Redeemed (House of Night #12) by P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast

Hear ye hear ye, oh gentle people who read Fangs: it has been a long journey, there have been lows and… well, lower lows. There has been suffering and sadness (all mine) and even glee (when a book is finished) but I have finally finished Redeemed and, with it, completed the entire House of Night Series. Do take a moment to blame Cyna and Mavrynthia and Merriska for the suffering I have endured.

So to the review, starting with the good.

 

Nothing to see here. Move on.

 Well that didn’t take long.

So this is the book where Neferet finally gets hers and where we conclude the journey of Neferet’s terrible, baffling villainhood. I’ve said before it’s bizarre that she became the main villain when Kalona was around. I’ve said before that her motivation made no damn sense and is offensive besides. And her quest for power is dubious because, unlike the gifts she gets from Nyx and gets to keep (and yes I will be getting to the terribleness of Nyx in a moment), her evil death power involves her constantly begging shadow-snakes to do her bidding.

But this book is where we take her motivation and run with it past any sense. She has decided she’s a goddess so she needs to be worshipped. Which means taking over a hotel and recruiting lots of human worshippers by locking them up inside, making them call her goddess and occasionally putting on floor shows for her. Seriously, the big evil Neferet spends a substantial part of this books demanding her event planner put on shiny displays for her amusement and possessing random hotel staff with shadows so they can call her “goddess” and bring her wine.

Basically, she spends the whole book playing with dolls. The dolls are human slaves, but since they’re either possessed robots the amount of actual worship she gets is negligible. She also has a minor hissy fit because there’s not enough 1920s costumes to go around for one of her little parties

Seriously, this “goddess” spends all her time a) drinking all the wine b) randomly killing people and c) playing fancy dress

She also hates modern names, as we’re told at length. And denim. She’s a caricature of ridiculous at this point. She also decides to exposition to an empty room. No, really, she just outright starts telling huge recaps to an empty room. There’s not even a minion to monologue at, just flat our says it to the air. That includes her confession that the two guys Zoey killed were actually by Neferet.

She also conveniently tells this to the police because having her archenemy locked up is apparently bad and she stopped mak… sorry, she never started making sense.

This means Zoey goes form the most epic self-pity to “yay I didn’t murder anyone” (except those two black guys) there’s no blood on her hands (except those two black guys) and she doesn’t have to go to prison (except for those two black guys she killed. Hey can someone please remember this?) It’s really glaring which lives are valued.

So with the plot line of the last 3 books pretty much erased (they were all fighting to prove Neferet was evil and dealing with Zoey’s murder of people they decide matter) that leaves them to do… not much of anything. I mean, Thanatos and Shaunee do their shield and the rest of the gang kind of… mingles. There’s some humans who arrive to hide. There’s a lost cat to get out of a tree and… and there’s pages and pages of them not doing a whole lot.

Kalona's Fall (House of Night #11.5) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

I think the easiest way to sum up this short story is to re-write it in a way that makes sense (for House of Night anyway). So I’m reading Mother Earth as a troll who absolutely loathes Nyx while Nyx is that House Guest who won’t take a fucking hint (she taught Nyx everything, clearly). I can now follow the plot which now seems a lot more coherent. So:

Mother Earth: Ah Earth, so peaceful and special, just me and my children…

Nyx: Helooooooooooooo

Mother Earth:… you’re still here? All the other immortals fucked off years ago

Nyx: No, I’m going to stay here forever and ever…

ME: Oh. Yay. And I see you have tattoos now

Nyx: Aren’t they wonderful

ME:… yes… I’m sure. In no way does it look like a sugar high six year old was let loose on you with a sharpie.

Nyx: Look the book has illustrations!

ME: Thankfully that means less text.

Nyx: I love Earth and my fae just love frolicking here

ME: You mean your slaves that exist to serve you love taking holidays as far away from you as they can possibly get? Funny that…

Nyx: I’m just so lonely…

ME: I wish I was… I know, if I give you a companion you can spend more time anywhere I’m not. Sun, Moon, get down here and create some poor sap to endure Nyx!

Nyx: Oh thank you! Hey, they’ve created two?

