Christine Feehan - Dark Prince

This is first book I’ve finished in 2019 and hopefully the first of many. It took me a while to get through this one mainly because it’s a hard book for me to get into. The text was small and frankly, I found most of the book boring.

As a side note, I was reading through some of my older reviews and it seems that I’ve decided to be more PC of late. I’m not sure why, maybe I’m afraid of offending people by having an extreme opinion that may differ from theirs and on that subject, Dark Prince could be a very dangerous book for me to review, especially with what’s about to follow. So here goes.

Dark Prince is the first in a long series of books about a race of creatures known as Carpathians. These creatures are somewhere between human and vampire and need to from a connection with a life mate in order to not be fully consumed by the beast inside. This story follows the Carpathian male, Mikhail who finds his life mate, Raven and the whole experience is essentially a study on how not to date women.

I won’t go too much into the detail of the story but essentially Raven has psychic abilities and can use these to communicate with Mikhail with just her mind. Upon the first contact with Mikhail, he gets annoyed when she tries to read his mind and in response… he mentally breaks into her bedroom and plays with her vagina. There is a lot of back and forth from then on mostly involving Raven continually claiming that she is going to leave him, is a totally independent woman who doesn’t need Mikhail and can look after herself… but then does the exact opposite of what she says.

The other thing I don’t like about Raven is the fact that she is portrayed as a barbie doll. Blonde hair, massive tits, tiny waist. In a book released in 2006 when I thought we were past objectifying women, even in a book as smutty as this. I also don’t think I’m the intended audience for this book so I find it even more surprising that Raven is portrayed in this way.

Raven appears to be totally submissive towards Mikhail and despite continually saying that she wants to be a strong, confident, independent woman, continually lets him dominate her. There is nothing in narrative that suggests this is a slowly changing character trait and the whole ‘love’ between the two is more of an author’s ‘because I said so’ approach to character development.

In terms of the writing itself, it’s horribly put together. Perspectives change at a whim which makes it hard to tell who’s narrating and from what perspective. This happens all the time and is made worse on page 32 where one of the character names is actually wrong.

The worst thing about the book however is that… nothing really happens. It does that, what I’m finding to be, typical thing of being 308 pages long and only having anything happen in the last ten pages. Okay, I’m overexaggerating here but even if you count the smut as things happening there’s still 150 pages of nothing – just more gesturing by Raven and Mikhail being angry that she was breathing without permission.

The last section of the book sees the arrival of Andre the vampire, a character who has had no visibility in the story whatsoever and shows up as if from nowhere to piss on everyone’s parade. The way he’s dealt with is just terrible too. I cannot believe that there were two run-ins with Andre before the final show down, during both of which he could have been killed… but I’m guessing for plot reasons he wasn’t?

Dark Prince is the first in a very long Carpathian series of which I’ve been informed, they get better. But it’s going to be a while before I test that theory.

Dark Prince by Christine Feehan was published by Piatkus books in 2006. RRP £6.99 (Paperback)

James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

One of the most important things about a book is that the reader can identify with the characters involved. However, there are certain ways a writer can prevent a reader from doing so even if they design a really good character and this is exactly the case with James Becker’s Chris Bronson.

Of all the surnames there are to chose from, including making up new ones, I do not understand the decision to name the main after one of Britain’s most notorious criminals – complete with a matching first initial. He is also referred to throughout the book as Bronson and he is a policeman. I found it impossible to picture anything but a bald guy with a cheesy eighties moustache as Bronson was gallivanting around Venice.

There will be more on Chris Bronson’s skill set later, but for now let’s discuss the actual writing. The first few chapters hammer out a load of semi-relevant information in the form of dialogue from Bronson’s wife, Angela.  My main problem with this is that it stops being dialogue and reads like non-fiction. There is no characterisation to the paragraphs; they just run as uninterrupted dialogue for pages at a time. I would have forgiven this had Bronson said something at the end like, ‘Sorry darling, I stopped listening about 3 pages ago.’

There are small problems with the characterisation of everyone throughout the book. On page 125 when some random dudes have a woman prisoner, they haven’t said anything to her for the entire time she has been captured. Then, all of a sudden, it what appears to be a complete change of character, one of the dudes turns around and starts antagonising her.

