Due to her being hunted by various forces, Wlodek decide
the best thing to do with Lissa is get her out of the way for a while.
Thankfully mysterious Griffin has an idea
Send her to an entirely new world where she can use her
great powers to solve a whole load of easily-fixed-by-violence problems in a
not-very-alien-society
Meanwhile Wlodek & co try to continue the hunt against Xenides while simultaneously making terrible decisions.
So I pick up the next book in this vampire series and….
Aliens.
Ok that was unexpected. I admit to having reservations,
but I’m not adverse to genre mash-up even if I’ve rarely actually seen it do
well and if, after three books in this series, I’m not confident that this
series would be the one to do it well. And, alas, I was surprisingly right.
So, Lissa ends up going to another world and meeting a range of new species and it is done so incredibly lazily that was just quite depressing. Lissa is moved to this new world through woo-woo. That woo-woo also comes with convenient understand-any-language woo-woo to avoid any kind of culture shock
Of which there is absolutely none. The world is called Refizan, the people are Refizani and may or may not be human. If they’re not they look entirely like humans. And by humans I mean white western humans (there’s an Asian-appearing-alien-who-looks-human-because-LAZY who is apparently clearly not from this planet because he’s not white). Their culture seems to be a vaguely western parallel. Their buildings, cities, market place, food, manufactured products, modes of travel, news dissemination, media – none of it is presented as any different from what Lissa had experienced in the US and London. There was no real description of the world to make it seem any different from a generic western city. Flying over the city as mist, Lissa can pick out buildings like shops and hospitals and religious buildings. Their government is a fairly generic democracy which, like anything el
Honestly, you could replace “Refizan” with “Ohio” and not really make any real difference to the story. An alien world that is completely unrecognisable from a western nation populated by people who are indistinguishable from white westerners with all language and transports difficulties being resolved by woo-woo is some of the laziest damn aliens I’ve ever seen – and that includes every film and TV show that decided a little bit of heavy make up would be sufficient to depict an alien species. Though we did have a giant blue dude. Who was giant. And blue. That’s kind of it.
Even on the supernatural side, the world has its own
vampire circle which is basically a direct parallel to Wlodek and his people on
Earth. Except lazier
Why lazier? Because to make this lazy plot glide along
with minimal difficulty there is no real conflict. And one of the sources of no
conflict is Gabron, head of the Refizan vampire council who basically nods and
smiles to everything Lissa says because she is the Specilist Person Ever,
Praise be Her Sueness and, like so many others, he found her super hot and
wants to have sex with her. Despite being a complete stranger and alien, Lissa is
trusted, her every suspicion and suggestion is quickly followed up. Including
when she declares various prominent vampires to be super evil and deserving of
imprisonment. Effectively this turns the vampires into Lissa’s personal army.
Yet the laziness continues! Because this book is
AMAZINGLY lazily written. The next item of laziness is Lissa’s powers. Her
super shiny Mary Sue powers that make her super-duper dangerous even if she is
only 5 years a vampire and able to kill just about anything she comes across
with zero conflict at all because she is just that special. Her powers are
completely unprecedented and completely eclipse everything any other vampire
has ever been able to achieve. On top of being able to kill anything around her
with minimal effort, she also has the useful ability of being able to smell
evil
Yes we’re introduced to dimension hopping light and dark
elves to try and justify this, but it comes down to being able to “smell evil”.
With this infallible evil detector she kills bad guys with her super killy powers.
No, really, she uses this detect evil power with such lack of subtlety that a
10 year old playing a Paladin in a D&D game would disapprove.
There is no nuance in Lissa’s powers and also no nuance
in the bad guys – the Solar Red priests. This is a foreign religion coming to
this planet and is regarded with suspicion and worry and accused of human
sacrifice. Of course this is an excellent way to examine suspicion of the
outsider, how foreign faiths can be demonised, how the rituals we’re familiar
with are comforting while foreign ritual seems barbaric even though,
objectively, both make as little real sense and seem a little weird and it
could be a great way to examine how the persecution of minority religions
happens
HAH! No. Solar Red priests are evil. They rape, torture and murder with impunity. In fact that’s all they do. The entire point of this religion is to be pure evil – I can’t even imagine this religion having holy texts. They regularly kidnap and torture people for funsies, they’re brutal for the sheer sake of brutality. They are caricatures of evil. There’s no attempt at nuance here, let alone any attempt to depict HOW this religion has gained so many adherents. I mean, what do you do, hand out religious tracts about the joys of torturing children?
