Merry Christmas1 and happy New Year! ARE YOU READY FOR SOME EXPOSITION?!?
Because that’s what this chapter’s for. And I apologize, as this chapter is a bit of a long one.
Recap: after a recent attack by the evil German witch coven, and finding out that his longtime employee Perry the Goth had been murdered by the witches, Atticus arranges with his werewolf lawyer Hal to go ahead and sign his treaty of non-aggression with the friendly Polish witch coven in town, led by Malina.
This chapter begins with Atticus and Hal going to Malina’s condo, and all the members of her coven are also there. There’s a section of them all being introduced, starting with Bogumila.
“You may call me Mila in public,” Bogumila said. “The Americans stare if your name is too ethnic.”
I nodded with a half grin, and Hal–whose full name was Halbjorn–said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
You know how often I say my name to people in public? Not a lot! I mean, I get that it’s more conspicuous of a name in the Anglophone world than “Emilia” was in the last book, but I also think Hearne is being really judgmental of American culture here, considering I’m pretty sure that he just Google’d “Polish female names” and plucked these out for this book.
Also! This goes against Chapter Four of the last book, in which Atticus tells us that Americans don’t care about names, as long as you show off money (and it’s established in this book that the witches have wealth, live in an affluent neighborhood, and don’t mind showing it off, so I think they fit the bill). A comment that was super hypocritical considering Atticus buys expensive crap, sits on maps to lost treasures, and can throw away thirty thousand dollars as he did in Chapter 25 of the last book.
I’m going to give a
Did Not Do Homework: 17
because he can’t even keep this idea straight from his own last book. He’s judgmental in both cases, but can’t decide what he’s judgmental about: if Americans care about names or not? Well, do they, Hearne? Do they?!
Next introduced is Berta, who is in the kitchen. She’s overweight. That’s her personality.
Berta, a festively plump personage, was snacking as she prepared a tray of hors d’oeuvres
I mean, yeah, it’s nice that the overweight character isn’t evil or stupid or ugly. At the same time, so much of her role in this chapter is that she likes to eat. That’s all she does here; make quick comments while eating or talking about eating. It’s dumb.
Anyhow, there are three other witches: Kazimiera, Klaudia, and Roksana. And as I go through these introductions, I can’t…. There’s something here that bugs me, guys. Let me play you some bits, and I’ll try snipping around so that they’re not too lengthy (hence the ellipses/… you’ll read in these blockquotes–that’s me, not Hearne). This is from Bogumila’s introduction:
…a slim brunette who regarded me steadily with one large eye; the other eye was hidden behind a dark curtain of hair that occluded half of her face, and I wondered what I’d see if I peeked behind it. She nodded curtly at me, and the candlelight….shimmered across the curtain as it rippled gently with the movement.
Here’s Kazimiera:
Kazimiera was very tall and leggy, her tan skin and bright white teeth suggesting that she’d grown up on the beaches of California rather than… Eastern Europe.
And Klaudia:
Klaudia was the petite, waifish sort, with a pair of sleepy eyes and a set of pouty lips, her hair cut short and layered at the neck and her bangs teased around her face in a wet, languorous fashion, giving the impression that whenever you saw her, she had just finished having sex before you walked into the room and would now like nothing more than a French cigarette.
Finally, Roksana:
Roksana, had her thick hair pulled back so tightly from her face that it appeared to be a crash helmet, but after routing itself…through a silver loop at the base of her skull, it exploded into an untamed curly man. Her owlish blue eyes regarded me steadily through a pair of round spectacles. She wore a power suit with a white blouse, shoulder-padded purple coat and black pants
Do you get what I’m saying here? I’ve talked a few times about how when introducing a male character, Atticus will give a quick description, but when it comes to female characters they’ll get much more, telling you what they’re wearing, how their hair is styled, and essentially a note that Atticus finds them attractive.
Except for Berta, who’s only descriptor is “festively plump”.
Recently, TMary and I have been talking about this in the comments for last book’s Chapter 22 sporking, and we think that Atticus’s fixation/over-sexualization of women is supposed to be some kind of character flaw, but it’s not really treated like one? It isn’t as if he has gotten in trouble because of it in this book or the last one. At most, he’s slapped by the Morrigan in the first book, or he’s embarrassed by his hawt apprentice. And so we have a character who is introduced to five women, and he gives us descriptions that sound like he’s coming up with stereotypical attractive women: the shy but hawt one, the hawt beach girl, the sexy model who looks like she just had sex, and the hawt bookish nerd. Instead of writing these women as characters, he’s picked fairly basic… I don’t know, are these all stereotypes?
