Oh, joy, today’s chapter is going to focus heavily on Matthew and Diana’s date.  Because that’s really what I want to read about.  A whole page devoted to wondering what kind of food a vampire can eat, but still not a whisper of a hint on who is ‘forbidding’ creatures from going in to politics.

Near as I can tell, this book has two potential plots: the magic book that everyone wants but no one can get, and the murders.  Of the two, I’d prefer the murders, because there’s no urgency to the book.  It’s just there, missing, as it’s been missing all along.  If it stays missing, nothing changes, and we’ve not heard about anything that would add in a deadline.  The murders, however, are indicative of something actually going on, some plot that needs to be figured out.

And yet, this book has systematically avoided talking about either of those plots in favor of retreading the same tired passages about how Diana is being watched (but not obstructed, harassed, or harmed) and how Matthew is so hot and attracted to her.  There’s maybe two chapters worth of material in those concepts, but they’ve been repeated and padded out to eleven chapters.  And that’s just so far.

We spend so much time on this fucking date that we even follow Diana through her entire grocery shopping trip.  She once again compares Matthew to a wolf, and really, where is this coming from?  What’s the vampire/wolf connection?  Did the author just decide to senselessly meld the two creatures-du-jour without realizing that there’s not actually a connection between them?

And now we follow Diana through getting dressed for the date.  I am banging my head on the desk just to relieve the boredom.  She stares in the mirror again.  Seriously, I have four seasons of Castle that I just got; this book is not encouraging me to avoid the seductive pleasures of television (and Nathan Fillion).

My chest fluttered at the sound, as if this were a date. I squashed the thought immediately.

You invited him to dinner, out of the blue, without even the thin excuse of talking about the book or the murders or anything else.  You then proceeded to spend several pages going on about clothes and hairdos and getting ready.  If you don’t think this is a date then, pray tell, what do you think is going on?

Matthew even shows up with roses.

I had seen that on TV or read it in a book.

His lips curved into a smile. “Forget most of what you think you know about vampires, Diana.

So if we’re admitting that the books and TV shows are full of bunk, then can we get rid of that idiocy about how all vampires are walking piles of hotness and sex?

Then we get to endure the fascinating saga of “Diana and Matthew eating appetizers.”  It’s enthralling, I assure you.

Matthew points out once again that he wants to eat Diana.  She Of The Overactive Adrenal Glands has no reaction to this death threat except blushing.  Yeah.  He says he wants to suck out her blood, and she’s mildly flattered, then moves on.

I swear, it’s like this book exists somewhere in a pocket of its own logic, and the only way to figure out what is important or not is by gauging Diana’s reactions, because you as hell can’t tell by what’s going.  In this pocket of other-logic, getting eaten by vampires is cool, but owls are the spawn of the devil.  I’m sure we’ll learn many more bits of other-logic as we go on.

She said vampires will consume only blood, because it’s all you need to survive. But that isn’t true, is it?”

Matthew’s eyes narrowed, and his tone was suddenly frosty. “No. You need water to survive.

Blood, of course, has no water in it.  At all.  Seriously, that stuff is solid as rock and not at all classified as a liquid.  Nope.  There ain’t a drop of water to be had in your blood.  It’s practically dust being blown through your veins.

GOD DAMNIT, SMART PEOPLE, WHY DON’T YOU START ACTING SMART?!?

“Black hats, bats, brooms.” It was the unholy trinity of witchcraft lore,

…

I…just…I don’t even…

Is this what the book thinks counts as ‘bad stories’ about witches?

Here’s an unholy trinity for you: orgies with the devil, spells made from the skin of freshly peeled babies, and curses that cause pestilence and famine.  That’s what witches used to be accused of.  No one gives a flying fuck if you like bats; they demonized witches by painting them as cannibals. 

You know how I know all this?  I’m working on an urban fantasy book, too.  Do you know how many books about witchcraft and the history of the occult I have in my room at this very moment?  Six.  I scour used book stores for them, I travel three hours on a train to ‘the big library’ to get their books, and I look through online repositories of academic articles.  I’ve taken classes on the history of myths and witchcraft.  (Okay, that one was before I started writing, but I still have my notes.)

Basically, just because something is a work of fantasy doesn’t mean you can’t do research.  And this goes double for any author that wants to make ties to real-world events.

