Book #48 (This one's lengthy)

Happy Hour of the Damned
by Mark Henry

I had a unique experience in reading this book: for the first time in my life, out of all the books I have read, this book was so bad that it kept me awake at night. I actually couldn't sleep because I couldn't stop thinking about how annoyed I was at the author, at the characters -- and, I suppose, at myself for actually deciding to read this wad of tripe.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we? Hold on -- this may take a while.

The beginning of a novel should do two things: it should catch your attention in some way, hook you in, and it should introduce the most basic elements of the story -- the setting and the characters. This book's hook is: the character is a bitch. That's right, because everybody who reads fantasy and paranormal romance is a fan of the hard-nosed supercilious bitch archetype, aren't we? Well, no, but that is only the first clue of the author's incompetence. So we're supposed to be amused and, I assume, pleasantly shocked and even titillated by the -- er -- heroine's abrasive and thorny conversation with her equally bitchy friends. Unfortunately, this is not an episode of Sex in the City; bitchiness, while sometimes -- vaguely -- amusing, is certainly not going to make me want to read 300 pages of the same. As for the setting, it is cliche -- a hidden world of supernatural beings in the heart of a city, in this case in Seattle -- but somewhat interesting in that it is in an undead bar. The bar scene is ruined, however, by the people whose company we are forced to keep: namely the main character, Amanda Feral (Yeah -- I buy that name. Of course I do.) and her circle of shallow, obnoxious, fashion-obsessed undead twits. From the first scene, when Amanda brings up the strange weather as a topic of conversation, and then loudly complains that the conversation is boring all of two (interrupted) sentences later, I hated these people.

Now, that isn't necessarily a bad thing. There have been books that have very successfully created main characters that one loves to hate -- Pennywise the clown springs to mind, as does Hannibal Lecter -- but there are a few special requirements for those characters. First of all, they have to be the bad guy. We don't root for the one we love to hate, we want them to fail. If they are going to be the good guy -- as Hannibal Lecter becomes in the later books, to some extent -- then there must be something about them that is sympathetic, something that actually puts us on their side. Amanda doesn't have that. It amazes me that anybody can stand her company, but of course, her friends are just as shallow, narcissistic, and overwhelmingly obnoxious as she is, so they have that in common. Unfortunately, I am not the same kind of person, and so I don't admire her superficiality nor her condescending attitude; in fact, I want to slap her, except, of course, I don't care enough about her to want to improve her behavior by beating her bloody. The second requirement for an anti-hero like Hannibal Lecter is they must be consummate villains. People admire perfection, even if it is perfect evil: Hannibal Lecter is the ultimate serial killer, the most vile and villainous murderer imaginable, which makes him cool; Pennywise is the ultimate demon (Though Randall Flagg from The Stand is right up there with him) and so there is an element of awe in reading about these characters; we are impressed by the depths to which they can sink.

But Amanda? Amanda isn't even a good bitch. For starters, her bitchiness is neither clever nor stinging; she tends to fall back on calling someone names, rather than actually zeroing in on a deep insecurity, as a true bitch does. Here is her defense against condescending nicknames:

"First off, you two. You two must shove the pet names up your asses. Second, it's Amanda Feral, and if that's too difficult for you, then don't refer to me at all."

Here is her ultimately devastating comeback after the villain -- because all of the characters in this book are shallow, superficial bitches; I kept expecting the fights to devolve to hair-pulling and scratching, but I suppose the author couldn't do that because it would have been sorta funny -- calls her fat:

"Fat? You motherfucker! At least I'm not some crazy lesbian werewolf's impotent little chew toy. You're a worthless piece of shit, you know that?"

Wow. Quite the zingers, there. I don't know how I'd be able to look myself in the mirror after taking a verbal tongue-lashing like that. Of course, after she delivers that soul-tearing barb, the villain literally crumples up in tears, holding his hands over his ears and saying, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" But for me, as a real person and not one of the hollow imitations of same in Mark Henry's feeble mind, I found Amanda's insults simply -- boring. Which does not fit well with a character who is supposed to be glamorous, fabulous, and endlessly entertaining, the life of the party and the center of attention. Which is why the book didn't work.

