Land of Illusions

I technically finished Land of the Dead by Andrew Bates on Friday, however, lazy is taking over.

Any way, we're again sort of focused on Thea the Hunter (who's friend Jake stick around for most of the book), Sforza the Mummy, Carpenter the Zombie, and Beckett the Vampire (who honestly doesn't do much in this novel. One wonders why he even got inserted in.)

So, Sforza starts the book off returning to Cairo and giving the readers a run down on Amenti politics and powers. Which mostly consists of other Mummies pointing out that Sforza's cult is not as well respected as their cults.

Then we catch up with Beckett, who figures out most of Chicago's vampires are under the sway of one of two Methuselas. As such, he leaves, fearing being under the control of Meneleus. He catches up with Carpenter in New York Harbor, loses a fight over the Heart, (not without doing some serious damage to the zombie), then decides his pursuit of the Heart is likely being influenced by other vampires, so he wanders out of the narrative until the epilogue.

T'hea tracks down her mother, who informs Thea about his actual parentage and her connection with Egypt. After Sforza arrives in Egypt and manages to blow up a tanker, word gets out, leading Thea and Jake to Cairo for the final showdown.

And what a showdown it is. While no one particularly ever acknowledges their special powers to one another, Carpenter's end game involves a bunch of extra zombies being created in Saqqara, several mummies in a resurrection temple, and two very annoyed Hunters. While things work out for the best eventually, the epilogue does make it clear Thea's crusade in Chicago is far from over, Sforza getting the Heart is only the beginning of his quest to bring back Osiris, Beckett getting out from under the influence, and oh yeah, Carpenter getting back to the Skinlands.

Now, keep in mind this is the second time I've read this series, so I honestly didn't remember that much about it. However, there was one conversation I thought was in here that wasn't in here. Given that there was never that much fiction written about the Mummy line, so I have no idea where that conversation exists.

All told, it's good RPG fiction, and given the character's are continually ignoring larger plot lines in favor of pursuing personal vendettas, it does seem to be written by someone who's played one before.

They did the Mash....

After the events in the last book, I wasn't quite sure how Raven Hart was going to continue with The Vampire's Kiss. 

As it turns out, it worked out well.

 We start with William in Russia trying to get information on his now undead wife's coterie's location. Given she and her vampire sire/husband Hugo and William's bio son Will ran off with a young child and William's newly created companion at the end of the last book, this is understandable. The trail leads to London, which is convenient since Olivia's resistance is centered there.

Jack, in the meantime, is stuck tending Savannah while William is overseas. Which means dealing with a pack of meth dealing werewolves and helping Werm open up his new Goth Club, which is being refurbished and staffed by Elanor's currently displaced hookers. (Frankly, I have yet to figure out why all the vampires in this series have an obsession with burning down each other's havens.)

Any rate, the two stories never really intersect, so we keep swinging back and forth between William trying to rescue Renee (and learning more of the secret history of the vampire world) and Jack's Werewolf issues and relationship issues with Connie. (Connie asks Jack to use his Voodoo powers to open the portal to visit her ex and her son.)

By the end, we have the next volume fairly well set up, with Melaphia going off the deep end having figured out Connie's biggest secret that not even Connie knows, meeting the council of vampires, and Jack doing something remarkably stupid.

One really wonders what the end game with this series will be, given the number of plot elements floating around. But it's still a fun read.

Anubis was a bad idea...

Bad attempts at puns aside, Andrew Bates's second installment of the Year of the Scarab trilogy, Lay Down With Lions, is a rather large improvement over the initial outing. (On the other hand, given some of the silliness in the first volume, one wonders if some of that came via play testing, because I can totally see a gaming group decide ramming a van through a security gate in broad daylight with armed security on site being a fabulous idea.)

Anyway, while this volume again focuses on Carpenter (the Risen), Nicolas (the Amenti Mummy), and Thea (the Hunter), we also introduce Beckett (the Vampire, who also would have been a better choice for Clan Novel Gangrel than Ramona), who's in Chicago doing research. Beckett gets sucked in to the current drama by virtue of the eldest Gangrel in the city, who offers to trade information in exchange for information about the Hunters. Now mind you, the eldest Brujah (Critias, who's a pawn of Menelaus) is convinced the new Hunters are in league with the Gangrel, but Khalid (the eldest Nosferatu), is aware of other things going on. (Evidently, Lodin is canonically dead in this. I forget how all that happened, since it was in the really old splatbooks.) 

So, anyway, Beckett comes in right about the time the explosion that opened book one, and promptly gets hit with Menelaus's Presence discipline that has him run all the way to Idaho. He comes back, after visiting a Mage in San Francisco, who provides him with an amulet that allows him to blend his aura in better to be less noticeable.

