Ever wish you had an almanac?
Why, Harry? Do you mean that if you knew you probably wouldn’t get there in time, you’d just walk the other way? Because really, with all your talk about wishing you knew exactly how long it was, I’m pretty suspicious. (more…)
I made it out of the park, exhausted and barely able to keep from screaming with pain.
I’m still glad Harry’s suffering. Mind you, nowhere near as glad as I’d be if these books were just about someone else entirely. (more…)
So there I was being strangled by a ranting, half-naked madman in the middle of the woods, with a she-werewolf dangling from a rope snare somewhere nearby.
So yeah, today Harry’s back to making a big point of the fact the nonhuman monster has tits. We actually don’t even have any evidence this is a “she” at all given he’s just worked out Tera is a shapeshifter, but Tera has a female human body and the part where the brain in that is some monster from the Nevernever doesn’t matter, thus “she-werewolf”. (more…)
Harry wakes up in a cheap hotel. He’s also in pain, bandaged, and otherwise naked. So, a regular night for him. (more…)
Last time, Harry’s lying, laziness and continual self-centered attitude combine with an idiot ball for cathartic tragic result. Also he leers at a corpse, again. (more…)
Last time, Harry gives up the third of his four names to a demon because he doesn’t want to bother looking up the information he was handed himself or telling Murphy so she could explain because then he’d be letting Murphy know anything about what’s going on. (more…)
The demon trapped in the summoning circle screamed, slamming its crablike pincers against the unseen barrier, hurling its chitinous shoulders from side to side in an effort to escape the confinement. It couldn’t. I kept my will on the circle, kept the demon from bursting free.
“Satisfied, Chauncy?” I asked it.
The demon straightened its hideous form and said, in a perfect Oxford accent, “Quite. You understand, I must observe the formalities.” Then it took a pair of wholly incongruous wire-frame spectacles from beneath a scale and perched them upon the beaklike extremity of its nose. “You have questions?”
Okay, so the explanation is, there are actual rules saying demons must attempt to break out of the summoning circle and, should they accomplish it, must then kill their summoner.
This is so fucking stupid and it’s really only there because the author wanted to do the whole sudden tone shift you see above, which any non-hack could’ve accomplished by just mentioning the “crablike pincers” snapping etc and it being a demon in a circle followed by the glasses and snooty accent. (more…)
Last time, Harry decided to walk into the home base of a gang with the brilliant plan of hoping they’re not in. Shockingly, this didn’t work out so great. Then he found Mr. Tiger Fridge waiting at his office, OH NOES NOT THE MOBSTER WHO IS SURPRISINGLY PATIENT WITH HARRY’S LIP. (more…)
A block from the Forty-ninth Street Beach there was a run-down garage, the sort of place you only find in the worst sections of big cities. The building consisted of corrugated metal on a steel frame, oxidating in the rain and the mist rising off the lake so that gobbets of rust ran down the walls in streaks and pooled on the sidewalks in uneven puddles. On one side of the garage was a vacant lot; on the other, what looked like the sort of pawn shop where crooks traded in their spare guns and knives for a few extra dollars when things were tight.
I…I don’t think that’s how crooks work, Harry. (more…)
The police headquarters downtown consists of a sprawling collection of buildings that have sprung up over the years as the need for law enforcement has increased. They don’t match, and they come from a wildly varying selection of styles and designs, but they have somehow adapted themselves into a cohesive whole—much like the force itself. Special Investigations operates out of a big, run-down old building, a huge cube that has managed to hold up solidly in spite of the years, the grime, the smog, and the graffiti sprayed on its walls. It has bars over the windows and the doors and sits hunkered amidst buildings much taller than it, like a faithful old bulldog amidst a crowd of unruly children, struggling to maintain peace and order.
I actually liked this up until he realized that since noir, unneeded metaphor that adds nothing. (more…)
Last time, werewolves werewolves werewolves dickery. (more…)
Call me crazy, but I’m not big on defiance when I’ve got a gun rammed against my skull.
That sounds perfectly rational, and yet actually you behave like an idiot in the fact of imminent threat all the damn time. (more…)
I got out the lump of chalk I always keep in my duster pocket, and the circular plastic dome compass that rides a strip of velcro on my dashboard, then squatted down, my voluminous coat spreading out over my legs and ankles. I drew a rough circle upon the asphalt around me with the chalk. The markings were bright against the dark surface and almost glowed beneath the light of the nearly full moon.
I added an effort of will, a tiny investment of energy, to close the circle, and immediately felt the ambient magic in the air around me crowd inward, trapped within the confines of the design.
MAGIC
And it only took us five chapters to get there. (more…)
Harry is showing emotions that aren’t dickery! (more…)
This chapter opens with an extended discussion about the Blue Beetle that is not blue despite the fact they’re not taking it, because this book is just barely above Babysitter’s Club forced exposition.
(more…)