It's Coming Back Up: Final Thoughts

It occurs to me that I have been a little tardy in writing up this, the last entry in this particular series of posts. It seems customary that I finish off these little series with some sort of summary. But I must confess, I am somewhat stumped. I mean, what CAN you say about these books? Would it be going to far to say that this entire genre serves as proof, if proof be need be, that feminism is not so much dead as firmly shut in the goddamn kitchen making a sandwich, and apparently happy to be there.

Which is not nearly as cool as the Godman Kitchen

I was juggling the idea that maybe the whole thing is secretly about periods, only backwards. You know, we have the leading lady who is normally all violent and bitchy and irrational, and then she's given an anti period and turns into weak and submissive "proper" woman for a while. However I quickly realized that this wasn't quite right, I was overcomplicating things.

Via genital bleeding

At the end of the day the day the message, should you wish to take one away, is that ladies will never be truly happy until they're in thrall to some man. And in order to attract one you must be weak and USELESS.

Seriously, I've seen rape porn that had stronger leaning towards female empowerment than this. I mean, yeah, they're male power fantasies in which women are objectified as purely sexual objects, but at least the characters are enjoying themselves. Eventually.

Well at least I won't be saying it with my mouth full

So, leaving aside the subtext, what of the actual plot? Well, there's something that's been bugging me there. I mean, there are many things that bug me, but one I feel the need to mention right now. The plot hook for this book, as stated on the back of the cover, is that after all that business with the brain AIDS, Binty awakes mysteriously on the street covered in blood with a dead whore at her feet, right? Not only is this particular plot line never explained or resolved, it is never mentioned again. Save once, where we learn that there was someone else in the room. Quite who that was is open to debate. maybe it was Santa. This would perhaps explain that crushed to death guard that everyone forgot about. I guess he was standing to close to the chimney.

I mean, there's only some sinister conspiracy going on, with the fingerprints of evil all over it. Should we investigate? No. let's go to the country so that Binty can swoon heavily and change her underpants twice a day whilst the latest in a long line of Sanchos broods and masturbates on her head whilst she sleeps. THAT'LL CLEARLY SOLVE ALL OUR PROBLEMS.

This is the major problem. It's not so much that the author is completely bereft of good ideas, she just seems irrationally determined to avoid them. All 3 books have followed to some extent the same basic pattern:

1. Something bad happens
2. Ignore it
3. Do nothing
4. Continue to do nothing
5. For eons.....
6. and eons...........
7. Oh, are we running out of space?
8. CONVENIENT COINCIDENCE!!
9. And then they bad guy died and they lived happily ever after.

The actual PLOT of the book is given such a cursory treatment it's a wonder it's there at all. I realize that these are (allegedly) "romance" novels, and as such those elements are going to be given some degree of priority, but seriously? Firstly, I've read plenty of other books that featured romance and sexy times as part of an actual story, thus imparting context and validity to such matter. And secondly, if this is romance then I'm Baltan Seijin.

And that would make it a bit hard to type

I admit that I'm not really the most qualified person in the world to comment about matters of the heart, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to involve a little more conversation and a lot less rubbing your penis on peoples heads. About the only positive thing I can say is that this one somehow came of as a bit less rapey than the last volume. After all, it really only involves sexual assault. I'm not quite sure what it counts as when someone wants to have sex, but you just come on them and then leave precisely, but then that's for the courts to decide.

I'm guessing that this is probably the last of these books, what with the big bad guy suddenly turning up and then promptly dying without any sort of real fight or drama. Quite frankly I don't know where else they could go with it, having run out of characters to make me hate. The only one that achieved any level of interest was that of Pandora, and she got blown up. As is the habit of this author, a promising idea is introduced and then immediately discarded, however I suppose we should be grateful. After all, it's only when the characters spend most of their time offscreen that they achieve any sort of interest. Once their lives start getting written about in detail they are reduced to mere ciphers for whatever weird crazy pseudorape fantasies it is the author is apparently entertaining. In the hands of a competent author I feel there may even be stories worth telling that could be taken from some few of the ideas in here, but sadly that's decidedly NOT the author that we've been given.

And anything else would basically be Night Falls Darkly fanfic, which is possibly the most terrifying thing I've ever thought of.

In summation then. This book, like those that went before, is a horrible non-story, terribly written, and should be avoided at all costs. The rare flashes of interesting ideas that occasionally surface merely serve to counterpoint the overall ineptitude of every other aspect of the piece, and frankly there's no statistical evidence to support the fact that these rare instances are anything more than random chance. Give an infinite number of  monkeys typewriters and perhaps one day they'll produce the complete works of Shakespeare, but I doubt that any of the rest of the random crap they produce will be more painful to read than what I've experienced with these tome of iniquity.