I’m guessing you guys are probably tired of this book sporking, considering that the amount of comments on the last chapter was [checks] zero. I get it; this sporking became pretty repetitive over time. But I did say I was going to finish this book, and I feel like I should at least try to do that before disappearing into the ether. Maybe nobody’s reading it, but at least it’ll be out there and I’ll feel some sense of inner peace.
So last time, Granuaile’s possessed by an Indian witch named Laksha and she wants to be a Druid! At the end of Chapter 19 the witch takes over Granny’s body to talk to Atticus. The chapter opens with Atticus asking Laksha to drop an info-dump about her backstory, and she is happy to oblige!
She was born in 1277 in Madurai and she met Marco Polo when she was sixteen years old and happened to be passing through the area. She decided she also wanted to know more about the world, so when she got married, she made deals with demons while her husband was away.
No really.
“I married a Brahmin and played the dutiful wife while he was at home. While he was away, I played with the demon kingdom. I saw no other way for a woman in a caste system to free herself from that system.
Hearne? There are ways to do sympathetic backstories, and this ain’t it.
I don’t know enough about the Indian caste system to really do a full analysis, but given the level of research Hearne’s done so far, I doubt he has either. Stereotypically, the Brahmin caste is pretty high up, if not the highest caste in the system. So basically, Hearne’s had this character say to the audience, “I’m from the most privileged background a person from my time and place could have been, and it wasn’t enough so I cut deals with demons.”
And here’s the thing: there were movements by people in the Brahmin caste to try and make social reform accept people despite their caste or gender. Some of them lived in Laksha’s time! I figured this out from five minutes on the Wikipedia page! And you’re telling me that Laksha decided that the only way she couldn’t be a housewife was through becoming BFFs with demons?
I suppose this might have been on purpose, and that Hearne is trying to portray a witch as a terrible person and for once succeeding, but it’s a bit weird, yeah? We have one witch that was almost raped by Nazis, and another that sold her soul to demons, and… the one almost raped by Nazis is the skank ho, while the one who sold her soul with no regrets is the helpful witch that helps our hero? Doesn’t that feel like it should be switched? And yes, Atticus seems uncomfortable around Laksha and her magic, but the character’s treated like an anti-hero. It’s not bad mind you, because Laksha explains that she’s trying to become a better person, but this level of sympathy isn’t given to someone whose backstory is that she was almost raped by actual Nazis.
More to the point though, this exposition is really, really boring. Laksha tells a quick bio of herself. She tells how she learned from a vetala how to live indefinitely by moving her soul from one body to another. She asks Atticus if he knows what a vetala is, and he says he does and asks how she ended up in a necklace on the ocean floor, and she tells him that in 1850 she took a boat from China to the US, paying for it by sleeping with the captain, but then the ship wrecked and a guy one of the lifeboats tried to mug her so she jumped in the necklace after she got stabbed and sank to the bottom of the ocean. She explains when Atticus asks that the necklace in question is a very powerful magical item crafted by a demon and that she can’t replace it. Then she explains that she can take any body she wants, but she would prefer not to steal an innocent’s body because she is actually trying to become a better person.
I remember when I did a writing workshop in college, we were warned against infodumps, and I think some classmates took that lesson too much to heart because they labelled any exposition at all as an infodump. But this? This is a textbook infodump. It’s just one character telling us a bunch of backstory, occasionally interrupted by questions. It’s dull to read, especially because we’re getting pretty close to the end, and the book promised us that the protagonist was going to start actively trying to take the fight to Aenghus Og. But that’s not happening; instead he’s sitting in the bar talking to a hawt bartender and the witch in her head.
And there are ways to make infodumps not feel tedious! Think about the end of a lot of the Harry Potter books, where someone sits down and explains what’s going on. That’s an infodump, sure, but there were a lot of mysteries in the Plot, so you don’t feel bored as much as excited to finally find out what’s happening. Not so here—Granny’s deal was barely a footnote in the story, but now it’s taking up two entire chapters and some change to get payoff on something we never really cared that much about to begin with. Imagine if near the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban there’s a couple of meaty chapters explaining the origin of the Herbology department and the history of magical botany. Who cares? Not me.
We also get bulshimflarkus like this:
All this time the Scary Witch-O-Meter had been traveling further and further into the red. The phrase crafted by a demon sent it all the way over to the right so that the arrow was pointing only a degree or two above the x axis.
Yes, her amulet/necklace was made by a demon. And that’s not great! But you know what, Atticus? You’re lawyer is an actual serial-killing vampire and by many cultural standards, that counts as a demon! Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer got that right. And while she’s not technically a demon, you also pal around with the Morrigan, the Irish goddess of war and violent death. And you’re planning on giving her the knowledge to craft an amulet like yours, so that she can kill magical beings by touching them, in exchange for immortality. That’s not a deal with a demon, but it sounds pretty close, doesn’t it?
There’s also this bit where Atticus asks what happens to the souls of people when Laksha takes over their bodies, and Laksha admits she doesn’t know. Which, considering she’s been doing this for, like, seven hundred years, is kind of silly. But for all she knows, they’re dead and passed on to the next reincarnation (because she’s nominally Hindu, I guess). Atticus is all disgusted by this, as if he doesn’t kill people or let people die all the time. Do I need to pull out the list again? This doesn’t work, Hearne! You can’t say that Atticus is cool when he kills his allies or innocent people, and then turn around and say it’s not okay with Laksha does it! Pick a stance and stick with it!
After reaffirming that she wants to help, Laksha explains that Granny’s plan to get her a new body was to go to the hospital and find a coma patient; or as they put it “Bodies that are still alive but whose spirits have already left them.” Okay, I guess?
And then Atticus says he’ll agree to help, but only if Laksha does something for him. She says she’s already agreed to kill Radomila for him, but Atticus insists that doesn’t count, because she already wanted to kill Radomila, so it’s not really a favor? That’s pretty stupid reasoning, and Laksha should tell him to shove it, but because “Make it easy!” is this book’s motto she agrees, and the task Atticus gives her is to remove the cloaking spell Radomila put on the magic sword. She agrees to this.
Atticus gives another condition: that when she gets her new body and her necklace, Laksha has to move the fudge away (his words are “east of the Mississippi”) and never come back without telling him. He basically says that he thinks it’s possible that she’s going to be doing weird deals with demons again and that’ll lead to trouble, so he’d rather it not be his problem. Because that’s what makes a good hero, right? One who’s all too happy to make it someone else’s problem?
Laksha agrees to this too, and then retreats and Granny takes her body back. She goes off to deal with the actual customers, “when Gunnar Magnusson, alpha male of the Tempe Pack, came barging into Rula Bula with most of his werewolves behind him”—waitwaitwait, Gunnar? Who the fudge is this guy? You’re telling me Hal’s not in charge? Hearne, what are you doing introducing the leader of a major faction this far into the book? Considering how important the Pack is to the Plot, you’d think Hearne wouldn’t have saved him until right as he’s Plot Relevant to introduce him.
Welp turns out that Hal, Atticus’s werewolf lawyer, has gotten dognapped! As did Oberon, I guess. Atticus checks his phone, and there’s a text from Emilya saying she’s taken Hal and Oberon and that she wants the sword, or they’ll die. And so the chapter ends with Atticus being angry, and that “Gods Below, I hate witches.”
This is such stupid plotting! Chapter 17 ends with Atticus swearing that he’s going to go on the offensive, that he’s going to make an active effort to go after Aenghus before he goes after his friends. And it’s not that Atticus fails to live up to that promise; to paraphrase George Washington, the damned poultroon didn’t even try it! After that oath he just goes to his favorite bar, and essentially gets caught up talking to the hawt bartender that he doesn’t realize one of his friends and his dog has gotten kidnapped. And this is what kicks off the buildup to the final showdown. So that proclamation that he’s going to take this all seriously? Completely pointless!
Wow, that chapter was short, so I guess we’re on to Chapter 21!
So Atticus shows the text to Magnusson. Instead of telling the others in the Pack who are there with him, “he communicated the message to them through their mental link.”
[lowers book] I’m sorry, what? Werewolves are telepathic? Since WHEN? I don’t read/watch a lot of werewolf fiction, so maybe this is something that Hearne picked up from pop culture and I had no idea. If this has been brought up before, it hasn’t been highlighted, and that’s weird considering we have seen different members of the Pack interact with Atticus. If they’re all telepathically connected, we should know this, and it should have been more relevant before instead of only being brought up as it’s important to the Plot.
Because it is important to the Plot, in that they’re going to use it to find where Hal’s been taken. Magnusson explains that Hal was knocked out when he was taken, and now he’s blindfolded, so they can’t discover where he is, but if Atticus calls then maybe they’ll get some hints. Atticus requests that they all stay quiet while he calls, so that Emilya doesn’t know they’re listening.
Atticus calls and Emilya’s all like, “It took you long enough,” and this is ridiculous? Atticus was talking to Hal two chapters ago, right before this conversation with Granny. That means that at most, it was like, what, an hour ago? And Emilya’s acting like it’s been hours, and implying that he doesn’t care that much about his dog, when the message about Hal and Oberon was probably sent twenty minutes ago. That’s not that long of a time for him not to respond to a text.
Before going further, Atticus demands proof that the captives are still alive. Emilya puts the phone to Hal, who of course uses the opportunity to pass information. He says that he’s in the woods somewhere, and that they’re tied to trees with silver chains. Emilya takes the phone back and says that they’re in “the eastern Superstition Mountains” and that he’s to meet them at “Tony Cabin” with the sword so that they trade them.
Of course, Atticus loses his cool and threatens Emilya, who doesn’t care and points out that she’s got Aenghus Og as an ally. Atticus, having no restraint, barks back that Aenghus hasn’t killed him in two thousand years of trying, what makes her think she’s got a chance?
“Two thousand years?” Emily said.
“Two thousand years?” Magnusson said.
Whoops! This is why I don’t like to get angry. It makes you reveal things you would rather keep secret.
Oh, right. Yeah. There’s that whole thing where the werewolves don’t actually know how old he is. I don’t get why this is a big deal? Did Aenghus Og not tell the witches how long their feud has been going on? It’s just a fun fact that Atticus kept secret from his friends and enemies for no reason.
Also, Atticus doesn’t like getting angry? Which is weird for a guy who is constantly going around provoking everyone he can.
Atticus hangs up, and Magnusson, with his super werewolf hearing heard the entire conversation. He insists that Atticus is not going out there by himself. With their werewolf telepathy, they were able to see some of the coven when they pulled the bag off of Hal’s head. Because apparently, with this telepathy, they can see through each other’s eyes, and also smell through each other’s noses! Magnusson asks what was up with the swan smell, and Atticus explains that it was probably Aenghus Og, as the swan is one of his animal forms. For once, Atticus acts like this is a fight he might actually have trouble with, but he hopes that bringing Laksha will give them an edge.
