Neferet continues to be evil – and has decided the next
step in her evilness is to kidnap and sacrifice Sylvia Redbird, Zoey’s
grandmother. Naturally Zoey and the gang run to the rescue, even though the
Vampire High Council is providing no support for their efforts. They also need
to be careful with their public persona as Neferet is starting to launch a
public relations battle with the human authorities.
It does give Aurox a chance to make a choice about who he
wants to be and which side he is on.
We need to take a moment to look at the overall story arc
of these books – because I’m on book 10 now and it’s not quite holding
together.
The overall meta is that Neferet is a big bad evil who
must be stopped. And if you preserve your thinking to that very shallow depth
(understandable since deep thinking and the House
of Night Series go together like Canadians and tropical weather) then that
kind of holds together. Neferet does evil things, Zoey and co then respond to
stop her. But what does Neferet actually want? And, no “evil” is not a motive.
So we have Neferet rather belatedly acquiring a motive: she wants “control”
rather than just power (which I’m taking to mean no accountability. Which I’ll
let pass… except all of Neferet’s power now seems to come from her having to
repeatedly bleed and beg for help from her Evil Cow. How does she have more
power than she had before?). And to get this power she’s going to make humans
and vampires fight each other and then she can swoop into the ashes and be confident
she’ll take over
Ok, let’s suppose for a moment that this plan has a
chance of working when she’s pretty much setting herself up as a number one
target in the giant war she’s planning on starting. Let’s let that go for now
and instead ask:
WHY THE HELL ARE YOU IN TULSA?!
Look if you want a global conflict, it’s not going to
start in Tulsa (no insult to Tulsa, the same applies to my home city or most
cities on the planet). In fact, her attempts to manipulate humanity have netted
her some shaky control over the mayor of Tulsa. I paused a moment to see if she
meant the Governor of Oklahoma. Or a senator. State senator? No, the Mayor of
Tulsa. That’s the extent of her power. It’s not even the state capital or the
biggest city in Oklahoma! It’s the 47th biggest city in the US. It
doesn’t have a significant vampire presence – the most important vampire in
this city was Neferet herself.
Even in Tulsa, Neferet ignores the one target that could
actually make a difference in this conflict – Thanatos, High Council Member.
Thanatos may as well not be there as far as Neferet is concerned – why ignore
one of the most influential of the vampires’ leaders? But then, the feeling is
mutual! Because facing indisputable proof of Neferet’s evil murderous ways the
High Council of Vampires decides the appropriate response is to Not Talk To Her
Anymore, so there. I suspect they may also have given her a nasty look. That’s
it. Meanwhile Thanatos continually pokes Zoey and co to grow up and be ready to
face the big bad evil Neferet and how can you be such nattering children?!
Really, Thanatos? How about you not rely on teenagers to
save your entire civilisation? How about you actually DO SOMETHING?
Because this whole broken story comes down to one thing:
centring Zoey. So Neferet, rather than actually do anything to further her
wicked plans, instead decides to target Zoey again and again and again. She’s
killed Zoey’s mother (and if she’d just chosen ANY OTHER HUMAN, she wouldn’t
have been discovered by Thanatos) and the entire plot line of this book
revolves around Neferet kidnapping Zoey’s grandmother to get a sacrifice to
KILL ZOEY, despite KNOWING that Sylvia Redbird is an impossible sacrifice because
she isn’t a person, she’s just a collection of Native American mystical
stereotypes, a couple of handfuls of feathers and a good cry over environmental
destruction from a full trope collection. Neferet has literally paused her
entire plan to attack Zoey again. She repeatedly sabotages herself because she
must attack those meddling kids!
This is one of the many problems of the whole series. The
story centres on Zoey while, at the same time, not actually having Zoey do a
great deal. Most of her decisions during the series have been guided by the
Irritable Bowel Goddess making her
decisions for her while she stews in guilt and self-doubt – and her actions
against Neferet are pretty much always defensive: Not defending the world or
defending Tulsa, but defending herself because Neferet is inexplicably obsessed
with her. It’s clumsy writing – Neferet has no coherent plan because her whole
role is to attack Zoey over and over so Zoey can then step up and be shiny with
her special powers (which, again, seems to exist to take all her actual agency
away and just make her a vessel for shiny powers. This book, again, with her
saving the day by reciting awful awful awful poetry that Kramisha randomly
gives her because, why not? You want Zoey to actually achieve something?) This
renders not just the plot of this book – but the plot of the entire series –
extremely convoluted and not only is it not driven by the characters, it’s not
driven by common sense.