Except for Berta, who is “festively plump”.
[rubbing forehead] I need some apple juice.
I know that there are guys out there who think like this, look at women they’ve just met and instantly start analyzing how hot they are, but you would think a guy who is over two thousand years old would know not to objectify women on sight? You would think he’d have long moved past that? Also, in what universe is it remotely okay to look at someone you just met and say to yourself, “She looks like she just had sex”??
And after Klaudia’s description, there’s this:
I used to carry around a cigarette case expressly for the purpose of offering them to women like her, but that social custom lost its luster when people finally realized that offering someone a cigarette was the same thing as offering them lung cancer. Still, I patted absently where my vest pocket would be if I’d been wearing a vest
Is this a joke? I don’t care.
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 32
The way this is phrased makes it sound like Atticus already knew that cigarettes caused cancer before the general public did, which, if true, means that he was offering people something he knew was harmful to them and didn’t care because it was the social custom.
Figures.
The witches all wear the same pointy boots? I don’t know why but I thought it was an interesting detail that I don’t mind.
Atticus introduces Hal to the group in a way that gives us no dialogue, and he pulls out the treaty and the quills to sign it. Each witch uses the quill to sign in their own blood. Atticus explains that he argued against signing in blood during the negotiation period between books, but Malina insisted because it was more binding and was an actual magical contract because of it. He eventually agreed, though he’s hesitant right now because it feels weird.
Signing it would contradict centuries of what I considered “best practice” in denying witches the opportunity to snuff me.
Hey, do you guys remember in the last book, when the evil witches sent someone to his house to steal a sample of blood that acted as assurance so they couldn’t hex him? And Hal says that he doesn’t think they found it, but he wasn’t sure? And Atticus’s reaction was to say, “Don’t worry about man, I’ll check on it later!” And he never checked on it ever?
Regardless, the witches have never shown hostility to him, have been more than gracious considering how much Atticus hates women witches, and so there’s no reason not to sign this contract. His irrational hatred of witches in particular is on display here, but he’s trying to spin it as “his usual paranoia.”
You Keep Using That Word: 33
Atticus is a hypocrite, a liar, and a complete idiot.
So he signs, and everyone is happy.
Berta clapped and said with a grin, “We should celebrate. Who wants chocolate and schnapps?”
Her personality is that she’s jolly and fat. That’s it. In this chapter alone she brings up eating at least three timeless.
As they sit there eating chocolate and cookies (that Berta baked), Atticus–hey, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a freaking minute! Everyone in this room is remarkably chill and jolly here, and they’re at war! Remember, members of this coven have actually been killed fighting the evil German witches! These witches? Some of their friends have died in this conflict. And they’re not really shaken up about this at all? What’s up with that?
[What’s up is that Hearne isn’t interested in writing emotions in his characters if it doesn’t serve Atticus.]
Alright, so Atticus asks what’s the deal with these evil German witches anyhow, and why they hate this coven anyway. So there’s a long info dump! The original coven, led by Radomila (who was evil for no good reason in the last book), met in Warsaw during World War II. After that, the group went to Bulgaria to escape Nazi invasion.
“Bulgaria?” I frowned. “But that was an Axis power as well.”
Malina explains that Czar Boris of Bulgaria only joined the Axis in the war to stop the Nazis from invading, and he didn’t put any of his troops in the fighting, and refused to go invade Russia like Hitler wanted. He also didn’t send tens of thousands of Jews to the Nazi concentration camps. To Atticus’s astonishment, Malina says that Radomila’s coven is to thank for that, as they cozied up to Boris and acted as his advisors.
[raises hand] Uh, hi. Um. Look, I’m kind of glad the good witches were anti-Nazi, and all, because Nazis are garbage. That being said, I’m a little uncomfortable with A) bringing the Holocaust into the narrative so lightly, and B) suggesting that resistance to the Holocaust by a prominent historical figure was actually the credit of these fictional characters that Hearne made up. It’s like, “Hey, want to know why my characters are the good guys? [shoots finger guns] They told Boris to sneakily go against Hitler.”