So he calls over Granny and says that he will accept her as an apprentice, and that she must quit immediately. Like, right this second.
“Okay,” she said, beaming as she jogged back to the kitchen entrance to slap open the swinging door. “Hey, Liam! I quit!” Then she vaulted herself onto the bar, swung her legs around, and hopped off between a couple of stools.
“Attagirl,” and elderly gentleman said, raising his pint in salute.
We left the place en masse before Liam, whoever he was, could properly register that he had just lost a damn fine bartender.
Where to start?
Well how about here: this would be a mildly amusing scene if I cared at all about these characters. Instead, Granny’s a character we barely know, and her yelling that she quits and bailing is just something that feels like it’s meant to be a joke, instead of a convenient fix to make her active in the Plot when she’s only really been a character for the past three chapters.
Also some random old guy is there and thinks that’s cool? Uh, okay? Is that supposed to be funny? ‘Cause it’s not. It’s just random. There’s Just Some Old Guy there, and he approves of her quitting.
And lastly: Atticus doesn’t know who Liam is? Dude, you’ve been going to this bar for years, you’re apparently a regular customer, and were constantly flirting with the bartender. But you didn’t even know the manager’s name? I guess if it’s not a hawt girl he just doesn’t care.
Anyhow, Atticus’s whole crew leaves the bar and drives to the Leprechaun’s house, because again he thinks the police are watching his house, so it’ll be perfectly safe to instead go to his favorite neighbor’s house and no one will notice. He has them working on the yard so that he can still help the Leprechaun with yard work even while he’s busy with the Plot.
While the widow was happily occupied admiring impossibly fit men and women grooming her landscape
Oh right, we need a reminder that everyone in this book is a horndog. And I don’t know about you, but if when one of my neighbors has a bunch of people working on the yard, I’d notice. The cops watching Atticus’s house would also notice this, and probably notice that these guys aren’t professionals by their lack of equipment. This should send up a million red flags.
Atticus tells Granny that Laksha needs to remove the cloaking spell on the magic sword. Then he tells Magnusson to keep an eye on Laksha, because he’s “paranoid.” He’s not, but that’s what he says, and in this case it actually makes sense to have a trusted ally watch the witch he just met and doesn’t fully trust.
Because he wants to get Radomila’s blood sample from his house, but his house is being watched, Atticus turns into an owl and flies to his backyard. He confirms that the cops are indeed sitting in front of his house to watch. He gets the blood sample, and then goes back to the Leprechaun’s house.
While Laksha continues working on the cloaking spell, Atticus infodumps to Magnusson for a bit. It’s boring. He explains that he wants the cloak off of the sword because Radomila’s found a way to weaponize it when Fagles could see it, so maybe she could turn it against him or something.
Atticus also mentions that while having the Pack will definitely be an advantage, the witches would be stupid not to expect it, so there will be silver weapons. This makes Magnusson mad, I guess? And also the other werewolves, some of whom change. And hey, remember they’re working on the front yard of the Leprechaun’s house? While the Leprechaun’s watching? Welp, Atticus decides that it’s high time he had a talk with the Leprechaun.
“Can she be trusted?”
“Absolutely,” I replied. “Two days ago she watched me kill someone, and she offered me her backyard as a place to hide the body.”
“Truly?” Magnusson raised his eyebrows in surprise. “That’s a fine woman.”
No, that’s an unhinged woman. And if you recall, she only agreed to help you cover up the murder when you lied to her about who Bres was. If you have to lie to someone in order for her to help you, that’s not trustworthy. Besides, the woman is downright homicidal when it comes to English people. The Leprechaun isn’t some eccentric but wise old sage. She’s an insane woman with whipped crazy on top.
This is proven when Atticus goes to talk to the Leprechaun, who is more than a little freaked out that a bunch of people turned into wolves right in front of her. When Atticus tells her that it’s okay, she first asks if that means they’re Irish. Atticus replies that they’re Icelandic, and she asks if Iceland was a British colony. Atticus has to tell her more than once that they’re not British.
So Atticus sits her down and has the Talk. No, not that one. The one where he reveals that the world is actually magic and there are gods and monsters and stuff walking around and that he’s a Druid.
“All of it’s real, then? There’s no make-believe?”
“There’s plenty of make-believe in the details. This vampire I know actually likes garlic quite a bit. And werewolves, as you just saw, can change anytime, though they do try to confine it to the full moons when they have to change, because it’s a pretty painful transformation.”
Okay, cool, I guess, but this doesn’t change that Hearne hasn’t really done anything new with his vampires and werewolves, except maybe the telepathy thing which he pulled out of his butthole when it was Plot Relevant. Other than that, the vampires and werewolves fit pop culture perceptions, and not the actual myths that the pop cultural creatures are based off of.
Hearne’s werewolves are:
-A wolfpack that works on outdated notions of how wolves behave based entirely on animals in captivity.
-Weak to silver, something that’s not present in any werewolf stories before they became big in Hollywood.
-Hate vampires, because that’s what they always do in urban fantasy.
Hearne’s vampires:
-Can’t come out in the day, something invented by the film Nosferatu to have an ending without too much violence.
-Have super strength and speed, like they do in all pop culture fiction.
-Hate werewolves, because that’s what they always do in urban fantasy.
It’s like Hearne’s trying to insist that there’s creativity in his worldbuilding, and there just… isn’t. It’s almost all copied-and-pasted. That his vampires actually like garlic is the absolute bare minimum of originality. This wouldn’t necessarily be bad, even, but this story’s just so terribly done that it’s another thing that feels half-baked. This story could have been more interesting if the worldbuilding was cool at least, or if the Plot was good but the worldbuilding was cliched I wouldn’t have minded so much. But if both are barely thought-out, well… it’s just a weak book all-around.
And then we get this:
“So God really exists?”
“All the gods exist, or at least did exist at one time.”
“But I mean Jesus and Mary and all that lot.”
“Sure, they existed. Still do. Nice people.”
“And Lucifer?”
“I’ve never personally met him, but I have no doubt he’s around somewhere. Allah is doing his thing too, and so are Buddha and Shiva and the Morrigan and so on. The point is, Mrs. MacDonagh, that the universe is exactly the size that your soul can encompass. Some people live in extremely small worlds, and some live in a world of infinite possibility. You have just received some sensory input that suggests it’s bigger than you previously thought. What are you going to do with that information? Will you deny it or embrace it?”
I’ve alluded to my issues with the Gods Need Prayer Badly trope in this sporking before. But let’s talk about it in full, and why I think it hardly ever works:
It’s become increasingly popular in fantasy fiction to treat mythology this way: the gods exist because people believe in them. When belief in them wanes, then the gods get weaker, and if no one believes in them at all, then the gods die. This system was made popular by Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The thing is, it worked in those stories under specific circumstances. The Discworld is a parody of fantasy, and a world that explicitly runs on magic. Likewise, the world of American Gods is the world of one-shot novel that’s meant to make a statement about human nature in general and American culture in particular: specifically, that we live in a culture that’s always trying to move on to the Next Big Thing and forget a lot of the important ideas that shaped the past. I’m condensing a lot in talking about those works, but you get my idea, right?
But here, it doesn’t fit at all. In this conversation, it seems like Atticus (and by extension, Kevin Hearne) is using this system to point out the idea that different people will have different experiences of the world. The small-minded, who aren’t open to other people’s beliefs, have a smaller world, whereas more open-minded people live in much larger worlds.
Here’s the thing: everyone lives in the same world. So whether you personally believe that there’s a Zeus, there is a Zeus because enough other people believed in a Zeus. So Atticus’s statement? Isn’t true. The world isn’t “exactly the size that your soul can encompass.” It’s the size that everyone had unconsciously decided it already is.
And again, that means that God is potentially a fake. Because if God exists because people believe in Him, then He’s not God! He’s a created being! Christianity, Islam, Judaism… heck, any religion, becomes a lie! So yeah, for someone who isn’t religious, this sounds warm and fuzzy, but for the Leprechaun, who is at least nominally Catholic, reciting a creed that declares God the Creator of Heaven and Earth every Sunday, this should be grabbing her worldview out from under her. Atticus is telling her that God only exists because He was made up! But we’re acting like this wouldn’t fundamentally change the way a believer thinks? That a religious person would just nod and be like, “Hmmm, okay, so that just means all religions are correct, right?” Because it doesn’t! It means that all religions are at best misunderstandings and at worse hollow lies! And if the characters acted like that, that’s fine. But instead by Atticus’s words and the Leprechaun’s reaction, this is supposed to be a heartwarming affirmation of everyone’s beliefs and the connectedness of humanity or… something. It’s not. You just told this woman her religion is a lie. Mind you, she’s not especially devout, but given how the next book goes we’re meant to believe this is a large part of her worldview.
And like, if reality is shaped by people’s beliefs, how the fudge does anything work? Are you telling me if that the Flat Earth Society ever gets enough members, then the Earth will actually be flat? Because if the world is shaped by people’s beliefs…then this, and a bunch of other stupid beliefs are just as valid, right? That’s what the ‘Everything Anyone Believes is True’ trope means, doesn’t it? So Flat Earth? Yup, it’s true. World run by Alien Lizard People? Also true. Elvis assassinated JFK? Get enough believers, and it will be true! And that’s only the relatively tame conspiracy theories. What about the beliefs of groups of violent extremist factions in the world? Because if reality is built on beliefs… well, those guys also have very strong beliefs about things.
How do scientific discoveries work? Like how did we discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun if everyone already believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth? Because if the universe conforms to what people believed, then there’s no way that anyone would have made a discovery of anything that wasn’t what people already believed. You can’t discover something that contradicts what everyone already believes, which means science would barely work at all!
To be fair to Hearne, it’s unclear how much of reality is shaped by belief in this universe. Is it just the gods/religious figures? Or is it like Sandman where it affects everything, like who is in charge of the world, how physics and geography work?
And again, this system can work, if it’s applied to a specific setting or if it’s done to make a point, like what Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman did. But that’s not what Hearne’s done here. Like with the vampires and werewolves, he’s lifted an idea wholesale from other authors and hastily taped it onto his own series, without any deep thoughts into how it doesn’t make any sense. And then he has his protagonist explain it to another character in a way that’s meant to be warm and fuzzy, and she just smiles and nods, when instead she should be acting like everything she thought she knew is falling apart in front of her.
[sigh]
Oh and because I’m in constant emotional pain I’m making you guys read the Leprechaun’s accent.