The one good thing -- seriously, the only good thing in this book -- had to do with the larger setting, as in the concepts for the undead and their world. Henry actually has some pretty good ideas. Amanda and her friend Wendy are zombies, or abovegrounders -- clever nickname -- which means they eat human flesh. And drink alcohol, even though there is absolutely no logical or creative explanation for that; it seems he thought to himself, "They have to eat human flesh, and can't eat anything else. But they have to go to bars. I know! They can eat two things: people, and alcohol." And then when that little voice inside said, "Wait, how the hell does that work?" he put his hands over his ears and said, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" But as dead people they don't heal wounds, so they have to be careful not to get damaged -- there's an other clever moment when Amanda's friend tries to fix a gash on Amanda's arm with that liquid leather repair goop they sell on TV. The villain of the piece turns out to be Persephone, which is fairly clever -- though some explanation of her presence in this particular part of the mortal world would have been welcome -- and the bar where the climactic fight scene happens is actually the grade above clever, intriguing: it is called Mortuary, and it is decorated to give you the feeling that you are a rat in a morgue. It is several stories tall, all open space, with the main bar under a 30-foot steel gurney with a proportional (fake) cadaver on top, under a sheet that drapes down to the ground; brown liquid (brandy) bubbles upwards into an IV tube leading under the sheet, and red drips out the other side into a basin. The morgue drawers, accessible by elevator, are the VIP rooms, like private boxes at a theater. It's an intriguing concept. Too bad the author is too incompetent to do anything with it beyond fill it with a blood bath for the final fight scene.

Okay, so that's the setting and the characters. Now let's discuss the plot. (Don't worry -- this will be quicker.)

There isn't one.

Well, that isn't completely true. It's just that the plot is impossible to follow, because in between important events are pages and pages of bitchy attitude, bad toilet humor, poorly done sex scenes, and descriptions of high fashion -- I suppose the author does those well, a positive aspect that was lost on me since I don't care what designer somebody is wearing. By the time the next important event rolls around, and makes reference to the prior important event, I had forgotten the previous event -- but Lord knows I wasn't going to go back through pages of boring superficial bullshit to find the previous reference. So when Amanda recognizes the man over there as Shane, and I think, "Wait -- who the hell was Shane?" I had to keep reading until there was enough context to place him. When Amanda realizes that there is the blue van again, and I didn't remember the first time the blue van appeared, I just kept on reading, even though the first reference never actually came back to me. I didn't care that I didn't see the significance of the blue van's appearances, because, you see, there was another problem with the important plot moments: they weren't important. The blue van? It was the camera crew from an undead reality show following Amanda around, so it wasn't important. The disappearance of her succubus bitch-friend, which started the whole "plot?" She hadn't actually disappeared, and the "Help me" text message had been a red herring. So that wasn't important. The one apparent love interest for Amanda, her human therapist from before her zombification? She ate him. He wasn't important. The plot, it turned out, was as empty and superficial and pointless as was the main character herself.

So what's left? Ah yes, the writing. So because I am above stooping to the level of grammar nazi, I will not mention his run-on sentences, nor his inability to differentiate between "affect" and "effect" or "instant" and "instance." After all, a competent editor should have caught those -- clearly the editor is also an idiot. But I knew that, since the author thanks his editor for believing in the book and getting it sold, and only an idiot would believe this crap should be sold. No, my problems with the writing fall into three main categories: it is not funny, it is far too precious and gimmicky, and it is completely inappropriate for the audience and genre.

First of all: not funny. Most of the humor relies on Amanda's bitchiness, which, of course, is both poorly done and inherently unfunny, so this book's laughs are pretty much doomed from the start. But then to top that off, the author actually uses toilet humor: when a ghoul -- who can only eat human flesh and alcohol, remember -- ingests normal food, it gets explosive diarrhea. Which might have been almost funny, in an immature gross way, when it first happens to her. Except it keeps happening. At least ten times. Because diarrhea is funny. Really, really funny. He also uses gay stereotype humor -- not well, of course -- and he actually goes so low that he makes fun of a Korean man's accent. Really. Amanda laughs at him because he says l's as r's.

