Cerulean Sins Chapter Fifteen

Anita wakes up in a strange bedroom with Jason beside her, answering the phone. She somehow realizes they are still in the Circus even though she doesn't recognize this particular room. How the hell big is this club supposed to be, and why hasn't Anita been over the whole place with a fine tooth comb? You'd think a vampire hunter, currently engaged (is she engaged to him yet, or am I thinking Kiss the Dead?) to the Master of the City would want to know every in and out of his main hiding place. What if there's an ambush? Hired killers?

Jason and Anita do that L shaped sheets thing from movies.

Anita doesn't know why she and Jason are naked together. When she does remember she has something that I can only think to describe as grand mal seizure meets desperately unsexy orgasm, because reasons. Why remembering what happened with J.C. and Asher is having this effect on her, I have no idea. And neither does poor Jason when she starts clawing his skin off.

She also has some kind of weird vision about a woman Asher fucked in the past on Belle Morte's orders, who has the same experience while sitting down to some poncy banquet.

Jason and Anita natter on endlessly about how this is a power of Asher's, how Asher's bite can cause orgasms, how Anita is acting like the woman from her vision, how Jason is nude and how Anita wants him to cover his dick despite most of the shapeshifters she knows being nude as a matter of course.

Anita tells Jason he "helped bring me" before. I assume bring in this case means orgasm. What the hell is up with describing it that way? Even someone as prudish as Anita ought to be able to use the word orgasm considering she's a grown ass woman.

Anita doesn't like to be teased about her sex life, but Jason does it anyway because he "can't help it" and is an unapologetic piggish waste of space.

I hate Jason.

They go on and on about vampire orgasms and drinking Gatorade and blood loss.

Dolph and Zebrowski are calling, demanding to know where Anita is. I don't know why they care all of a sudden, considering Anita only remembers she has a job when it suits her.

Jason points out that Anita needs more people to feed on. Unfortunately given the decidedly awful parameters this book has set up re: the ardeur, he happens to be right. And that's what I'd like to see from her, honestly. She's the main character; things are going to suck for her. That's basically what storytelling is, putting your protagonists in fucked situations and asking them to sink or swim. She ought to get over her upset eventually, take a look around, put together a list of her resources, and muddle out how to live with the limits she's been handed. It's Anita though so she'll just have tantrums like a spoiled child instead.

Apparently shifters are so strong "we can punch our finger through someone's ribs."

Does anyone out there understand physics? I am pretty sure that's not how they work.

Emotions spill across Jason's eyes.

Dolph is rightfully pissed because Anita is busy having orgasm convulsions while crimes are happening, plus surprise surprise Jason was an ass on the phone.

Cerulean Sins Chapter Fourteen

Dottie's chapter

Back to Anita. 

Jason comes in to get Anita out from between J.C. and Asher, who have both 'died' now that dawn is here. Everyone is covered in blood and Anita is sick from blood loss. Why the hell Asher fed off of her to the point where she's in medical distress I don't know; he knew he would be unresponsive shortly after and that none of them had set up any contingency plan. What if Jason hadn't heard Anita scream?

Things aren't very clear here. Anita is sort of delirious from blood loss but she wants to hang back and admire how beautiful J.C. and Asher are even though they're, yanno, dead. Jason is carrying her? I think? Anita is speaking French which I am sure is supposed to be significant but for the life of me I can't figure out why. Also, um, SHE LET ASHER FEED ON HER AFTER RESISTING BEING FED ON FOR LIKE ELEVEN BOOKS and it barely warrants a whimper.

This entire chapter--such as it is, it's like four pages--is crap back and forth between Anita and Jason, and Jason trying to get her in the bathtub. At one point he puts her over his shoulder so he can take his pants off. I don't think that's physically possible.

Anita feels great but she's "naturally grumpy" and is trying to fight it because I guess you can't be toughy tough darkity dark if you allow yourself to enjoy things, which might explain why Anita hates eating, sex, fancy clothes, baths, and friendship.

Then shit gets predictably creepy because Anita is being described as essentially under the influence yet Jason is still manhandling her and stripping her out of her clothes. He's naked himself, which Anita says should bother her, yet right now it doesn't because she's in some kind of altered state. She also thinks Jason has a nice ass and, no joke, feels "silly talking to his ass" because she's somehow still over his shoulder.