She grinned fondly. “Ah, me dear boy, how can I deny anything y’say? If ye haven’t killed me yet for seein’ more than I ought ter, I figger ye mus’ like me and ye wouldn’t steer an old widow wrong. And besides that, I saw those bloody werewolves with my own eyes.”
Wait, hang on, I need to do that thing TMary suggested:
She grinned Irishly. “Ah, me dear Irish boy, how can I deny anything y’say? If ye haven’t killed me yet for seein’ more than I Irishly ought ter, I figger ye mus’ like me Irishly and ye wouldn’t steer an old Irish widow wrong. And besides that, I saw those bloody werewolves with my own Irish eyes. I’m Irish!”
…you know, this actually doesn’t change that much, but it is a little easier to read.
Atticus affirms that he does like the widow, especially because she’s the kind of person who helps him hide a body, but, uh, again, the reason she did that was because he lied to her about who it was that he killed in the first place, using her only-then established trauma and prejudices. You can’t count someone as “the friend who helps you hide a body” if you have to lie to them to get them to hide the body!
Anyhow he tells her that he’s got to go save his dog and his friend, but if he survives then he’ll sit down and answer any questions she has about him being a Druid or the supernatural world or whatever.
The Leprechaun expresses some surprise at the idea that Atticus is actually in danger. I would too, if I actually thought he was in danger, and this wasn’t just more lying on the narrator/author’s part. Yes, this is going to be the final battle. But look at this! Atticus is only barely acting concerned about his own safety! He’s preparing for a fight, for once, but it isn’t as if he’s leaving behind notes in case he dies or anything like that. It’s just business as usual, but with more allies this time.
Gunnar strolls up with his wolf pack and Granny and holding Fragarach in his hand. The cloaking spell Radomila put on it is gone, and apparently it’s basically buzzing with magic. The chapter ends with Atticus declaring he’s going to stick the sword in Aenghus.
This sporking chapter got longer than I hoped. But at least we’re getting towards the end of the book? And it all feels very… rushed. We’re just now getting a handle on the world, on how werewolves work and how Druids work and yet now we’re running to the final battle? And now we’re going to meet the villain for the first time? It doesn’t feel right.
Furthermore, we were told by Atticus that now he was going to take a more active role in pursuing Aenghus Og and his minions. Except he hasn’t; what kicks off the final battle is the bad guys kidnapping his lawyer and dog while he wasn’t paying attention. This entire story is Atticus being passive and then reacting to whatever the villains throw at him. He never pursues any course of action that isn’t a reaction to what someone else is doing!
And this “final battle” doesn’t feel remotely final. We’re told that Atticus is concerned that he might die, but he doesn’t act like it. Sure, he makes more preparations than he has the entire book, but that’s not a high bar. This is supposedly the final confrontation with the god that has been chasing Atticus his entire life, and I don’t feel hyped. I feel confused.
Welp, that’s it for this time. If there is anyone out there reading this, pray that I make it through NaNoWriMo in one piece.
Aikaterini on 8 November 2019, 11:28 said:
Maybe it would’ve made more senes if he said that Laksha used to be an Untouchable. Because, yes, this sounds more like Laksha was bored and stifled in the same way that a stereotypical 1950’s housewife might be.
I mean, what did she find personally oppressive about the caste system? Was she married to the Brahmin against her will simply because he was a Brahmin and he turned out to be an abusive husband that she couldn’t leave? Was she in love with a person from a lower caste? Nothing is explained. The reader is just supposed to take it for granted that the caste system is awful for her and that’s why this woman is apparently justified in ‘playing with the demon kingdom.’
I don’t think that Hearne had any actual awareness of what he was doing when he assigned that backstory to her. I think it was really just a matter of flipping the coin or pulling out a random generator or something. I mean, Laksha’s backstory may be minimal, but at least it portrays her as proactive. I don’t get what the point of the Nazi backstory was supposed to be.
Yes, the ‘Scary Witch-O-Meter.’ That’s how I would expect an immortal who’s lived for hundreds of years to talk. Sure.
And Atticus isn’t a werewolf, so I guess that being able to tap into their mental link is one of his abilities as a Druid?
No, it’s okay for other people to get angry so that Atticus can show how superior he is. Because he’s a jerk.
Yes, the whole moment is a plot convenience. No need to give two weeks’ notice, no need to figure out how she’s going to pay the bills after she quits her job, no need to make sure that there are people who can pick up the slack. No, just quit on the spot to make Atticus’s life easier.
She’s a fine woman in their eyes because she’s helping them. If Aenghus Og murdered someone and the Leprechaun offered to let him use her yard to hide the body, Atticus and Magnusson would denounce her for being an accomplice to murder.
Uh, yeah, you know what else used to be a British colony? Ireland and America. You know, the country that you’re from and the country that you currently live in?
Seriously, this is as silly as Garrett from “Breaking Dawn”, who killed a drunk guy singing a Beatles song in the movie because he’s American and was turned into a vampire during the American Revolution.
Honestly, I think this is why a lot of urban fantasy doesn’t bother with gods from real-world religions and only includes the mythological beings. Because once you introduce gods, then, yes, an inevitable question is, “Well, if this god really exists, what about that one?” I saw a review of the first Percy Jackson book that asked this question: if the Olympian pantheon is real, then what about other gods? What about the Abrahamic God, who specifically stated, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”?
Authors use monsters because they find them cool and they make them secular because it’s easier. You don’t have to explore complicated questions of religion; you don’t have to run into potential minefields of which belief is right. You just have people interacting with the supernatural.
But since Hearne decided to include gods in his story, he had to come up with a reason for why there are multiple pantheons running around, so he settled on that explanation.
TMary on 10 November 2019, 18:12 said:
I’m going to leave a longer comment, but I had to pop in here just to say no, don’t feel like that! Admittedly, I don’t know where anybody else has gotten to, but I’m still reading and enjoying. I’m just being bizarrely completionist about leaving comments. :)
Juracan on 11 November 2019, 22:44 said:
Yeah, but that requires, like, research and stuff beyond a five second Google search, and I don’t think Hearne wanted to do that. It’d be less egregious if this was a minor character, but she’s introduced as a key part of the climax of the novel, and all the character development is lazily shoved here.
I think that when he decided that the witches were Polish, he wanted to tie in something from Polish history, and that’s the first thing he could think of: that it was invaded by Nazis. And he just rolled with that, not really caring about how horrific a backstory that is because… well, I don’t think he really cares much about his side characters at all.
I would say this fits under a ‘That’s how the kids talk these days’ count, but it doesn’t even fit in that. It’s just… really weirdly juvenile. Out of someone like Harry Dresden or Shawn Spencer, who is written to be a goof with a juvenile sense of humor, it’d be fine, but with Atticus it feels strange. He does have a juvenile sense of humor, but no one else seems to really react to it? And it never lands correctly because he’s a massive douchecanoe.
Does he tap into their mental link? I never got that impression. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s another power of his that I missed.
Pretty much.
To be fair, it’s made clear that she’s going to be working for Atticus now at his shop and as his apprentice, so he’ll be paying her bills. But there’s not a lot of consideration put into this. We don’t get any indication she knows where Atticus’s shop is. So she’s uprooting her current job for another which she’s only been briefed on… for less than ten minutes. And is a lifelong commitment.
And yeah, it’s an urban fantasy novel and that’s not the point of the story, so this can be sped up. But not that much! She just quits on the spot! She didn’t make any friends on the job she needs to say goodbye to or anything.
Smith’s “Make it easy!” comes to mind.
Let’s be real—this is probably true. And then Atticus would kill her and crack a joke about it.
That’s using common sense. These characters don’t have that.
I’m sorry, what?!
Percy Jackson sort of tries to get around this in the first book with Chiron specifically saying they’re not going to talk about “capital G God” and handwaving that as metaphysical, or not their problem. And it’s not really as big of an issue, because it’s just one mythology, and it’s unclear how many of these characters really “worship” the Greek gods as such, or just kind of accept that they’re facts of life and parts of the way the universe works.
That being said, the sequel and spin-off serieses sort of blur that by trying to suggest that every pantheon that people remember is simultaneously true, and that’s… I’m sorry, that makes for a very convoluted universe. And Magnus Chase bends over backwards to make the first openly religious character, a practicing Muslim, feel completely justified, what with Valhalla having halal dining options and Heimdall even admitting that the gods aren’t really “gods” as such.
I think, when the supernatural comes up at all, religion isn’t that far behind. But it is much easier to use secular monsters. I don’t think Hearne’s even bad for using gods and such from mythology, but he could have come up with a better explanation, or just not used one at all (like Dresden Files or Hellboy does). Instead he copies and pastes one that really doesn’t work.
Alrighty then! But I will, at the very least, take a break after completing this spork. I’ve got enough stress going on as it is right now.
TMary on 13 November 2019, 00:35 said:
By all means take a rest if it’s needed! I’m sorry to hear things are stressful right now, I hope they get better soon.
The Smith of Lie on 17 November 2019, 06:39 said:
It is Hearne’s fault. I am having trouble coming up with fresh reactions to the stuff you describe, so I can’t imagine how difficult it is to actually come up with something for the sporking…
Eh, the core is not too bad. The big issue I see here is how blasé she is about it and how little of context we get for her situation.
Also, don’t forget that we are supposed to find serial killer murdering carpenters for using hammers sympathetic. The standards of this book are pretty low by this point.
Ah, but you ignore that the moral compass of the Iron Druids is centered around Atticus. It doesn’t matter how terrible you are, as long as you are helping him you are a good person (Leif) and as long as you obstruct him you just as well deserve to die (the cop guy who I can’ be arsed to check name of).
What kind of twisted, insane troll logic is that? She is trying to be a better person, so instead of taking a body of someone comatose or brain dead or in the pinch a body of someone evil, to then try and do good she is willing to basically kill an innocent, to then be a good person?
That’s not how that works.
Ah, but the story of Bucolicious Humpfrey and his reforms in the care of mandrakes was particularly inspiring. Don’t tell me that minutes of Herbology deprtment meetings regarding the desired level of opacity in the glasshouse number 4 didn’t stir you to action, I wouldn’t belive you anyway!
Oh boo hoo. She has an amulet made by a demon. And you have one that is made by a terrible prick. And yours is a perversion of everything we’ve been told about druidic magic.
From certain point of view Atticus himself is a demon. Just look at how nostalgic he is about riding with Genghis Khan (gaaaah, now I am obsessing about that too! Send help!)
So what was that talk about finding an innocent for her before?
I am confused. Wasn’t the cloaking already broken? And if it still there, why is Atticus wanting to get rid of it all of sudden?
At this point the only thing I want is for Laksha to stab him in the back and rid the world of his presence. I know it won’t happen, but hey, one can dream.
I guess that this is supposed to be a plot twist?
Since it Makes it easy!