I don’t know, it feels weird, like an easy way to make your immortal characters sympathetic is to have them fight Nazis and save Jews in World War II. Like, yeah, hooray, you’re condemning the Holocaust, that’s great. Though the way it’s written here, it feels really cheap–the people being systematically exterminated by genocidal fascists are being reduced to… not even a statistic. It’s like a good deed done to prove one’s goodness. They’re not really people in this scenario, they’re numbers to indicate that these characters, Malina’s coven, were on the Right Side of History.
It doesn’t make much sense. One of them even states later in the conversation that saving Bulgarian Jews was one of their main aims. Okay, well then, why weren’t they doing anything about the Polish Jewish community? These witches are originally from Poland; what was going on there?
[Hot take: this would have worked better if Malina and members of her coven were of Jewish descent. Though that would require some effort on Hearne’s part.]
The answer is that Hearne quickly Google’d people who saved/spared Jewish people in the Holocaust and hastily decided to give credit to his own characters instead of historical figures. Which, you know, is also pretty problematic: this guy who went against the Nazis? Yeah, no, it wasn’t his idea, actually these witches. Half of whom we blew up in the last book.
We should talk about that! This scene makes the last book super weird in the way it drew the lines. Remember, Malina’s coven is a break-off of the coven that actually did this. Which means all the evil witches we saw in the last book? One of whom had her head imploded? Another was decapitated and her head used as a trophy? They were also witches who opposed the Nazis in World War II (one of them, Emilia, joined the coven after Malina saved her from being raped by Nazis, if you remember).
Anyhow, Boris died, which Malina claims was an assassination by the evil German witches hunting them now. Atticus protests that he knows “a little bit about his death”, and that he only died of heart failure. Given that Perry the Perky Goth dropped dead without a mark on him because the witches made his heart stop, you would assume that “Oh so paranoid” Atticus would figure out that it’s a possibility. But remember: Atticus is an idiot.
You Keep Using That Word: 34
So Witch Roksana reminds him that it’s a thing the German witches can do, and in fact their preferred method of murder. It’s a spell that “causes a small area of tissue” on the heart to die, causing death. It’s only then that Atticus puts together that the heart-failure hex is what happened to Perry the Goth. Berta explains that it’s really the only thing that the witches know how to do without a demon backing them up.
Also, when she’s saying this, Berta is talking “around a mouthful of cookie.” She’s “festively plump”, remember?
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 33
Hearne, typing on his computer: I have to put food in this character’s mouth, in case readers forgot that she’s fat! That’s her one character trait, after all!
[Then again, she’s the one in Malina’s coven who actually has a personality trait, so maybe I’m being too harsh.]
Roksana points out that unfortunately, there are plenty of demons willing to help evil witches. This is a throwaway comment, I’m sure.
Atticus, quite rationally, wonders why the evil German witches wanted Boris of Bulgaria dead. It’s because the witches wanted Bulgaria to invade Russia. Our protagonist then asks if that means these witches are Nazi witches, and Malina refutes this, claiming that this coven is far older than the Third Reich (despite them having “Third House” in their name), and merely used the Nazis as tools for their own ends. Mainly: invading Russia.
“What? You’re suggesting he launched that entire bloody stupid offensive due to their influence?”
Welp, apparently so. The evil German witches tried the same in World War I with Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. When Boris didn’t invade Russia, they hexed him to death, and Bulgaria was never successfully invaded. The German witches are still mad about the whole thing, though, and are out to kill Malina’s coven because of it. Why did it take them so long? [shrug] I dunno.
Atticus asks the real question here, which is: why did these German witches want the Germans to invade Russia so badly? One of the witches tells Atticus/us that there’s a group of witch hunters based in Russia that has been hurting this German coven for a while. These guys dislike witches in general, but they hate die Tochter des dritten Hauses because of their demonic associations. The German coven hoped that if the Nazis took over Russia, these witch hunters would be taken care of, especially since “Himmler was obsessed with the occult”. This is true, by the way.
If you’re an attentive reader, you, like Atticus, are probably thinking of the Rabbi in Chapter 16 who is Russian and evidently part of a religious group that hunts evil. Atticus doesn’t say that, though, and only expresses surprise that Stalin didn’t stamp out these witch hunters. He asks if they know what they’re called, but no one in Malina’s coven seems to know.
The ladies all shook their heads slowly yet in unison. It was a creepy effect. I wondered idly if they practiced such maneuvers.
Ima
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 34
Because this is just a weird joke thing and I don’t know what to do with it.
The reason Malina’s coven knows all this is that back in World War II, they actually captured one of the German witches and interrogated her for information. This also adds to their mutual enmity because, well, the German witches didn’t quite like that.
