"Grave Secrets", Alice James
9 October 2022 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeNecromancer raises zombies and solves murders while dating vampires -- the pitch for this did sound rather like Anita Blake. On the other hand, I *liked* Anita Blake before she went over the top, so I was inclined to give it a go. (N.B. the 'and croquet' in the strapline is false advertising; there is one brief non-plot-relevant croquet scene near the beginning of the book :-p)
It turns out that the heroine is unusually short -- "five foot in my stockinged feet" -- and has curly hair, as well. (But 'copper curls and emerald eyes' rather than Anita's dark colouring, which isn't really a score in my book; if the author wanted to make her red-haired, she could simply have been ginger like the rest of us :-p)
The selling point for this book proves to be that the zombies are the good guys, for a change. (And generally on the losing side against vampires, since the latter have the advantage of speed and intelligence -- which makes the ability to command the undead less over-powered, even if you can raise recent victims out of a sense of burning outrage.) Indeed, we meet one of the most attractive characters in the book in the first chapter, when Toni (whose real name is 'Lavington', although nobody ever questions this!) raises him from his grave as part of an exercise in raising every single corpse in the cemetery.
In her case, being a necromancer is not an official profession, but what she terms a Compulsion, and she has been working her way in secret through the local supply of graves in order to keep her abilities in check. It turns out our heroine is actually an estate agent, although she doesn't manage to turn up for work very often in the course of this book and one does wonder how long she will hang onto the job at this rate! It can be surprisingly useful to have access to lists of the local desirable properties when you are trying to track down where vampires might be hiding out, however, and Toni meets her Designated Vampire Love Interest when he employs her to find him a house -- with suitable cellars.
I have to admit that said love interest constitutes one of my two main gripes about this book: the 'romance' between the two of them carries no conviction whatsoever, largely because Oscar is completely two-dimensional. The one bit of independent character he gets to display comes right at the beginning of their relationship, when he tries to use his powers to send her away for her own good (which, as it turns out, was very much justified) -- and Toni treats that not as chivalry but as an outrage, in a sudden swing that felt more like a plot device than a convincing train of thought. But of course they are back together again within hours, because she finds him sexually irresistible. (There is one skippable sex scene and after that, fortunately, it's all off-page.)
But I did find it impossible to see what on earth she sees in him: every single other male character in the book -- from elderly Farmer Hugh to sturdy and friendly Peter to 17th-century Bredon the zombie to Kit the drug-dealing ex-boyfriend to Henry the gay black fencing-double who collects swords -- is more interesting and more sympathetic than Oscar, and since she apparently has a record of short and disastrous relationships I spent most of the book expecting her to realise this and dump him. But she doesn't. Points at least for loyalty and consistency, I suppose -- an outcome I'd normally be all in favour of, but Oscar is just so completely cardboard that it's hard even to visualise him as the credible warrior commander we are told he is supposed to be after we see him fighting with super-speed.
He isn't especially dislikable, as vampires go; as a character he just manages to have no personality to speak of other than Designated Love Interest, he comes across as incredibly juvenile, and there is no 'chemistry' between them, which is awkward since wanting to be with Oscar is supposed to be Toni's main motive for getting mixed up in all this. He is just a plot point, and not very convincing as one where I was concerned :-(
However, Benedict Akil, the Vampire Eric, was the character I least wanted her to leave Oscar for (and the one who seemed the most likely, since he also has the sex-on-legs effect), and mercifully she doesn't... or at least (bearing in mind the Sookie Stackhouse precedent) not in the course of this book. I could actually like Benedict a lot as a pragmatically ruthless and amorally competent character -- and a lot more interesting than Oscar -- but *not* as the love-interest, please! (At the end of the book he actually tries to bribe Toni to dump Oscar and move away, and I was in favour of her doing that ;-P)
In terms of world-building there is an interesting set-up, and one that is established in what feels like a natural way, without any sense of info-dump: Europe and America have adopted diametrically reversed laws so far as vampires are concerned, thanks to a saintly vampire doctor in Heidelburg who was busy using his powers to cure children with cancer, versus the Mason-Schelling Act in the US, also known as the Stake-on-Sight Act. The result, for the purposes of this book, is that some of the nastiest Chicago gangster-mob vampires have moved over here and are trying to stake out territories in England against the opposition of the local bloodsuckers; Toni stumbles into a vampire civil war.