ME: Oh, how surprising. I totally didn’t do that on purpose so they would both compete for your affections and drive you to distraction. Not At All.

Revealed (House of Night #11) by P.C. Cast and Kirstin Cast

Neferet’s machinations continue to kill more people, only this time in a very prominent, public fashion. Faced with a possible backlash from humanity, the vampires of the House of Night need to act quickly to expose Neferet and protect their own reputation

This book also brings us a lot of Neferet’s back story

Perhaps realising how utterly inadequate Neferet’s Curse was about actually giving Neferet an actual motive to be the big bad. So this book spends a whole lot of time going through Neferet’s history to try and give us a better reason for why she is the Worst. Unsurprisingly, it petty much fails. We have three options:

Firstly, from Neferet’s curse we have the ongoing supposition that Neferet is evil because she is broken. She was one of Nyx’s super special ones hence the reason she got lots of shiny healing gifts she didn’t give a shit again (because Nyx has TERRIBLE judgement or, again, is just trolling everyone)

Secondly, her cat died. Seriously. She couldn’t deal with the loss of a pet. This is a hard, painful lesson many children learn. Neferet decides she hates Nyx and all she stands for because her cat died

Thirdly: She’s kinky. Because Neferet likes to be rough in the bedroom and punish her naughty naughty lovers she is evil and corruptible. In fact, she may even be kinky BECAUSE of her terrible past from Neferet’s curse. It’s not even a matter of her inflicting it on lovers without their consent – one of the stories from her past is the lengths she goes to to find a man who WANTS her to punish him. But no, she’s kinky that means she’s corrupt and evil (and he’s corrupt and sick) and they’re all corrupt and broken.

At least on some level we have Erebus –

- Wait, we need to talk about Erebus. Why is Erebus the god of sunlight? He shines in sunlight, he shines all right and sunny. Erebus is the Greek… not even god, more avatar/chthonic entity of pure darkness. Do the authors just pick names at complete random for funsies? Don’t they even try to do some research. Seriously all it would take is wikia. Google. It’s not hard.

- anyway we have Erebus accusing Kalona of being responsible for corrupting Neferet. But the reason why she’s susceptible to that corruption in the first place is because of her evil naughty sexuality in the first place. And, really, all this attempt to place some responsibility on Kalona comes off far more as a path for Kalona’s redemption with Nyx (his uber redemption) than any real attempt to explore Neferet.

Neferet's Curse (House of Night #10.5) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

It’s time for another short story in the House of Night series to give terrible back story no-one asked for and manage to make already terrible things worse

Now, on the plus side this book does have a very haunting depiction of abuse and sexual assault and rape within the family, especially back in such an utterly patriarchal era where women are constantly abused and demeaned as hysterical and nonsensical and not to be trusted to look after themselves. Emily, who will become Neferet, is utterly helpless and with very few avenues to actually escape.

That includes being ruthless and hurting people she considers friends because she just has so few avenues that she has to take any to actually free herself and protect herself.

Of course, that desperation is kind of undermined by the fact that Emily is not exactly a nice person anyway. I don’t entirely disagree with this, the idea that she would have been a saint before becoming Neferet would be ridiculous. At the same time she is a woman of her time – and is unlikely to care over much about the poor she would consider beneath her beyond a kind of demeaning pity (of course, she doesn’t even manage that). To the surprise of no-one, this book fails to draw the line between depicting bigotry and challenging bigotry, like so many other books.

The main problem is now how Emily’s captivity is portrayed as she grows ever more afraid and lost and desperate. Nor how her saviour seems to be so much less than she hoped for (I actually really like how her saviour turns out to be utterly flawed and not what she really wants. I actually like that skewering of the white knight ideal)

The problem is the very concept of this book.

Hidden (House of Night #10) by P.C. Cast and Kristen Cast

Neferet continues to be evil – and has decided the next step in her evilness is to kidnap and sacrifice Sylvia Redbird, Zoey’s grandmother. Naturally Zoey and the gang run to the rescue, even though the Vampire High Council is providing no support for their efforts. They also need to be careful with their public persona as Neferet is starting to launch a public relations battle with the human authorities.

It does give Aurox a chance to make a choice about who he wants to be and which side he is on.