This book was basically another redemption book for a
murderous man – Aurox this time – Neferet was barely the point.
Of course, this being House
of Night we also have all kinds awfulness as well. For ableism we still
have repeated use of the slur ret*rd as a slur. We have the mystical visioned Shaylin
who has been cured of her blindness because vampires cannot be “damaged”. And
the whole gang still goes to school on the bus they insist on calling the “short
bus”, a derogatory term for buses used to the transport disabled students to
school.
On to POC – we have Thanatos (lurking in the background
being ominous and mysterious but doing nothing), Shaunee (pretty much following
Zoey around and since de-twinning from Erin she has even LESS personality – all
she does is worry about Erin) and Kramisha who also has no real role beyond
providing magical aid for Zoey. I mean, they’re all there but the only
characters in Zoey’s life who have anything resembling an actual role or
personality are Stevie-Rae, Aphrodite (who is both awful and the only person
with a shard of common sense in between that), Stark and, increasingly, Shaylin.
The rest could be replaced with dolls who have their power.
And as for Native American characters – well, both Zoey
and her grandmother Sylvia are Native American. Which is relevant only because
of woo-woo. Their race is all about woo-woo, all about myths and legends, all
about magic, magical rituals, magical artefacts and general mysticism. This
is a common trope with POC in general – to reduce them to the mystical
brown people who provide woo-woo to the plot and their whole
role is about the magic their POC-ness grants them. This trope is
especially pernicious for Native Americans who are continually portrayed as
wise mystics dispensing magical aid and little else. Which pretty much entirely
sums up Sylvia Redbird
Also, why is Erebus, the PERSONIFICATION OF DARKNESS, a
white guy who embodies the sun?
We should also take a moment to look at Lenobia’s love
interest, the reincarnation of her previous love interest from Lenobia’s
Vow. So she can now love this guy because it’s her old lover returned –ignoring
the fact that his experiences (previously a Black man in 18th
Century Louisiana, now a White guy in the 21st century) are so
utterly different that there’s absolutely no way for them to be the same
person. On top[ of that she is worried about getting into a relationship
because the world is more dangerous than it was in 1788. Errr… no. Lenobia, the
world is not more dangerous now than it was for a Black man in Louisiana in 1788
in an interracial relationship. It really really REALLY isn’t and it continues
to gross ignorance we saw in Lenobia’s
Vow about the racial context they’re invoking.
Also, again we have Black people described as coffee orders.
On to the homophobia – of course we have homophobia.
After Jack died, (forgotten by, well, everyone), Damien faded into the
background because it wasn’t about Zoey, certainly his grief was downplayed and
largely ignored. Well, now with the ashes of the pyre barely cold, Zoey has
decided Damian needs to date again. This involves Damien giggling. A lot. It
also means Zoey approaching a complete stranger and asking him if he has a
boyfriend – because putting people on the spot in public, while working, to
disclose or deny their sexuality is totally ok guys! Damien is also continually
called “Queen Damien” and “Miss Congeniality” and “Gay Boy” without the
slightest challenge because constant homophobia isn’t a problem to any of these
characters.
We also have a terrible little moment where Neferet’s
description of a man meant to depict him as weak and pathetic is that he’s “feminine”.
Go Matriarchy!
We need a special mention for Erin – since de-twinning
from Shaunee she has decided to turn fully evil. Why? Since when does anyone
need a reason to do anything in this series? She and Shaunee stopped finishing
each other’s sentences so she decided to sign up to Team Evil Bull Fucking.
Perhaps it’s because the author has only two positions: fawning,
personality-less Zoey follower, or evil sexual woman. And yes, Erin turned evil
and suddenly she’s using her water powers to perform impromptu wet t-shirt
competitions, having lots of sex, stripping off and she’s even inherited evil
Aphrodite’s evil sexy laugh – the mark of true awfulness! Other books imply a
correlation between sexiness and evil, but House of Night is not even that subtle
(possibly because, given the vocabulary presented as impressive or obscure, the
authors don’t know what correlation means) – if a woman is evil, she will be
sexual. It is a rule.
This book achieves one thing – reminding me that the House of Night Series is so utterly
terrible in every way and while it’s very very consistent in its awful, it can
still find new and terrible ways to be horrible, pushing it just a bit further
with every book.