The dialogue problems also continue throughout. A lot of the conversations are very wooden with little characterisation from either party. It makes for very uninteresting reading.

Around chapter 31 I started to become aware of a few problems with the pacing of the novel. Some parts which feature a lot of moving through different locations pass by in a few sentences and other parts, such as unnecessary conversations and information based dialogue get dragged out. I was quite shocked in this chapter especially because I almost didn’t notice that we had skipped a really long journey and passage of time.

Chapters are written from a few different perspectives.  One such perspective is the captured girl mentioned earlier. All these chapters serve to do is remind us that she was captured and is still captured and is being held captive. They don’t add anything to the story other than to remind us that she is in trouble and that something potentially bad is going to happen to her later. If nothing happened later, there would be no point to the story. There is far too much forewarning in these sections – we know something is going to happen and we do not need to be reminded of it every five minutes.

Moving on to problems with the story itself – one of the other characters is captured later on and kept alive to complete a translation. However the captors point out that they have translated some of the text themselves so would know if she was doing it wrong on purpose. At this point, it seems the only reason to keep her live is a device to drive the story.

As mentioned earlier Bronson has very specific skill set. One such skill is the art of aikido which is explained to us in the middle of an action sequence. The only reason for this is because Bronson needs to use this skill to survive. Similar occurrences happen throughout the novel, if Bronson needs to do something, the author gives him the necessary skills to do so with a quick history of why he is able to do it. At one point he needs to use a gun so it is brought to our attention that he used to be in army. After this I was half expecting him to come face to face with a lion – but he would be okay because of that year he spent as part of the circus as a lion tamer.

There are several other irritations, too many to mention all of them at this stage so I’ll mention two more that really got under my skin.  At the end of one chapter, Bronson is asked to if he can confirm whether or not a dead woman is his wife. His response is, ‘Yes I can.’ This is expected, he should know what his wife looks like. But surely if anyone is ever in this position where they are asked if they are able to confirm whether the dead person is their wife, the response would not be, ‘yes I can,’ and then stop talking.

The last one comes near the end where there are two girls are captured together - one of them is English and the other is Italian. The Italian knows a little English. Now in my experience, when someone says they know a little English, they know the basics. I wouldn’t expect someone with limited knowledge of a foreign language to know what the translation for taser was.

It seems that Becker, throughout the 466 paged of the novel, will give his characters the necessary requirement to make his story work with very little effort on his part which is attributable to very lazy and predictable writing. I managed to predict the ending to the letter and I am very rarely able to do that which is a not a good sign.

Despite the many, many points I’ve raised I still sort of enjoyed it, although the best bit was the author’s note in the back which taught me a lot about the history of vampires. Wait, I’ve just thought of another irritation! The book is called The Nosferatu Scroll and this would indicate that there is an item in the book of that name. However, Nosferatu is not even mentioned until the author’s note which makes the title of the book almost completely meaningless.

The Nosferatu Scroll by James Becker was published by Bantam Press in 2011. RRP £6.99 (Paperback)

Stephanie Meyer - The Twlight Saga

For some reason I’ve been too polite to review these books but seeing as the literary world is spiralling out of control I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at where it all went wrong.

So far, I’ve reviewed three books that are essentially Twilight rip-offs which shows; a) how much people are buying into the supernatural love thing; b) The supernatural can be made to be really boring; c) Men no longer read.

There are four books in the series with a total of 2,227 pages, of which 100 are exciting and the other 2,127 made me want to die.

The first book, Twilight is roughly 300 pages of getting up in the morning, going to the same three classes, Edward stares at Bella, Bella stares back, rinse and repeat. And then in the last 50 or so, there are a few fast paced scene that make for slightly entertaining reading.. I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. Even when Bella finds out Edward is a vampire it’s pretty much, ‘So, you’re a vampire.’ There is no fear or amazement. She simply seems bored by the whole notion which is quite the feat considering she is meant to be in love with him.

So how can Stephanie make her serious of books even more interesting? Introduce Werewolves! Oh wait, they aren’t actually Werewolves, they are Shapeshifters, as we are made aware in the final book but, frankly, who gives a shit. New Moon is not only the worst title, it’s the worst book.