We need to take a moment to look at the overall story arc of these books – because I’m on book 10 now and it’s not quite holding together.

The overall meta is that Neferet is a big bad evil who must be stopped. And if you preserve your thinking to that very shallow depth (understandable since deep thinking and the House of Night Series go together like Canadians and tropical weather) then that kind of holds together. Neferet does evil things, Zoey and co then respond to stop her. But what does Neferet actually want? And, no “evil” is not a motive. So we have Neferet rather belatedly acquiring a motive: she wants “control” rather than just power (which I’m taking to mean no accountability. Which I’ll let pass… except all of Neferet’s power now seems to come from her having to repeatedly bleed and beg for help from her Evil Cow. How does she have more power than she had before?). And to get this power she’s going to make humans and vampires fight each other and then she can swoop into the ashes and be confident she’ll take over

Ok, let’s suppose for a moment that this plan has a chance of working when she’s pretty much setting herself up as a number one target in the giant war she’s planning on starting. Let’s let that go for now and instead ask:

WHY THE HELL ARE YOU IN TULSA?!

Look if you want a global conflict, it’s not going to start in Tulsa (no insult to Tulsa, the same applies to my home city or most cities on the planet). In fact, her attempts to manipulate humanity have netted her some shaky control over the mayor of Tulsa. I paused a moment to see if she meant the Governor of Oklahoma. Or a senator. State senator? No, the Mayor of Tulsa. That’s the extent of her power. It’s not even the state capital or the biggest city in Oklahoma! It’s the 47^th biggest city in the US. It doesn’t have a significant vampire presence – the most important vampire in this city was Neferet herself.

Lenobia's Vow (House of Night #9.5) by P.C. Cast and Kristen Cast

Unlike the last short story I read set in this world, this book does not strike me as entirely pointless. Lenobia isn’t dead, she’s a semi-important character and this story is useful. After all, a plot point in the main series is that Neferet has introduced a horse-loving human (that sounded wrong, especially in a series with the shagging of evil bulls) in order to get under Lenobia’s skin, especially since she has sworn an oat never to love a human again.

That begs several questions! That needs expanding and explaining! That can give us a great insight into Lenobia’s past and the no-doubt epic circumstances that have shaped her and caused her to swear such an epic vow that is causing her so much trouble to this day…

…except it kind of undermines all of that.

Because the whole set up made me picture Lenobia having an epic, tragic, terrible love affair. Perhaps she loved someone over years of great passion but, alas, the aging of the vampire inevitably took him away from her. Or the prejudice of the mortal world wouldn’t let them be together. Some epic reason why she had lost all faith in humanity as potential love interests – either human society or human frailty has convinced her that this would never be possible.

Which turns out not to be true at all! Instead it turns out that she fell in love with someone after knowing them for a few weeks (no more than 6, in fact considerably less) when she was 19 and then they died due to magical means. And she hasn’t sworn her oath because she thinks love between a human and a vampire is impossible – but because she is FAITHFUL to this dead man.

The man in question was a mixed race Black man (referred to as “mulatto” and “quadroon” in this book due to the era) who was convinced there love could never be because of racism. Lenobia continually dismissed this (which came across as a complete inability to listen to the world he was describing) and to try and convince him she decided to epicly declare she would love him or no other man! (So he better run away with her or she would be lonely forever – which, by the way, is coercive and gross).

Dragon's Oath (House of Night #8.5) by P.C. Cast and Kristen Cast

There is something absolutely wonderful about a short story from the House of Night series – it doesn’t have enough room or enough people to be nearly as awful as the main series. Yes, this book hereby gets the prize for being the first House of Night book that I DON’T think will inspire an invading alien species to wipe us out because the universe needs to be spared our bullshit.

This makes the book good in comparison to the series – but not good.

As I say with every short story as part of a series, I look for a point. What does this story add to the larger story of the books? Why should readers read this book as part of a greater whole? Because the best short stories both add to the larger series, without being essential (so a reader can skip them without being lost in the main plot but still add interesting new elements to the main story).

