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

[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.

[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.

[frabjously.livejournal.com]

That's awesome and terrible.

[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 :(

[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.

[witchwillow.livejournal.com]

That... is a definite wtf.

[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.

[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]

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

[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?

[cicipsychobunny.livejournal.com]

Also, in the White Wolf vampire RPGs, vampires could burn/consume stored blood to get erections, but didn't actually enjoy it.

[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.

[gwynethfar.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[manekikoneko.livejournal.com]

I think it's like the dismissal of comic books. People like to think that genre fiction isn't "serious" literature. They ignore the fact that "serious" does not equal "good." Romance also tends to appeal to women more than to men, and the historically male dominated literary culture looks down on it for that reason, too.

[brandiweed.livejournal.com]

Accumulation of the gases of decomposition in the tissues, perhaps?

[Unembalmed male corpses have been found, when exhumed at the right stage of decay, to be quite priapic.]

[manekikoneko.livejournal.com]

One of the things that actually impressed me about Anne Rice's early vampire books (the first four-ish) was that vampires didn't have sex, the blood-drinking was a substitute for the sex in many ways; that always struck me as logical and clever on her part. In The Tale of the Body Thief when Lestat has sex, as a human, for the first time in hundreds of years, he thinks, "Eww, this is so sloppy and inelegant!"

But Angel and Buffy had sex, and I don't think a vamp was ever celibate again.

[clover-elf-kin.livejournal.com]

The stereotype is that it's all badly written softcore porn with formulaic soap-opera plots, I think. Said stereotype keeps me far away from it, so I can't really say much. ^^ It's not some peoples' cup of tea, mine included, but there's nothing wrong with it.

However, I do get annoyed when a story I like turns into nothing but romance--partly due to being mostly asexual, I think romance in general is overrated. When an interesting supernaturally-oriented series I really liked turns into badly written not even softcore porn with formulaic soap-opera plots... T_T

[mizmalice.livejournal.com]

I love Buffy but I've never read Anne Rice

[mizmalice.livejournal.com]

GAAAAHHHHHH
Bad mental image

[easol.livejournal.com]

Hee hee, I guess vampires don't have photographic memories, or he might have remembered that yes, sex is kind of icky if you give it any actual thought.