Oh, turns out Asher rolled her (mind control) without her consent or knowledge, so now she "feels drunk" and Jason is making decisions for her despite her diminished ability to understand her circumstances. Jason frankly doesn't know her well enough to know what she would prefer under such circumstances and therefore doesn't have the right to tell her what to do.

Anita passes out but feels safe and loved.

Yes, I'm still writing

Here's an excerpt:


"You’re smart, Mor. And I’m so proud of you. But you don’t know anything important.”

“How can you say that, Dad? I worked my ass off to get where I am.”

“I know that.”

“Then what the hell do you mean? Because I don’t know to weave a fucking basket or catch a goddamn salmon?”

His face went hard and cold. Or I thought that at first. But on second glance I saw pain there and my heart dropped out knowing I had caused that.

“You think if you work hard enough, say the right things, and walk and talk white they’ll accept you?” I felt like he’d nailed me to my chair, and I couldn’t make any words come out of my closed throat. “You’ll never be white in their eyes, Mor. Never. The world will never forget that you’re Indian, no matter how white you act with your big important degrees, with the white man’s magic coming from your fingertips. And meanwhile, what? You don’t want to learn our language. You don’t know our stories. Where are your spirit power songs? Your guardian spirits?”

He leaned in towards me, eyes ablaze, the laugh lines usually so evident on his face smoothed away by the rough touch of fury. “So no, you don’t know anything important.”

He got up. Before he could storm out I started trembling so hard I thought my teeth would chatter right out of my head.

“Then why did you take me away? Why did you bring me here?” I shot to my feet. “Why won’t our entire fucking family talk to us?”

Dad stood with his head bowed, his gnarled hand on the door that lead out to the living room. “Don’t walk that road. You won’t like what you find at the end.”

Fear trapped air in my chest, along with whatever else I might have said. I choked and wobbled on my feet.

Dad disappeared out the door. I didn’t follow.

Cerulean Sins Chapter Thirteen

Time for another Anita Blake chapter (oh and here's Dottie's)

For someone who supposedly enjoys writing sex so much, there's a weird hour long time skip. I am not sure why. Granted, I too tend to skip whenever I feel like it (which I've been criticized for, so I'm going to try and move away from doing it so often) but the middle of a sex scene feels like a particularly bizarre time to employ this device. I mean, this is the sort of sex scene that should take time. It's emotional, it's complex (well it would be if the author were someone else), lots of things are going on. This is the time to really weave a spell for the reader, to show us all the sensuality at work here. Instead we get jumped right to the ardeur. I have nothing against sex magic--honestly I'd be a hypocrite if I did--but I dislike the ardeur. Every time it makes an appearance it's a guarantee that the fucking to follow will be joyless banging, if they even get that far.

To wit,

..."it [the ardeur] was like a force of nature, a storm that broke over us, washing away Jean-Claude's clothes and what was left of mine."

Teehee. Instead of a like, wind and water storm, it's a storm of sex. 

There's a fairly hot moment where Anita is giving Asher's balls a tongue bath but she uses the word "scrotum." Okay see, I think sex scenes should be appropriate to the character narrating them, so I can see a certain type of person resorting to clinical terms. That said, this scene is supposed to be sexy and scrotum is just not a sexy word. It just isn't and it never will be.

It also bothers me that the perfection of Asher's penis is his most important defining trait. This is not what writing books mean by "backstory wound." 

So let's see if I can make sense of this. J.C. is inside one of Anita's "openings." I presume his dick is in her pussy but we'll never really know with language like this. Asher is pressed up against her with his "weight beating in to both of us" (wat) but Anita doesn't want to share her "opening with him."

Her reluctance to be out and out dirty really hurts these scenes.

So J.C. is fucking her and Asher is dry humping her ass.

Whoa hold on, Asher is wet?

Oh wait, I think it's supposed to be precome. But LKH just can't use a word as low class as precome so I am left thinking she doesn't know how assholes work.

Hold on, stop the presses. Asher bites her. Isn't this the thing she's held out against for like eleven books? She won't even let J.C. feed from her. She consented (sort of) to sex, but she didn't say anything about biting. She's screaming at Asher to "be inside" her but I doubt she meant teeth to be the avenue.

Asher comes in a "scalding wave."

The ardeur "drinks" them both "down" 

They all come like, a billion times you guys, and then Asher and J.C. 'die' because dawn is here. Anita is trapped between their bodies. Haha comedy.

She screams.

Cerulean Sins Chapter Twelve

Strap in for some more joyless, mechanical dry humping because this shit is about to go down.