There are no 'vegetarian' vampires and no 'True Blood' substitutes here -- everyone drinks from humans. The difference between the 'good' and 'bad' vampires, for plot purposes, is that the 'good' vampires have a human coterie and generally feed on those in a reciprocal protective (and, it is suggested, sexual or quasi-sexual) relationship, while the 'bad' vampires kill people in the process. Although to be fair, I think the villains only start killing and draining random locals once Toni and her group have destroyed most of the coterie they brought along with them...
Toni scored for me at the start of the book when her reaction to being attacked was the very sensible one of calling the police, then deliberately screaming as loudly as possible for as long as possible until the rescue party located her -- she is an estate agent, not an action heroine, although later in the book she manages some rather desperate bonking on the head with a shovel. (It turns out in real life this is harder than it looks, especially when the shovel is large and heavy and you have never tried anything of the sort before.) When she does fight her weapons of last resort are zombies, although since they tend to get dismembered by vampires it's better not to use the corpses of people you know and are still grieving for...
A number of people do die in this book, despite the general spoof/humour slant, and several of them are people we've come to care for, despite relatively brief appearances. I'm afraid I rather got the impression that I cared more about their demise than Toni did, although some of the later text makes it clear that she is *supposed* to have been upset ("Those people killed Amelia. They killed Hugh. [...] They slaughtered that girl in the pumping station and Hugh's cowman and his housekeeper. How can you even think of letting them off?"); it just doesn't really come across in the moment.
The one that really rang false to me is when old Hugh Bonner and his entire household gets slaughtered, and she calmly "picked my way over two dead people, the ashes of one ex-vampire, four dead dogs and a whole lot of bluebottles. They worried me a lot less than the prospect of Peter joining them" -- I mean yes, it's logical that the priority is to save the living, but her initial reaction was "I got the impression that Hugh had ordered his last brandy at the Black Mitre. It seemed a shame", followed by bursting into tears instead on the discovery that Peter has been kidnapped. She has known Hugh her entire life; she has only known Peter for a few days. Somehow I was expecting... well, a little more reaction. (And yes, I know she is feeling responsible for abandoning Peter, while harmless old Hugh's messy demise is none of her fault -- it's all *logical* -- but it just felt as if she ought to have been more rooted in the world of her friends and neighbours and less englamoured by her new undead allies.)
By and large the book treads a pretty sure-footed line between humour and horror/thriller without allowing the former to undermine the effectiveness of the latter; comparing it again with Anita Blake, I'd say it's less hard-boiled in both respects, which I think is intentional in tone. The original Anita Blake books were basically Raymond Chandler/Mickey Spillane with the undead, while this is more Agatha Raisin. "I wasn't much as a military tactician, but what I lacked in strategy, I made up for in overkill."
And as I mentioned, I liked Benedict as a character: he may have stereotypically long vampire hair and big muscles and Sexy Powers, but he is intelligent, pragmatic, and ruthlessly good at his job -- and unfortunately has the tendency to make Oscar look like an inept idiot by comparison.
I enjoyed this book a lot, probably more than I am making it sound; I gather there are sequels in the pipeline (the ending is certainly less than decisive in terms of resolving things), and while I don't know if I shall read them or indeed ever set eyes on them, I'm not surprised the publisher feels there is a market. In a world full of knock-off Vampire Romances(TM) this is a breath of fresh air, with interesting snippets of lore (e.g. you need to know the name of a corpse in order to call it back to life -- echoes of the old idea that you should never give your true name to a fairy creature -- and it's *tidal* water, not running water, that discommodes a vampire).
The author's afterword explains a lot: she did in fact set out to write a brief erotic spoof ("I decided my unexpected heroine could shag her uninvited two-dimensional toothy blonde[sic] love interest for a few pages and then I would get back to my paid work" -- which sums up Cardboard Oscar, I'm afraid!) and accidentally ended up with an actual plot ("Could it be a novel? Could it even be a whodunit?") It does not, however, explain my second chief irritation with the book, beyond the stale love interest: the narrator's implausible fixation on things and people being English!
