(no subject)

[skygiants]

I have a weird compulsion to finish books I start, regardless of whether or not I'm actually enjoying them. Like, if I don't finish it, it's like the book has BEATEN me and I DON'T LIKE TO BE BEATEN.

(This is related to my compulsion to read every book I get out of the library before I have to give it back, otherwise THE LIBRARY WINS.)

. . . the reason this is relevant is because Henry VIII: Wolfman came as close as anything has come in the past five or six years to beating me. It didn't, in the end, the compulsion won out, but I wish it hadn't, because seriously, self, LIFE'S TOO SHORT.

You may well ask: "WHY were you reading Henry VIII: Wolfman to begin with?" The answer to this question is threefold:

1. Fatal curiosity
2. In the first place I saw it on sale, they had typoed the title as Henry VII: Wolfman, and THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN AMAZING. NOBODY writes Henry VII pastiche! So anyone who would think to write Henry VII werewolf fanfic is someone I feel happy about supporting
3. My roommate literally gave me a dollar to do it

I should have known when I read the first chapter, in which Henry VIII eats his queen. ~but which queen!~ is the mystery you have to read the rest of the book to find the answer to. I should have just stopped there.

Don't worry about spoilers, because YOU SHOULDN'T CARE. YOU SHOULD NOT READ THIS BOOK. But for the equally fatally curious,

- Cardinal Wolsey is in charge of a secret band of demon hunters that includes Thomas More and Strong Female Character Jane Seymour
- Katherine of Aragon actually has a son, but then it gets EATEN BY BABY WEREWOLVES
- one of whom also bites and werewolves Henry VIII
- Secret Demon Hunter Thomas More gets raped by a werewolf lady in the woods and then held prisoner for a while as an accomplice by a . . . Comedy Torturing Feminist Witch Hunter . . . who spends all her time complaining that it's sexist that women can't hold jobs as executioners . . .?
- anyway Strong Female Character Jane Seymour tries to rescue him, but she accidentally rescues the wrong person, and meanwhile Thomas More catches the sweating sickness
- sidebar: the werewolves bring the sweating sickness to England because they're using sweating sickness victims as . . . like . . . projectile werewolf zombies? I DON'T KNOW EITHER
- but then there's basically a zombie contamination zone in the middle of England so there you go
- anyway Comedy Torturing Feminist Witch Hunter and her hapless husband nurse Thomas More back to health and they make weird friends, because all the torture in this book is played for comedy so she's really not all that bad, I guess! ANYWAY SHE'S REALLY GOOD AT KILLING WEREWOLVES AND THAT'S WHAT COUNTS
- back at the ranch, the werewolf lady seduces Anne Boleyn, who also gets turned into a werewolf, and she and Henry go on gleeful eating-people rampages together
- meanwhile Sir William Compton gets the sweating sickness, and his boyfriend gets accidentally Comedy Tortured to Death by Cardinal Wolsey, and then Cardinal Wolsey comes and mercy-kills William Compton by SITTING ON HIS FACE
- then Thomas More comes to tell Henry about the incoming werewolf sweating sickness zombie invasion but accidentally PUNCHES OUT ANNE BOLEYN so he gets sentenced to death
- but he gets rescued by the Comedy Torture Couple and smuggled off to live in the country somewhere so that's all right
- then it turns out that there's a cure for werewolf-ism by killing the leader of the wolf pack or something, I don't know
- but Strong Female Character Jane Seymour accidentally kills the werewolf leader before Henry can get to him
- so it turns out Henry never gets over being a werewolf and the queen he eventually eats is Jane Seymour. Surprise twist ending!

AND NOW YOU KNOW EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN THE BOOK, minus several hundred pages of Comedy Torture and extremely graphic depictions of werewolves tearing off people's faces and eating people's guts.

The thing is it's not even that this is the most poorly-written book I've read in five years or anything? I have read many bad books in my life and somewhere deep in my heart I have to one extent or another enjoyed reading most of them, because even terrible things are often entertainingly terrible. But between the constant gross-outs and the expectation that I was supposed to find it all funny, I got pretty much zero pleasure from this book.

So, well done, Henry VIII: Wolfman! YOU ALMOST DEFEATED ME. But you were saved by the fact that I was reading you on Kindle, and therefore I was not able to throw you violently across the room.

Comments

[rymenhild]

...

[skygiants]

YEP.

[sophia_sol]

Oh my god. What.

sometimes I am glad I have a tendency to get distracted and never ever finish like half the books I read, because it means I usually succeed at not subjecting myself to the ENTIRETY of particularly awful books....

[skygiants]

IT'S SO MUCH BETTER TO BE ABLE TO WALK AWAY. Save yourself!

[brownbetty]

WHAT.

