lkh_lashouts | What was THE MOMENT for you?

What was THE MOMENT for you?

Hey Fellow Lashers.

I've got a question I've been wondering about for you all. Consider it a survey of sorts.

What was THE MOMENT when you knew that you were done with AB:VH (Or even Merry?) I'm not talking about the bad grammer, the endless, bore me to death sex scenes, or LKH not even remembering how to spell her own character names. (We've all plodded along with those in the hopes that it would someday get better.) I mean the moment when it FINALLY happened. When you threw whatever book you were reading across the room and just KNEW you were never going to pick it up again?

For me, it had to be in Incubus Dreams. I almost did it when we found out Richard was now a rape victim (WHAT?? A-fucking-NOTHER one?? Can you not have a dick in the AB world and not get raped?) But I held on. Then it was almost the sex scene were Anita goes on and on in great detail about barfing and blowjobs, followed by the 18 thousand fuckmefuckmefuckmes at the end. But not quite - I was plodding along until....

The bad guys leave a note.

After all this drama, all this tension (well, no not really, but let's pretend), said bad guys don't even show up and do a "Whoops! Our bad! So sorry. Gotta-go-bye!"

For me, that was IT! I was never ever EVER going to pay good money to read this woman's crap again. And I feel so much freer for it!

What was everyone's else THAT'S IT moment of clarity?

Just curious.

Blue

P.S. For Merry, it was in the last book, which I didn't even bother to read, when my friend mentioned to me that is was 384 pages and they STILL hadn't made it to the Seelie Court. But they sure as hell did fuck alot. BAH!!

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Is THAT what that was? I remember being so confused by the book I kept looking at the cover and checking to see it said something about Anita Blake and 'by Laurell K Hamilton'.

My memories of it are something to do with a party, and then a club, and really bad BDSM scenes. I put it down right away, cause WTF? Where were the bag guys who show up to hire her who'll end up trying to kill her later? Were the bad guys trying to sex her? What?

I was very confused. There was also something about swan maidens and rape, I think. The very thought of which made me fling the book across the room.

My favorite is still the first one I read: The Blue Girl. It's just such a cute little self-contained story that, at the same time, hints at something much larger. Plus, the characters are great.

True Story: I got the book from my friend for my birthday. She was an exchange student in Germany at the time, and sent me the book from there. So, I got an English book as a gift from Germany. It amused me.

Well . . . I didn't finish Blue Moon because I couldn't figure out what the hell that ancestral werewolf spirit shit was all about (also I hate Richard and there was an awful lot of Richard in that book). So, I skipped to Obsidian Butterfly because I, too, love me some Edward and I figured this would be a good one - South American mythos! Awesome! Fantastic! I'm excited!

I got past the part where the Mayan (or Incan? Eh.) vampires were blowing werewolves for blood, but just barely (couldn't get past how inefficient, dumb and OMGOTH it was). I don't remember how much farther I read after that, since it was a long time ago, but I do remember why I stopped. After about the 300th time Anita had taken a break to internally agonize over what a monster she'd become, it suddenly dawned on me that. . . that was it. I couldn't read anymore.

She'd been getting progressively whinier in the last couple of books, and I just had enough. That wasn't the Anita I knew. The Anita I knew would have either accepted the fact that she was a monster, or worked to fix it - even if it meant killing herself. She wouldn't whine about it like a little bitch.

So I stopped, and thank god for that! If I'd actually read NiC or farther, I think my head would have exploded from sheer rage.

I haven't read those ones yet. I'll definitely check them out. Thanks for the recommendation!

I loathe Micah. I don't care for the pard. But Micha, I really can't stand. He's just so damn perfect.

That would make a really cool fanfic.

It is a very sad thing that that short vignette is about thirty times more compelling than anything I've read about every book LKH has published since OB. And frankly, it makes a lot more sense character-wise than what's occured in the books.

I second the opinion that that would make a kickass fanfic, though. I don't usually read fanfic, but I would definitely read that.

XD All I remember was us complaining to each other. That was about it.

And to think, Mi... if it wasn't for Anita we would never had met!!!

Incubus Dreams, but I think it would have been NiC if I'd actually paid attention rather than skim-reading my way through. Was it ID in which they fuck a lot, then the cops call and say, "We have another dead stripper"? Because that was it. When I realised I actually could not remember the supposed "plot" of the book because they'd just spent hundreds of pages in bed. I honestly thought they were referencing an earlier book in the series, because dead strippers seemed familiar, but I just couldn't figure out when they'd been mentioned previously.

XDD

remember, Mia. Cannibalism is BAD for you.

I used to buy all the books (ABVH, anyway, I won't touch Merry Gentry) in paperback, but now I won't even accept them as gifts. Harsh, but still.

I read Incubus Dreams in the bookstore in hardcover because I was thinking about buying it in paperback if it was better than whatever came before, but then the Byron/Requeium scene happened. About a paragraph after introducing TWO MORE POINTLESS CHARACTERS, she fucks one. And it's the gay one.

Even if rocks fall and everyone dies, or it turns out that the whole fuck crisis of both series are the result of a tragic brain parasite that is miraculously removed and she suddenly returns to a semi-decent series, there is no way I'll ever give LKH my money again. But if it is a brain parasite, I will happily donate toward the brain parasite miraculous cure foundation.

I heard a recommendation of Hamilton's early works from a friend at about the same time I ran into the Anita Blake thread on godawful.net. Then I got my first bookstore job, at about the time Incubus Dreams came out.
I opened Incubus Dreams and found porn. I opened it again at random and found porn. Lather, rinse, repeat, about a dozen times. Porn, porn, porn. And from what I saw of the porn...that's when I first knew it was shit.

