Bad Blood - LA Banks

I love werewolves. I love werewolf novels. And yet I nearly didn't finish this book. It dragged. Oh God, it dragged. For a book that promised such high-octane adventure on the cover copy, it really, really dragged. Sasha Trudeau, Special Ops soldier and werewolf attack survivor (or is she?) is thrown into a "shocking" world of government conspiracies after returning from a solo mission. Her team is missing and stunning revelations abound. There are double-dealing vampires and three, count 'em, three subspecies of werewolves. I should have been riveted. Instead I was kind of bored.

First of all, any time a book mentions a "shocking" government conspiracy, I can pretty much rest assured it will not be shocking. At all. Government conspiracies rarely are. They always revolve around the government doing the very things they claim to be stopping bad guys from doing, and they usually involve some kind of weird science. Totally unshocking.

Second, the different types of wolves. We have:

Werewolves: They can only change when the moon is full and they're probably dumb, inferior hicks (or at least that was the impression I came away with).

Shadow wolves: The stealth jets of the werewolf world. They're faster, better, stronger, morally superiour (except for the corrupt ones) and they have the power of shadow! Want to clock a guy with all the strength of a rock? Hop into a rock's shadow and pound the bastard. Want to run with all the speed of a speeding articulated lorry? You know what to do. Huzzah for the shadow wolves! Sasha is, of course, a shadow wolf.

And Demon Wolves: Like regular werewolves, but possessed by demons that sneak in through interdimensional doorways that may or may not be something to do with nuclear weapons. They eat human flesh and get massive erections.

Frankly, for me, there was too much crammed into this book on the werewolf front, and that's really saying something. The differences between the various subspecies never felt properly clarified, but this was a problem that carried over to the plot as a whole. I think if Banks had taken the time to introduce her different wolves, rather than shoving it all into one, confusing lecture at the start of the book, it would have been easier to keep track of them all. And yet, somehow, despite all this confusion over types of werewolves, there's really very little werewolf action that isn't sex-related.

I had the same problem with the government/military aspect of the story. Whilst it was an interesting premise to have werewolf attack survivors working for the military, their purpose as a unit never felt fully realised; nor did the weird science going on around them. Possibly some of this was down to Sasha herself, who seemed willfully ignorant of the people around her. It was like she deliberately chose not to learn important things, and therefore I could never learn them either.

What she did do was have a lot of sex with a shadow wolf called Max Hunter (no, really) and this was when I nearly abandoned the book. Not because I object to lots of sex, but because as soon as Max entered the plot, the book turned into an erotic romance with all the requisite thrusting, moaning and angsting, and never fully recovered. And it happened just when all the military/government stuff was starting to look interesting, which is just plain annoying. The dive into erotic angst was accompanied by a seriously confusing injection of shadow wolf culture, which did nothing to enlighten me. Is Max part demon? Part werewolf? Was Sasha the survivor of a werewolf attack, as implied at the beginning of the book, or did she pick up her wolf genes from her parents, as implied later? Who knows? I certainly don't and nor do I care.

Another thing I disliked was that every woman in the book besides Sasha was either a bitch or a treacherous part of the government conspiracy. Seriously, is there some embargo in Urban Fantasy against women being friends with other women?

My final problem with the book was some of the dialogue. Having one character tell another, "I'll be razzing you until that gorgeous black hair of yours turns stone grey" is a really clumsy way of telling me said character has black hair. And having a character think, "a beautiful woman like Sasha shouldn't have had to do a pack kill" makes me think "so if she was ugly, it would have been okay?"

So, to conclude, interesting premise, poorly executed. I shan't be picking up the sequel.

Full Moon Fever*

In 1998 researchers conducted a study on maximum-security prisoners at Armley prison, Leeds, England. The results of the three-month psychological study on 1200 inmates showed a significant rise in violent incidents during the first and last quarter of the lunar cycle, the days either side of a full moon.

Other studies shows an increase in criminal activity on full moon nights, with most researchers attributing this simply to the full moon providing more light by which to commit crimes. As a werewolf aficionado, I have to ask if there’s another, more primal explanation. Does the full moon call to some deeply buried, instinctive part of our nature, bringing out the beast in us?

I’m not suggesting people can literally be turned into wolves by the light of the moon, but lets face it: human beings are weird creatures and the brain is a powerful organ. Powerful emotions such as rage can override our common sense, making us capable of inhuman acts of violence and destruction. And the wolf, having long (and wrongly) been a symbol of fear and darkness, is an ideal avatar for the manifestation of these less-than-human traits.

In medieval Europe, countless people were burned at the stake, tortured and persecuted for witchcraft and, more importantly to me, for being werewolves. What could have caused such widespread belief and panic? Could it possibly be the knowledge that beneath our civilised masks lurks something deadly and untamed? Something more beast than man?

In honour of my obsession with the wolf within, I’m dedicating this blog to werewolves and shapeshifters, both fictional and real. Real, you ask? Stay tuned…

*Reposted from the Lunatic Horizon 03/07/07