I never expected to say that, but it is refreshing to see someone else being an unreasonable idiot aside from Atticus himself. It just makes for a change of pace I guess.
I bet you that the only reason for that is to be able to make this such a reveal and have us marvel by proxy at how amazing Atticus is.
Not to mention that he is terrible at keeping anything a secret, even when negotiating with potnetially hostile party he blurts out all they need to know. So why is he beating himself over revealing his age now?
Oh come on. So that whole “I don’t need to bother checking if sample is still there” set up came to nothing?! What a BS.
Also how convenient that cops sitting in front of his hous don’t pay any attention to anything esle going on in the neighbourhood.
MAKES IS EASY! x 2
Yes Hearne, keep remind us that Leperchaun is not so much a character as a prop for Atticus to use and to channel a parody of stereotype though. It’s not like the book needs actual characters.
No, that would be a character. She is a prop. She is trustworthy because that is what Authorial Fiat demands. She helps Atticus because that’s the only reason for her presence in the book. And she will take all the supernatural shit in stride because there is nothing remotely human about the way she’s written.
And the more often she crops up the more I hate her with fiery passion.
This was a good rant.
I think the big issue with people adopting this system is that they just ignore implications that come from it and just take the surface level stuff. It reminds me a bit of what infuriated me in House of Night (as experienced by sporks) – the fact that existance of vampires being common knowledge didn’t change society at all. The whole House of the Night system was just tacked on the world as we know it without any thought for ramifications and how that would change everything. Bright did the same thing – world that had a Dark Lord, elves, orcs and magic and somewhow we still end up with United States and remembering the Alamo?! The world and history are goddamne Rube Goldber machine. You can’t just add a giant system to it and expect the rest to work exactly as it did except with vampires…
Eh. Seems par for the course for a badly paced novel.
Exactly! I can see situation where even being a high caste she’d be stifled and have good reasons to want to break free. But her backstory is just hand waved though.
Ok, so here’s a quick backstory for her, that alludes to the same historical events without making her overly sympathetic.
So she’s living in Nazi occupied Poland. And things are bad but stable. And then she discovers witchcraft and starts killing. First she kills the soldiers to protect people and stop the abuses. But then she escalates and kills more and more, with increasing brutality, moving onto German civillians and then to anyone who collaborates.
Boom, there. Someone who went off a deep end is not a sympathetic victim.
Juracan on 24 November 2019, 22:17 said:
I don’t know if we’re meant to find him sympathetic, but we are supposed to think he’s cool. Which… well we don’t think that either.
Fagles. And to be fair, Atticus does feel bad about what happened to Fagles, as he makes sure to send money to his family anonymously, but he doesn’t feel that bad, as he’s still planning on suing the police department for millions for a situation he himself caused.
Not sure if it was my phrasing or not, but to make it clear: she would rather take a comatose or brain dead patient, and she doesn’t want to take an innocent person’s body. There is insane troll logic in this book, but this is not one of those instances.
No one in-series mentions this and it really bothers me. Especially because… [sigh] Dresden Files has this whole thing with how magic works, and when Harry sees something that he views as a perversion of magic and its purpose, he’s downright offended, like it was some sort of blasphemy. Atticus, on the other hand, doesn’t care, because it just makes his life easier.
I was confused too. But the way it works I think is like this: it, as a sword, is visible to the human eye, but if you were to look at with magic-vision like a Druid or witch does, you wouldn’t think it’s anything more than a sword because of the cloaking spell. Once the cloaking spell is off, not only does it look like a sword, but with magic vision it appears to be full of magical power.
I really wish this magic vision thing was better explained. Compare this to the Bartimaeus Trilogy which explains his magic vision pretty early on very clearly.
He’s an idiot that the text keeps telling us is actually brilliant. Yet another sign right here.
So you’re saying I should call her the Leprechaun Cutout rather than the Leprechaun?
It’s just lazy worldbuilding! Newsflash: if there are massive departures from real life on how the world works, the author has to explain those changes! Hounded has a Masquerade thing going on, where the supernatural is hidden from the public world… but that’s almost entirely unexplored aside from how it affects Atticus’s life, because Atticus is the center of the universe of these books.
You. I want you to write novels, Smith. Not Hearne.
The Smith of Lie on 25 November 2019, 05:34 said:
But he is one of Atticus’s various hangers-on, which makes him a nominal good guy. Especially with the ill treatment Thor gets from Hearne. And while being a serial killer does not preculde character from being interesting, sympathetic and in rare occurances they can kind of be considered on the “good guys” side of narrative (see Dexter, while it was still good), doing so requires some good writing. And that is in short supply around Atticus.
I don’t buy Atticus feeling any kind of real remorse for that one. He caused Fagles’s death with a callous disregard for any kind of risk, not only to Fagles but to his own friends. Given how Atticus excused his decision to mess with spells laid on Fagles with “eh, too much machismo in my upbringing” I say that any kind of regret he shows is him paying lip service to how normal people act.
Yeah. But that would require magic working based on a more complex rules than “Whatever Makes it easy! for Atticus.” So that’s a hard no.
He’s a walking bundle of contradictions. Carefree paranoiac, bumbling genious, psychopathic and cruel hero, millenia old frat-bro…
Sounds about right. Garden Gnome Leperchaun could work too but is a bit of a mouthful.
A Masquerade is a bit of lazy trope on its own these days. I love Dresden Files but even I have to admit that the way Masquerade works there is a bit flimsy and suspension of disbelief required for it to stand is propped up by a lot of good will the other aspects of the books garner.
I get why it is used, it has became as ingrained in urban fantasy as Hollywood Vampires and Hollywood Warewolves. And it allows for some interesting interactions, when character lives on the border of natural and supernatural. But at this point exploring how the world would be different if all the mythological gods existed or if going to university to learn magic was a thing, et caetera is more interesting proposition than another book about a secret wizard/vampire/werewolf/whatever living among humans and dealing with what probably boils down to paranormal noir. (And yes, as a proponent of Dresden Files I am aware of hypocrisy. It is just that Dresden Files is old enough and got to me early enough that it gets by on the Grandfather Clause.)
Ah, if not only my innate character flaws I’d be writing them. I have terrible work ethics and am too aware of how technically deficent my writing is. I suppose I need to start reading more popular but incredibly bad books, maybe that’ll motivate me. I mean, if Hearne, Meyer and Jadowska (the Polish author of most urban fantasy about Mary Sue who probably dwarfs Atticus in that regards. Yeah, chew on that.) can get best-sellers maybe so can I?
Juracan on 25 November 2019, 17:20 said:
That’s fair, considering how he’s been acting in the last few chapters.
Like, I get this attitude, but at the same time… I also still hold that if it’s done well enough, the Maskerade still works fairly well. Without getting into contemporary news, there are plenty of real-life examples of massive, important things going on right under people’s noses, with proof and documentation, but people will refuse to believe in them because it sounds ridiculous.
That’s kind of how I try to motivate myself to write, but it doesn’t quite work for me. In part because I’m just a bad novelist. But maybe it’ll work for you? Fingers crossed.
The Smith of Lie on 26 November 2019, 15:45 said:
Sure. And Elves, Orcs and Dwarves fantasy in hands of a good writer can make for a great setting. But it is the kind of default fallback, that hacks turned into a cliche. And it certainly is not as fresh as back in the Tolkien days.
And it literally requires less work than un-masked world. All it takes is an excuse for supernatural to remain beneath the common notice (or not, as evidenced by Hounded which treats Masquerade as a natural status quo that needs no further explanation). No need to think how the existance of supernatural would shape the politics or society, no need to make any large branch-off from the history everyone is familiar with, no need to come up with a whole lot of important details.
It is by no means a dealbreaker, but it is a rather tired, old trope by now.
Juracan on 26 November 2019, 16:01 said:
Alright, fair. And like you said, most people don’t really put that much effort into explaining how the Maskerade’d supernatural world interacts with the normal one; it’s just off to the side as this flabby bit that no one acknowledges because Reasons.
And you know how much I hate when the answer is “Because Reasons.”
TMary on 2 November 2023, 15:09 said:
I’m back again! Life has been doing a lot, but I have returned. And by golly, I am going to catch up with commenting on these sporkings if it takes me the rest of my life. Because I HAVE THOUGHTS. LOTS OF THOUGHTS. That’s the main reason I don’t comment more often; not that I don’t have anything to say, but, as you may have noticed … I have too much.
Onward!
I CONCUR.
I don’t really have much to add except hearty agreements to all your points here, but I would like to ask: Were there … really no supernatural creatures that she could have started communicating with that were less immediately objectionable than demons? Like, seriously? She went straight from “I want more freedom and to know more about the world” to “lol im gonna summon some demonz”? Wasn’t there any transitional period between those two ideas? Wasn’t there any other option besides demons?
I just do not understand the choices that Hearne’s characters make. And I don’t think he does either.
Piggybacking off of that:
But, like, why though?
…I mean, obviously not “why” from a moral perspective, I applaud the choice to try to be a better person, that’s fine by me. But everything Laksha says about herself and her life choices gives me the impression of someone who was stone-cold callous verging on sociopathic, and thus I am completely at a loss as to what changed for her to want to be a better person. This is a woman who spent six hundred years jumping into people’s bodies and driving them out by sheer brute magical force, whose reaction to “I want freedom” was “I guess I’ll cut deals with demons to get it”, and you’re telling me that all of a sudden it occurred to her that it was wrong to do that? That sounds like the kind of character that gets trapped in a magical gem for a couple hundred years and spends them stewing and vowing revenge on those who wronged her and then is released and rains bloody vengeance upon the world, you know? And yeah, I guess Atticus is nominally mistrustful of the situation, but neither this book nor the next one (as far as I know) suggests that Laksha is anything but as repentant as she claims to be. And maybe Hearne meant for her to come across more tortured and less callous, but, well, he also meant for Atticus to come across as intelligent and charming, and see how well that went. Either way, he failed.
For crying out—
Hearne, could we please have one woman whose story does not immediately involve sex in some way, shape, or form? Please? Just once, could you not?
And — I mean, the way she describes it sounds like it was her idea to offer sex as payment from the start, but it’s still like … why did she have to? She’s a friggin’ witch, and an apparently super-powerful one at that! There was seriously no other way she could think of to get onboard the ship? Counterfeit some money? Hypnotize the captain into thinking she’d already paid? Ditch the body she was piggy-backing in and take over the captain’s head? And obviously that last one is morally abominable, but it’s not like she cared about that at this point! What I’m trying to say is that she had loads of other options, but nope, Hearne decided that she would just have to sell sex, because he had a female character and that’s all he knew to do with her.
I hate this book so much.
