After a long and totally undeserved break, I’m back! With summer break just starting an a to read list longer than my arm I should be busy for awhile. I’m sorting out my library at the moment, so there may be a couple of giveaways down the road for some books that I, unfortunately, just don’t have space for anymore. It’s good to be back though so, as always, on to the review!
James R. Tuck’s Blood and Bullets is a mix of urban fantasy and action movie with a main character who is a study in over done manly man-ness. Chalk is a larger than life, gun toting, monster slaying badass and he’s going to tell the reader about it at every chance he gets. This gets old really quickly. Chalk is supposed to be the big tough monster hunter who shows up and gets things done, the problem is he reads a lot like a bad self insert from a kid who wants to be the tough guy that solves problems. This could have still worked out alright if the story had been in third person, the plot itself is fairly solid if a bit underwhelming. The book is in first person though with the world’s most talkative know it all narrating everything that he does no matter how insignificant it is. Even with that I would have been alright were it not for the repeat descriptions, Chalk describes his guns and himself at least three times. His apparent effect on some women is also brought up repeatedly. I don’t know if Tuck ran out of things to write with these descriptions or just didn’t trust his readers to remember any of it.
The plot, as I said before, is fairly decent. Good guy gets attacked by more vampires than any of the major players in the city should have been able to put together, discovers the big bad’s existence, and has to figure out how to beat her without losing his rag tag team of monster hunters. It’s been done, but that doesn’t stop it from working here. To my mind the things that bring down the plot are, yet again, Chalk’s reiterating things too much, the big bad’s throwing logic out the window because she wants to have sex with Chalk, and the dues ex machina character that shows up towards the end. I’d have really liked to have seen more of the secondary characters doing what they’re supposed to be good at rather than just taking Chalk’s word for it, it seems like most of them could do pretty well as protagonists on their own.
At the end of the day, the blurb for the next book sounds interesting but this seems like more of a series to borrow from the library than one that I would purchase the rest of. I’m giving Blood and Bullets a three out of five for decent premise but a miss with the main character.
Wow, I expected a 2 at best, but I guess that’s just cruel. The moment you drop below a 3 is the moment to drop yourself off a skyscraper. Anyway, the topic this one made me want to talk about is “repetition.” You had this to say about repetition today “I don’t know if Tuck ran out of things to write with these descriptions or just didn’t trust his readers to remember any of it.” And it got me to thinking. Now, as a psych major, I can tell you that repetition is an effective study tool which helps humans remember things better. However, it must be used in a delicate balance. Repeting too much actually makes us more likely to tune out. For instance, do you listen to the radio? Down here there’s this commercial that just comes on CONSTANTLY. It’s this guy yelling about “KIA KIA KIA!!!” trying to sell us crappy cars. Well, as it turns out, those commercials are ineffective due to the fact that we start tuning them out. They simply come on too often and our brains are programmed to ignore irrelevant information. We think “oh I’ve heard this already” and then fail to listen to the commercial, whether or not Kia happens to have an excellent brand new sale going on. (Kias are crappy cars anyway so this doesnt really matter) but it gets to be a problem when something that actually DESERVES our attention is repeated too much. Case in point: the arrow to the knee joke. I LOVED the arrow to the knee jokes, but unfortunately they caught on with EVERYONE including people who didn’t even play, understand or even enjoy skyrim! Every yahoo was running around making arrow to the knee jokes, to the point where those of us who do understand the reference actually just got tired of hearing it. It’s ironic because Skyrim itself repeats arrow to the knee so many times that hearing it on the game was annoying, but then hearing in online was funny because those who mentioned it understood how annoying it is XD But then it became “cool” and multiplied like a jackrabbit on ecstasy. Needless to say, no one wants to hear the joke anymore. It died a sad, ironic death.
With writing, I notice that authors usually take time at the beginning of each subsequent book in their series to reintroduce the characters and restate some basics about the world, etc, such as JK Rowling’s reitterating Number 4 Privet drive and Harry’s eyecolor. With her work, it creates a sense of nostalgia which is actually quite pleasing but even I find myself wanting to roll my eyes and skip over the first few chapters. I can only imagine then, how annoying it must be to read and reread the same descriptions over and over in the same damn book. A sequel, sure, refresh my memory, but in the same book?? Give me a break! At that point it starts looking like pure laziness on the author’s part. How about having the character actualy DO something bullheaded rather than just reitterating “by the way, I’m pretty bullheaded.”
Show don’t tell.
Oh! But one beautiful thing about repetition! Setting the character up is witty and fun for the reader. I accidentally did this with Heather at one point and my readers commented “uh oh I already know what that girl is gonna do!” XD When you get to the point that the readers can already guess how your character will react in a brand new situation, you’ve officially gotten their personality across. That moment is beautiful. Sighhh.
It’s repetition in a way, but with a spin to make the reader feel intuitive rather than bored and it is HARD to pull off. If you try too hard to pull it off you fail and if you don’t try enough you fail. I hope to pin down that balance.
As a completely unrelated sidenote, self-inserts are pathetic.
I couldn’t really justify giving it a two because while Chalk himself is a big problem if the author fixed that the book would be fairly average maybe even a bit better than. Like you said, some repetition is good, but too much and it’s like trying to slog through mud. It kind of reminds me of this one character from a different series, when she was first introduced she had this thing against the main character because sometime in the past she’d had a bit of a crush on her but the main character wasn’t interested. The next several times that this character was used we were reminded that she had be antagonistic towards the main character because of an unturned crush, this happened in at least three books but really only effected her introduction in the first one. The writer only recently stopped doing this and let the character stand on her own. On the other side of things, I suppose, would be the side characters whose appearance gets mentioned once and then ignored for books on end. Repetition has it’s place, just not to the degree that Tuck used it.
It can be used well for nostalgia or as a call back to a simpler or easier time for the character, even dramatically. I’m not a fan of much repetition beyond reminding me of the basics of what a character looks like or the interactions between the characters, but even that I want to see kept to a minimum. Too much and you get to Twilight levels of trying to find a million ways to say that someone’s attractive. Showing is definitely more important, though more difficult as well. Showing that a character is quiet and standoffish is decidedly harder than saying it and utterly breaking suspension of disbelief.
But setting a character up well still requires more show than tell, it might be repetition but it’s repetition through action rather than dialogue. You know? If I want to make Jane come across as really angry I describe how she’s holding herself, her voice when she talks, her facial expression, or note something that’s seemingly out of character for her that indicates her mood rather than just saying that she’s really mad a bunch of times without showing anything.
It’s not just the narrator informing you of something though, it’s the audience reaching a conclusion based on previous interactions.
Self inserts are pathetic as main characters, they can be funny if they’re really minor or not totally blatant wish fulfillment. Stephen King has a habit of putting himself in his books, but from anything I’ve heard he’s never a heroic hero type who’s there to save the day, rather he’s usually a writer who’s had problems with alcohol or drugs who stays a minor background character. It, like anything else in writing, is all in how you use it.
wow the book sound interesting i want to read more of it
It’s not that great, but if you can find it in a library it isn’t terrible if you can get past the narrator.