Atticus says that the die Tottentots des drippen Haagendaas were apparently very influential among the Nazis, and wonders if they were the ones who came up with the horrible racism and antisemitism that defined them, using a demon or succubus to make them go for it.
“Not that we know of,” Berta said, a few crumbs of her third cookie spraying from her mouth as she talked.
Get it? Berta’s fat and likes to eat!
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 35
I need an apple juice.
Berta points out that the Nazis appear to be as they were in real life–not influenced by witches, but just really sucky, hateful people who took power and murdered millions of people. I think, to Hearne’s credit, this works better, because trying to take real-world atrocities and ascribe them to “Those evil monsters/demons/whatever” always feels a bit cheap.
One of the witches, Klaudia, mentions that dice Tottenham despacito Haugens specifically targeted Kabbalists, and this makes Atticus interrupt.
“Kabbalists!” I exclaimed. I slapped my forehead. “So that’s why he didn’t die.”
“Who didn’t die?” the witches all said in polyphonic harmony. They were like a Greek chorus.
This moment would work, or come closer to working, if he was referring to an event that we actually saw in this book or the previous one. But alas, no–he’s referring to an event decades ago in his backstory that he’s about to tell us about. Meaning… this is awkward, unfunny, and falls flat.
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 36
[Petition to make “Awkward, unfunny, and falls flat” the tagline of this book series?]
Atticus explains that he figured out earlier that he’s run into these witches before in World War II when he deflected their hex (he doesn’t explain how his amulet did that though because, for once, he shows some level of paranoia; shocking, I know).
Berta stopped chewing and looked at me with widened eyes. “Really? Where were you?”
Get it? She’s chewing food! Because she’s fat!
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 37
Atticus answers that he was in the Atlantic Pyrenees while guiding a Jewish family to Spain, so that they could take a train to Lisbon, and then a boat to South America and safety. You might be thinking, “Wait, that sounds remarkably out of character for Atticus.” And you’re right! We’ll get to that in a minute, don’t worry.
[Also, I don’t know how accurate this is to Jewish refugees at the time? Wikipedia says that there were Jewish refugees that went from Spain and Portugal to the US, UK, and Latin America, but I haven’t done a deep dive into the subject. I’m willing to bet Hearne hasn’t either.]
And immediately after that paragraph, two paragraphs after the last “Berta likes to eat” “joke”—
Berta held up her hands. “Stop right there. This sounds good,” she said, and hauled herself off the couch. “I’m going to make popcorn.”
Hehe, she “hauls herself off the couch” instead of just standing up like a normal person. To get more food! It’s because she’s fat!
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 38
This isn’t funny! Hearne has written an overweight female character and is constantly going on about how much she eats! Even if this was acceptable (which I am compelled to tell you, it’s not), it’s like the most basic joke he could think of, and he keeps repeating it! This is hack writing! And again, the sad thing is, aside from Malina, she’s the only witch with a semblance of a personality here. I wrote this sporking chapter, and I couldn’t tell you the others’ names or what they looked like. The only good thing here is that Berta’s at least not presented as a bad person because of her weight; it’s still really uncool that he’s written a female character whose one trait is that she’s fat/likes to eat.
So against their protests, Berta makes popcorn, and Atticus, in telling a story, actually feels a bit of kinship with the witches because “One thing that’s never changed in two millennia is that people love to hear war stories–at least, stories in which their side wins.”
You do know people like tragic war stories, too? We have plenty of those floating around. And that’s not new. Check out Song of Roland or Y Gododdin for starters. Those are poems/stories about noble heroes who died and lost their big battles against their enemies.
Did Not Do Homework: 18
Another thing I want to point out is that Berta points out that telling a story is going back to Atticus’s roots as a Druid, because they were renowned as bards. And I want to insert again that Hearne has a really weird idea about what druids are even supposed to be? We’ll get into this more some other time, but having read a bit more into Irish myth this year, I feel like Hearne missed the mark significantly. Druids are supposed to be the scholarly class of Celtic societies, the bards, healers, poets, and astronomers; above all, they were like wise men, holy men. They were later mythologized into wizard types, but even then… Atticus is instead based more off of an RPG idea of what fantasy druids are supposed to be. Telling stories should be his thing, which is maybe why this book is written in first person perspective. And yet the man apparently spends all his time running his store, watching movies, and hanging out with his dog.
