Oh the humanity!

[witchwillow.livejournal.com]

I love this article just for this quote alone:

It's as if Laurell Hamilton and Anne Rice have recently had an unholy tryst and have spawned a scampering horde of little horror-romance novelists who have all skittered off and scrawled out series after series of stories about vampiresses, vampire huntresses, vampire princesses, vampire trailer park queens, and vampire lovers.

I mean, it's not like Lashers haven't been saying exactly that for a couple of years now, right?

But look! And Behold! Mundanes too see the parallels!

Link via this SmartBitches...

ETA:

Oh my! Things get even more telling in the comments.

...Supernatural Romance" is the largest growing, hottest selling category in fiction right now, a subgenre he described as "women committing every imaginable act of lust and perversion with vampires, werewolves, demons, Lovecraftian tentacled rape gods, basically anything you can imagine as long as it's not a normal human man."


Ahem. Paging LKH, your legacy is waiting. Paging LKH to fluid spillage on Aisle 9.



ETA2:

Ha. If Hamilton thinks she's fooling anybody that her books are anything more than horror porn liberally sprinkled over role playing game plots, she needs a stronger buff on her sanity check. I've suspected for years that the people she credits as her "writers'group" are actually the gamers whose characterizations she plunders.


The snark. It is out there.

Query: Does anyone know why half my post just disappeared for no reason? I was also spontaneously logged out.

Comments

[witchwillow.livejournal.com]

Check my ETA :)

[witchwillow.livejournal.com]

Ok, and now thinking about it too much has me all:

He was stiff and cold and hard.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I like the line following the one you cited, too:

They all seemed to be by female authors and feature female protagonists, too; some of the covers also blurred into similarity with the romance novels, except that the muscular-breasted Fabio on the cover was also sporting fangs.

[eldestmuse.livejournal.com]

At this point, I've been judging the quality of urban fantasy based on the ratio of sex/romance/relationship angst to actual plot.

I'll never understand how Patricia Briggs ended up in the Romance section of Borders, whereas Talia Gryphon ended up in Fantasy.

I weep :(

[witchwillow.livejournal.com]

That... is a definite wtf.

[cicipsychobunny.livejournal.com]

I can only assume your equations lacked the "Normal vs. Clearly Made Up Author Name" variable.

[gwynethfar.livejournal.com]

Romance, technically, is expected to have a happily ever after. I don't understand why half of the authors who show up in the Romance section show up there.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

Briggs is in the Sci-fi section of the Borders I go to, if it's any consolation. *consoles* And she was in the SF section of the Coliseum Books I first discovered her in. (Actually so is Gryphon, I think.... no, actually I've never seen Gryphon in a Borders, only in Midtown Comics.)

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

And yet you still can't find anything decent to read in the damn genre, let alone anything up one's alley. Xenokink is in and yet I am still left wanting. Woe.

[easol.livejournal.com]

I blame LKH a LOT more for this than Rice. Rice is more of the woe-making vampires alone, not vamps and weres and endless parades of monstrous penii.

[tsubaki-ny.livejournal.com]

True -- until she messed with the rule in "Pandora" Rice vamps couldn't even have sex. Just, you know, with the orgasmic bitey bitey.

[mizmalice.livejournal.com]

Can someone please explain something to me.

I've noticed that vampire romance is growing but I have a technical difficulty.

Now I know that nothing about vampires are logical but please someone tell me this.

Vampires are clinically dead yeah?

Hearts don't beat, blood don't flow, technically they shouldn'e be able to move and such.

Yet what really grinds my gears how do vampires achieve and maintain erections?

[witchwillow.livejournal.com]

Mystery of the ages. I've written fanfic where I played around with eletro-magnetic fields and magic. But I haven't ever read why they're not permanently up or permanently down.

[cicipsychobunny.livejournal.com]

Well, LKH has, to give her tiny credit, at various stages mentioned that her vampires can only get it up if they've recently fed.

By which I mean "endless paragraph about Anita "liking it when it's soft", followed by Magical Ballooning Penis after JC bites someone".

[easol.livejournal.com]

I don't know. It would be so easy to just say that they can control their entire bodies at will, rather than making us try to believe that somehow they can magically have erections.

By that same token, how does their hair grow?

[gwynethfar.livejournal.com]

Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that, if LKH went into detail about it, we would go on the warpath about how it's too overly detailed and we didn't need to know?

But, really it depends on the author. Some of them don't write "clinically dead" vampires, but "undead" vampires, whose hearts do beat and such, in order to explain why they need to drink blood, why they can still be alive, etc.