Apparently Alice James, who wrote the book, was born in Staffordshire and currently lives in Oxfordshire... so why on earth has she managed to write a book that sounds as if it was authored by an American who thinks the 'British accent' is just so cute? I'd assumed that this had to be a US author trying to write in an exoticised foreign setting for the benefit of her back-home audience, but James really has no excuse :-p
It starts off with Toni comparing a zombie's height to "my short English ancestors back in the 1750s" (as opposed to other nations of the era who were taller...?) and informing us that "his English accent could have cut glass" (in this part of the world, people have English accents *by default*... it's known as England), and then doing the same thing with her vampires: Oscar has "deliciously English vowels" (again, what exactly was she expecting -- Transylvanian vowels from a vampire, possibly?) and Benedict has "a very deep, very English voice", and compounds the offence by initially sounding like a fanfic version of Ron Weasley.
We also get observations like "our conversation had never run past general pleasantries and observations on the weather. We were English, after all", "They did that very English thing of standing up until I sat down", "We really needed to get to first names soon. Still, we were both English and it had only been five years..." and "This is England, you know. We don't see [the sun] very often, full stop. We get like three sunny days a year". In isolation, any one of these might pass muster without jarring, but the fact that the author for some reason keeps harping on about it makes her come across as an outsider -- like Peter Grant being perpetually surprised in Foxglove Summer when yet another native of the Welsh borders turns out to be 'white'.
I suppose there is some logic to her surprise that the thug who attacks her turns out to have "an English voice. A Birmingham voice to be exact", since she goes on to speculate about Chicago hitmen... although the *reader* isn't told about the relevance of Chicago and vampires until several scenes later, and in fact doesn't even know that vampires are going to enter the story at the time of what appears to be a random attack, so the distinction appears entirely weird. (What one would naturally observe under the circumstances is that the attacker had a strong Brummie accent, not that he had an 'English' accent!)
As I said, I ended up assuming that the author was obviously an American writing for the American market, as I couldn't think of anyone else who would consider the subject so bizarrely noteworthy :-p
(Also, the past tense of 'to slay' is 'we slew', not 'we slayed', or at least not in the contexts in which James uses it: "Not if you were one of those we slayed in the house"/"They thought to control an army of the dead, but we slayed both master and servants".)
It turns out that the heroine is unusually short -- "five foot in my stockinged feet" -- and has curly hair, as well. (But 'copper curls and emerald eyes' rather than Anita's dark colouring, which isn't really a score in my book; if the author wanted to make her red-haired, she could simply have been ginger like the rest of us :-p)
The selling point for this book proves to be that the zombies are the good guys, for a change. (And generally on the losing side against vampires, since the latter have the advantage of speed and intelligence -- which makes the ability to command the undead less over-powered, even if you can raise recent victims out of a sense of burning outrage.) Indeed, we meet one of the most attractive characters in the book in the first chapter, when Toni (whose real name is 'Lavington', although nobody ever questions this!) raises him from his grave as part of an exercise in raising every single corpse in the cemetery.
In her case, being a necromancer is not an official profession, but what she terms a Compulsion, and she has been working her way in secret through the local supply of graves in order to keep her abilities in check. It turns out our heroine is actually an estate agent, although she doesn't manage to turn up for work very often in the course of this book and one does wonder how long she will hang onto the job at this rate! It can be surprisingly useful to have access to lists of the local desirable properties when you are trying to track down where vampires might be hiding out, however, and Toni meets her Designated Vampire Love Interest when he employs her to find him a house -- with suitable cellars.
I have to admit that said love interest constitutes one of my two main gripes about this book: the 'romance' between the two of them carries no conviction whatsoever, largely because Oscar is completely two-dimensional. The one bit of independent character he gets to display comes right at the beginning of their relationship, when he tries to use his powers to send her away for her own good (which, as it turns out, was very much justified) -- and Toni treats that not as chivalry but as an outrage, in a sudden swing that felt more like a plot device than a convincing train of thought. But of course they are back together again within hours, because she finds him sexually irresistible. (There is one skippable sex scene and after that, fortunately, it's all off-page.)
But I did find it impossible to see what on earth she sees in him: every single other male character in the book -- from elderly Farmer Hugh to sturdy and friendly Peter to 17th-century Bredon the zombie to Kit the drug-dealing ex-boyfriend to Henry the gay black fencing-double who collects swords -- is more interesting and more sympathetic than Oscar, and since she apparently has a record of short and disastrous relationships I spent most of the book expecting her to realise this and dump him. But she doesn't. Points at least for loyalty and consistency, I suppose -- an outcome I'd normally be all in favour of, but Oscar is just so completely cardboard that it's hard even to visualise him as the credible warrior commander we are told he is supposed to be after we see him fighting with super-speed.