It doesn’t matter what these dog things, they are still boring in contrast with the actual legends that created them, and it’s made even more boring when one of the Werewolves is in - that’s right - love with Bella. Introducing Jacob, the whiniest, most annoying character in the history of the world. When Jacob finds out that Edward is a vampire and Bella wants some vampire porking love, he first goes into a sulk and then gets mad and stamps his feet and then plays the best friend card while occasionally dropping in the odd, ‘WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?’ line. He goes as far as saying that they are perfect for each other, but who is he kidding? Edward is a one-hundred-plus year old vampire, Jacob is a prepubescent puppy who thinks he knows what life’s like. If he was born a few years earlier, he should have dated Avril Lavigne.

This is coupled with the fact that Bella spends the whole book in a depressed state because Edward has decided that being with a vampire is too dangerous for her after she gets a paper cut. There are four pages with just the names of months on them to show that nothing happened for a long period of time. This was my favourite bit and I wish Meyer had taken it upon herself to do this every time nothing happens in her books. Then we would have one novella instead of four over written novels that as more usual as door stops.

Eclipse is the best of the bunch, because, and it’s taken two books to get here, something actually happens which warrants writing about. A big fight with werewolves and vampires and actually using your characters to create excitement.

However, while this was happening, Bella has decided she is going to be a massive dick. After saying she is in love with Edward, he is her shining star, her one and only, she will never love again blah blah, blah - she then goes and kisses Jacob and tells him she loves him. He kind of forced it on her but you can forgive him because he was already a dick. Bella can fuck off.

The final book, Breaking Dawn coming in at just over 700 pages and is a major waste of time - mainly because half of it is written from the perspective of Jacob. After having to listen to his whining from the third person for three books, having a dose of it straight from the werewolf’s mouth was cringe-worthy. It was literally whine, whine, whine some more and when I’m done whining about that I’ll whine about something else. Literally, he whined about Bella marrying Edward. He whined about having his wolf pack split up. He whined about having all their voices in his head. It goes on and on and on.

Then when Bella’s baby is born - half vampire, half human, something that Dracula couldn’t manage in Van Helsing but in this world were vampires can walk in the day and look like diamonds, it’s easy – Jacob decides that he is linked to the child and that they are going to spend their lives together. Bella is angry at this, not because of the paedophilic connotations associated with this whole ‘linking’ thing, but simply because she can’t accept the fact that he likes the baby more than her and this, and everything I’ve mentioned above is the thing that pisses me off the most.

In a world of vampires and werewolves, even though she hasn’t been exposed to it for long, Bella gets so caught up on the mundane childish relationship garbage that happens to 14 to 16 year olds in school with all their mortal friends. I was under the impression that if you were exposed to the supernatural world you would be a little bit awestruck, confused, frightened or any other sensible relative emotions. Bella shows none of these and settles for apathy, and this is captured perfectly in the films where she could be replaced by cardboard cut-out. I’ve seen the trailer for the new Breaking Dawn movie and even there, the smile is completely forced.

I can’t believe the extreme furore the books have created with this Team Edward, Team Jacob stuff and the sheer amount of money, Meyer has made from it. I don’t think the quality of stories merit the success and acclaim they have received and I also think a lot of genuinely good books get overlooked because of it.

I didn’t like The Twilight Saga. It took a lot of things I liked, romance included, trivialised them and destroyed their power through uninteresting storytelling and bad writing. However, the sales and acclaim speak for themselves. Stephen King agrees with me, the rest of the world does not. After Stephanie Meyer and J. K. Rowling can the next big thing please be something worth reading.

The Twilight Saga bibliography:

1. Twilight by Stephanie Meyer was published by Little, Brown in 2005. RRP £7.99 (Paperback)

2. New Moon by Stephanie Meyer was published by Little, Brown in 2006. RRP £7.99 (Paperback)

3. Eclipse by Stephanie Meyer was published by Little, Brown in 2007. RRP £7.99 (Paperback)

4. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer was published by Little, Brown in 2008. RRP £7.99 (Paperback)