I think the other difference with the Harry Potter exposition is that it was interspersed with action. Like, take the end of Goblet of Fire. That has three infodumps in a row, and pretty big ones at that: Voldemort explaining to the Death Eaters what he’s been up to for the last thirteen years, Barty Crouch, Jr. explaining to Harry that he was the one rigging the tournament, and then his interrogation under Veritaserum to explain how he escaped from Azkaban. But, like you said, all of that was solving mysteries that we had been trying to solve all book, and then too, it’s broken up by action scenes. Voldemort exposits, duels Harry, Harry escapes, Crouch Jr. exposits, almost attacks Harry, is stopped by Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape, they rescue the real Moody, Dumbledore interrogates Crouch Jr., and then we shift to trying to deal with the aftermath of Voldemort’s resurrection. Not to mention, there’s some genuine tension even in the expository scenes themselves, especially when Harry is alone with Voldemort and Crouch Jr. There’s a big difference between those and the exposition in Hounded, which is about stuff we don’t care about, interrupting the action we (nominally) care about, and taking place at a time when the protagonist is not in any danger and is able to sit back and leisurely sip at his whisky while he listens. Boring, I say!
Now, if Hearne had been setting out to write a completely amoral hypocrite who can always justify his own actions but is filled with disgust when others — especially others he considers beneath him — copy those same actions, I would have said he did a bang-up job here. As it is, I’m just left feeling annoyed and confused about how one can be this blind to what one is writing.
Starspirit: pokes his head in with a frozen grin on his face Hi, Atticus. I have a story for you, and you’re going to sit down and listen to it.
See, back when I was a young adult, I learned something about the man who had raised me (the dark twisted abusive kinda father-figure). Namely, that he was the leader of an international crime syndicate bent on taking over the world, who was definitely not above a little kidnapping or blackmail or torture or murder to get what he wanted. And he had had me created as a weapon to help him achieve those ends. I found all this out, incidentally, because one day I woke up in a dungeon chained to the wall.
…I managed to get away from him. And I had people at the time, and later on, tell me that I could just … disappear. I probably could have, to be honest. Gone somewhere far enough away, hidden out in the woods — I’ve got enough power to do something like that. Let him be someone else’s problem. But he never would have rested until he had hunted me down again, and anyway, I was the only one who knew what he was doing, and maybe the only one who could do anything about it. To let that be someone else’s problem would have been wrong. Seeing a problem that could hurt other people, a problem you could do something about, a problem where you are the only one who could stop it, and doing nothing, actively trying, in fact, to get away from it, is wrong.
In summary: Bite me, O’Sullivan, you selfish little turd. You wanna be a protagonist? You can be a protagonist. It’s not hard. We’re all the protagonists of our own stories. But if you want to be admirable, likable, then get off your backside and DO SOMETHING. stomps out
TMary: This is just staggeringly incompetent writing. There are ten-year-olds with a better grasp of narrative structure. HOW DID THIS GET PAST AN EDITOR? HOW DID THIS GET PAST A MAN WHO USED TO TEACH ENGLISH?
Not only that — he actually heard this text come in, and he silenced his phone instead of checking it! I mean, how thick do you have to be to know there are multiple parties out for your blood and everyone connected to you is in danger and not check your cell phone when you hear a text come in?
But please, Hearne, tell me all about how paranoid Atticus is and how he’s prepared for every situation.
Also, can I just say that Emilya’s text made me giggle? Specifically, the fact that she said “I have your lawyer and your little dog, too!” I’ll grant you, it’s possible I only found it funny because I hate Atticus and am happy when he’s unhappy, but I did think it was a more clever pop culture reference than Our Hero has ever made.
Also, also, can I just point out that he says he hasn’t been this angry since World War II? Which is … a weird thing for him to say, I feel. I mean, maybe he’s just saying that the last time he was this angry was around WWII and he was angry for completely unrelated reasons, but mentioning the war1 just makes me think that, well, he was angry … because of WWII. Presumably, HOPEFULLY, he was angry at the Nazis, but with everything we know about Atticus, it is well-nigh impossible for me to believe that he cared one bit about what the Nazis were trying to do. Especially considering that in this book, he heard Emilya’s backstory and didn’t even bat an eye. So what was he angry about?
…Do you think Hearne wants to write battle scenes? It just now occurred to me. He doesn’t write like a guy who wants to write battle scenes. He made Atticus a warrior — theoretically — because that’s cool, but the thing he seems to enjoy more is having Atticus swan around talking to hawt women and being “funny”. I’m wondering if he kind of wrote himself into a corner, because this story and genre is very much one where you need lots of cool battle scenes, but he didn’t actually enjoy them, so he just sent Atticus on loads of random pointless sidequests instead, in order to keep him from having to do much battling at all. But then of course he couldn’t have Atticus flat-out say “I don’t want to go fight Aengus Óg”, so he just had him say he was going to, and then threw a distraction at him so he wouldn’t have to. I dunno. Just a theory. It would certainly explain the notable dearth of action in this action-adventure urban fantasy. I mean, I’m not a big fight scenes person myself, but if you promise me action I expect ACTION.
Since Twilight.
OK, to be fair, I don’t know that it started with Twilight, but Twilight (or more specifically New Moon) definitely had a pack of telepathic werewolves that shapeshift whenever they’re angry and answer to an alpha who has supreme control over their actions and can force them to follow orders even if those orders are suicidal. And I’ve not really seen any reference to the idea from before New Moon (though to be fair werewolf fiction isn’t my forte and it’s very possible I missed something), but there is now an entire subgenre of romance called shifter romance in which that image of a werewolf is basically taken for granted. And New Moon was published and wildly popular five years before Hounded. It’s conceivable Hearne got the idea from there, or even that it was just floating around in the pop cultural psyche and he just grabbed it without knowing its origin. I don’t know for sure that he did, but these werewolves are definitely a little close to the Twilight werewolves for comfort.
I think this is a case of Hearne just throwing in Villainous Lines™ without stopping to think whether those Villainous Linea™ make sense in context. Either that, or Emilya is having the same problem I have with this book, in that every chapter feels about a hundred years long, in which case I completely get it.
And does he mention to her how dangerous this is going to be? He does not. Because he’s awful.
Also … is the Leprechaun checking out the women as well as the men? Or is Atticus just incapable of remembering that there are people who do not find women sexually attractive?
Also also, much more to the point, does she not think to question where Atticus found this troop of people who all apparently have nothing better to do with their time than work on her yard? They’re clearly not an actual landscaping company — they don’t have uniforms or a branded company truck or anything — they’re just … people Atticus shows up with and goes “Hi, Mrs. MacDonagh, they’re here to scape your yard!” and she goes “Oh, OK! Cool!” without even a cursory question of “Who are they and why did you bring them here?” It’s just … everyone in this book is so weirdly blasé about everything that it makes the reading experience almost surreal. I get that it’s a comedy and it’s not supposed to be super serious, but it’s still nominally supposed to take place in our world, and it’s impossible to be invested if nobody reacts to anything the way you’d expect.
And, I must note, he strips naked with no warning in front of Granny, who, though she recovers (and I admit I do like that she just snarks at him and does not seem impressed with his impossibly hawt body or something), is a little taken aback at first. And, in case you’re wondering, this means Atticus has committed indecent exposure by Arizona law and is guilty of a misdemeanour. If we count the other times he was buck-naked in public, it could be a felony!
Seriously, Atticus, does it take that much effort to just say, “I’m going to turn into an owl, but I need to take my clothes off to do that, if that makes you uncomfortable you can look away”?
GAH everything about the Leprechaun makes me so uncomfortable. grabs a megaphone HEARNE. A PERSON BEING THIS AFRAID AND SUSPICIOUS OF AND HATEFUL TOWARDS AN ENTIRE NATIONALITY IS NOT FUNNY OR QUIRKY OR ENDEARING. IT’S CALLED PREJUDICE AND IT IS FROWNED UPON IN A CIVILIZED SOCIETY. PLEASE. STOP IT.
…Also, can I just point out that they really should be concerned about someone else having seen the three werewolves change right on the Leprechaun’s front lawn? It’s a well-lit residential street; odds are good somebody would notice three people suddenly morph into giant wolves.
This whole book feels like I’m reading a dream. Where nothing really matters and weird things happen but all the passers-by seem to view it as entirely normal.
The third Hotel Transylvania movie had a joke where Dracula just has a bad gastrointestinal intolerance to garlic, and that was more clever than this. And it was just one long lead-up to a fart joke. (I never actually watched the Hotel Transylvania movies, I just happened to catch the trailer once.)
YES. YES, THIS. ALL OF THIS. THIS ENTIRE RANT. A THOUSAND TIMES THIS. There is a massive difference between something like “ultimately all religions are looking for the same truth, and all faith is in the same thing at its core”, and “gods exist because we believed in them hard enough”. Yeah, one might be a bit of a shock, but it’s not that much of a fundamental shift in worldview if you’re already pretty tolerant and broad-minded. It’s definitely less of a shock than the other, which, besides turning one’s idea of the world entirely upside-down, would make me personally scared to believe in anything too hard, lest I accidentally call it into being!
Which leads me to my next point:
Like you said, it’s not actually clear how much of this world’s reality is shaped by belief (although if I were in the Leprechaun’s position, I would want that point clarified posthaste, in case, I dunno, OCD intrusive thoughts are suddenly true, or there really are monsters under kids’ beds waiting to eat them, or something. …Come to think of it, is the Tooth Fairy real? Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny? WHERE’S THE LINE, HEARNE???). But also, if this is how the world works in Atticus’s reality … well then, how did Christianity even begin? Was the Messiah born because enough people believed He would be? The logical implications are hurting my head!
OK, gonna drink some apple juice and finish this comment.
Happy to have been of service :D
And, like, I know there’s the saying that “villains act, heroes react” and all, but … that’s only true on a grander scale. Sauron begins searching for the One Ring, so Frodo sets off on a quest into Mordor to drop it into Mount Doom. Well and good, villain acts, hero reacts. But it’s not as if Sauron pops up literally every step of the way and pokes Frodo with a stick to get him to keep moving or something! Frodo does plenty of things on his own, or at the counsel of his friends! But Atticus has to be prodded into every action he takes, and you’d really think, considering how long the fight has been going on and what the stakes supposedly are, that he’d want to do SOMETHING proactive.
All Hearne had to do was make this the main focus of the series. We could have followed Atticus on his journey to become the Iron Druid, through conflict after conflict with Aengus Óg, culminating in this final battle. It would have also helped with the point you raised about how we’re only just getting a feel for how this world is supposed to work and the story is already ending. But instead he started his story at the end, and so now we’re all confused and there’s nowhere for the series to really progress from here.