He isn't especially dislikable, as vampires go; as a character he just manages to have no personality to speak of other than Designated Love Interest, he comes across as incredibly juvenile, and there is no 'chemistry' between them, which is awkward since wanting to be with Oscar is supposed to be Toni's main motive for getting mixed up in all this. He is just a plot point, and not very convincing as one where I was concerned :-(
However, Benedict Akil, the Vampire Eric, was the character I least wanted her to leave Oscar for (and the one who seemed the most likely, since he also has the sex-on-legs effect), and mercifully she doesn't... or at least (bearing in mind the Sookie Stackhouse precedent) not in the course of this book. I could actually like Benedict a lot as a pragmatically ruthless and amorally competent character -- and a lot more interesting than Oscar -- but *not* as the love-interest, please! (At the end of the book he actually tries to bribe Toni to dump Oscar and move away, and I was in favour of her doing that ;-P)
In terms of world-building there is an interesting set-up, and one that is established in what feels like a natural way, without any sense of info-dump: Europe and America have adopted diametrically reversed laws so far as vampires are concerned, thanks to a saintly vampire doctor in Heidelburg who was busy using his powers to cure children with cancer, versus the Mason-Schelling Act in the US, also known as the Stake-on-Sight Act. The result, for the purposes of this book, is that some of the nastiest Chicago gangster-mob vampires have moved over here and are trying to stake out territories in England against the opposition of the local bloodsuckers; Toni stumbles into a vampire civil war.
There are no 'vegetarian' vampires and no 'True Blood' substitutes here -- everyone drinks from humans. The difference between the 'good' and 'bad' vampires, for plot purposes, is that the 'good' vampires have a human coterie and generally feed on those in a reciprocal protective (and, it is suggested, sexual or quasi-sexual) relationship, while the 'bad' vampires kill people in the process. Although to be fair, I think the villains only start killing and draining random locals once Toni and her group have destroyed most of the coterie they brought along with them...
Toni scored for me at the start of the book when her reaction to being attacked was the very sensible one of calling the police, then deliberately screaming as loudly as possible for as long as possible until the rescue party located her -- she is an estate agent, not an action heroine, although later in the book she manages some rather desperate bonking on the head with a shovel. (It turns out in real life this is harder than it looks, especially when the shovel is large and heavy and you have never tried anything of the sort before.) When she does fight her weapons of last resort are zombies, although since they tend to get dismembered by vampires it's better not to use the corpses of people you know and are still grieving for...
A number of people do die in this book, despite the general spoof/humour slant, and several of them are people we've come to care for, despite relatively brief appearances. I'm afraid I rather got the impression that I cared more about their demise than Toni did, although some of the later text makes it clear that she is *supposed* to have been upset ("Those people killed Amelia. They killed Hugh. [...] They slaughtered that girl in the pumping station and Hugh's cowman and his housekeeper. How can you even think of letting them off?"); it just doesn't really come across in the moment.
The one that really rang false to me is when old Hugh Bonner and his entire household gets slaughtered, and she calmly "picked my way over two dead people, the ashes of one ex-vampire, four dead dogs and a whole lot of bluebottles. They worried me a lot less than the prospect of Peter joining them" -- I mean yes, it's logical that the priority is to save the living, but her initial reaction was "I got the impression that Hugh had ordered his last brandy at the Black Mitre. It seemed a shame", followed by bursting into tears instead on the discovery that Peter has been kidnapped. She has known Hugh her entire life; she has only known Peter for a few days. Somehow I was expecting... well, a little more reaction. (And yes, I know she is feeling responsible for abandoning Peter, while harmless old Hugh's messy demise is none of her fault -- it's all *logical* -- but it just felt as if she ought to have been more rooted in the world of her friends and neighbours and less englamoured by her new undead allies.)
By and large the book treads a pretty sure-footed line between humour and horror/thriller without allowing the former to undermine the effectiveness of the latter; comparing it again with Anita Blake, I'd say it's less hard-boiled in both respects, which I think is intentional in tone. The original Anita Blake books were basically Raymond Chandler/Mickey Spillane with the undead, while this is more Agatha Raisin. "I wasn't much as a military tactician, but what I lacked in strategy, I made up for in overkill."
And as I mentioned, I liked Benedict as a character: he may have stereotypically long vampire hair and big muscles and Sexy Powers, but he is intelligent, pragmatic, and ruthlessly good at his job -- and unfortunately has the tendency to make Oscar look like an inept idiot by comparison.
