In this case, it was clearly loyalty only to a story. Sherrylin Kenyon's darkhunters, those men just rev my engine, and her plots read like a good action flick. In the darkhunter books, she made all the same quirky little writing errors found in her Born books, and it only bothered me in a very minor way. Because her story was good, and I wanted to hear it, I suppose. Born of Ice and Born of Fire didn't have that kind of story.
Frankly, it was a depressing world where almost everyone deserved to be shot. Each and every romance followed a pattern of Attraction, Betrayal, Forgiveness that leads to happily ever after. I'm not knocking it, but how happy can anyone be in a world where brutal torture is commonplace, justice is blind and hospitals expel patients on life support for lack of funds? I wanted to kill the characters and put them out of my misery.
There were high points, of course. In Born of Ice, the hero's mother has some great lines and the ending is everything anyone in a screwed up world could hope for; the bad guy buys it in a hail of blaster fire. Problem solved! Sometimes, violence is the answer apparently, but even that didn't seem to fit in the series like it would in a darkhunter universe. Because there were other answers! You have a justice system and diplomats popping up everywhere, so that the solution seems wrong somehow, too easy. Her universe may have been too much like reality in some ways.
Then there were the little things that kept adding up. Words in common phrases misplaced. References straight from the forties and fifties, like the mecha, Vik, doing a "danger-will-robinson" move, that just didn't fit the tone or story at all. Grammar was an issue, Ms. Kenyon! While, in the past, I've spotted the dark side of Ms. Kenyon's writing style, I dismissed it, or it wasn't this dark. The story was too good to pass up, perhaps. The Born Books left me feeling all hollow inside and wanting to edit like mad.
So, how much can any author count on reader loyalty? I don't think they can. Maybe sometimes we really ring the bell and our work takes on a life of it's own, then maybe, sometimes we realize we have to polish our craft because sometimes the story isn't enough on it's own. I'm going to pay much more attention to craft because of reading this series, so good came of it at least. However, I'll probably pass on more League books, since I can't really edit them and I can't really read them without Prosac.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_urp4nRwCZGl-UaHexqAaxICA9UFixw7giQaGtFmQAkLD5FQIP3uwi0uVUpTWW-_pPdQ6KKA3_b8hC-xjyCt2wqxRf9ZZHCjUYh4pVINMpanZhP4Q-Y47oANWM3m9CyShBJKZvWNltCkwJRVCoBG-Xi=s0-d)
No comments:
Post a Comment