WHAT.

WHAT.

[skygiants]

I HAVE NO LOGICAL EXPLANATION. FOR ANYTHING.

[elsane]

WHAT.

I feel this is inadequate to express my feelings but I don't even know where to start.

[skygiants]

THERE IS NOTHING ELSE THAT CAN REALLY BE SAID.

[agonistes]

I saw Eric Foner give a keynote last weekend about Lincoln and slavery where he started describing a great movie dealing actually-sort-of-well with Lincoln's life, times, milieu, feelings, etc., and then said it was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which he actually enjoyed.

That said, I think we can probably blame Henry VIII: Wolfman at least a little on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

[skygiants]

Oh, it is totally the fault of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, or rather, before that, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. (The person who wrote this book has also written another book. It is called Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter. Yeah.)

And, I mean, it's not the concept per se that I take offense at! If the concept were regularly done well, I would REJOICE at the trend! What I take offense at really is the fact that I KNOW dozens of people who could have written a great "Henry VIII is a werewolf" story but inevitably what we get, in this and every case, is the most godawful interpretation imaginable.

[dorothean]

Cardinal Wolsey is in charge of a secret band of demon hunters that includes Thomas More and Strong Female Character Jane Seymour

I can't even

[skygiants]

I forgot to mention that all the rest of the demon hunters are cardinals sent special express by the Pope! EXCEPT STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER JANE SEYMOUR OF COURSE.

[dragovianknight]

WUT?

I...

WUT?

[skygiants]

I GOT NOTHING, MAN.

[innerbrat]

I'm sorry.


I'm not sorry

No, I am. But only because I'm about to start singing Sit On My Face, and this is your warning.

[skygiants]

YOU SHOULD BE SORRY. I think this counts as cruel and unusual punishment.

[gogollescent]

…

Skimming down my reading page, I thought this was going to be a post about Wolf Hall. /stares in fascination

[skygiants]

Oh, HOW I WISH IT HAD BEEN. (Honestly, having read Wolf Hall not that long ago made the whole thing that much more painful . . .)

[next_to_normal]

I have a weird compulsion to finish books I start, regardless of whether or not I'm actually enjoying them. Like, if I don't finish it, it's like the book has BEATEN me and I DON'T LIKE TO BE BEATEN.

(This is related to my compulsion to read every book I get out of the library before I have to give it back, otherwise THE LIBRARY WINS.)

OMG I DO THIS TOO! And now my shame is doubled thanks to Goodreads. (I'm not sure which is more shameful, actually - letting a book languish in "currently reading" for aaaaages or making it disappear without ever marking it read.)

then Thomas More comes to tell Henry about the incoming werewolf sweating sickness zombie invasion but accidentally PUNCHES OUT ANNE BOLEYN so he gets sentenced to death

Best sentence I have ever read.

But you were saved by the fact that I was reading you on Kindle, and therefore I was not able to throw you violently across the room.

UGH. I hate that. They should make violent-throw-proof Kindles.

[skygiants]

Hee! I am afraid to start up with Goodreads, I would spend ALL MY TIME on it, and I do that enough with book reviews and logs and so on already . . .

Violent throwing is the one piece of book functionality that it's very hard for Kindles to duplicate!

[bookblather]

...I.

....What?

Thank you for reading this so we don't have to. Holy crap.

[skygiants]

If I was going to do this I should have held out for a WAY bigger bribe than a dollar. ;______;

[rachelmanija]

I am so glad you alerted me to the existence of this book! It sounds like reading your review was much more entertaining than reading the book.

Also, the fact that this was published by a respectable traditional press (Pegasus) goes a long way to bolster my feeling that, while publishers certainly do filter the slush, they do not always filter it with regard to actual quality.

Finally, the fad for historical/horror mash-ups cannot end soon enough. I mean stuff like this and Jane Slayre and the same author's Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter: never not dumb!

PS. What's the sweating sickness? TB? TB makes you a zombie???

[hebethen]

Nahhh, the sweating sickness is the healer-draining, magically directed epidemic that Duke Roger creates in order to steal his cousin's throne.

I just checked this on Amazon, where I also found...

[rachelmanija]

Little Vampire Women
Little Women and Werewolves
The Undead World of Oz
The War of the Worlds, Plus Blood, Guts, and Zombies
BOLEYN: Tudor Vampire
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim
Alice in Zombieland
Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers
Wuthering Heights and a Vampire and a Zombie
A Vampire Christmas Carol
Shakespeare Undead
Romeo and Juliet and Vampires
A Tale of Two Vampires
Emma and the Vampires
Emma and the Werewolves
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

Make it stoooooop!

I think what annoys me the most is that none of them are even clever! It's just [Famous X] and [supernatural creatures.]