And I can’t say I see a big point on this book. We get an insight into Dragon and Anastasia… but firstly both of these characters are dead. It’s not like they’re characters who are going to have continued affect on the book series. Secondly, they’re not exactly influential characters. I honesty would find it bemusing if any fan of the series (of course I find “fans” of this series bemusing in general) could genuinely say they were intrigued by these characters. I mean, beyond “she loved Dragon and she died” what pertinent information did we have about Anastasia? What was so intriguing or important about her that anyone really needed to read her story?

The same applies to Dragon – was there any reason to care about this character? Like Anastasia, he was a cardboard cut-out of a character – the guy who can use a sword. That was his pretty much only definition of him.

Destined (House of Night #9) by P.C Cast and Kristin Cast

Life at school becomes more tense and Zoey and her friends insist on parading a murderer around the grieving loved one of his victims and Nyx insists on not intervening with the super evil Neferet still in control

With ties of family and honour, Dragon and Kalona face hard choices: while the new being Aurox must decide exactly what he is.

Time to open another bottle of the Good Booze because it’s another House of Night review (or, as I’ve come to think of it, my penance for the terrible evil I must have committed in a former life).

The first point that struck me about this book was that I realised why Zoey’s mother died last episode – because Jack and Anastasia died. These two deaths could never ever be about Zoey. Even after a series of making everything about Zoey, this was too much a stretch. So Zoey’s mother died – and the other deaths are pushed quickly into the background. Damian gets to be occasionally “soggy” but now all deaths are eclipsed because now we have Zoey pain to focus on

I have ranted about this in so many books but the redemption/forgiveness themes in this series are truly and utterly awful.

Take Dragon. Dragon’s wife of several centuries was murdered by Rephaim the bird boy who was magically redeemed last book. Dragon is incessantly shamed and demonised in this book because this terribad evil man will not forgive his wife’s murderer when said wife’s ashes are not even cold. The idea that Rephaim should stay away from school and give this poor man a little space so he wouldn’t have to see his wife’s murderer every day (it’s not like he’d lose out on an education – this school has a terrible curriculum and Rephaim himself is over a thousand years old so how much of a high school education does he need?) is considered outrageous. Rephaim’s desire to experience life as a “normal teenaged life” outweigh’s Dragon’s soul crushing grief

Awakened (House of Night #8) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Zoey is taking a holiday to avoids all the drama and sad things that have afflicted everyone (but which makes her super sad because she’s so special). The bad guys are not respecting her wish for a happy holiday so Zoey will eventually have to get back into the action

Meanwhile the redemption of Rephraim continues, because what’s a little murder when you’ve decided a guy is going to be your freaky birdy love interest?

Zoey spends a lot of this book hanging out on the Isle of Skye-author-isn’t-quite-sure-about-the-difference-between-Ireland-and-Scotland-but-likes-guys-in-kilts (Scotland doesn’t use Euros) deciding she wants to take a time out because it’s all so sad and hard and everyone else tries to think of ways to get her back into the action. Also I’ve been to the Isle of Skye – it’s not just a made up place but the author has just overlaid the whole island and made it vampire world.

Y’know I’d be sympathetic – but the shit she’s been through is not any deeper or smellier than what everyone else has been through (hey, remember Dragon mourning his wife of several centuries? Or Aphrodite changing species? Or Stevie-Rae and the Fledglings dying and coming back? Remember any of this?) and none of them had their soul shattered and then decided to take a prolonged island holiday. This follows book after book after book of everyone worshipping Zoey and centring her grief to the complete exclusion of everyone else’s. Stark’s death? All about Zoey. Stevie-Rae’s death? All about Zoey. Heath’s death? All about Zoey. Has anyone even told Heath’s parents yet? Anyone? Having an all-about-Zoey holiday so she can be all schmoopy with Stark the Redeemed Rapist and have a whole new set of vampires declare how super duper awesome she is just causes migraines.

And that’s ignoring the multiple prophecies all saying that if she doesn’t get her arse back into gear then the whole world is going to fall apart. No, screw prophecies, that is with her KNOWING Neferet is out there doing terribad awful things, but hey time out holiday time because precious Zoey!

