Archive for April, 2009

Sweet-blood by Pete Hautman

ISBN: 0689850484
180 pages
published in 2003.

This was… I don’t even know where to start, lol. This was so dumb. It’s the story of a young diabetic girl who goes out of her way every single day to make herself seem Goth As Shit(tm), but tells everyone over and over and over again that she’s not really goth in order to make herself seem MORE goth. Whatever. Stop trying so hard.

Anyway, she spends her free time chatting online with a bunch of people online that pretend to be vampires, eventually meeting one of the creeps from the chatroom in real life, who winds up to be… surprise! An overweight, middle-aged man who gets her drunk. She is really angsty on top of all of this diabetes stuff and thinks she’s really ~special and different~. Oh, and she thinks she is just so misunderstood, bawwww, because she writes an essay about her theory about how vampire legends were started by people not understanding diabetic episodes a billion years ago and people think she’s ~weird~. Whatever. Shut up.

Terrible book, kept me entertained in the library during finals week when I had nothing left to do.

The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker

ISBN: 0061002828
164 pages
published in 1986.

So, this is my first experience reading something by Clive Barker that isn’t a short story. I’m feeling pretty good about it. It wasn’t really what I expected but it was interesting. He has a really unique style for reasons that I can’t really pinpoint otherwise I would describe them.

The Hellbound Heart is kind of all over the place and confusing, but it’s a story about a man who calls forth these… demons? by doing this puzzle box/ritual expecting them to be able to supply him with sexual pleasure of some sort or another. Things wind up not going exactly as he planned and they capture him and torture him and he sort of lives in the wall of this house… I think. It was a little confusing.

Then, his brother and his brother’s wife move into that house and his wife (who was raped by the first guy? had an affair with him? more confusion here) winds up discovering him in the room upstairs and starts killing guys to “feed” him and bring him back into this plane of existence… or something like that. So, she succeeds, but he needs more, and she winds up fucking things all up when her husband’s ex-girlfriend? discovers what’s going on.

So, it’s really short, and as you can gather from the review, kind of confusing, but it was a quick, interesting read and I wasn’t that disappointed, just a bit… not sure of what exactly happened. I’ll definitely be reading more though. (PS: I think Clive Barker has an S&M fetish. This might be obvious, but if it is I’ve never read about it, but if his books and stories are any indicators… just putting that out there.)

The Seventh Tower #1: The Fall by Garth Nix

ISBN: 0439176824
208 pages
published in 2000.

I was excited to pick up another book by Garth Nix after enjoying Sabriel a little while back. I was sort of disappointed by this book though, and I’m not sure if it’s a matter of it just not appealing to my interests, to it being aimed at a younger audience or a mixture of both. I found this book really hard to get through though for such a short book. The story is about Tal, a young boy that lives in this castle that follows a system of orders in which ones importance and power is designated by what color you belong to. There is also some interesting stuff going on with shadows having powers and Sunstones and all kinds of stuff that I found kind of difficult to follow and I can’t imagine a ten-year-old having a much easier time with. I think my problem was with the author trying really hard to cram a lot of stuff into a very short, very sparsely worded book without taking much time to explain it.

The events seemed to carry on lightening-fast, which can be a good and a bad thing but I don’t feel worked very well in this book. This is a series, so I feel like it could have been spaced out a little better without much of a problem. Tal went from one thing to another very quickly and somehow wound up on this adventure through what seemed like really improbable circumstances even in a science-fiction/fantasy book, which is saying something. I felt like Nix couldn’t really figure out a way to get the action started and so just sort of threw the main character around.

I guess it wasn’t too terrible, and I’ll probably read the rest, I just don’t think it’s going to take very high-importance on my “to read” list. I’m going to attempt to update my posts with books I’m reading currently as I feel like this blog is getting kind of dull (or maybe it was always dull? I’m not sure.) PS: Can someone direct me to a layout in which I can add content to my sidebar or show me how I could do it with this one? I’m not very good at this sort of thing.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

ISBN: 04410085340345342968
292 pages
published in 2001.

So, I finally got around to the first book in the “Sookie Stackhouse / Southern Vampire” series. If you recall, I mistakenly picked up the third book first and read it without really realizing (until I went to type up the entry) that I had read the book out of order. I enjoyed it enough to go pick up the first one, and here it is. Although each of them really seem as though they can stand on their own (obviously, I didn’t notice) reading this really did put a lot into order for me and the series makes a lot more sense now. It’s especially interesting to see the way Sookie has progressed, having read the third book and backtracked to the first book. She seems so much more innocent and oblivious in this book until the end, so there was really character development going on.

Anyway, Sookie Stackhouse is a waitress at a bar. Folks in her town think she’s pretty weird – most know she can read minds, but simply write her off as being crazy. She lives alone with her grandmother. In this world, vampires have just come on the scene and have appealed themselves to the general public as being the victims of a virus. Sookie meets a vampire (and subsequently saves him) at the bar she works in and eventually becomes romantically entangled with him. However, when some girls start getting murdered in her town, Bill, the vampire, starts to become a suspect. Sookie doesn’t want to believe it, even as many people around her that care for her begin to judge her for her choice in boyfriends. Now she has to deal with the repercussions of existing in a world thick with vampires and finds that as long as she is with Bill, she isn’t going to be able to avoid the other supernatural things in her world

The Young Desire It by Kenneth “Seaforth” Mackenzie

ISBN: 0207162840
330 pages
published in 1937.

(I apologize for the cover used to represent this book – it was really difficult to find anything at all. Scanning my copy would have just produced the same image.)

I picked this book up as part of the research I’ve been doing lately into LGBT Australian literature. This is one of those cornerstone books in the field. It’s intriguing for the time it was published, the author and the popular and critical response to it. It actually wound up winning an Australian award when it was published, although that is more likely due to the fact that the protagonist wound up choosing a heterosexual relationship rather than the homosexual one that he was presented with throughout the novel.

The story takes place on a boarding school (quintessential setting for a gay story involving youth taking place in Australia) where young Charles Fox has just enrolled. He winds up getting the interest of a teacher there, Penworth, who finds himself developing something of an unethical attraction to him and begins, without really realizing entirely what he’s doing, pressuring him into returning some sort of affection to him as well. Charles doesn’t realize what is going on initially, although, after he meets a young girl during a vacation at home and begins a relationship with her, he eventually rejects Penworth when he realizes the sort of interest the teacher has taken in him.

Penworth, though blatantly homosexual, is not portrayed by Mackenzie as being a devilish or unlikeable character as one would probably expect for the time period in which it was written. Yes, he is eventually rejected, but the insight we gain into Penworth’s thoughts and history makes him a character that, although we become frustrated with him often due to his foolishness and poor choices, we sympathize with. His faults are simply human faults, and though it’s unacceptable for many understandable and valid reasons for a teacher to take the sort of interest in his student as Penworth does – especially during this time and especially considering it is a homosexual attraction – we are able to recognize him as a human and thus he is not turned into some immoral entity, formed only to warn readers away from the inhuman, homosexual monster. It’s just a really fascinating book and I think perhaps it doesn’t reach as far of an audience as it should.

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