This actually makes a lot more sense if you discover, as I did, that the reason the main character is a Druid is because Kevin Hearne, when brainstorming the series, wanted his main character to talk to his dog and ‘druid’ is what he came up with. Yes, really.
Atticus realizes, though, that he has to explain a bit to us, the audience, before he launches into his story. Atticus had wanted to take part in more of World War II, and he’d earlier actually tried to enlist with the British army. But the Morrigan told him not to, and because Atticus does whatever the Morrigan tells him (except that time he doesn’t). That’s how you write an immortal wizard’s character motivation, right? He does stuff because he’s told to. That’s why he took the magic sword McGuffin from the last book, and that’s apparently why he didn’t fight the Nazis on the battlefield.
[Although given his powers and his avoidance of drawing attention to himself/having fake identities throughout history, you’d think it would have been better to just, like, go kill Nazis instead of enlisting in a specific army?]
“Do you know how many battles there are for me to watch over throughout the world right now?…I cannot be worrying about you every bloody moment and making sure you don’t step on a mine or get bombed by the Luftwaffe. Stay out of the war, Siodhachan, and don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself–specifically, attention from the Fae.”
I’m sorry, I think it’s a little messed up that Atticus decided that he couldn’t be a soldier in World War II because the Morrigan told him she couldn’t protect him.
[rubbing forehead] Okay, hang on, so you’re saying, the Morrigan is in charge of all battles everywhere? Look, the world works on the idea that the gods manifest in ways to believers, right? The Irish gods are specifically different than that, though, because they’re essentially super-Druids that got deified. So unless there were unexpectedly a few thousand people around the world who happen to be Irish pagans in the early to mid-20th century (no), the Morrigan shouldn’t be in charge of that. Maybe she’d take an interest, but it’s not her job. Even if it was, there are a bajillion gods of war from around the world who can also help pick up the slack. This explanation makes no sense based off of what we’ve been told, and so I’m giving another
Did Not Do Homework: 19
And hey, it’s remarkably handy that the Morrigan was always looking out for Atticus and calling the shots, keeping him safe and also taking any agency out of him as a character, even in the backstory. I’m feeling less than generous.
Make It Easy!: 26
Anyhow, Atticus doesn’t tell any of this Morrigan stuff to the witches because he “didn’t want to imply that I had any sort of relationship with the Morrigan now” (and by that I presume he doesn’t want to tell other people the Irish goddess of war and violent death is transparently in love with him). Whatever! He starts the story explaining that he spent a lot of time hiding from Aenghus Og, and avoiding doing anything overtly magic so he didn’t draw attention to himself. Apparently, though, his conscience–
–stick with me here. Apparently his conscience wouldn’t allow him to sit on the sidelines in World War II, so he… okay, no, you’re right, let’s talk about this. Because Atticus is a man who has spent all of history schmoozing up with the biggest name celebrities of the time and having a rip-roaring good time slaughtering people in different wars because he felt like it. He specifically dismissed the Crusades as nonsense he didn’t want a part of, and so he was happy to kill people as part of Genghis Khan’s army for funzies.
We could make long lists of infamous historical atrocities, massacres, and antisemitic pogroms that Atticus skipped out on, that his “conscience” didn’t care one single wiggly chicken about. What did he think when the streets of Jerusalem ran red with blood during the First Crusade? Where was Atticus when Cromwell was slaughtering the people of Ireland? The Reign of Terror? The Atlantic Slave Trade? The Thirty Years War? I don’t know, and I’m fairly certain neither does Hearne. And you know why?
Because Average Joe on the Street is not familiar with them. History in Iron Druid Chronciles is based off of what you know in history if you failed middle school history. That’s why Atticus is saving Jewish families in World War II. Not because this is the best use of his abilities, but because again, Jewish victims of the Holocaust are props for Atticus to make himself look like a better person.
Better Than You: 16
I’m tempted to say he should have just… marched into Berlin and slaughtered/incapacitated the Nazi regime, but he does give the excuse that he didn’t want to draw attention to himself with magic. Then again, he says he avoided attention by not doing magic for two thousand years, and he definitely forged his magic iron amulet doohickey in that two thousand year timeframe, so I don’t know what he’s talking about.
The families under my care arrived in Spain faster and healthier and more reliably than those of any other smuggler
Oh, give me a break.
Better Than You: 17
Of course Atticus was SO MUCH BETTER at protecting Jewish families then anyone else who was working at it.