Let’s hit another annoying element (and there are so many!): Rephaim’s redemption storyline – in fact, no, cut that. This isn’t a redemption storyline. Redemption storylines suggest some level of trying to make amends for the shit you’ve pulled. Redemption storylines mean actually working to earn forgiveness and being a better person. Wave the woo-woo of Nyxness and suddenly declaring yourself team good guy is not a redemption storyline.

Yet that’s basically what Rephaim does. As we all saw coming (with the inevitability of a train racing towards us while we’re tied to the tracks), Rephaim loves Stevie Rae (and she has a thing for bird guys) and that means all is good! Nyx even totally comes to seal the deal!

Burned (House of Night #7) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Zoey’s soul has been shattered but, sadly, because my suffering has not ended that means everyone is running around trying to save her.

Meanwhile Stevie Rae is determined to make even worse relationship decisions than Zoey. That sounds like a near impossible task, but she is up to the challenge.

This book is… so very typical of the House of Night series.

We have a plot line that completely rests on Zoey even though it really should be about someone else – Heath. Heath is the one who died – but no, it’s all about Zoey and her shattered soul. Y’know, I’d be a teeny tiny bit of sympathetic towards her if every last death in this series wasn’t all about her. Heath just follows Stark and Stevie Rae as yet another death that was all about precious precious Zoey.

So with Zoey properly centred as all important, nearly everyone else (except Stevie Rae, which we’ll come to) runs around trying to help her. This involves, inevitably, cryptic clues, poetry and everyone spending far far far far far too long trying to interpret everything because Nyx is incapable of being clear and the rest of the cast don’t have two brain cells between them.

Of course all of this happens with Neferet and Kalona planning terrbad naughty things and with Neferet manipulating the Council to try and make them believe she’s still on team good guy. And Nyx, while happy to send cryptic poetry, happy to send prophecies, happy to have little conversations with Aphrodite and Zoey and is even willing to slap Kalona upside the head in the Otherworld. But she STILL cannot bring herself to send her precious High Council a memo, or informative bowel problems or anything. Seriously, you’d think they’d be due a text or something. A tweet. Smoke signals, carrier pigeons (or raven monsters) something, anything. Nyx is trolling, pure and simple.

But while we’re discussing Kalona let’s touch on the intolerable retcon and redemption we can see hoving into view with inevitable awfulness: Kalona is going to be redeemed. I know this is coming because we spent time in this book AGAIN saying how sad and tortured poor Kalona is with an added side dish of how terribad evil Neferet is. Yes, she is definitely promoted to biggest of big bads and directly connected to the Darkness more than Kalona (more than that later) and is even imprisoning and forcing the poor tortured evil Kalona. I’ve said before, this series is much much more invested in having a female villain. The last two books have tried very hard to downplay Kalona’s villainy while bigging up Neferet’s awfulness.

Tempted (House of Night #6) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

It’s time for another House of Night book, yes my epic suffering continues

Here we have an evil plot to take over all vampire society and doubtlessly do bad evil things – but far more importantly we have to spend an age battling with Zoey’s endless love dodecahedron. This eclipses doing any actual plot line. Oh and Stevie Rae decides to lose her ever loving mind and find yet another irredeemable evil to redeem. Of course she does.

The desperate, awful, contrived theme of this book is “choice” and making the right choice. This was kind of touched on in the last book and now has been taken to new, utterly awful, appalling levels. So the whole point of the Red Fledglings is because they made the right choice which made them good little vampires. Or there’s the whole conflict with the Raven Mocker and, again, choice.

So, here’s the theme – making the right choice to be a good little Nyxy follower

Now the problems, firstly this “making the right choice” comes with a clumsy and pretty offensive retcon. Previously we knew Kalona came to the House of Night and managed to get everyone to worship and obey him because he used woo-woo. Mind control allowed him to take over the House despite how clearly dubious the whole thing was – and only a few managed to resist because they had sufficient woo-woo to do so. Even Zoey’s band of sycophants had to fight against his pull and they managed that because of their woo-woo

