lumineaux

52. Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops by James Robert Parish

This book is just what is says on the tin: a history of Hollywood movies that involved too much money, too much ego, and too little common sense. The way these people throw around good money after bad is just astounding.   I had expected a book with a subject matter like this to be a lot more interesting than it was. In attempting to be fair and even-handed to his subjects, Parish committing the besetting sin of being simply dull.   Parish clearly is plugged in to the Hollywood information mill -- he quotes from trade publications and insiders with the certainty of a historian quoting from a primary source. Yet somehow he fails to turn all the facts and information about how these movies went wrong into anything particularly interesting.

At the end of the book, I was glad that I'd read it on the Kindle rather than in hard copy.   In short, "Thank God I was not personally responsible for killing trees to read this."

On the other hand, it was not as dull as Namaah's Blessing or as awful as Intrigues, so it had that going for it. It was a gentleman's C+ sort of book.

53. Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey

One would think that, after Intrigues, I would be avoiding Lackey's books like the plague. And one would be wrong. She put the lure out and I fell for it like a cat seeing the laser pointer. Again, I can only thank God that I did not require trees to be killed to read this.

Lackey's "Elemental Masters" series consists of takes on classic fairy tales, mostly set in Victorian or Edwardian England, with a backdrop of magic based on the four classical elements of fire, water, earth and air. Sometimes she's put together some highly entertaining stories out of this mix. Sometimes the output has been merely "meh."   This one should have been a good one. It's based on "Donkeyskin," the same highly dark and disturbing fairy tale that Robin McKinley turned into her dark and disturbing novel "Deerskin."   Lackey is no McKinley. This one is another entry in the "meh" column.

As always with Lackey, the good guys are very very good and the bad guys are very very bad. The love story is perfunctory, although it features a character that I sort of liked from an earlier entry.

As if somehow a tale of a father deciding to kill his daughter in order to put her dead mother's spirit into her body isn't grim enough, Lackey throws in the horrors of WWI as a plot element.   Yet, she somehow manages to drain the death of an entire generation of Europe of all drama. As handled by Lackey, even necromancy in the water-logged trenches -- what should be an episode of true horror -- produced only a "really?" out of me.

There should have been a really good book here. Lackey completely phones it in, and produces something so utterly meh in its mehness that I can't even get annoyed by it.

54. Time of Death by J.D. Robb

To get the bad taste of Intrigues, Namaah's Blessing and Unnatural Issue out of my mouth, I downloaded a set of three short stories featuring one of my favorite guilty pleasures, Robb's Eve Dallas character.    They were all three precisely what they are. In other words, if you like the Eve Dallas novels, these are fine and dandy ways to pass the time. If you don't like the Eve Dallas novels, nothing in these short story entries is going to change your mind.   The thread that held all three short stories together was a seeming veneer of supernatural elements -- a "vampire" killing, a man who disappears into thin air, and a Satanic cult. All of the "supernatural" elements are ultimately explained by science fiction answers, but at least they are science fiction answers consistent with Robb's near-future universe as already established. I didn't walk away feeling that Robb had cheated on the plots.