He goes on to explain that he only failed getting one family out of France, and that he thought the father of the family was a scientist, but appears to have been some kind of Kabbalist, as he had “traces of magic in his aura that I didn’t take the trouble to examine”.
Have you ever been so paranoid that you detected magic on someone else and never bothered to check what it meant?
You Keep Using That Word: 35
Basically, they were jumped by six witches, who whammied them all with their heart attack spells. All of them died except Atticus (because of his amulet), who faked his death by turning invisible as he fell over because he expected gunfire or something, and the father, who was protected by Kabbalistic wards. And then the witches shot him full of bullets, so it’s a moot point.
Atticus is also… weird about explaining how this guy cried over his dead family, and then was shot to death, and then shot full of more bullets.
Atticus stayed silent and watched as this guy got shot full of bullets. You probably guessed that, but Atticus avoids fights where he has any chance of losing. He explains that unlike now, when he’s immune to death, he can only heal, but given he’s got stealth and healing powers, and a sword, and so I think he could do a lot of damage.
The witches noticed that one of their victims disappeared, and were confused by it. They leave one witch at the scene to investigate while the others wandered off. Atticus killed her with his sword and then booked out of there. He never saw those witches again, but he assumed they were a special magic ops unit for the Nazis or something. It wasn’t until he encountered them again in this book that he found who they really were.
One of the witches asks what happened to the witches he met today, and if he managed to kill any of them. He did not, but shows that he got hair from one of them, which should help them track and/or kill them.
Hey, have you ever been so paranoid that you didn’t immediately tell your allies the crucial piece of information that gives you an advantage over your enemies? You waited until after you have a lengthy conversation of backstory?
You Keep Using That Word: 36
So Atticus asks if the witch’s hair would help them track the witch, and every member of Malina’s coven nods and says “Definitely.”
That’s where our chapter ends.
So let’s talk about this. I’ve made it abundantly clear that I think this entire Plot is… badly written. Let’s recap the Main Plot of the book for a minute, without the side quests of maenads, Coyote, cops, or the priest and rabbi:
-Atticus is about to sign a nonaggression treaty with the witches of Tempe.
-Then Atticus is suddenly attacked by random witches’ hexes.
-He suspects the Tempe coven, only to find out by talking to Malina that it’s another, unrelated German coven that hates the Tempe one and decided to kill Atticus for… Reasons.
-He goes on with a bunch of side quests and BS until the evil witches actually attack him a little over halfway through the book.
-During this fight Atticus realizes that he’s met these witches before, in an incident we’ve never heard of, long before the events of the book.
-In the fight he grabs a lock of hair off one of the evil witches.
-He goes to Malina’s coven to sign that nonaggression treaty, in which we’re finally told the backstory of these witches, and how Atticus fought them before.
-Atticus shows the hair he grabbed, and thus a way to beat the witches.
We are, according to Kindle, almost seventy percent of the way through the book, and just now we drop a massive exposition bomb on the audience. This isn’t a mystery that the characters have been wondering about; Atticus was told that these evil German witches want him dead for Reasons, and then, over halfway through the story when he actually fights them, suddenly says, “Wait a minute! I’ve met them before!” and then spends another few chapters NOT telling us about it.
Again: Atticus didn’t discover he has history with these characters until Chapter 17 and doesn’t explain until this one, Chapter 21. That’s four chapters in which he barely gives any indication as to what the previous encounter was like. It doesn’t read like a reveal of something we were wondering, it reads like something Hearne made up on the spot and awkwardly inserted into the story.
And you can do that in a first draft! But then you need to go back and make sure that there’s foreshadowing leading up to it. Given Atticus supposedly hates and distrusts witches so much, it wouldn’t be hard to do–throughout this book, Hearne could have made mention to different encounters Atticus has had with malevolent witches throughout history, along with a creeping sense that something was familiar about these attacks.
Instead, at the end of Chapter 17, Atticus tells us he’s met them before, and then doesn’t give us details. In this chapter, he awkwardly refers to this event in the backstory (“So THAT’s why he didn’t die!”) and feeds us a story out of nowhere, that doesn’t make sense with the character as he’s been presented so far, but does make him sound more sympathetic and awesome.
This isn’t how you write a story! You don’t drop the idea that the protagonist and the antagonist have encountered each other before, and then spend four chapters not talking about it, only to drop random exposition in there that feels so out of place that it should be for a different character or different story entirely.
Anyhow. Join us next time, as we… what are we doing, anyway? [checks book] Uh, recruiting Atticus’s bloodsucking lawyer and getting ready for the final battle. For the next couple of chapters.