Asher is "like a reluctant child." 

All of sudden Asher believes Anita truly wants him, despite her giving him the mother of all mixed signals the chapter before. It's like she can't admit that she wants to have sex with him, so she has to couch it in this bullshit political vampire nonsense. Just once, I want to see Anita enthusiastically consent to sex. Just once. I don't think that's ever happened. Anita's life makes me so sad. Supposedly she's this untouchable badass, but she's really just emotionally disabled to the point where nothing she does has any real meaning.

They natter on about how the ardeur might rise, and how it's close to dawn, and how J.C. has this masculine chuckle that only men do about sex.

Anita realizes she's the only girl. It took her this long to figure this out. I don't even know. When men are interested in you, by the way, it's like "lions watching gazelles." 

Asher is afraid. Great. So we have a bed full of people who don't want to do this. Again. This is also going to be yet another scene where Anita tries to have sex and instead releases all the crazy animals and hungers and vampires and god knows what else are currently using her body as a skin suit.

Asher is afraid and doesn't want to do this so J.C. soothes him "almost like a baby." 

Anita strips down to her underwear and high heels. Okay, that's fairly sexy. I'll give her that one. Tame, sure. But at least it's not vomit inducing like most of these scenes are.

The funny thing is, I want to be in to this. The only thing I like writing and reading more than action is sex. I'm begging LKH to seduce me as a reader and frankly, it's not that difficult.

 Yet I feel nothing when these things happen to Anita. They always leave me cold because there's not a drop of true passion or love.

There's some...um, stuff about where everyone's legs are. I have given up on trying to picture this, not that I was inclined to do so in the first place.

"She begins like an American man, but she does foreplay like she is French."

What? Does that mean she likes to cover people in wing sauce before getting down to business? Does she have to pour a PBR over Asher's naked body before she can find him sexually attractive? Maybe she can only fuck in a jacked up Ford truck. What does French foreplay look like, by the way? Do they have to argue over whether French beef is of high quality first? Whether the French Revolution was justified? What Marie Antoinette's wig was made of?

Also when has Anita ever engaged in anything approaching foreplay? She's sure rushing this, ignoring Asher's reluctance because she doesn't have time for that shit.

Anita is a saint because she can look past Asher's scars, you guys.

She's tickling Asher's neck and that's supposed to be sexy. She gives him "that safe edge of teeth." I don't know what that means but apparently Asher is wild for it.

Anita licks Asher a bunch.

I think it's that I don't find "licked" to be an especially sexy word, but I'll give her a pass because we all know how goddamn impossible it is to find words that everyone agrees are hot.

Asher tells J.C. he has taught Anita well. Anita tells him that's sexist. Okay. I don't think you get to make that call, Anita.

Anita is afraid to unzip Asher's pans because she's worried about getting his dick caught in the zipper.

Somehow Asher's hands "spill."

Turns out Asher's dick is scar free and works now, and this is momentous that him and J.C. laugh and cry and hug and there's rainbows and fireworks.

Cerulean Sins Chapter Eleven

Dottie's chapter is here 

Asher comes in and he's wearing white, which apparently doesn't suit him. Great. He's hiding behind his hair, as usual. Can someone explain this to me? Because I used to have hair down to my ass and I couldn't have hid half my face behind it reliably. Part of why I cut it was because it had become a crutch identity wise, but it certainly wouldn't have veiled extensive scarring.

Basically, we once again have a scenario where Anita doesn't want to have sex but she is forced by the ahem, 'plot', to do so. Nor does she want to share Asher with J.C. (because as we've covered, she is a queerphobic dick cheese) but she is also being forced in to doing that, because this is apparently the only way good girl Anita can sign off on gay love. The fact that Anita and by extension LKH believes that good and queer are mutually exclusive is so expected at this point that it just fills me with a strange sadness, the kind that makes people write existentialist poetry and drink too much gin (not that I need another excuse to do those things).

Anita starts to come on to Asher and you know what? It's good! There's a lot going on in this scene emotionally. Asher is mortified because Anita saw the paintings, saw him before the scars, saw him when the scars were fresh. For a vampire that comes from a line such as Belle Morte's, where conventional beauty is one's greatest currency, he's been utterly humiliated in front of the people he cares for the most. I feel for Asher here, and he initially rebuffs Anita's advances because of this.

"She will do anything to protect her people, even take a cripple to her bed for one night."

Oh Asher, sweetheart. He doesn't want a pity fuck and who can really blame him? Anita asks him if her reasons are really that important.

