As I struggle to get anything done today, the perky publicist is at me again, this time trying to get me to review something that sounds like it might be one of the worst books ever.
Because I’m not going to read the blasted thing, I won’t give the title or the author’s name: no way anyone will be able to say I gave them a bum steer. Anyhow, what matters is some general principles.
Two unwholesome cliches are basic to this book–which, incidentally, is not self-published.
First, we have the Beautiful Female Police Officer who, it turns out, much to her surprise, is the daughter of a Greek god. Yeah, I guess that’d surprise most people–unless they read a certain kind of squishy, nauseating fantasy. Then they wouldn’t be surprised at all, because this daughter-of-a-pagan-god thing is done to death.
Second, we have her–let me quote it exactly, because there’s no way to paraphrase the bodacious awfulness of this–“saved by the man of her dreams–the tall, dark and sexy vampire named Xen Lyson.”
The publicist goes on to tell us that this author “lives with her husband and their Alpha and Beta children…” What is that? How are these different from regular children?
Are these writers and publishers and publicists trying to bury fantasy altogether? Put it out of business? Suffocate it under a mountain of tacky, unwholesome, unoriginal, stale, brainless, tiresome, lubber-headed garbage?
The sexy vampire–it ought to be a flogging offense. There’s a certain kind of romance mind-set, involving sex with entirely unsuitable objects, that totally makes me scheeve. You don’t go far in the romance genre without encountering this. To bring it into fantasy, too, is literary vandalism.