Now, instead of woo-woo they make a big thing of choice and outright blaming people for making the wrong choice. There’s a whole lot of judgement of people who continued to follow Kalona and Neferet because they made the “wrong choice” – but that support goes up to and includes actually murdering a teacher. So what is it now? Are these students and professors mind controlled (and we’re blaming them for “choosing” to be controlled?!) or did they, of their own free will, decide that a raven monster killing one of their teachers was totally ok? Whichever way you look at it, it makes no sense. It’s there only so Zoey & co can be morally superior to their mind controlled fellows

But this goes to much much much worse levels when we consider Becca. Becca was the girl who Stark (the new redeemed Red Vampire) raped – something Cyna covered in her excellent take down of fucking Stark here. Becca was assaulted by Stark and he would have raped her if Darius and Zoey hadn’t stopped him. She was then mind controlled into forgetting and promptly turned into a mean girl so Zoey could get on with redeeming Stark. Now, Becca is back, and she is the terribad awful mean girl who hates Zoey because Becca just can’t make the Right Choices. Because that’s how it’s framed now – Becca is a terrible, weak, awful person because she’s not making the Right Choice.

We have zero sympathy for the rape victim, have demonised her and are outright blaming her for her victimisation (for making a bad choice!) while Stark is now firmly on team good guy. This is when I’d normally call for killing everything with fire but I fear the air pollution it would cause.

Hunted (House of Night #5) by P.C. Cast and Kristen Cast

After a series of dubious events force Zoey and her people back to the House of Night after they managed to escape in the last book they are left only with a random series of poems to guide them to finally drive off Kaloma.

Yes, it’s time for another House of Night book, inflicted on me by Cyna and Mavrynthia, who will either be co-defendants in my trial for trying to annihilate humanity for no longer deserving to exist, or will be the people I blame in my defence. I intend to use this link spam in my defence argument.

Let’s start small – this book is utterly overwhelmed with stand-alone-stuffing. I’ve said before that this series treats their readers as having the intelligence of algae – every book feels the need to recap every single book that has passed before. By the time we get to book 8 it will be 10,000 pages long and only 100 pages of it will be actual plot, the rest will be endless, painful, dull recap

Which pretty much sums up well over 100 pages of this book. We have a brief introduction of the Red Fledglings, most of them who are nothing more than a name (and the one who isn’t, frankly, would probably be preferable as a name). Zoey and Erik begin their relationship do-si-do and they all do… nothing. They hide in the tunnels, safe from their enemies that hates going underground. They have no idea what to do but they’re safe unless they go outside and are attacked by their enemies.

Which Zoey promptly does. Of course she does. In a desperate, forced attempt to move this limping plot forward, Zoey abandons even her limited supply of common sense. She gets injured, they belatedly decide they simply have to return to the House of Night for REASONS so we can try and drag out a storyline

I say try. Because when they get there they do…. They do… uh… well Zoey and Stark connect and then they escape. That’s pretty much it until the very last chapter. It’s one bizarre distraction which was really all about Stark and the clumsy relationship and terrible love dodecahedron (more on that later).

The one attempt at a plot line is the prophecy of how to get rid of Kaloma the big bad, brought by Kramisha, the convenient source for more Nyx “wisdom”. Like the last book, this prophecy involves everyone scratching their head about how impossible it is – only Nyx has even less faith in her minions than I do! Rather than suffer Zoey & co struggling to figure it out, she again plays Irritable Bowel Goddess and gives Zoey her special “feelings” whenever she’s right. Honestly when deciding what special people they need to banish Kaloma they didn’t even need the prophecy – they just needed to read the phone book aloud and wait until Nyx started churning

Untamed (House of Night #4) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

This is the part where I have to pretend there’s a plot to summarise… due to the machinations of Cyna and Mavrynthia and Merriska and I am doomed to reading 4 of these books, in 4 weeks. 