And to not only spit in the face of academic research, but to reduce countless cases of abuse and atrocities to the level of some Halloween decorations?  Shame on you, book.  Shame.

Matthew and Diana titillate us with the promise of talking about what powers and abilities vampires and witches really have, but instead they just spout of flowery sentences about denial and comparing sunlight to knowledge and all of this tells us absolutely nothing solid.  Also, apparently creatures are just super-special, but in ways that aren’t visibly obvious, and yet they attract attention and make humans nervous just by walking down the street.  I guess they reek of specialness.  Uhg, how boring, to take legends and monsters and reduce them nothing more than a refined version of “you’re just jealous because I’m smarter than you.”  There’s no actual tension here.  There’s nothing to really overcome.  There’s no conflict.

Damnit, the point of a story is conflict.  It’s why Angel was popular enough to get his own spinoff show.  We don’t want vampires who just sit around and go “yeah, I don’t actually have any problems.”  We want soul-rending, torturous angst!  We want something to overcome!  We want tragedy that has to be surmounted!  That’s what got these stories popular in the first place, and it’s all being watered down until the complaining is still there, but all the reasons to complain are long gone. 

All we’re left with is even more pages of Diana telling us about the food and the wine, as if that’s somehow supposed to be important.

Then they sit around and talk about what they smell like.  No, really.  It’s every bit as creepy as it sounds.

By the by, why is it that in every scene like this, people always end up smelling like plants?  Why can’t they smell like…people?  Or at least something new.  I mean, he’s a vampire, why can’t he say “you smell like opals and endorphins”?  Something not normally smell-able to humans.  You’ve got a super-sniffer; use it.

Cupping the nut in my palms

Yes, I have the dirty mind of a middle-schooler.  🙂

blah, blah, blah, more pages talking about wine and smells.

Almost three pages to bantering about Matthew’s age.  He’s about 1500 years old.

They start talking about what Matthew was doing with the magic book 150 years ago, then get sidetracked by Darwin, because this book has never met a tangent that it hasn’t tried to chase like some drunken frat boy desperately trying to get laid.

Maybe Matthew was right and magic really was in everything. It was in Newton’s theory of gravity, and it might be in Darwin’s theory of evolution, too.

So by magic you mean…science.  Because, really, in the entire conversation preceding this, you didn’t come up with one single un-scientific note.

“When I read Darwin and saw how he seemed to explore the alchemical theory of transmutation through biology

Do you know how anything works, book?

Anyway, thinking about Darwin got him to thinking about the legendary magic book, so he started looking for it 150 years ago and couldn’t find it.  Really, that’s it.  He wanted it for idle curiosity and it was missing without anything specifically linking him to that spell that was placed on it.  How utterly disappointing book.  You made me wade through your stupidity for that?

the alchemist can help one substance change into another, creating new forms of life.”

“That sounds like evolution,” I said flatly.

I feel like we should keep a running list of all the topics this book just doesn’t understand.

I mean, this is up there with saying that evolution = “humans are descendent from monkeys.”  It’s in the ballpark of the right idea, close enough that you could excuse a layman for saying it, but not two characters set up as being uber-special-smartie-pants.

Becoming a vampire makes us nearly immortal, it makes most of us rich

Do vampires shit money in this world? 

Matthew mentions that there’s now a timecrunch on finding the book, but he won’t tell Diana what it is, because this is the book of people not explaining anything.  Instead he wants her to come by tomorrow so he can show her in his lab.  Oh, joy, I’m sure we’ll be getting pages and pages of description and a backstory on every fucking microscope in the place.

Then Matthew notes that the lock on her door is loose.

“You should have them look at that,” he said, still jiggling the door’s hardware. “It might not close properly until you do.”

When I looked up from the door, an emotion I couldn’t name flitted across his face.

Yeah, I’m going to go with that emotion being “yay, I can totally sneak into her room while she’s asleep!”

Diana kisses Matthew on the cheek on impulse, then spends more time being worked up over that than she was about his saying that he wants to fucking eat her.  This progresses to a short make-out, and then Matthew leaves.

So, what happened in this chapter?  What really happened in this chapter?  Matthew said that there’s a time limit on getting the book, but not what said time limit is.  That’s all.  A whole chapter of fluff and filler and bullshit for the news that we might get some plot later.  Maybe.  If kissing doesn’t get in the way.