Okay, then. It certainly doesn’t feel like we’re gearing up for the final battle of a fantasy book, does it? That’s how Iron Druid rolls, I guess.
Better Than You: 17
Did Not Do Homework: 19
The Kids These Days: 11
You Keep Using That Word: 36
Make It Easy!: 26
LAUGH, DAMNIT!: 38
1 “But Christmas is over!” [slaps] Shuddup! There are twelve days of Christmas!
Stranger on 3 January 2024, 03:27 said:
Happy new year Juracan! I hope you have a great 2024 :)
Faranae on 6 January 2024, 15:01 said:
I’m reading this on Epiphany, so it was still true!
What does that even mean?! Fruit can be festively plump, not people! Does the coven only roll Berta out in public at holidays? Is the reason she’s eating so much is because it’s like summoning a god of something and she can’t stop or she’ll cease to exist?
Pin-ups. Classic pin-up types.
No, it’s worse than that – he was offering them to hot women because they looked sexier while smoking. Atticus’s “flaw” is the kind of thing that makes for an entirely unlikeable protagonist, but we are supposed to like him instead of feeling a deep urge to punch him in the face until something crunches.
Yeah, as a general rule, if you’re writing characters for historical fiction, there are lines you don’t cross in every period, and making your characters the equivalent of Raoul Wallenberg or otherwise qualifying for Righteous Among the Nations status is going way, way too far. Your character can be anti-Nazi pretty easily without that. And while there are definitely cases of people who did great and good things like saving Jews from Nazis, and then went on to be horrible people that’s… a level of depth you have to really, really work towards and Hearne has absolutely not.
Which is it Hearne? The former involves multiple melodies interacting, the latter is a single melody in the same notes, literally monophonic harmony.
Slams gavel Make it so!
News at eleven! Humans like stories! We learned this in a story! Is this Hearne trying to be metafictional? Because it’s not working.
Anne Rice did the ancient character thing so much better. Marvel Comics does it better. Atticus just does not care about anyone but himself. If you write a history-breaking character, you had better be able to explain why they didn’t break history, because there’s a lot of atrocities to account for. And sure, lots of them happen at the same time, dude can only be in one place at a time. But Atticus just nopes out of all of it. “With great power comes great responsibility” and all that.
Juracan on 7 January 2024, 22:53 said:
And may you also have a great year, Stranger friendo!
Hurrah! Fun fact! In a lot of Hispanic countries, presents on Epiphany is A Thing.
It means that Hearne wanted to describe an overweight character as being happy and upbeat, I guess? I don’t know why ‘jolly’ wasn’t used when it would have worked just fine, I think. It’s a weird description! I don’t know!
[considers]
Huh. Yeah, that tracks.
It’s not just me that finds it really weird that this ancient immortal being still looks at women as objects to be sexualized, then? It’s really, really messed up? He keeps saying trash like this, and somehow we’re not meant to think he’s a massive sexist jerk? He’s supposed to come across as really cool and funny?
I don’t get it.
It felt really, really weird to put these characters (both the witches and Atticus) in that position. For Atticus, it felt like trying, once again, to prove that the protagonist was Teh Most Awesome to Evah Awesome, whereas with the witches it’s a strange tidbit. Either way, it reads as if Hearne is stopping to say to the audience, “Don’t worry, you can root for these guys. They were on the Right Side of History and saved more Jewish people in WW2 than Anyone Ever.” Instead of making realistic characters or something.
Look, as a general rule of thumb, I’ve decided that if Hearne ever refers to an idea that isn’t straightforward modern pop culture, there’s a 95% chance he’s misrepresenting it or getting it completely wrong. Even then, there’s a good chance that he gets the pop culture wrong, too.
So that Atticus sounds smart, I guess? [shrugs] I dunno.
Part of it is because Hearne is just…. so bad at talking about history or deeper topics in any convincing way. Again, he gets most of it wrong. Reading this much, it’s not surprising that he can’t write an ancient character in a way that doesn’t make much sense; it is surprising that this man taught high school English, and yet he couldn’t figure out how to do research and represent historical facts to save his own life.
[rubs forehead] Atticus is such a Mary Sue, it’s ridiculous.
Brooklyn on 2 February 2024, 18:32 said:
Yeah. A few notes about the Holocaust thing:
1) The Jewish population is I think just past 1930 levels. HaShoah, the catastrophe, shouldn’t be used to make characters more sympathetic. Especially if it’s poorly done by a Gentile author who probably didn’t consult Jews.