I would say Narcissus in Chains was the beginning of the end for me, when the books really began backsliding for me. I was like "Uhhhh, I don't like where this is going." I lived in a state of denial and hoped that the aderuerarer would "fade away" like JC had indicated that it might. Cerulean Sins was kind of the last ditch effort to me, and I HOPED it would be better. I mean...it was squicky, but at least there weren't that many spelling errors that I noticed.

ID was pretty much the final straw for me. I couldn't get past the first fifty pages and I skimmed through a bit more here and there, and when I got to the part about Damian walking in sunlight and being "prettified", I was left full of serious WTF-ness. I thought that was SUCH a cheap Mary-Sue trick. And of course, Anita being made prettier by the "vampire glamor." I just gagged when I read that.

And I skipped over Micah because I didn't want to read it and I didn't think I would miss much of anything. Glad I did, in hindsight.

I held out a last, desperate hope that Danse Macabre would be better and that LKH would snap out of it. But when I heard about how bad and utterly ridiculous it was, that was the deal breaker. I read a "preview" in this community and ended up joining so I could vent my anger and frustration along with everyone else.

I'm glad I stopped at ID before my brain melted completely...and even more glad I didn't finish reading it. I probably would have shattered my fragile lil psyche.

Still...I'm left very bitter that I rushed out and bought it without thinking.

*sighs mournfully and shoots ID to smithereens with Alucard's Jackal*

There, I feel better now. :)

I love Sookie Stackhouse! Just for the fact that there's a vampire named Bill. And BUBBA! Bubba is my hero.

Though, the third book has made me wary what with the love-rectangle between Sookie, Bill, Eric and Alicide - but I've yet to read the next two books. They're sitting on my "to be read" pile.

Eh, not a huge fan of Kim Harrison. They make as much sense as Sharpe's Challenge (Part one (http://dwg.livejournal.com/584608.html) and part two (http://dwg.livejournal.com/587362.html)), only without the awesome of Sean Bean to propel the story. Really, there are ink-blot tests out there with better writing skills.

I'm new but I'll dive in.

What made me stop reading? Was when she yanked down the first set of forums (aka the guest book) because people were being mean. I was willing to keep putting up with the shlock in the hopes it would get better but when she pulled that I said "yanno what? I'm done." If an author can't respect their readers, how can we respect the author?

This also coincided with two incidents:

1) Getting hooked on Jacqueline Carey and saying to myself "WOW! Now *Here's* an author who can write some steamy sex and have it be good. Some of it isn't even my kinda thing but I can read it and ENJOY it nonetheless."

2) Reading 7 chapters of ID and realizing that LKH isn't a tenth of the writer JC is.

I thought OB was the best of the series. She went away from the boys and... the book had a PLOT. I was amazed and I wish LKH would reread that book and see what she's capable of.

But that takes work. Sigh.

so anyways.. Hi, I'm new here, glad to find more people who share my feelings on LKH. :)

I think The Moment for me was in the end of... the one with the fire and the vampire who had butterflies for his animal to call. Burnt Offerings, I think? I'd already been having issues with the stories, but I had read the books initially because I liked the mysteries as well as the rest. I liked that I had figured out who was killing the Vampires in Guilty Pleasures and all that, and even the later books had some aspects of being able to put the clues together.

We didn't *get* all the clues in that one, at all, and just had everything revealed in a nice package.

At that point, I was done even pretending to enjoy the books.

The last one I read was OB, and I read it because I had a long bus ride ahead of me. It confirmed everything I didn't like. I haven't looked back.

That's the one where they're out in the woods and Richard was accused of raping a woman, right?

That was when I started rolling my eyes a lot and started describing Anita as "a supernatural slut".

You'll laugh - but the first Merry book. I just knew it could be so much cooler but it kept coming back to Merry fucking people. And I got mad that this woman made so much money and wrote such trash.

Don't you know, LKH INVENTED porn. (Nevermind that women like Anais Nin were writing female erotica back in the 20s and 30s - and doing a MUCH better job of it - alot of that stuff is definitely dated, but it's still sexy as hell IMHO.)

Just like she invented penicillin and gave human beings sunlight.

Narcissus in Chains. After still smarting from the soap-as-lubricant squickiness, I encountered plot hole after dropped plot line in favor of sex. We needed to spackle the wall when I finished hurling the book against it.

Call me an optomist. I started falling out of love with the Anita Blake series after NiC. But I read ID and CS anyway, just on the off chance there might be an improvement. Stupid, I know.

My 'moment'? When I decided not to spend money on her latest book.

I think it was probably when she had sex with Byron in ID. The whole book up to that point had consisted of sex scenes and setting-up-scenes-for-sex-scenes, but that in particular just felt so pointless. Anita's sex life had begun to resemble George Mallory's oft-quoted reason for attempting to scale Everest: "Because it was there."

Since it's not in my nature to give up on books, and because (even taking into account other quality slippage in the preceding several books, which up to then had seemed more subtle to me) I still thought there must be something worthwhile going on somewhere, I finished it. And then I discovered that there really was no structure-saving thing happening at the end. So... curious though I was about what Anita would do next (I'd imagine some sort of liniment for the vaginal inflammation would be a good start), I felt that wasting another tenner on the next book would be just plain daft.

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean and Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones are both re-tellings of the Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer stories. Both VERY good, but in different ways. Whee, fairies that don't suck.

Oh and JS and MN is really good - first 400 or so pages slow going, next 400 or so pages a whirlwind where you're really glad she did 300 pages of worldbuilding because everything makes sense.

I mean 400 pages of worldbuilding. :)

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Oh Please....

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