just say no to the venom cock book

[jinian]

Background: The "venom cock book" is Touched by Venom by Janine Cross. I became acquainted with its existence by way of rachelmanija's post about its intense badness. Being I guess kind of masochistic, I had to check it out from the library.

Laughably bad at first, with terrible overblown naming (Xxelteker!) and shoehorned native-language bits, the book actually came to hold a strange power over me -- I kinda cared what happened. It's like the time I saw the movie Species, which I had to keep watching because it had good elements, they just weren't exploring those, but they might! at any moment! (They didn't.)

The cool bits: A few terms; I liked "navel" vs. "blood" relatives. Her mother's magic is actually pretty neat, and I'd like a book that focused on similar stuff. The world is visibly skewed for plot purposes, but there's some decent stuff there too.

The biggest problem was that the author deliberately set out to write Kushiel++, but she failed to realize a fundamental thing: Phèdre wrote in that polished, descriptive style because she was raised in refinement and specifically taught to be perfect. When your heroine is born and raised in a potter's hut and plays in the mud for fun, she does not get to say things like "luminous liminality" without a damned good reason^*. Being taught bare literacy as a young teenager doesn't qualify. Furthermore, you can't have overblown vocabulary and syntax in your sentence and then start it with "sure" or stick a "hey-o" in the middle. ("Hey-o" was merely dumb the first time she used it, but grew into a flingable offense through repetition.) And, finally, when your characters' language is explicitly not English, puns in English are a bad thing to include in your book.

^* Actually, my favorite example of Language Inappropriate to Character was not in the really overblown style, it was an infodump: "And as they [dragons] tend to return each season to the same crown, or treetop nest, the kwano snake returns there faithfully, too. The reproductive cycles of host and parasite are synchronized."

So don't start! Only pain awaits you, much as it does the main character. Oh, did I forget to tell you her name? ZARQ. I'm telling you, don't read it.

Comments

ZARQ! ZARQ! ZARQ!

[beaq.livejournal.com]

See, now, this is the kind of review I find useful.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

"The reproductive cycles of host and parasite are synchronized."

I had a paragraph like that in the unfortunately titled WolfeWyngz (which I'm mangling because god I hate that title and desperately want something better), but I have two excuses: 1. it was 50K words written in one month and 2. I've already edited that paragraph out.

If I ever write like that? kill me. On the spot. Just bang, dead. Unless I'm being silly or sarcastic. Otherwise, please, tell me you'll put me out of my (and everyone else's) misery.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

The first draft gets to have that, even if not written at breakneck Nano speeds. If you try to pass it off as good, I'll whack you, no problem.

(I guess for a very specific narration style it could work, but otherwise NO.)