Dragon Quill

Last time, Harry does his usual dragging of his feet, but as usual, plot means he’s still forced to get there in time, and then he fights vampires and nearly dies and then chance saves his ass in the nick of time, but now he’s doped up on vampire spit. (more…)

“Eat me,” I whispered. “I don’t … I don’t understand.”

While this has been an innuendo-heavy book, this turn of phrase is actually quite appropriate. It literally ate a part of him, as will be clarified in a moment. (more…)

Right, so there will be a delay returning to Moon and so instead there will be an end to the delay of Grave Peril.

Last time, Harry’s bullshit “reasoning” led him to figuring out the nightmare wanted revenge for that time Michael killed it, at which point he declared he needed to go warn Murphy.

We open this chapter with him attempting to explain his equally bullshit decision:

There’s a kind of mathematics that goes along with saving people’s lives. You find yourself running the figures without even realizing it, like a medic on a battlefield. This patient has no chance of surviving. That one does, but only if you let a third die. (more…)

Well, first I mislaid the game and then I left the notes on the wrong computer, so here we are again!

Last time, instead of properly warning either Michael or Murphy, Harry rushes off to save Murphy and gets there too late, so off he goes to try to save Michael.

Now, previously, Harry visited Micky (it seems like M is a cursed letter this book) and gone on about their wonderfully homey home. Now he’s doing the same thing about Michael’s place, which is a chunk of suburbia with, yes, white picket fences, plopped into Chicago. (more…)

I’ve done smarter things in my life. Once, for example, I threw myself out of a moving car in order to take on a truckload of lycanthropes singlehandedly. That had been nominally smarter. At least I had been fairly certain that I could kill them, if I had to, at the time.

That’s really not how that went down.

God, the “last time on” things in this series are always so annoying. (more…)

All hospital emergency rooms have the same feel to them. They’re all decorated in the same dull, muted tones and softened edges, which are meant to be comforting and aren’t. They all have the same smell too: one part tangy antiseptics, one part cool dispassion, one part anxiety, and one part naked fear.

This feels like one of those situations where the author’s flunking out on the whole “write what you know” thing and resorting to cliche. (more…)

Back in my lab, it felt a little creepy to be working by candlelight. Intellectually, I knew that it was still full daylight outside, but last night had brought out the instinctive fear of the dark that is a part of being human.

Intellectually, working by candlelight makes you go blind. (more…)

Last time, Harry decided that he’d so thoroughly fucked up everything about investigating the A-plot that he might as well work the vampire party B-plot. (more…)

Last chapter, Harry wears a dumb outfit and the vampires get cartoonishly outraged.

This chapter, Harry’s remembering he has to complain about fucking everything, so the fact the outfit he chose to outrage vampires outraged them is now terrible. (more…)

“Poisoned?” I said, witlessly.

Look, Harry got something right! (more…)

Right, so.

When last we left off, Harry had decided to go to the vampire party because the nightmare ghosty has some third party buffing it and he’s decided that the only possible place for such a person would be the vampire party. He then proceeds to aggro everyone in the place repeatedly for no reason,  guzzles drugged wine in front of them, and says his true name twice to a dragon while getting mad at it for thinking it’s stronger than him merely because it actually is. Also, still no followup on the drugged starving sick cursed child Harry let get taken by vampires, because Harry doesn’t care. At the end we discover that this entire time, he somehow missed that Susan was at the party because her outfit slightly resembled a vampire one, and Harry realizes that since he already said Michael was his plus-one, Susan does not have invite protection. (She also doesn’t have invite protection because she forged the invite, because Harry’s stupidity is catching.)

Someone else has also just noticed! Or more likely, been tapping their foot this whole time waiting for Harry to notice so they could jump in and pretend to just notice. I’m sorry he takes forever, evil monster. It must be so frustrating to be a villain in these books. (more…)

When last we left off, Susan appeared, had Harry insist she was being dumb, then saved Harry’s stupid dumb ass by sacrificing a bunch of her memories. Now she doesn’t know who he is! On the one hand, that means she’s forgotten she knows the guy, which will make convincing her to leave harder. On the other hand, it means she’s forgotten she knows the guy is always like “everything is super dangerous and you can’t be involved for reasons I can’t explain and which will turn out to be kind of bullshit later”, which will make convincing her to leave easier.

Harry proceeds to do a bad job of explaining anything to her, but a better job of explaining anything to her than he was just doing, so it’s still kind of a wash. (more…)

This chapter opens with a speech about different kinds of fear likening them to metals. It’s an elaborate metaphor but I found it pretty trite. Point is, Harry is scared and scared in the live wire sense. (more…)

So more and more it’s hard to follow the plot of these things. We haven’t so much as had a rewrite break because there was never a point where it seemed to be clearly going in a particular direction, and now seems like the best we’re going to get. (more…)