I know you wrote that checks dates … no, I refuse to believe that it’s been four years, that’s absurd … some time ago, but since I know you’re doing NaNoWriMo again this month, best of luck to you with it! Can I ask what you’re writing this year?
1 That Fawlty Towers reference was completely unintentional, honest.
Juracan on 4 November 2023, 15:07 said:
YOU’RE ALIVE?!
I think if I had to guess that what Hearne wants to do is show that witches are naturally inclined to making deals with demons for power. Except we see that they don’t have to—the witch coven in this book draws power from Slavic deities. So no, there’s not really any reason that an Indian witch, born into the priestly caste, would seek power by automatically jumping to demons as the first resort.
The narrative hates witches though, so demons it is.
My guestimate? He wanted to have this character help clean up Atticus’s mess, but he doesn’t want to feel bad about Atticus teaming up with her. So she’s bad, but not too bad. She wants to reform! Why? [shrugs] I dunno. Laksha feels it’s about time, I guess. Hearne skipped the character development for it. Honestly, this info dump is the most character development we get for her in this book.
Yuuuup. I recently browsed a Reddit AMA he did, and he says he tries to write female characters as complex people, unafraid of doing what they want/have to in order to reach their goals, but that doesn’t change that so many of them have characters that revolve around sex. Moreso than the men! We don’t get much sexualization in the characters of Hal or Leif, for instance.
Looking at this scene, and other bits in the book, I think Hearne is just.. not that creative at thinking how one could use magic? He bends the rules when it suits him fairly creatively, but when it comes to applying any solutions that don’t involve hitting things or seducing them, he’s up a creek.
I didn’t think about that, but you’re right. There’s no tension in this scene. In theory, he should be tense about whatever the witches and Aenghus Og are up to, though he doesn’t care. As you point out later on, he silences his cell phone. In what should be the tense part of the novel, gearing up for the final battle, Atticus comes across a new character out of almost nowhere who infodumps her entire backstory and proves to be helpful. Instead of, say, doing a scene with actual stakes. What if Laksha was actually malevolent, and Atticus here is captured and negotiating release, or trying to make a deal with her to be his ally against a mutual enemy (Radomila)? Instead everything stops for this exposition on something we don’t care about.
Me, reading these books.
It’s as if Hearne didn’t realize that the protagonist needed to do crap in order to make us care! He can be a hypocritical villain protagonist, but even then he’d have to be proactive in the Plot, so that’s not what he appears to be going for with Atticus. Enemy after enemy rolls into town to kill him, and he doesn’t care.
I ask this a lot.
bq..Not only that — he actually heard this text come in, and he silenced his phone instead of checking it! I mean, how thick do you have to be to know there are multiple parties out for your blood and everyone connected to you is in danger and not check your cell phone when you hear a text come in?
But please, Hearne, tell me all about how paranoid Atticus is and how he’s prepared for every situation.
I am struggling a bit with my own writing because I keep saying, “Oooh! And then my characters will do THIS!” Then I stop and look at the decisions required for that to happen, and realize that it can only happen when people are doing stupid decisions or making out-of-character choices. So I have to go back to the drawing board.
Hearne appeared to have written ‘PARANOID’ in big letters on Atticus’s character sheet, and then thrown away that sheet or entirely ignored it. When something needs to happen for the Plot or dialogue that he wants, it’ll happen, regardless of whether or not it contradicts established character motivations or traits. It’s also possible, though, that Hearne simply doesn’t realize what the word ‘paranoid’ means…
I’ve noticed that (in the first two books, at least) side characters tend to be a lot more amusing than the protagonist and his allies when it comes to making jokes and allusions.
Popping in to note that Atticus’s activities in World War II are going to be covered in the second book. The next chapter up for sporking covers it, actually! He’s going to tell us that he spent World War II smuggling Jewish families out of Nazi territory.
You might be thinking something like, “Wait, that doesn’t sound remotely in-character for him, considering he tells us his entire schtick is running away from conflict, helping bloody warlords, and he’s never shown any inclination to helping out in any other genocides in history, antisemitic or otherwise. It sounds like Hearne generic and hastily taped on that backstory to make him sound more sympathetic and cool.” And yes, you are correct.
This is worth asking. We know he’s a fan of Neil Gaiman, and Neil Gaiman fantasy books have an odd tendency to end without an action scene, or with the characters realizing they don’t need one. I don’t know. I think he does like battle scenes; however, he doesn’t like writing them.
Hey, wait a minute. Your use of the word ‘sidequest’ (and I’ve used it in these sporkings before): it makes me wonder if this book is structured like an RPG video game? The protagonist goes around the game’s map, getting stuff and talking to characters, going on sidequests and defeating minibosses until going to the final battle, which only happens when the player chooses to activate the dialogue that opens that quest…
It’s not exact, but I think I’m onto something…
MAYBE Limyaael mentions telepathic werewolves in her Fantasy Rants? I don’t think it started with Twilight but you’re right in that it popularized it. I am certainly willing to believe that he was influenced by Meyer’s werewolves/shapeshifters while writing his book, though he probably wouldn’t admit it. It’s such an odd thing though, and I’m confused as to why Atticus stops the action to explain some things but not others, such as that the werewolves are telepathic.
How does that work? Can they communicate like that with wolves from other packs? If not, how do werewolves move from one pack to another? Can they do that in this world?
I’m reminded of an episode of the cartoon series The Batman that I re-watched recently, and there’s a lot of dialogue that feels like “Cool one-liners” without having the setup to make it work. For instance, Catwoman says, “I love a man in uniform,” to Batman, at the end of a conversation that had no lead-in for that line.
Except that cartoon has cool action and animation. This book has… terrible writing all over it.
Don’t worry! He’ll tell her all about it while he’s telling her to look at the gore left over from the final battle at the end of the book.
I assumed she was checking out both. I don’t know if Hearne was going for that.
Again, this character is a tribute to an elderly family member.
There is a weird lack of passers-by throughout the novel, in places where SOMEONE should theoretically be able to see what’s going on. The only ones mentioned are people like police or the nosy neighbor. The answer, of course, is that Hearne didn’t want to bother inconveniencing Atticus with witnesses to whatever’s happening.
Not too related to the spork, but this reminds me of the subplot in Hogfather where the wizards of Unseen University keep accidentally calling beings into existence with the extra belief floating around, like the Eater of Socks and the Hair Loss Fairy.
You’ll see that I keep using this joke as the sporkings go on. It’s very helpful!
It also makes the series weird and lopsided, because the main character is from an Irish background, but the Plots of the next few books aren’t about Irish mythology? It makes this one, centering on Aenghus Og, feel very strange considering this lifelong feud has nothing to do with the rest of the books in the series.
Again, the author AMA I looked through had some insights, and apparently he only chose to make him a Druid because he needed a magic user that could talk to animals? So he just… went with ‘Druid’, I guess? And so he had to shape this first one’s Plot around that?
I am currently working again on my own urban fantasy story, the first installment in what I hope is a series. It’s… gone through a lot of work, and I don’t know how good it’ll be (as I said, I am very bad at making the Plot stick together). But at least I have to try.
TMary on 5 November 2023, 00:27 said:
I am indeed! :D Good to be back!
That all makes sense from a Doylist perspective, so I’m willing to bet that’s what Hearne was going for. From the Watsonian perspective, though … well, you don’t need me to tell you.
…“Show, Don’t Tell” is all I have to say to that.
Yeah, that’s the thing that really makes it egregious to me! We don’t get these kinds of backstories for the men. We hear nothing about Hal and Leif in regards to sex, and we certainly don’t hear about them needing to offer it in order to accomplish a goal. And even Atticus, oversexed as he is, doesn’t need to use the offer of sex in order to get something done, because he has other abilities
and everyone around him is rock-stupid.Maybe his flirting with the Leprechaun and Brigid could fall under that category, but generally speaking, he’s having sex because he wants to, not because he has to so someone else will do what he needs them to do. That’s the difference.…Well. Except for Chapter 13 of Hexed. But I’ll get there. I have thoughts. Some of them are going to come up in Chapter 25 of this book.
Yeah, I’d say that’s definitely a big problem these books have in general. It’s also why the worldbuilding and plots fall so flat, too: He’s not really thinking of anything to do with any of this stuff, so it doesn’t flesh out the world and it doesn’t drive the plot forward or influence character decisions. It’s just … there.
Yes, see, that would be so much better! Especially if, say, Laksha had been a mystery throughout the book, maybe if she’d lulled him into a false sense of security, and then BAM it turned out she was also working for Aengus Óg or something, and now she’s expositing to him while he’s also restrained and waiting to be delivered to his worst enemy. Suddenly the exposition becomes a lot more relevant and a lot more interesting, because she’s explaining who she is, why she’s like this, and quite possibly what she’s going to do to him, but also there might be a vital clue in there that tells him how to get out of this situation. At the very least, there’s reason for the audience to be invested in this scene. But nope. Because that wouldn’t Make It Easy. sigh
I appreciate what you do for our entertainment, if that helps.
Oh, word. I have definitely struggled with times where I had something cool happen, and then went back and realized that it would only work if somebody did something that made no sense (or else something that made them look a bit unempathetic). I think it’s a pretty normal problem while you’re writing a first draft (or a second, or third, or fourth, for that matter). If it helps, I think a few stupid decisions are fine as long as A: the narrative actually acknowledges that they’re stupid, B: they’re stupid in a way that makes sense for the character, and C: the character doesn’t constantly make stupid decisions (unless that’s the point). People aren’t always smart all the time, after all. But that’s … not what Hounded is.
This one is so frustrating to me, because I’ve always felt like … plot grows out of character choices, and not the other way around? Or at the very least they’re a huge driver. YMMV, but I don’t really know how to structure more than the bare bones of a plot until I know my way around my characters and I can gauge who’d be likely to do what in what situation. And then their smaller choices guide the greater structure of the plot. Sometimes you do have to box them in so they have no other choice than the one you need them to take, but I think it’s really interesting to see what they do when they’re allowed to.
…Honestly at this point I’m starting to wonder.
I wonder if that’s because Hearne isn’t trying his best to make them sound “clever”, and so they can be, y’know, actually funny?
…
You read my mind. Seriously, who was this supposed to be, and what did he do with Atticus? …And why can’t we read about him instead? Seriously, “supernatural being smuggling Jewish people (and other demographics targeted by the Nazis) to safety during the Holocaust” sounds like a great premise for a story.
And I think that’s fair; personally, I find battle scenes really hard to write, in large part because I’m not a combat sort of person, I don’t especially enjoy research into battles and fighting styles, and I’m never sure whether my fights sound realistic or even like they make sense. I actually enjoy Neil Gaiman’s writing partly for that very reason (and Ursula K. LeGuin’s and Madeleine L’Engle’s as well), that while there’s not a fight scene per se, there’s still something happening for the climax and it’s interesting and satisfying. Obviously that’s a personal preference thing as much as anything, but I do enjoy seeing examples of authors who managed to write compelling stories and win great acclaim without any real need for battle scenes.
