wants: RAPES

My Reaction: You don't need to capitalize that.

What Anne Bishop Wants: CASTRATIONS

My Reaction: Is this part of some kind of system of weights and measures?

What Anne Bishop Wants: UNICORNS

My Reaction: ...I will accept these unicorns.

I think I'm just not very good at Anne Bishop.

( I bring this up because I'm reading a Dark Jewels anthology called Dreams Made Flesh... )

I’M READING ANNE BISHOP AGAIN apparently I suffer from masochistic tendencies.

So I’m about 3/4 through this book. And there’s this guy Lucivar, and he’s explaining evil magical roofies to his zombie-vampire father, Saetan SaDiablo, the High Lord of Hell. And this is the third time he’s talked about the evil magical roofies, and Saetan SaDiablo is shocked by the cruelty of mortals and has to sit down on his dark throne, and Saetan SaDiablo has been shocked by the cruelty of mortals and had to sit down in every single scene he’s been in. Except for the one where he was pretending to be a pedophile serial killer to trick the other pedophile serial killer into coming into his bedroom so he could kill him.

Not his bedroom in Hell, his bedroom in the Shadow Realm. The Shadow Realm’s someplace else.

Lucivar spent 2/3 of the book enslaved to a rapist, and his father Saetan SaDiablo (third-most powerful male wizard in the world) and his teenaged adopted sister Jaenelle Angelline (most powerful wizard in the world) know that, and stuff, but they kinda don’t do anything about it. I guess it’s not that important? So there are all these scenes where Lucivar’s being tortured, and then there’s a scene where Jaenelle shows up at Saetan SaDiablo’s grim palace with a unicorn or an adorable telepathic wolf cub and Saetan SaDiablo goes “OH MAN IT IS A UNICORN AND/OR TELEPATHIC WOLF CUB AND THAT IS NOT OKAY FOR MY IMAGE” and people smile and offer him a drink, and he’s sitting down in his dark throne again I mean I don’t know why he bothers to stand up. And then Lucivar escapes by himself and shows up, and they say, “Oh, hey! You made it!” And Lucivar hangs out with the unicorns and things are basically fine. He isn’t mad about how, you know, they didn’t rescue him! He knows they were real busy.

(I came up with a new way to describe Anne Bishop today: “Laurell K. Hamilton writes licensed Disney Princesses books.”)

It is because Anne Bishop is not good at remembering what the plot is. She also forgot how Lucivar has a brother named Daemon Sadi - alias, The Sadist, other alias, Hayll’s Whore - and Hayll is also a different place from Hell - who is a 1700-year-old Warlord Prince sex slave with the second-strongest magic powers in the world, and is impotent (and random people just up and start talking about his impotence because everyone knows - stuff gets around in 1700 years, it’s just a thing - even though people periodically forget that he generally kills the women he sleeps with), and who was the protagonist of the first book and spent half of it being sad that he was an impotent sex slave unworthy of the woman he loves (Jaenelle, his then-twelve-year-old adopted sister), and the other half being angry about the same issue, and killing people in many ways.

Anyway, she forgot Daemon was there. This book he went insane in a way that makes him weep all the time and occasionally refer to himself in the third person, mainly to keep him out of the way so we can get this big important The Unicorns And Telepathic Wolf Cubs Move In With Saetan And Wacky Antics Ensue thing established. There are also some scenes where Jaenelle goes clothes shopping and doesn’t get along with the other kids.

I totally forgot about how, in this book, there is an evil queen named Dorothea who wants Daemon to father her children. There’s also an evil priestess named Hekatah who used to be married to Saetan and wants to kill him. I think sometimes Bishop forgets which one of the two has which set of motivations.

I like how it’s possible to forget about things like that in this series.

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Unrelated note to the internet: Nobody buy a Samsung Magnet, please. Dad bought one and I just spent three hours trying to get the drivers installed so I could sync up his address book. At least for Vista, there are no working drivers for this phone.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)