Inside the Masquerade

Given that I talked about the mixing of the modern and the supernatural last time, it felt only fitting to cover some of the books I read while preparing to publish my own book. Call it market research, call it scoping out the competition, I mainly just wanted to see what other urban fantasy stories were out there; how they handled different aspects of the genre, what I liked and what I didn't like. The results were...eye-opening, but not quite in the way I was expecting.

The first book I tried was from the October Daye series, featuring a half-Fae private investigator. Now, don't think these are the cute little pixies that leap to mind when you first hear the word “faerie”, these are capital-letters The Fae, ageless, otherworldly beings connected with many aspects of nature that come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Our titular heroine is one of many unlucky half-breeds in her world, born with the vulnerabilities of both human and Fae without too many of the advantages. To her credit, she decides the best course of is to take a unique profession: ferreting out the lies of a race of chronic liars.

It opens in the middle of Daye tailing a suspect when she's caught and left for dead...which, in Fae terms, actually means turned into a fish and tossed into a lake for fourteen years. By the time the spell wears off, her human family and friends thought she really was dead and have all moved on, leaving her depressed and alone. Only a few months back to having two legs, and an old friend of hers is murdered, with the victim leaving her a phone message containing a death curse demanding she solve the murder or suffer the same fate. Nowhere to go from here but up, right?

Or so you'd think, but Ms. Daye has somewhat different ideas, which brings us to the story's first issue: that October spends much of her time indirectly trying to get herself killed. Offers of help from her Fae allies go mostly rejected or avoided. She walks into dangerous situations without much preparation or a clear idea of what her plan is. Her skills are rusty and she makes little effort to change that. The result is that she spends much of the book almost getting killed or crippled in some way, leaving little time for more exciting actions like, you know...solving the mystery? Kicking some ass? Or at least not just stumbling from one plot point to another? She does eventually solve the murder, but not before a number of other people are killed, and it wasn't a terribly complex mystery either.

Okay, so the first book wasn't exactly a thrilling adventure. But my favorite book series, The Dresden Files, also has a rough first few books where the protagonist spends a lot of time incapacitated, and it got better as it went on, so why shouldn't I give this series the same chance? I read through about half the current series, 4 books all told. And does it get better? Well...marginally. The world the author creates for us is interesting, as are many of the side-characters. The books are well-written and excellently-paced, and the plots tend to be fairly creative. But the big problem is that the main character, October herself, just isn't much of a protagonist. It's pointed out in the third book that she's borderline suicidal, repeatedly charging head-long into danger without taking the steps to try and not die in the process, and if this behavior was intentional as a way of communicating the psychological issues October has been dealing with after losing 14 years and everyone she loved, then that is quite clever indeed; maybe it shouldn't have taken three books for her to be confronted with that issue, but fine, I could forgive it if she starts trying to get past that in the fourth book and starts improving as the hero that she is killing herself trying to be. But...she doesn't. She continues to spend a sizable portion of her time being injured, incapacitated or captured, requiring that she be protected or nursed back to health by her friends. She continues to miss obvious clues, often needing to go to others for guidance, or only figuring things out when it's almost too late to act on the information. I look back over the events of the four books and there is surprisingly little that she has done under her own power.

So, dissatisfied with how my first venture was turning out, I went out and found another book to try, this one of the Cal Leandros series. It focused on a pair of brothers struggling to make a living for themselves, the titular younger sibling being another half-breed. Here, though, the protagonist has spent four years constantly on the run from his supernatural side, in this instance a race of monsters (elves? Drow? Demons? The book seems to have a hard time defining them) called Auphe, who arranged to have Cal born for some mysterious agenda.

Now, I am in no position to judge another writer too harshly, but this was just a painful book to try and get through. Part of the problem was an issue of over-indulgence on the part of the author; their primary method of describing something seemed to be “come up with two or three snarky metaphors for it”, a practice used by almost every single character that ends up inflating chapters where relatively little actually happens. I very quickly got tired of being beaten over the head by the pointless repetition, almost as tired as I got of the protagonist. Like in the October Daye series, the largest obstacle to the enjoyment of the plot was the narrator himself, here a bitter, spiteful and very angsty 19-year old boy. As a character, he was certainly...realistic, as there was plenty in his past for him to angst over, but as a main character and narrator, he just wasn't a person I liked spending time around. I was relieved to see him slowly starting to mature, but then the author threw a twist into the mix that severely disappointed me.

I'm going to delve into spoilers for a bit here, but as I don't recommend too many other people go out and read the book themselves, hopefully it won't be as much of an issue. See, halfway through the story, Cal finds himself possessed by male banshee named Darkling (yes, that is his name) who takes over as narrator for much of the latter half of the book; surprise, your protagonist is now a villain! This, however, is a twist that's a major detriment to the story; we've barely had enough time with our hero to start feeling sympathetic for him, despite how grating he could be, and suddenly he gets replaced by a completely unrepentant asshole who takes Cal's negative aspects and dials them up to eleven. Cal/Darkling then proceeds to spend the bulk of his time advancing the Auphe's agenda from behind the scenes, leaving us with only second-hand accounts of what the other characters we've just started getting to know have been doing while our narrator sits around gleefully fantasizing about all the violent and sadistic things he's planning to do later. When we do get to see the other heroes again, Darkling wastes so much time taunting them and reveling in his own evilness that he sabotages his own efforts more often than he succeeds.

Speaking of plans, while the Auphe's evil plot is certainly novel, the creatures themselves are incredibly bland; they don't seem to have a leader or even individual names, a culture to define them beyond “stereotypical Always Chaotic Evil monsters who hate everything and everyone”, or distinct personalities which you could use to tell them apart. They exist only as a vague collective force who present a threat for the heroes to overcome without actually being much of a threat; during fight scenes, they generally just hurl themselves at the heroes en masse and are individually rather easy to dispatch, with one scene involving three people armed with ordinary guns and swords arguing with each other as they almost-casually slaughter their way through the entire Auphe population.

While the book did have some decent aspects, primarily its secondary characters and the setting itself, a world in which fantasy monsters have integrated themselves into human society as well as they could while hiding their true nature, they were difficult to see past the insufferable protagonist and boring villains. Definitely not a series that I was interested in exploring further, and, as mentioned, not one I recommend you try out either.