Re: I just checked this on Amazon, where I also found...

[skygiants]

The point when I was like "THIS MADNESS MUST STOP" is when I realized that they had published both Little Vampire Women AND Little Women and Werewolves. Like, one was not enough? THEY HAD TO HAVE BOTH.

Also Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons is the most redundant thing imaginable, and also completely misses the point of Northanger Abbey!

[imperfect_tense]

I don't even... How in the world did this get published? XD

[skygiants]

Because when something's a fad, it doesn't matter if it's dreck! :D?

[ashen_key]

What?

[skygiants]

I DON'T KNOW ;_________;

[carmarthen]

You're kind of like the glvalentine of books: you read them so we don't have to.

(And you're right, the Yuletide version would have been AWESOME.)

[skygiants]

APPARENTLY SO. For my sins in a past life, one presumes, which cursed me with terrible compulsions in this one.

(I kind of want to make it a Yuletide prompt this year! "DO THIS BUT MAKE IT GOOD. Wash the taste out of my brain!")

[alias_sqbr]

WOW.

I have the same problem, and have been getting around it (especially now that my brain fog makes it hard to concentrate) by flipping to the end and skimming backwards until the ending makes sense.

[skygiants]

Ha! I don't think I could manage that myself, but that's an awesome way to get around THE TERRIBLE COMPULSION.

[lizbee]

You know, last year I had an idea for an iPad app that's like Angry Birds, only instead of flinging birds at pigs, you just fling books at walls. (For an extra fee, you can upload your own book covers!) All the satisfaction of book throwing, and none of the wanton destruction!

[skygiants]

I COULD USE THAT APP. You could call it Angry Readers!

[lacewood]

AHAHAHAHAHA. I salute your victory, Pyrrhic though it might feel. I do generally make myself finish books I start (... eventually...) but I feel this book would have defeated me SOUNDLY.

(I also do the "skip to the end and then go back to the middle" thing but mostly I do this to reassure myself that the cast will still be in one piece by the end. Or if they're not, who will be kicking it. >_>)

[skygiants]

In the end, it hurt me more than it hurt it. This probably would have been true even if I HAD been able to fling it across the room.

(Hee! But if people are going to die, I don't want to know!)

[celestinenox]

Oh maaaan. This sounds so hilariously bad, I can understand why it almost defeated you. LOL, Comedy Torture, what.

Also, I share your compulsion. As evidenced by this post about Catherine Asaro's The Night Bird.

[skygiants]

Sometimes the only way out is through!

. . . okay, really the only way out is by closing the book and walking off, but FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION.

[batyatoon]

...


how does Comedy Torture even WORK

[skygiants]

"lol we shoved a lute up his rear to make him talk! lol it had sharp wooden ends that excruciatingly pierced his innards and he died! WHOOPS!" "oh, woe is me, why am I cursed with such comically incompetent minions?"

COMEDY TORTURE(tm)

[tree_and_leaf]

While it sounds almost entirely dire, I quite like the idea of

Cardinal Wolsey is in charge of a secret band of demon hunters that includes Thomas More and Strong Female Character Jane Seymour.

[skygiants]

Well, like, I mean, I'm all for giving Jane Seymour interesting things to do, but it would be kind of nice if they were things that accorded AT ALL with the historical character of Jane Seymour instead of cut-and-pasting in a cardboard Action Girl . . .?

[aberration]

Still sounds better than The Other Boleyn Girl.



(I really need snarkier icons...)

[skygiants]

OH, YOU SAY THAT NOW.

Look, if you really want to make that comparison, I could probably figure out how to get you my e-copy. IF YOU REALLY WANT TO SUFFER.

[evewithanapple]

- meanwhile Sir William Compton gets the sweating sickness, and his boyfriend gets accidentally Comedy Tortured to Death by Cardinal Wolsey, and then Cardinal Wolsey comes and mercy-kills William Compton by SITTING ON HIS FACE

WHERE DOES THIS COME FROM? Is this from The Tudors? Because I am All About queering historical figures, but whenever William Compton gets queered, it always seems to end in tragedy and sweating sickness (WEREWOLFY?) death.

Also I . . . I can't engage with Strong Female Character Jane Seymour. I can't. I caaaaaaaaan't.

[skygiants]

Yeah, I have NO IDEA where queer William Compton comes from! And like, I'm not complaining either, or I wouldn't be in a better book -- and God knows William Compton and his boyfriend were about the only sympathetic characters in the thing before their tragic deaths -- but I am sort of perplexed why, of all people, William Compton in particular.

On the other hand, I would totally be willing to believe that the only training in Tudor history the author of this book has is watching The Tudors, so . . . MAYBE THAT EXPLAINS IT.