The Book of Gold and Crimson: A review

So I found a suggestion/prompt in one of the writing magazines to look forward to when your current project was complete, then write a scathing review (and, contrastingly, a glowing one, to.) I tried it, and found my negative review to be so amusing that I thought I'd share it. So if/when I actually let people read it and you see real reviews that look like this, you can remember that the author already saw it coming.

Fans of trite slash fiction rejoice, for now a breakthrough author has found an “original” twist, combining clichéd epic fantasy with gay torture porn to create some mutant hybrid that somehow manages to be as engaging as neither. We're given Caliborn, a whiny and personality-free smuggler whose solution to every problem is to run away contrasted with Zakai, a doormat Gary Stu who spends most of his childhood (and half the book) in homosexual escapades, broken by the monologues of—oh yes—his violent alternate personality. While these kind of plots might work for shoujo anime, they fall decidedly flat when the attempt is to write fiction with any kind of literary depth or appeal. With a plot as coherent as runny oatmeal and a cast of cardboard characters that we're stuck with for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of pages, the only thing one can treasure in The Book of Gold and Crimson is the book's utter lack of description. Trust me, you're better off not seeing what's going on.

Review: In Hanuman's Hands: A Memoir

I recently had the opportunity to read In Hanuman's Hands: A Memoir by Cheeni Rao (HarperOne, ISBN978-0-06-073662-0). On the surface, it's just a story of an Indian-American overachiever who, aimless and rebellious, gets too deep into the dark world of drugs and barely fights his way out. But to call it just a memoir of addiction and recovery is to sell it short. In Hanuman's Hands is a vibrant trip through the history of he and his family, an epic of gods and demons, sex and death, magic and, yes, drugs. It's a story of salvation, and it has some of the best elements of literary fiction combined with the raw emotional power of experience.

As I'm normally a consumer of nonfiction and genre works who has tended to view both lit-fic and memoirs as boring or badly-written, my hopes weren't very high. As soon as I opened the book, however, my fears began to melt away. While it held my attention from the beginning, as soon as I hit the middle of the book, I couldn't stop reading. I stayed up half the night turning pages until I practically passed out. I read in the car and while eating, needing to know what happened next. From the author's note in the front of the book to the very last page, Rao has an incredible poetic voice that combines with an interesting storytelling style in which his story is woven back upon itself and interspersed with vignettes of modern myth and a family's faith, traditions and fate. The story slips between years and at times generations with the ease of thought and yet holds structure enough to make it easily followed. Rao doesn't just tell a story, he takes us on a vision quest into the bowels of his history, the images flowing in a vivid stream of consciousness. In Hanuman's Hands is powerful and satisfying, and when I'd turned the last page and the glow wore off, I felt myself inescapably jonesing for more.

Skritchings on the Page...

Slowly, I'm getting further with this story, even though it took me several months of working on anything but to get back into it and get past the scene I didn't want to write. This blog has been too abandoned because I haven't been doing very much on the literary front except whining how much I want to write and then not doing it.

And reading, when I get the chance. And roleplaying, which sucks up more of my creative juices than it probably should, but also serves as writing practice when it does come time to work solo. Or so I tell myself.

Anyhow. Expect more from this blog. I plan on adding some of my thoughts on writing, some links, some reviews, maybe even an excerpt or (very) short story.

But for now, I leave you with this, some of the worst Pustulant Purple Prose: An Excerpt from a novel called Silk and Steel, posted by vandonovan over on LiveJournal.