In the meantime, Carpenter has Sforza duct taped up like a mummy and user enchanted bands that more or less paralyze him. (Sforza designed these to hold Carpenter, so the irony is a bit thick here.) Carpenter does use some of his compulsion powers to get Sforza to open up about being one of the Undying. Which is fine, until Carpenter kills Sforza, who comes back in about 12 hours or so. (For the record, I read through the rule book once, about the time it came out. I don't really remember the mechanics.) Sforza manages to escape and set Carpenter on fire. His concern is more for the Heart, some object in a Canopic jar Thea currently has. Anyway. Carpenter comes back, goes and gets his fetter out of his ex's tomb, finds out his relic (a straight razor that crossed the Shroud with him) has a mind of its own, and goes after Sforza. (Really, one of the biggest truths about the Classic World of Darkness is that no matter how many world altering events are going on, supernaturally endowed characters will still pay more attention to personal grudges than anything that might advance the main plot.)

So, Thea and Jake in the meantime, are being hunted by various factions that want the Heart, including Sforza's gang and another gang that wants it for other ill defined purposes. They wind up being held by Critias's bully boys (and girls) in the Sears Tower. Who also wants the Heart, because Menelaus wants it. They've also destroyed Thea's roommate's will, making her essentially a puppet. End result, by the end of the book, several people go out 47th story windows, the Zombie gets the heart, and no one is happy.

I seem to recall that book three takes us to Egypt finally and everyone ends up having an English cozy moment where everyone gets revealed to each other. but we'll come back to that is another entry eventually.

Honestly, it was more fun revisiting Chicago by Night, which is likely why I enjoyed this book so much more.

Hell hath no fury like a vampire scorned

So, Raven Hart's The Vampire's Secret has one joke that borrows a bit from the old movie Major League, then it turns into a Soap Opera.

Towards the end of the last volume, William's sire Reedrek let slip that William's wife Diana was still around and kicking. This volume starts with Olivia, the British vamp who's essentially William's nephew telling William that the Diana in her book of female vampires is not his ex wife, then telling William's childe Jack, that oops, it really is.

Which does set up some interpersonal conflict between Jack and William, particularly when Diana sails into town along with William's heretofore unknown "brother" Hugo, and as an added bonus, William's biological son Will.

But first, we have William's creation of his mistress, Eleanor, as a vampire; the assignment of Voodoun loa as patrons of the family by Melaphia, Maman Lelee's descendant; and Jack and Werm's problematic invocation of Papa Legba, that accidentally brings a character back to life that died in the last book. (That one of the offerings is a KFC extra crispy drumstick makes me think he had it coming.)

Any rate, The arrival of the bloodsucking Brady Bunch also comes with the news that a vampire killing plague has broken out across the continent in the Los Angeles colony. As such, one of the visiting New World vamps is infected. That William's son Will was the one who spread it through the colony and indeed had been in Savannah befriending young Werm prior to Hugo and Diana's arrival only adds to the suds.

Indeed, Connie, the possibly Mayan goddess Jack's in love with gets to make some bubbles of her own, flirting with a human servant of one of the visiting vamps, then getting a crash course in Jack's nature when Will eats the human servant in front of Jack and Connie.

The entire novel winds up with a bit of a cliffhanger, with William at odds with his entire brood and alliance, Jack annoyed at everyone, and everything up in the air as to where everyone will land in the next installment.

Fun read, really soapy. While the focus is still very hetero romance, there is a bit of homophilial scenery when Will Jr. goes a hunting.

Are you my Mummy?

So, in order to break up the blue vampires of Savannah series, I reached back on my shelves to find the Year of the Scarab Trilogy by Andrew Bates, Heralds of the Storm being the first.

Anyway, to give some background here, since this was really an odd series from White Wolf at the time...

Not long after they released Hunter: the Gathering (a table top Role Playing Game wherein characters are normal humans who suddenly get imbued and realize their are actual monsters all around them) during the Year of the Reckoning, they started a year themed Year of the Scarab, wherein most of the released materials had to do with Egyptian settings, characters, etc. The capper was of course Mummy: the Resurrection, a retake on previous books concerning mummies.

Anyway, this particular trilogy concerns mummies and their interactions with other denizens of the World of Darkness, particularly Hunters and the Risen (ghosts returned from the Shadowlands inhabiting bodies.)

As such, we meet Thea, an Egyptian American hunter who's mother works for Pentex through subsidiaries. Thea is a Hunter, working with a group of other Hunters on the North Side of Chicago. When we start, said group is busy stalking a vampire on his estate. Unfortunately, as we find out, someone else is working with them without their knowledge. That would be Dennis "Carpenter" Maxwell, a gangster who has come back from the dead to exert his revenge on the family that killed him. Problem being one of the grandchildren whom Carpenter had tried to take care of took a fatal wound but survived. (Yay! Mummies!)