There is not enough booze in the world

Ok, Zoey is feeling isolated with her friends turning on her – which is a problem because have several prophecies. One that predicts the rising of a dark and terrible force – and one which predicts Zoey’s death if she is alone

She needs to rebuild some bridges quickly

There’s another element of these books that is increasingly annoying me – the authors seem to think their readers are fools, blithering fool without a scrap of reasoning who need everything explaining veeeerrrryyy slooowly and veeerrryyy carefully and over and over to make sure it sinks in. This is why the book is so full of recapping, every element of the last book repeatedly hashed over not as Stand Alone Stuffing, but because the authors seem to have that little opinion of the intelligence of their readers. We see the same thing when the characters discuss a “cryptic” prophecy. The meaning of it is obvious, I mean really really really obvious. It’s impossible that any characters, especially purportedly intelligent characters, couldn’t have easily interpreted it in second. But instead the characters describe it and work it out in ludicrously excessive detail to explain it to the readers – there’s no assumption of even basic reader intelligence to work things out on their own or even realise the obvious. It had to be spelled out step by step in ridiculous detail.

It makes the book – already slow and lacking in any real development or action – even slower and more painful to read

And can we address that element as well? Nothing happens! Not until the very end of the book when Zoey and gang finally bravely run away. All through the book they just kind of hang around and mope. I would say they were developing their relationships or resolving conflicts or making plans – but none of that is true. Because they don’t.

It’s not like there AREN’T conflicts but they don’t take effort to resolve. All her friends hate her? That takes two paragraphs to resolve. Aphrodite doesn’t know where she stands? A paragraph. A prophecy to interpret? Takes pages but zero effort. We have a trip to a feral cat shelter which achieves… well… nothing, it’s just there. We have lots and lots and lots of circle casting with little achievement. Hand wringing about Stevie-Rae without any real advancement or thought. There’s no effort or drive or difficulty it all works out

Chosen (House of Night #3) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Zoey has to deal with her friend Stevie Rae’s death and return as the evil undead. Definitely something she has to deal with

Of course that has to take a back seat to her constant conflict over three different love interests.

The People of Faith also seem to have decided they hate vampires, but, really the love interests are way more important

My suffering continues thanks to the cruel machinations of Cyna and Mavrynthia and Merriska and I continue to battle through this series

However, now I can be somewhat positive, because there are some definite improvements in this book, especially Aphrodite. So far she has portrayed in the most grossly misogynist of terms and treated as a parody of a terrible person, here we actually get to see her as a more of a person. Sure, she’s not exactly a very pleasant person, but she is a person rather than a monster in human form. She’s actually far more developed than Zoey’s friends who are little more than mindless drones worshipping her every move.

So Aphrodite finding her own personality, being involved in the plot even if it is in the path of “redemption” for not being a good follower of Zoey in the first place. Even better, not only is Aphrodite not just a caricature of evil and awful, but she actually challenges Zoey in ways that don’t just come down to her being super evil and terrible. She challenges Zoey and she may be right – and she challenges her on several levels: She pokes at Zoey’s ridiculous refusal to cuss and her massive slut shaming and even demands the whole group see sense when they’re busy bickering. Now we have Aphrodite as part of team good-guy which means hopefully we will continue to have a character who will challenge Zoey in the future.

Another nice moment is when her friends actually challenge her over the secrets she’s keeping. Sure, they’re obviously wrong and mean and don’t understand – but this whole series is so saturated in evil people vs sycophants that just seeing someone challenge Zoey who isn’t evil personified is an amazing relief

See, this is the problem with this series – it sets the bar so damn low than it is incredibly easy to be pleasantly surprised.

Right here endeth my praise

Like the previous books in this series, this book is sorely lacking in plot – and actual active involvement in said plot.

Betrayed (House of Night #2) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Zoey is facing the task of completely redeeming and rebuilding the Dark Daughters into a new, reformed organisation. A difficult task for her at the best of times – but with boys from her old school going missing, police suspecting vampires and three guys vying for her attention, Zoey has a lot of distractions.

Before we begin the review, I must remind everyone that my suffering through this series is the fault of Cyna and Mavrynthia and Merriska. I cannot even remember how they convinced me to go along with this torturous read – but in the name of some partial justice I think everyone should remind Cyna that she’s only read the first book of the Fallen Series and really really needs to read the rest. 