How can I even respond to that? I think I'll just move on.

Next problem with the writing: precious and gimmicky. He uses epigrams at the opening of each chapter, but he wrote them himself. And, as they are ostensibly taken from a series of undead lifestyle guides for the Seattle area, written for such shallow fashionable idiots as the main characters -- in fact, written by one of the main characters, according to the narration -- they sound exactly like the regular narration. So it's like each chapter starts with an excerpt of itself. On top of that, he uses footnotes: whenever he feels the urge to add a witty comment or explanation of the text, he footnotes it and has the narrator expand or reply to something she herself said in the main text. Which is pretty stupid to begin with, but is made worse by the fact that the footnotes are even more irritating than the actual storyline. Though there was an interesting confessional moment or two when the author apologized for his own bad writing: at one point, Amanda says that things got serious, and then in the footnote she said "They'd better be, to justify the use of that adjective." The adjective "serious," that is. The one the author himself had the narrator use. The only good thing the footnotes did for me was give me a chance to pause in reading the main story. Sadly, the best part of the pause was the moment when my eye moved down the page, and the moment when it moved back up; the actual reading part of the footnotes was no less annoying than the story itself. And because two ridiculously bad gimmicks -- did you think I was done pointing out problems here? Oh, I could go on for days -- are never enough, the author also puts in large, distracting insets that give the recipes for the various cocktails the characters drink, as if I care enough about them to want to imitate their alcoholic intake, and some of the music they listen to, which, since they are electronica-loving club-goers (as is the author, one assumes) is nothing but annoying, pretentious, repetitive, noisy shit.

Let's see, now, I've forgotten the third problem I had with his writing. Let me scroll up and check. Oh right! It's completely inappropriate for the genre and audience. As I said when I started this, so long ago, the readers of paranormal horror/romance are not generally admirers of the bitchy club-hopping fashionista set, and so the narrative voice is annoying in every possible way, but apart from that, this book is clearly written by a man who does not know how women talk, or how women think, and despite being married, has no interest in trying to find out. Which would be fine, except the main character here is a woman, as is the majority of the audience, from what I can tell. The female character talks like a man. She cusses like a man, she describes things -- particularly objects and moments related to sex -- like a man, she has a man's sense of humor. Amanda thinks the poop jokes are funny. She insults her friends, trying to embarrass them in public, and laughs about it when she succeeds. When she checks out guys, she looks immediately at their crotch; when she describes the sex act she focuses on position and duration. The romantic elements of the book are completely overwhelmed by graphic, detailed, loving descriptions of excrement and of cannibalism; the man clearly has an oral/anal fixation, and the accompanying maturity level -- isn't that stage connected to two-year-olds? Maybe it's younger. Finally, the female main character consistently and repetitively refers to women by genital epithets -- the equivalent of a man calling other men "swingin' dicks" -- and inhuman objects, a portal between worlds, an object buried in a hole, with vaginal/anal imagery. I don't care how fashionably slutty the woman is supposed to be, it is men who are fascinated by the holes and putting things in them, not women. Actually, it is not even men: it is little tiny children, which some men -- the kind of men I want nothing to do with -- resemble far too closely.

Last night I found myself unable to sleep because I couldn't stop thinking about how annoying Amanda Feral was, nor could I stop counting the ways this book is badly written. When I woke up early this morning, I had to drop everything else just to finish this book, because I did not want to spend another day reading it. I'm glad I did finish it, because it feels like an accomplishment, almost an act of heroism for a lover of good literature. But I feel terrible that I added even one tally to this man's total sales. I have a tremendous urge to use this book for a symbolic act of opposition to all bad writing, especially bad writing that gets published and sold -- maybe nail it to a sign that reads "Bad Books Make Baby Jesus Cry" or track down the author and slap him with his own novel -- but I think it best if I just let this go, and move on.