But with Hearne … like I said, he kind of wrote himself into a corner with the sort of story and character he created. He might have enjoyed it better if he had tried to write a story where Atticus wins through guile and cunning rather than brute force; like I’ve said before, that would have fit really well with Irish folklore in general! But then again, he would have had to come up with a way for Atticus to triumph through cleverness, which would be really hard in its own right, so. Maybe not.
I think you are, yeah! This book really does feel more like it’s structured like a video game. Mind you, I don’t think it would be a very good video game, but it feels a lot more like it was written with that format in mind. The plot feels oddly … empty, and focused more or less or streamlining things so Atticus can get from one task to the next. Whether or not things actually make sense with that streamlining.
Yeah, it’s so odd how he treats it like this is a well-established piece of werewolf folklore with decades of precedent behind it, and it’s … not? It’s definitely become popular, but it’s still not really the first thing your average reader is going to associate with werewolves (I think, but maybe I’m just old-fashioned). And even if it is, you can delve into it and explain how the lore works in your own world. Like you said, how far does the communication reach? And how does moving from one pack to another work in this world? Considering that a wolf pack in the wild is basically a family and the pups usually disperse when they’re old enough to form packs of their own, but I don’t think that’s how werewolves are supposed to work, some information would be helpful on that front!
And see, I’m more willing to forgive a cartoon for kids if it’s got some kinda silly dialogue that’s just there to sound cool. Especially if it at least has cool animation. That will make up for a lot. This does not have that going for it, and the narration, the equivalent, is just obnoxious.
Oh, ho ho, yes, that. I will have words when we get there. And possibly a spitefic.
…Well, I didn’t know it was possible to be more uncomfortable than I already was, but here we are!
See, this is actually just fun. I really need to read more Discworld.
Isn’t it great? I do have to give credit for it to my brother; he’s the one who came up with it when I was ranting about the Leprechaun’s accent. Which is how I know it’s very soothing.
I’ve been meaning to bring this up for a while now, but this story … really doesn’t feel very Irish? Which, I mean, I’m not saying every story about an Irish character has to have Irishness oozing out of its pores or anything, I think it’s fine if a character just happens to be Irish, but … the Irishness of the main character here is kind of a selling point of the book, right? And it’s just … the story is not very Irish. The Irish gods are mostly a footnote, except for that brief scene at the beginning with the faeries, there’s no other creatures from Irish mythology (which you’d think would be Aengus Óg’s go-to to ally himself with, instead of Polish witches and demons from Hell), and there’s no sense of any real folkloric influence in Atticus’s character or the plot. It’s mostly just this gloss of vague stereotypical stuff.
I was at a loss to explain that, until I read this:
‘Cause that kinda sounds like Hearne wasn’t really interested in Irish mythology or folklore to begin with, and therefore they don’t feature very prominently because he didn’t really care. Which … OK, fine. You don’t have to be. Why not just make Atticus a wizard? “Wizard” is a concept so broad that you could throw basically any magic-user, doing any magical thing, under that umbrella and it would work fine. Just say he’s a wizard who can talk to animals. Problem solved. You’re not being given an assignment for creative writing class. It’s your book, you can write it however you want.
Best of luck to you! I feel the struggles with the plot. But working at it has already put you in a category well above any of the authors we lampoon here. I don’t know whether that’s any comfort or not, but you’re doing something right.
Juracan on 8 November 2023, 07:10 said:
It’s not a central part of Atticus’s character either. I mean, yeah, he’s easily distracted by sex—weirdly so, given his age—but without those moments his character’s story would change that much. In this, so many of the female characters are defined as sexual characters, with how long Hearne spends describing their looks, and how they flirt or sleep with Atticus. The Leprechaun, Flidais, Granny, Brigid, Malina, Emilya, and the Morrigan ALL flirt with (to varying degrees) or have sex with Atticus at different points of THIS book.
Right. Part of the thing is that I had characters disobeying orders to get the Plot moving, and then at the climax they fix their mistakes by also disobeying orders again, and in the end everything’s hunky-dory, which… doesn’t work. Why would their superiors trust them with ANYTHING when they can’t prove to them that they’re able to follow basic instructions? Especially when things could have easily gone wrong? It just didn’t work. I had to rework a lot of that Plot.
It depends on the kind of story, but yes, a lot of writing nowadays works on the principle that characters and their choices should be driving the Plot forward. Hounded feels like it thinks it’s doing this, but it isn’t, considering how often Atticus just ignores the Plot. It seems that Hearne had certain scenes in mind he wanted to happen, and didn’t care if they didn’t make sense in context with the characters he’d written—they just did it. It’s fine, right?
Crazy what happens when you’re not trying too hard to be clever, huh?
[Not about humor, but vaguely reminds me of Brett Devereaux’s review of Rings of Power, in which he (a military historian) complains about how a lot of the problems he had with the battle scenes come down to the makers trying to do something ‘clever’ instead of understanding how battles, cinematic and realistic, actually work, resulting in tactics that make no sense.]
It’s bizarre! It feels so weird! He tells his audience that his conscience didn’t allow him to stand by and let it happen, but I think the only reason is because that’s a genocide that Hearne knows the audience would have heard of. I’m not saying it’s a bad decision, but it doesn’t feel like this character at all.
Right, I think it works for Neil Gaiman because there’s still a lot of tension in the story leading up to that point, and the Plot resolves. Hounded gets resolved, I guess, though there’s very little tension. The bad guys can’t even bother Atticus while he’s walking to his favorite restaurant after coming out of the hospital—all times when you’d think they would leap out and stab him.
That, and he’s made invincible in… [checks notes] Chapter 2.
I think Hearne thinks he wants to write battle scenes, with a cunning character, but they mostly amount to, “And then Atticus easily killed them.” And he leaves it at that. As I note when we get closer to the final battle, if he’d thought about it, he could have had a spectacular and interesting fight scene with creative uses of power and skill. Instead, it’s just, “Oh yeah, I’m better than them! Then I win. The end.”
Really, given Aenghus Og is the main character, this should have been, like you said, a story about someone winning through guile and cunning, as both Aenghus and Atticus are supposed to be those kinds of characters. Aenghus Og doesn’t have coherent characterization in this book though, so that’s not what we get.
Yeah! Writing that last comment, I was thinking how in many RPGs, I put off the main quest ending until I’ve done everything I want to do, and that’s kind of what happens here? Not exactly, but Atticus puts off dealing with the problems until he does everything he wants, and then suddenly he gets pulled into it, conveniently after recovering, going to his favorite restaurant, and flirting with the hot bartender and getting her backstory.
I can’t wait!
Yes you do!
Let him know how helpful he’s been, then!
Well, to be fair, there are the Fir Bolgs later on, and Bres—but they’re dealt with so easily, it’s easy to forget them. Hearne certainly didn’t think that much of them, given how easily he killed them off. You’re right though, it’s clear that he isn’t that interested in Irish mythology, or making a story about it—which is why it’s weird to me that I’ve seen some readers say they liked this series because of the Irish mythology. I picked it up because I was interested in Irish myth but knew little about it, and ended up walking away thinking I hadn’t learned much at all.
But it is still weird that he thought he had to make the lead a Druid because he only wanted to have him talk to his dog. Was there no other way to accomplish that? I’m also unsure where in his research he got the idea that Druids could talk to animals, outside of, like, video games and stuff?
And these first three books, they lead up to Atticus going up against the Norse gods (Thor, particularly) makes me wonder if he’d been happier, or if the books would make more sense, if it just went with Norse mythology to begin with? It seems odd that the first book is vaguely based on Irish myth, only to not take much interest in it, warp the characters of it so strangely, and then the next two books being not about it at all.
I’m trying. It’s difficult sometimes. Right now I’m writing scenes in vaguely chronological order, and filling out the word count, though I’m happy to say that yesterday I got a bit of a Plot Breakthrough where I figured something out (I think).
TMary on 9 November 2023, 02:53 said:
This too, yeah! If they had other dimensions to their personalities, it might be more forgivable, but … well, nobody in this book has other dimensions to their personalities, but the female characters’ dimension is sex.
Ah, yeah, I getcha. That sort of thing is super frustrating to discover in your work, and you have my sincerest sympathies. On the other hand, you caught it at the right time.
Ooh, that sounds interesting! “Actual expert on something reviews pop culture relating to that thing” is my favorite genre of Internet criticism.
…Atticus has a conscience? First I’ve heard of it.
Yeah, I’m like … I’m not complaining that the main character was saving Jewish people from the Holocaust, and it’s certainly about time we saw Atticus do something to benefit other people (or even just something interesting with all his power), but it’s so out of left field that it honestly feels a little desperate.
And that’s the big problem. Even if we had had a big, dramatic fight scene in Chapter 24, would it really have mattered when there was so very little building up to it? I mean, it would have been better than what we got for sure, but it would still have been pretty hollow all around.
That sounds really right, actually. “Just let me collect every treasure chest on this map and then I’ll go defeat the Big Bad.” Which, you know, works fine in a video game, but it does not map well onto a novel, because nobody wants to follow a hero who puts off fulfilling his quest because he doesn’t feel like it yet. Or, for that matter, a quest that refuses to call for its main hero until it’s convenient for him.
Yay! :D It will have to wait until I’m done with the spitefic for Chapter 24, though. Although at least I’m done with the three spitefics for Chapter 23. The last three chapters got me feeling pretty … spiteful.
looks at huge TBR pile …Oh, it wouldn’t hurt to add Mort to the list…
I shall! :)
Ah, yes, of course, the Fir Bolgs and Bres. I did forget about them, which, like you said, is kind of its own problem there. Especially since you could literally just remove them from the story and nothing much would really change, except for the fact that we wouldn’t learn that the Leprechaun will help you hide a body if you convince her that the body is British. Which goodness knows was vital information.
Yeah, I think everything you learned was in spite of Hearne, and Googling stuff to see what he got right and what he didn’t, not because of him. And it’s really frustrating to me that for some people this is an Irish myth-based story. No. Just … no.
(Sidenote that is only vaguely related but that I was reminded of because of this comment: I told my friend/Gaelic teacher about this book, since she knows more about Irish myth than I do and I wanted to gauge her reaction to it, and when I told her Aengus Óg was the Big Bad, she made roughly this face:
and went “…That’s a … weird choice for a villain.” Which, you know, I found validating.)
Yeah, that’s very much a D&D/RPG in general kind of image of druids. It’s not totally out of nowhere, I guess, but it doesn’t match up with the folklore, AFAIK.