2) If these guys can help control countries, why the hell didn’t they just make America and Britain and Australia take in Jews and declare a preemptive war on Hitler, before he could become too powerful?
3) Kabbalah, to my knowledge, consists more of “and because the letters of chai, life, add up to 18, it’s a lucky number” and debating talmud than magic.
Juracan on 3 February 2024, 16:53 said:
Yeah, it strikes me as in very poor taste. Hearne does say that he consults experts on different topics, but I’m not sure how much he absorbs from those conversations, or how knowledgeable those people are. As I said in the analysis for the last one, he says he had a consultant on witchcraft, and I wondered if that person was the Witchfinder General considering how much the narrative dunks on witches.
Using the Holocaust as an event in the backstory is already difficult territory to do well! Using it to prop up characters for moral cookie points almost out of nowhere is… one of those ‘Obviously Bad Ideas’ and I’m puzzled why Hearne used it.
There is a lot in these books that the answer amounts to, “Hearne didn’t want to introduce an alternate history, so the characters sat on their hands during this crisis.” Atticus gives the excuse that he didn’t do anything drastic because he was trying to avoid attention from Aenghus Og (a BS excuse, as I explained); the witches have no such excuse? They can do some heavily impressive magic, and they just don’t do much with it because…. Reasons.
As I referenced in an earlier chapter, I know next to nothing about Kabbalah other than ‘It’s Jewish’ and ‘I see it referenced a lot in works related to alchemy and mysticism.’ I’m pretty sure that Hearne knows even less than that, as he seems to just have it as ‘Jewish magic’. The full implication of that being A Thing That Exists is probably not something he thought about.
Brooklyn on 7 February 2024, 23:42 said:
I’ll talk more about Kabbalah later; I know almost nothing about it and plan to learn more before continuing. This is me being annoyed about Hearne’s treatment of the Holocaust and namedropping a bunch of cool people.
Bonus laziness points for the fact that I’m pretty confident he shouldn’t have needed to consult with a scholar. Most Jews will say that what he did is a bad idea.
No matter how cool the idea sounds, I don’t include a mythical creature in my stories if it is from a culture I have genocided, killed more disorganizedly, or suppressed. (“I” referring to white people here. I haven’t killed any human.) The idea that I could take the Trail of Tears and boarding schools and just use it to build sympathy, without having it affect the character in any way…
There’s a reason it’s called the catastrophe. I’m sure many Jews have had flashbacks to Weimar Germany. It’s ingrained in Ashkenazi Jewish consciousness.
Also, as you said, there are others who saved Jews, many of whom suffered for it. Raoul Wallenberg. Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Irena Sendler. Sweden (look up what happened to Danish Jews).
And thousands of normal people. I was looking through Yad Vashem for a particular possible character who would be a Righteous. One of the stories jumped out at me. I forget the woman’s name, I believe she worked in Vienna, but the point is, she had a Jewish foster son. And to keep him, she registered as a Jew, moved to the ghetto, faced ostracizement, and I’m sure more.
And Jews who fought back, all across the ghettos. I’m reading The Light of Days, about female resistance fighters, and it has all these people. And as I said, there were thousands of Righteous, and they did it while being HUMANS, who had to fear stuff like dying, not Mary Sue and a bunch of witches! (And I’m neglecting others who fought; Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan, and the Night Witches, and those just off the top of my head.)
Witold Pilecki infiltrated Auschwitz, voluntarily, to tell the world. Others broke out to tell the world. (And everyone ignored them, but that’s not the point.) Atticus, an immortal superpowered quasi-god? Saved a few Jews. And that’s nice. But also, it’s not like the guy couldn’t have just, you know, shot Hitler or Eichmann or Mengele or, hell, even Arthur “ugh Nasa he joined in 1931 he’s a Nazi” Rudolph. Would’ve taken the last guy too.
I close with this. In Night, by Elie Wiesel, he is discussing the smokestacks of Auschwitz. He says that he won’t forget, “not even if I were condemned to live as long as God Himself.”
Condemned.
Read Night, Hearne. Read Dawn and Day and all the memoirs and talk to Jews and learn about how we—you—knew and failed to act. Learn about it and appreciate it and then rewrite this.
The Shoah is not an easy thing to write about, nor should it be. Trauma of millions and fear for generations and broken families is not an easy thing to write about.