Ok, let us start positively. Yes, I actually can start positively on this book (well, in relative terms). I do appreciate that an effort has been made in this book to make Aphrodite less of a complete avatar of awfulness (by giving her parents who are complete avatars of awfulness). There’s also a toning down of the all consuming slut shaming of the last book – certainly not a removal of it by any stretch, but a definite reduction. There was also a half-decent attempt at an emotional death scene

I’m not saying any of these are good, because they’re really not and in any other book I would bite off my fingers before saying anything positive about these things, but Marked set the bar so damn low that exceeding my expectations is pretty damn easy to do. Kind of how falling in a compost heap feels more like a warm, soft landing after having swum through a toxic cess pool.

The first complaint I have about this book is the glaring void where the plot needs to be. I have sat for 10 minutes trying to figure out what happened and come up empty time and again. Some guys disappear but she watches that on the news, that’s hardly a plot point. She just kind of wanders around not doing a whole lot until we have some action hastily tacked on the end.

I suppose, in theory, the reformation of the Dark Daughters, the super club of the House of Night is the plot. But it’s not only completely lacking in any kind of substance, but it’s also comically awful.

First of all she does a whole lot of research to come up with the genius idea of a student council. No, really, that’s her master plan that actually requires research on her part which would be sad to begin with. But it gets worse – because she also decides she hates how cliquish the Dark Daughters was under Aphrodite so she’s totally going to make it different no – by making 6 of the 7 council members her, her friends and her boyfriend. Marvel at this for a moment, to remove the cliquishness of the Dark Daughters she decides to replace Aphrodite’s friends with all of her own friends. Yes, Zoey lacks even the slightest sense of self-awareness.

Marked (House of Night #1) by P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast

Zoey’s normal life has been derailed by her being marked by a Vampyre Tracker. She is now a Vampyre, chosen by the goddess Nyx and entering the private school and vampire compound known as the House of Night

But in the House she finds that the leader of the Elite Group, the Dark Daughters, is pretty much terrible and she finds she needs to replace her. Thankfully she has been granted the greatest and rarest power, never seen before, compared to any other vampyre in history.

I try, I really do, in every review to say something positive about a book. There is usually something, some gem, some nugget, some facet somewhere I can seize on and say “hey, despite all the other problems, this is pretty decent.”

I tried with this book. I really did. But, honestly, I can’t think of one tiny, redeeming feature. It’s a a book that manages to be terrible on just about every level. With many other books I would have thrown it away, deleted it from my tablet and DNFed it after vigorously expressing my contempt. But not only am I now committed to reading this series due to the diabolical machinations of Cyna and Mavrynthia and especially Merriska I am now doomed to read this series – but also this book was so bad, so unutterably, shamefully awful that I felt the need to keep going. It was a combination of watching a terrible trainwreck and you know you should look away but are somehow drawn back to the horror, watching someone about to do something epicly ridiculous and watching them to see if they’re really going to go through with it and just reading in a vague, desperate hope that at some point the author would yell “ha! Fooled you, this is a parody!”

It was not a parody. If it were a parody it would be a bad parody because good parodies are more subtle than this.

So, since there’s absolutely nothing right with this book, let’s tackle the wrong. The oh-so-very wrong.

I will begin with the marginalised characters – on team good guy we have one gay man, Damien, and one Black woman, Shaunee, playing sassy sidekicks to the protagonist (along with two white woman, one of which, Erin shares exactly the same personality as Shaunee because characterisation is hard. We also get the joy of these two characters calling each other twin. The other is just a kicked puppy dog following Zoey around with utter devotion she developed within 10 second of meeting her because characterisation is hard).

Damien is gay, we know this because it is mentioned all the time. Even when mentioning things completely irrelevant to his sexuality – like how smart he is – he is the “gay genius.” We’ve seen this trope before and labelled it the Lesbian Shark. It definitely applies. Like all of Zoey’s “friends” Damien exists for the greater glory of Zoey, being slavishly loyal and obedient pretty much from the first meeting. As a bonus he’s used to excuse using the slur f@ggot. We also have such joys as Damien not counting as a guy because he’s the, direct quote “token gay”. He also takes on the rule as the expert of all things “peniled” because while having no relationship himself, it is the duty of all good GBFs to play advisor and counsel to straight ladies. To top this off we have derision of gay men who are “swishy girly-guys”. And all Lesbians are some kind of like minded cult who spend their whole time in the temple because Matriarchal Goddess = Lesbian devotion.