They’re super-duper evil because they’re being controlled
by super-duper-evil aliens. Again, that pretty much sums up what they are. Evil
for the sake of evilness
This very black and white, simplistic depiction of the
bad guys just covers everything. There’s no conflict because Lissa is so
deadly. There’s no machinations because the government (both vampire and
Refizani) is so damn bizarrely reasonably (despite being quite happy to allow a
religion to flourish whose entire purpose was “kill all the things”), there’s
no real conflict because Lissa is Mary Sue of death and her allies Dragon is
made of killy death and then we introduce Kifirin (more on him later) who is
the supreme god of Deux Ex Machinae Awesome power.
Even the way the plot works is insultingly lazy. Lissa
arrives on Refizani, sees a newspaper article about a terribad religion and instantly
launches on a brutal murderous crusade about them. Seriously, she reads an
article in a newspaper within minutes of arriving and within the hour is
murdering dozens – hundreds – of priests on the strength of this. I cannot even
begin to imagine how this makes sense. How does Lissa even function on Earth without
rapidly slaughtering anyone the newspapers has deemed the bad guy? Good gods,
this woman lives in London! She must have seen the Daily Mail! Imagine the
carnage she’d unleash!
While she’s playing with aliens, back on Earth we’ve got
random characters facing off against Xenides, the naughty-bad-rebel vampires
who basically do… precious little. Until the end when they decide to launch an
attack that is utterly doomed because of all the good guy Deux Ex’s gathered
together. But it does allow a gazillion names to be mentioned to tax you to
care enough about all of them to remember who they are.
So I really don’t like this book because of its immense
laziness on just about every level, but the fail does not end there – let us
now look, with a due sense of dread, at the depiction of marginalised people
First of all let’s look at POC. We have a briefly
mentioned Arabic terrorist, because of course. He isn’t a character, just a
tool who uses suicide bombers. And in Refizan we have Dragon who is Asian and
runs a martial arts dojo and has dragon tattoos because just because you’re an
alien doesn’t mean you can’t be a walking stereotype. Lissa has a couple of gay
men who briefly appear to be her fawning fanclub but serve little other use.
Glaringly, despite the eight kajillion characters,
Lissa is pretty much the only woman with more than the briefest appearance.
Seriously there is a huge cast here but because of that very very very tiresome
trope that supernatural beings are nearly always men (for Reasons) they’re all
men. Lissa
is almost completely surrounded by men at all times. The few women who do
appear are bitter jealous nasty beings (referred to as “bitches”) who, of
course, are super jealous of the perfect Lissa
Sue.
On top of that Lissa serves as a “love interest” for a
lot of the men. By which I mean Gavin, Gabron, Alex and Kirifin all feel the need
to force their romantic attention on Lissa regardless of what she says in the
matter. From Gavin’s forced wedding, to Gabron and Kirifin constantly pressing
her and outright groping her no matter how often she told her to stop, to Alex
openly planning to kidnap her despite his unforgiveable actions in the last
book.
We
also continue the same problems of the last book – Lissa is abused, controlled,
dictated to and repeatedly attempted to enslave and oppress repeatedly –
including by people who recognise that her experiences with them and abused
past makes her already VERY UNWILLING TO TRUST THEM.
As an aside on that – while I like that Lissa’s abused
past is drawn upon to explain her character, her distrust and caution, I hate
that this is relied upon to explain her relationship with Wlodek, Gavin and
Merrill while completely and utterly ignoring that their own actions are so
utterly appalling that it would be patently ridiculous for her to ever trust
them, let alone regard them with anything resembling affection, kindness or
anything but seething loathing
Yet she does – despite them adding YET MORE unacceptable behaviour this book, she again seems to be well on the path to forgiving them. She runs of for a brief tantrum and slaying-of-evil-womens-because-there-can-only-be-one and then… comes home and even gets back into bed with Gavin.
AAARGH Lissa, if you must be an insufferable Sue with the
super specialist power beyond all specialist power please use that power to
kill literally EVERYONE around you. All of them.