…Hey, here’s a thought: What if Atticus had been a berserker? Specifically, a shapeshifting berserker; possibly an ulfheðinn, one who fights like — or in the form of — a wolf. True, I don’t know whether there’s any folklore that says they could talk to animals either, but it wouldn’t be out of place and it would be an interesting thing to do with the folklore. And he could still have come forward in time through some kind of magic. Then the focus on Norse myth would make sense. Hal’s pack would make sense! He could actually be part of Hal’s pack — maybe he came forward in time abruptly, but Hal and his pack are modern-day berserkers, and they help him figure out how to navigate this very weird world he’s just landed in. Maybe even the resentment for Thor could be worked to make sense, if Atticus believed Thor was responsible somehow for sending him forward in time and taking him away from everything he’d ever known.
sigh I think the main problem with Hearne’s writing is that he has a tendency to just … pick the first option and stick to it, without looking into other options or what he could do creatively with the one he’s choosing? Which is why all Atticus’s decisions are so monumentally stupid and the world-building and plot aren’t very well thought-through.
Hey, Plot Breakthroughs are good! Here’s to more of them! apple juice toast
(Also, apropos of nothing, just an odd moment of synchronicity: I happened to see Hounded on a list of recommended “Books for Sale” on a different review website I follow — though I don’t think the proprietors of that site have actually read it. They did include the caveat that a lot of readers thought Atticus was a giant Gary Stu and the characterization of the female characters was sexist, but I may have left a comment warning people away from it … and possibly warning them towards the spork. In case anything comes of that.)
Juracan on 18 November 2023, 21:29 said:
Yes! It’s great fun. He also reviewed the battles from the movies. You can find all of it in the LotR tag on his blog.
I know, right? It’s weird because of how much he tells us he’s self-interested, only in for himself, and doesn’t get involved, for him to declare that one time he did get involved because… his conscience.
Sure.
Of course, we’ll talk more about this when we get to that chapter of the sporking.
Bres’s death actually does have consequences later on in the second book, if admittedly dumb ones that are terribly handled. The Fir Bolgs, though? That one really seems like Hearne said, “Hm, well I need something for Atticus to do, so why not give him some enemies to fight? We’ll tie that into the police investigation, I guess…” It’s Plot irrelevant! The Fir Bolgs do nothing! They’re just minions to be disposed of and never remembered! The biggest problem is cleanup. Which isn’t that much of a problem, because as it turns out, Atticus’s bloodsucking lawyer has a bunch of ghouls on speed dial to clean up his kills!
It’s not! It’s really not. Not even, like, “Using badly out-of-date research for Irish mythology” type of story. Because the Irish mythological elements are awkwardly thrown in there, and Hearne twists what’s there for his own story to make it near unrecognizable.
He’s such a bizarre choice for a villain! Hearne doesn’t even try to justify it in-story; Aenghus Og is somehow stark raving foaming-at-the-mouth mad because… “the mortals have the stories wrong”, I guess??? I’m still thinking of how this one page of Hellboy gave him more interesting implied characterization, when he’s not even really a character in that story, than Hounded, in which he’s the main antagonist.
I am wondering where he Google’d this, exactly. And again, as you said, it wouldn’t have been difficult for Hearne to just write “wizard” and then say, “Oh yes, this is a wizard who talks to animals!” Instead of… whatever he’s done with druids that he’s done with this series.
First: I like your berserker idea, and I want to see more about a berserker trying to adapt to modern day life. I think Hearne would botch it somehow, but at least it wouldn’t be too weird of a fit, exactly?
Second: This… you might be right on the nose as to the problem with writing decisions in Hearne. It’s as if he didn’t actually stop after writing the Plot or worldbuilding and say, “Hey, wait, does this make sense?” and instead of changing anything, doubled down on the first idea even though it makes less sense. So like, being a Druid, but apparently being a Druid doesn’t actually mean being Celtic, it just means being an Earth-related mage. And then the Plot revolving around Norse gods, because that’s what he wants to do, when he’s already giving an Irish mythological setup.
Aaawww, thanks! I do hope it brings in more readers, though if not I’m still glad for your boosting these sporkings!
Gotta love my apple juice… [chugs]
TMary on 23 November 2023, 00:50 said:
files away under “things to look at when I feel like diving down a rabbit hole”
Excited for that!
Well, color me shocked—
…OK, not that shocked. Very lightly shocked. Pastel shocked.
Yeah, that whole scene is very … random encounter-y. Which might have been okay if the rest of the plot was tighter-woven so that a fight scene made sense and had an impact, even if the mooks themselves were one-note and disposable, but … it wasn’t. So.
He really, really is! Bres at least has some precedent behind him, and heck, the Morrigan wouldn’t make a bad villain herself (ignoring for the moment the fact that Hearne essentially did write her as a villain in this series, because I don’t think he meant to). But Aengus Óg? I’m not saying it would be impossible, but he’d have to have a much more in-depth personality and motivations for his actions for him to line up at all with the myths and yet still come out as a bad guy. I’m not asking for total adherence to the folklore (especially since folklore changes from time to time and place to place), but some basis is important, or else you’ve basically just created an original character and also kind of insulted the people who came up with that folklore by just making a blanket statement of “oh, but they were just wrong and didn’t know what they were talking about”. Like … why didn’t they know what they were talking about? Was Aengus’s PR just that good? And what makes Atticus so special that he figured it out?
(I mean, we all know what makes Atticus so special. But still.)
Thank you! I might add that to the plot bunny warren … or you could have it, if you want it!
I think that’s the big issue with a lot of … not-terribly-good books out there — that the writers didn’t stop and think about the decisions they’d made and whether they all fit together. And, I mean, we’ve all done it when writing, I know I’m not immune, but it’s not thinking over your decisions that makes for poor storytelling.
I do what I can! :)
Juracan on 23 November 2023, 11:22 said:
I mean… yeah, his blog is one big rabbit hole, I’ve found.
Spoiler alert: it’s so another goddess can flirt with him.
The Morrigan would make a great villain; heck, even now, we could have a twist later in the story/series that the Morrigan was secretly manipulating Atticus to her own ends the entire time. Sadly, her fondness for Atticus is sincere and she’s just his supporting cheerleader in the story, which is dumb.
It’s very strange, and I think it really speaks to the “I Google’d who could talk to animals and got druids” approach. He got to druids, and then decided he needed Celtic/Irish myth, and needed a villain. In an attempt to break the mold, I’d guess, Hearne settled on making Aenghus Og the villain, even if he couldn’t think of how that would make sense. So he avoided making any sense at all instead.
Good job.
To be clear, some decisions not working all the way through can be forgivable—if the other elements work. But consistently throughout Hounded, the worldbuilding, the characters, the action, and the plot all seem, at best, half-formed, like someone needed to tell Hearne, “Go back and think this through in a couple more drafts to tie it together better.”
TMary on 24 November 2023, 16:12 said:
…You may erase the shocked, now.
That would be an AMAZING twist. I would laugh my head off — er, that is, feel bad for Atticus, oh no, one of his oldest allies betrayed him, whatever would he do, etc.
We’ve said this before, but it’s awfully reminiscent of his making Thor the bad guy too — I guess, like you said, just in an effort to break the mold? Someone should tell him that not all molds need to be broken. Sometimes you break a mold and what happens is that whatever you were casting ends up a messy, amorphous blob.
Yeah, that’s true. I’d be willing to forgive one or two messy decisions if the rest of it held together pretty well, especially since this is a first novel. But since none of it is well developed … well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?
Juracan on 24 November 2023, 18:58 said:
And it would fit better with who the Morrigan is in mythology! I think what we’re supposed to be getting is that she allied with Atticus because it bothered Aenghus Og, and it sort of built up from there, but instead of developing that relationship, we’re meant to get that she just loves helping him and it’s no big deal because Atticus has no problems being friends with the freaking Morrigan.
Perhaps if the series had been about Norse mythology from the get-go, there’d be time to develop this idea? I don’t know, at times it feels as if the Norse gods conflict is the driving one the series is trying to build up in the background, even if it amounts to “That guy is a douche so we should kill him.”
I think, maybe, in some way, “evil Thor” CAN work as a concept. It’s just so awkwardly done in these books that it feels like you said—something done differently for the sake of doing something differently.
‘Tis! I’ve read books that I think fail on one or two issues, but I don’t think they deserve the full sporking treatment. That this one bothered me so much, and keeps getting passed around on urban fantasy recommendation lists, I thought it deserved to thoroughly sporked and criticized.
TMary on 25 November 2023, 00:10 said:
YES. I mean, Atticus is also friends with a vampire who kills carpenters because they use hammers, so I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised as to which goddess he’s allied himself with. But more to the point, I agree that it would fit much more with the mythological Morrigan. And yeah, I feel like we’re supposed to get a sense that the Morrigan here started out using Atticus — and maybe still is using him to an extent? — but it really doesn’t come across well. Really, this is another of those things that might work better, or at least would have a decent chance at working, if Hearne had started from the beginning of Atticus’s story rather than what should be the end. Then at least we could have seen him winning the Morrigan’s favor (and preferably by doing something rather than just … being hawt, or whatever she sees in him), rather than starting here with no explanation and the goddess of battle and violent death being buddy-buddy with our protagonist just ‘cause, without having any plan in mind for him or expecting anything from him in return.
Yeah, it really feels like — as we discussed — Hearne actually boxed himself in with feeling like he had to write about Irish mythology because he had to write about a druid. Mind you, I’m still not sure he would have pulled off a convincing conflict with Thor even if he had started with Norse myth, but at least he would have had room to tell us some of what his version of Thor did, and to better set up a conflict with the Norse pantheon and make them feel like established characters. But this way it all feels rushed. He has to rush through the Irish myth bit in order to get to the Norse, but then, because he still had to spend time on the Irish myth, the Norse didn’t get enough attention to set them up.
Really, I think he tried to cram too much into the first three books of his series — and they’re not long books, either. Which is understandable, and I get it, but it leads to a story where none of the aspects are well fleshed out at all.
And yeah, like … I don’t want to say I reject out of hand the idea that you can do different things with the old myths. You totally can! I think evil!Thor and evil!Aengus Óg could have worked, but there just wasn’t any room to set them up, so we ended up in this weird world where Aengus Óg is just some generic foaming-mouthed villain and Thor is a colossal jerk who everyone, and I mean everyone hates, with no explanation. We’re just supposed to accept that that is the way the world works now, when all other available sources tell a rather different story.
YEAH, that’s the really egregious thing. If it had already been broadly panned, it might be all right, but when you see something like this getting so much praise and recommendation, that really makes one feel like it deserves a good shellacking. Thank you for taking it on!