Sadly, when the book ends, readers are aware that Nickolas Sforza is something, but not what. Nor do the Hunters, nor does Carpenter.

Instead, the reader has suffered through watching Hunters die, fight, and generally bicker; watched Carpenter extract revenge on the vampire that killed him in the 20's, and met Sforza, who kind of sounds like someone adopting traditions that don't belong to him.

It's readable, but it's also kind of silly and there were other fictions being released around this time that explored similar dynamics within the setting.

Hard Hearted Hannah

Ok, so I recently won 5 volumes of Raven Hart's Savannah Vampire series, and I just finished the first volume, The Vampire's Seduction. Really debating on how to review this, since it was more Jackie Collins than Bram Stoker or Anne Rice.

We meet William, who was turned centuries ago by Reedrek, who proceeded to kill William's family in front of him. William has been in Savannah almost since the founding, having run away from his Sire and the old world vampires. Now, in Georgia, he ships younglings from Europe to the New World in the great hopes of creating Western Clans that can resist the European Dark Sires. In the mean time, he has a child of his own, Jack, who he turned during Sherman's march to the sea. Jack these days runs an all night car repair shop, drives fast, and has a crush on Connie, the Police woman who was adopted into Savannah Society after being found on the steps of a Mayan temple.

William spends most night at a local bordello, feeding and being tormented by the Madam. He also has two immortal dogs, both of whom become human at night. He also has a Mambo on staff, descended from Maman Laylee, a Hougan of some repute.

This is all well and good until one of William's ships comes in empty, remains of dead Alger on board. Using some rituals left behind by Laylee, William figures out Reedrek destroyed Alger and is loose in Savannah. Which leads us to Olivia, Alger's child, who mainly exists to explain the fun of female vampires. Who can actually drain their male counterparts during intercourse, along with something about this being nature's way of evening the score for losing reproductive capability once turned.

Anyway, Reedrek plays hard, manipulating every party involved to get what he wants, while William contemplates ending his own...unlife...to take out his Sire. (Evidently one cannot kill one's own creator without joining them in the afterlife.

And so it goes, as we see the creation of two new vampires through the novel, although one does fail.

I enjoyed it, as I normally do with vampire novels, since I enjoy seeing how various people play with the myths. I did feel that it was starting to cross into a Supernatural free for all, what with some shifters, ghosts, and all the voodoun coming in to play, but mostly, it stayed focused. My only minor gripe is one I have fairly often with Urban Fantasy, in that none of the characters are people I particularly identify with. Which is fine, I'm sure I'm not the target audience of the series. And I can enjoy it as it is, just wishing alger would have been more developed to give me someone to cheer for in the closing.

Salt and moonlight

I'm happy Seanan McGuire hasn't retired October Daye yet, and Night and Silence is more evidence that the series still has legs 12 volumes in.

We pick up not long after the events of the last volume, with Tybalt and Jazz (October's fiance and her fetch's girlfriend, respectively), unable to process being kidnapped and locked into their animal forms at the hands of October's mother. Her Liege, Sylvester, is still unhappy about his brother Simon. And, as we open this volume, October's estranged daughter has been kidnapped again.

We find out about Gillian's kidnapping when October's ex husband and his new wife Miranda show up on her doorstep not long past dawn. What we have is a blood filled car, vandalism of both Gillian's car and her residence, and a really intrusive roommate. Oh, and all of Gillian's stuff at Berkeley has sachets of anti-fae herbs, making everyone in the party sick.

Along the path of tracking down Gillian, we meet a Baobhan Sith who had been trapped as a booby trap, and find a place that shouldn't exist that features a house on chicken legs.

Oh yes, and we get more on how the Roane became Selkies and Maeve's Last Ride.

All in all, othe rthan the villains being from out of left field, it's an excellent addition to a fabulous series.

Prophecy of the Phoenix

And at last, the Tribe novels wind down with Black Spiral Dancers by Eric Griffin and Wendigo by Bill Bridges, the last double Werewolf feature in the series.

For The Spirals, we focus on Arkady, the long disgraced Silver Fang long rumored to have become a traitor to the Gaians.  We spend much of the first part retracing his steps on the Silver Spiral as he tries to confront the Wyrm in the heart of its realm. This has a few odd consequences, such as his decent into Malfeas and eventually redeeming the White Howler's totem.

By far the biggest part of this is Arkady's eventual redemption by Falcon, and the gift or a duplicate Silver Crown. In the end, Arkady rallies the ghosts of long dead Silver Fangs at the lair of Jo'Cllath'Mattric and leads them into battle.