[gwynethfar.livejournal.com]

I love Romance. I don't understand all the smug, barely concealed hatred for it.

[nimnix.livejournal.com]

I think that's the severe lack of *good* romance. But then, it's the same reason so many people don't like fantasy. They see the cliche-crap that people make and assume the entire genre is bad.

[karmyn75.livejournal.com]

I'd like to reccomend some good vampire romances. There's Jennifer Armintrout's Blood Ties series and Colleen Gleason's Gardella Vampire Chronicles, which is about a Regency era Vampire Slayer.

[naeko.livejournal.com]

I blame Hamilton for the utter tripe that was Karen Chance's Touch the Dark (http://community.livejournal.com/like_zorro/1208.html).

I snarked that whole book over a month ago and my brain STILL hurts. Plus, the book is ripe with terms ripped straight from Hamilton's brain, which makes it doubly painful.

Since I gave up on LKH, I can't seem to find any supernatural series out there that don't make me want to gag. I've tried- oh man, have I tried- but nothing written by a woman about a woman going up against supernatural baddies is good, anymore.

*clings to Butcher, Langan, Wellington and J.D. Robb*

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

*reads link*
O_O
Crap, I just bought the first two books. Hrm. Oh, well, at least I can find out how bad they are.

[othellia.livejournal.com]

This particular comment (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/mass_market_genre_surprise.php#comment-881561) made me gag. And it reminds why LKH's stuff still gets on the New York Times bestseller list. D:

[othellia.livejournal.com]

*reminds me

[reticentric.livejournal.com]

Horror porn sounds like the perfect term for what LKH is writing now. I don't think it should be in the category of supernatural romance since there is no romance to speak of at all in her books. Generally when you think of romance you think of love, and contrary to what Anita/LKH says there is no love in her books. There is only sex and bad sex at that. And lots of it. There is really no drama or problem that needs to be solved, and if there is it's solved by sex. The characters don't show any real affection for each other when their clothes are on, and if they do Anita gets all pissed off about it.

I think it's possible to have some romance intertwined in a book about supernatural creatures. They are out there but if someone stumbles upon LKH first they're gonna be like "wtf is this"? and run far far away.

It makes me think of the Underworld movies; you have two supernatural creatures who love each other/have a romance/have sex YET still manage to actually kick ass. It just seems like people should try harder to transfer that to books if they wanna write about "hot girl meeting hot vampire/werewolf".

It's weird because in the earlier books I actually liked the sort of sexual tension between Anita and Jean Claude as well. I liked how he annoyed her but she was kinda into him, but every since LKH took his balls away that ship has sailed.

[amamelina.livejournal.com]

Y'see, things like this make me want to finish my novel in no time flat. I want to prove that you can have a vampire/werewolf story and not have it be this tripe that is being published today. No sex, just lots of scares and mystery and plot!

that said, I'm off to write my novel.

[witchwillow.livejournal.com]

I saw that comment (someone else has also commented on it, earlier up, as being the proof as to why Troobies exist) but I couldn't think of how to frame it.

I mean - The complexities of were society??

I have a friend who kept reading the books for that, because no one else even bothered, she felt, to try and explore ANY of it. They jumped straight to the sexing. So I understood, even if I lamented, her reading.

But she never claimed Hamilton wove a complex tale. She just said Hamilton gave her crumbs and she was starving.

This btw is why I loathe Kim Harrison. Her pixies? Lovely. The concept of Vampires having a book out full of etiquette from neck scarves to garlic to body language? Gold.

She should have stuck to writing about those types of things, I feel. Because when she moved from social anthropology into the Hamilton land of sex, angst and naked writhing, I just couldn't take it anymore.

And I was already skipping a lot of paragraphs and pages.

[missamii.livejournal.com]

Okay! Since we sharing tales of para-rom authors being wanky, I'll tell ya about a little run in I had with that woman who writes the Garadetti Vampire Saga(or whatever the Regency Era Buffy rip-off series is called) books and scary Phantom of the Opera bondage porn. The book was called the Rest Fall Away or something and it was just terrible. Full of ten page long info-dumps plus a heroine that runs around English High Society Parties in like four petticoats and a corset and fights vampires with special kung-fu and a stake in her garter. So I wrote a review on Amazon and the author contacted me, privately, and was actually quite civil and didn't throw a fit at all. Still I thought it was just weird for her to say anything to me at all.
I probably would have avoided this one altogether, but Bam gave it a good write up. Of course, this was when Bam's blog was transitioning from brutally honest reviews to author's circle-jerk and I hadn't quite caught on to that yet.