That Anita doesn't understand this is just more evidence that she has no ability to feel human emotions. Even that could be interesting. I mean, we all loved the first three seasons of Dexter, right? But LKH's cognitive dissonance prevents her from writing anything truly interesting. She can't see beyond the notion that Anita must somehow be good in order to be a worthwhile protagonist. The other glaring issue is that to LKH and by extension Anita good simply amounts to a totally arbitrary list of traits and behaviors that have very little to do, in the end, with moral righteousness. Rather they reflect an inability to perceive human motivation and the toxic values that LKH apparently holds to with the strength of a person who knows that without arbitrary rules she simply won't be able to effectively ape social mores any more.

Anita at least finally understands that Asher doesn't want to be discarded the way Belle discarded him, like he was a broken object that could be easily replaced. This is also good stuff.

...and then Asher randomly wants to know what Micah will think. What? Well, okay. Micah won't care because Micah's entire purpose is to agree with everything Anita says. Dicks for you! And you! Dicks for everyone!

Asher tells her that if she casts him out after this he will leave, because he's sick of watching J.C. offer love to others. He's sick of being their hanger on and tired of being toyed with.

Anita begs him not to go and they kiss instead.

Cerulean Sins Chapter Ten Part Two

Dottie's chapter here

Anita acts all judge-y because Belle ..."really doesn't understand that there's a difference between lust and love..."

Since when does Anita understand that? One of the major problems with this series is that, despite the high number of sexual partners Anita has, there's very little love. I am two books in and I don't understand why any of these people are together. What connects them beyond sex? J.C. and Anita never discuss anything beyond sex or politics, frequently both. She and Richard are even worse, constantly arguing, Anita constantly tearing down the things that make him who he is. Her and Micah? He's barely a character and at every turn he's asking Anita how high he should jump. That is his only purpose. And to have a penis that a friend of mine described as "tragically huge."

And I say all this as a polyamorous person who is a total sucker for romance. I should be eating this series up. I should be like a goose that just found a whole loaf of white bread. But it does so little for me, because I can't buy that these people love each other.

"Why is it always Asher we can't protect? Asher that we can't save?"

Gee, I'm glad you asked. Maybe it's because you want him to die or get banished so you don't have to imagine icky gay cooties all over J.C. any more.

Out of another character's mouth, this sentence could be seen as a mournful reflection on one's own inadequacy. Out of Anita's, rest assured it's just a preamble to her withdrawing her already questionable support and kicking Asher out of her inner circle.

Neither J.C. or Anita want to have sex, but they have to because otherwise Anita won't be able to handle the ardeur.

Anita realizes that if Asher were her and J.C.'s lover, the other vampires couldn't ask for him. She then goes on to tell J.C. she just can't share him with another man even though she knows how stupid and unfair that is. Guess what? Your character holding forth about how something she's doing is gross doesn't in fact make it less gross.

It hurts Anita to watch Asher and J.C. together.

How Anita and by extension LKH find this acceptable is beyond me. Normally I wouldn't draw such obvious lines between character and author but LKH herself has made it clear that I should. This is not a charming character flaw, or even a character flaw I can relate to, because there's nothing in Anita's life that shows me why she acts in such a miserly fashion. She won't even let J.C. feed off of her--a thing essential to his existence--and then gets huffy when he feeds off of other people. It's fine if you don't want to make him a hamburger, Anita, but you can't get mad when he goes to McDonald's. This isn't just a sex thing, it's a food thing. A continued existence thing. But no. Only Anita and her feelings matter.

Which brings me once more to, why are these people together? Why does J.C. want her so bad? Why? SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME. If I were J.C. I would dump her ass and go back to Asher. Anita does nothing but cause problems for J.C. She withholds constantly, at every turn possible. She's completely emotionally unavailable and self focused. Why? Why does he need her so bad? The thing with romance is, you have to make the reader believe these people are together for a reason. It doesn't have to be a good reason either. People get together for the wrong reasons all the time. But no matter the why, the reader has to buy in for it to work.

Anita decides that she'll try to have them both anyway. She hits me with a line I actually love:

"I want to show him with my hands and my body that I find him lovely."

We'll just ignore that hands are also a body part. Just let me have this one okay?

Of course it turns out Anita is just doing this for political reasons.

...what was I about to do? And could I live with it later?"

Well you could try not being a biphobic homophobic bdsm phobic shitbag. That might help.