Then comes Wendigo, as John North Wind's Son meets his daddy before the North American moot to figure out what to do about the Lore Banes.

Essentially, King Alberecht leads the Silver River Pack and a large number of North American werewolves into the Umbra to the lair of the memory eating dragon. While several folks die, none of the major names do, and we're left with the lore at the heart of the dragon, one that states that the Apocalypse is nigh, and the Gaians will die in short amounts of time.

The Tribe Novels thankfully have been much less disjointed than the Clan Novels, but they've still had their issues here and there. on the bright side, props for the downer ending.

The Bloodsucking Brady Bunch

So, I'm running behind, because last week was a little...off kilter. I technically finished Clan Novel: Anthology edited by Stewart Wieck over a week ago.

Anyway, this closes out the now 14 volume Clan Novel Saga, mostly checking in on characters after the Camarilla takeover of New York city, with a brief moment or two to talk about the fall of hour Goratrix in the Sabbat, as well as a brief reminder that [Tzimisce] is now fitfully dozing under Manhattan, instead of being fully asleep. Also shows that while Anatole might have undergone Final Death, it hasn't slowed him down much.

Most is it is about what you'd expect, with a few of the stories following an artist beloved by both Toreador and Tremere clans, who's final masterpiece is carved into the back of a Nosferatu. Said Nosferatu meets his end in the last story, encouraged by Anatole to fly through the gates of hell and feed the thing under the city in hopes of putting off its awakening. 

Some of it, like Fatima's entry, show how the characters have grown since their novel. (In this case, The path of Allah takes precedence over the path of Ur Shugli, who speaks for Haqim.) Or showing Ramona whine more about not being able to save her Sire and the Buffalo Gangrel.

While it really doesn't do much beyond tie up a few loose ends, it's a fitting conclusion to the occasional disjointed saga.

Signs and Portents

Robert Jackson Bennett's new trilogy starter, Foundryside, again shows his love of world buildingand giving readers delicate morsels of that world, whetting the appetite for more answers. In this particular case, though, the major protagonists are just as in the dark as the reader.

Given the characters all refer to the world as Earth, we'll assume we're in a much altered timeline. The action, however, centers on the city of Tevanne, and the four major corporations that run the city and its colonies. Our main character, Sancia, live between the Corporate campos in the foundryside, where laws don't particularly matter. Indeed, Sancia makes her money thieving,  and we meet her as she's trying to break into a warehouse on the docks to steal something from a safe.

Her rather improvised methodology for the break in introduces us to the concept of Sigils and the Scriveners who write them. Essentially, with the right signs, one can rewrite reality around objects. Things like making a arrow be convinced it's much more dense than it really is, and has been falling for several more feet than it actually has. (They get deeper into the physics later in the book, but for the sake of ease, we'll define the system here as symbols convince objects to be something they aren't.)

Eventually, and with a small bit of unexpected issues, Sancia gets the box and makes her way back to her safe house. Curiosity gets the best of her, which is when we meet Clef, the talking key that can open just about anything. Having a talking key can be a bit challenging, however, Clef does manage to drag Sancia out of her shell a bit, showing us her upbringing on one of the colonial islands and the forbidden act that frees her. (Briefly put, in a normally fatal proceedure, they insert a scrivened plate in Sancia's head that mostly lets her hear scrivenings.)

Investigating her break in, is Gregor Dandolo, son of the Founder of House Dandolo. Gregor is a former soldier, hero of the Enlightenment Wars, and called revenant for surviving a siege that killed off all of his men. Gregor has a thirst for justice, regardless of whom is guilty. Almost getting killed while trying to arrest Sancia gets him more wrapped into this adventure, that eventually leads to Orso and Berenice, the Master Scriviner of House Dandolo and his assistant. Who eventually all wind up with the Scrappers, folks who are scriviners not affiliated with a Corporate House for whatever reason.

There's a lot going on here.

We hear legends of the Hierophants, giants from prehistory who used the sigils (those which God used to create the world) to recreate the world in their image, and how the wars of the Hierophants left deserts and destroyed parts of the world. We hear of a God in a box used by one of the Hierophants. We even get inklings about certain Founders who are trying to regain the powers of the Hierophants through their artifacts.

By the end, we have an inkling of two sides of the forthcoming conflict promised in subsequent volumes.

It's very interesting, and thankfully, there really isn't any long Jurassic Park style passage were we get told the principles of the concepts involved. I mean, yes we get a few explanations here and there, but there's not a 10 page treatise on how all of this works. Much like his last series, most of the themes involved here deal with the nature of the freedom of man, and thinking of one's self as an item rather than as a human. I look forward to the next book, and hope it's more of a direct continuation than the Divine Cities trilogy gave us.