Oscar look[sic] conflicted but then shrugged. "[...]I am more grateful than I can say."
"If only that were true," Benedict interrupted. "Now that's out of the way, perhaps you could tell me why you are standing here pontificating instead of trying to track down that rest of this wretched band of incompetents?"
"I will do my best," said Oscar, and vanished up the stairs fast enough to spray me with blood as he passed. Benedict watched him go with a satisfied air.
"Do you really think Oscar can track them down?" I asked, largely to distract myself.
"God, no," he answered. "I shouldn't think so for a minute. I just find him extremely irritating."
"I have had weeks of this, and the lies I am pasting over these events are wearing tissue thin. Modern forensics are not exactly on our side; I do not think we could stay out of the spotlight if one of the local constabulary started bandying words like 'serial killer' around the station. Correct me if I am wrong, but please think about it first, because I very rarely am."
I enjoyed this book a lot, probably more than I am making it sound; I gather there are sequels in the pipeline (the ending is certainly less than decisive in terms of resolving things), and while I don't know if I shall read them or indeed ever set eyes on them, I'm not surprised the publisher feels there is a market. In a world full of knock-off Vampire Romances(TM) this is a breath of fresh air, with interesting snippets of lore (e.g. you need to know the name of a corpse in order to call it back to life -- echoes of the old idea that you should never give your true name to a fairy creature -- and it's *tidal* water, not running water, that discommodes a vampire).
The author's afterword explains a lot: she did in fact set out to write a brief erotic spoof ("I decided my unexpected heroine could shag her uninvited two-dimensional toothy blonde[sic] love interest for a few pages and then I would get back to my paid work" -- which sums up Cardboard Oscar, I'm afraid!) and accidentally ended up with an actual plot ("Could it be a novel? Could it even be a whodunit?") It does not, however, explain my second chief irritation with the book, beyond the stale love interest: the narrator's implausible fixation on things and people being English!
Apparently Alice James, who wrote the book, was born in Staffordshire and currently lives in Oxfordshire... so why on earth has she managed to write a book that sounds as if it was authored by an American who thinks the 'British accent' is just so cute? I'd assumed that this had to be a US author trying to write in an exoticised foreign setting for the benefit of her back-home audience, but James really has no excuse :-p
It starts off with Toni comparing a zombie's height to "my short English ancestors back in the 1750s" (as opposed to other nations of the era who were taller...?) and informing us that "his English accent could have cut glass" (in this part of the world, people have English accents *by default*... it's known as England), and then doing the same thing with her vampires: Oscar has "deliciously English vowels" (again, what exactly was she expecting -- Transylvanian vowels from a vampire, possibly?) and Benedict has "a very deep, very English voice", and compounds the offence by initially sounding like a fanfic version of Ron Weasley.
We also get observations like "our conversation had never run past general pleasantries and observations on the weather. We were English, after all", "They did that very English thing of standing up until I sat down", "We really needed to get to first names soon. Still, we were both English and it had only been five years..." and "This is England, you know. We don't see [the sun] very often, full stop. We get like three sunny days a year". In isolation, any one of these might pass muster without jarring, but the fact that the author for some reason keeps harping on about it makes her come across as an outsider -- like Peter Grant being perpetually surprised in Foxglove Summer when yet another native of the Welsh borders turns out to be 'white'.
I suppose there is some logic to her surprise that the thug who attacks her turns out to have "an English voice. A Birmingham voice to be exact", since she goes on to speculate about Chicago hitmen... although the *reader* isn't told about the relevance of Chicago and vampires until several scenes later, and in fact doesn't even know that vampires are going to enter the story at the time of what appears to be a random attack, so the distinction appears entirely weird. (What one would naturally observe under the circumstances is that the attacker had a strong Brummie accent, not that he had an 'English' accent!)
As I said, I ended up assuming that the author was obviously an American writing for the American market, as I couldn't think of anyone else who would consider the subject so bizarrely noteworthy :-p
(Also, the past tense of 'to slay' is 'we slew', not 'we slayed', or at least not in the contexts in which James uses it: "Not if you were one of those we slayed in the house"/"They thought to control an army of the dead, but we slayed both master and servants".)
no subject
Date: 2022-10-12 08:05 pm (UTC)I'm guessing an American publisher may have had some influence? But it still sounds silly.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-13 11:44 pm (UTC)It just seemed really fourth-wall-breaking to me.