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Thursday, May 05, 2011
Strong, silent typecast
Title: Night Passage
Author: Robert B. Parker
Ever see one of those CBS mystery movies with Tom Selleck as Police Chief Jesse Stone? Yeah, me either. Maybe part of one, a very long time ago, but that was it. And it's too bad, because Tom Selleck is pretty fantastic, and not just because the man knows how to wear a Hawaiian shirt. However, I'd seen enough commercials for the movies that while reading this book (the first of many Jesse Stone stories), I always pictured the protagonist as portrayed by Selleck, even though there's about thirty years difference between them. That's ok. Selleck is ageless.
Stone starts in LA at the bottom of a deep hole: his wife cheated on and left him, which led to him drinking way too much and often on the job (as an LAPD homicide detective), which got him kicked off the force. Then, somehow, things get worse. When he looks for a law enforcement job Anywhere But LA, he eventually interviews for a job as Chief of Police in Paradise, Massachusetts while completely blotto. He gets the job because Hasty Hathaway, the man running Paradise doesn't want a good cop at the helm of his force; he wants someone he can control. That's why he fired the last chief when he discovered what Hasty was doing.
On the surface, Paradise is a sleepy little New England seaside town. This surface is mere angstroms thick. Underneath is corruption, murder, money laundering, a nutty militia group, and a local psychopath who has an early confrontation with Jesse which leads to an eerie dance between the two for the rest of the book. By the way, it seems that the only people with whom the good citizens of Paradise do not have sex are their own spouses. Especially Hasty's wife. Wow.
Lately I've wondered a lot about the definition of a "mystery" novel. I usually think those are the stories in which enough information is provided for a clever reader to solve the mystery themselves. However, it often seems as though books labeled "mystery" just give the reader a ride: the story is fed out, and you just accept whatever you are handed, then the ending is revealed. There's never any question of who's guilty in Night Passage, but it's fun to watch Jesse make all the connections. Especially if you picture him with a thick mustache.Labels: conspiracy, murder, mystery/detective, spanking
posted by reyn at
10:48 AM
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Monday, March 31, 2008
...and I mean that in the nicest way
Title: You Suck
Subtitle: A Love Story
Author: Christopher Moore
Bookmark: an REI receipt for activewear that went unused while sitting on the couch and reading
Tommy wakes up dead and hungry, but food makes him puke. Coffee makes him puke. An aspirin to help with the puke-ache? More puke.
Tommy has been turned to a vampire by his girlfriend Jody. His buddies and former co-workers at the Safeway have turned from turkey-bowling to hunting him down with a blue hooker named... Blue. The ancient vampire who turned Jody (and Tommy had bronzed by a couple bikers) has escaped and is determined to get the little bastard who bronzed him.
The good news is that Tommy is discovering some really cool things vampires can do, like hearing shapes and having really unbelievably wild vampire sex, and he has a willing minion in Abby Normal (not her real name).
But you can get all that from the back cover of the book.
I seem to be on a run of funny books. This one, like the only other Moore I've read, takes place in the days (ok, days and nights) leading up to Christmas. All of it is sharp and clever, with an occasional interesting insight (chicks dig being vampires because it changes them from being potential victims to being top-of-the-food-chain predator queens), but the best parts by far were the sections written as entries in the journal of young Abby Normal, who despite her aspirations to Gothdom, still holds her Hello Kitty backpack dear and is elated that her mom gave her a care bear for Christmas. These entries invariably start with the sort of melodramatic woe-is-me pain-from-the-inky-black-shadowy-depths-of-despair crap that you'd expect from someone trying WAY too hard to be depressed, and quickly devolve into highly energetic squealings of her new friends and valley-girl teenspeak records of her exploits. I laughed harder in those sections than any other part of the book. Probably because I loved the overt mocking of that entire portion of subculture, and Abby's efforts to act glum and bummed despite professing her love for everyone who does something cool or saves her life (it happens more than you'd think).Labels: humor, spanking, special abilities, vampires
posted by reyn at
9:46 AM
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Friday, December 29, 2006
Never Been Spanked
Title: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
Author: Anne Rice, writing as A.N. Rouquelaure
It’s an innocent childhood tale, a story mothers tell every night to tuck their sweet little ones into bed. Once upon a time, they croon, a beautiful princess was cursed by a Wicked Fairy to prick her finger upon a spindle and die upon her sixteenth birthday. But the Good Fairy, who couldn’t let the Wicked Fairy upstage her in such a dastardly manner, modified the curse so that the beautiful princess would merely sleep – along with her parents and the rest of the royal household – for one hundred years, until Prince Charming should come along and wake her with a chaste, delicate kiss on the lips.
All happens as the Good Fairy foretells – the Princess sleeps, one hundred years pass, and a Prince battles his way through the jungle to waken her. And the story stops there, with Beauty and Prince Charming presumably riding off together into the sunset, to live together happily ever after among butterflies and bunnies and bonny bouncing poppets.
But in Anne Rice’s world, this is just where the fun begins. And when I say fun, I actually mean spanking. Lots and lots of spanking.
What little plot there is to The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty didn’t really register with me, since I mostly skimmed from one dirty section to another to laugh over how scandalous the spanking truly got (a friend gave me the book to cheer me up after a particularly stressful week at work.) But here’s what I managed to pick up:
After the Prince wakens Beauty (with something amounting to rather more than a kiss), he claims her as a tribute to take back as a sex slave to his own kingdom. Her royal parents don’t object too strenuously to the idea, since they were once slaves, too, and remember how the experience made them “wise.” A little sexual servitude, they figure, will do Beauty some good. As Emo Phillips once said: “You don't appreciate a lot of stuff in school until you get older. Little things like being spanked every day by a middle aged woman: Stuff you pay good money for in later life.”
In fact, the Prince’s palace is basically one big continual spanking orgy. How his family has time for ruling a country or collecting taxes I never really figured out, since they’re pretty much “distracted” twenty-four hours a day. There are naked sex slaves everywhere, scurrying about on their hand and knees. The castle even comes complete with punishment rooms, one for those who find themselves “reluctant” in their slave duties, and another for those who find themselves…er…a little too eager. Guess which group Beauty falls into?
Indeed, Beauty is so adept at being spanked that she eventually attracts the eye of the intimidating and possibly evil Queen herself. She also manages to find time in her busy spanking schedule for an affair with another slave, Prince Alexi, who tells her all about his experience with spanking. Eventually, Beauty misbehaves badly enough (deliberately, I think), so that she gets sent to “the village” for more spanking punishment, where she will be auctioned off to some plebian for a summer’s worth of labor (use your imagination). She meets the handsome and blue-eyed Prince Tristan on the cart carrying them to the village, and even though they’re both tied up, they immediately have flexible acrobatic sex (but no spanking). As for what happens next, you’ll have to wait for ket to review the second book. (Yes, it is a trilogy!)
Basically, all you need to know is that someone gets spanked or chained about every five pages or so. Beauty herself, I think, is naked for the entire book. And there’s lots and lots of sex, with no gender restrictions whatsoever. But no animals…at least not yet. There are rumors, I hear, of a kitten somehow becoming involved in the sequels.Labels: spanking, trashy romance
posted by Elizabeth at
1:45 PM
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