InsaneJournal

Current mood:	bored
Current music:	Tiger Lillies--Mortuary
Entry tags:	snark

yeah, the mortuary, the mortuary, the mortuary is near
Don't miss the last post--nightmare fuel goodness of a most exquisite nature! Right now, though, more snark.


Oh boy, it's time for another thirty-four chapters of liquid hell with Darren Shan, Boy Idiot. I'm excited, can't you tell? So's the author, apparently, since this volume has enough balls to include shout-outs.


For:

Granny and Grandad—tough old fogeys

OBEs (Order of the Bloody Entrails) to:
Caroline "Tracker" Paul
Paul "The Pillager" Litherland

Heads off to:
Biddy "Jekyll" and Liam "Hyde"
Gillie "Grave Robber" Russell
The hideously creepy HarperCollins gang
and
Emma and Chris (from "Ghouls Are Us")


Awwww, isn't that sweet? I'm inspired! Starting right now, I'm starting the OH-DS--the Order of the Hella Drunk Head-Desking Snarkers! I think some of you have already joined me. To be a Platinum Member, follow along in the book here.

As aforementioned, I've read about 1.85 of the books, and this is not one of that 1.85. This is all new, fresh territory just waiting to be explored!


It was a dry, warm night, and Stanley Collins had decided to walk home after the Boy Scouts meeting. It
wasn't a very long walk — less than a mile — and though the night was dark, he knew every step of the
way as surely as he knew how to tie a reef knot.

Stanley was a scoutmaster. He loved the Scouts. He'd been one when he was a boy and kept in contact
when he grew up. He'd turned his own three sons into first-rate Scouts, and now that they'd grown up
and left home, he was helping the local kids.


...although the Pedobear parallels are familiar, and "Nasty Habits" just came up on my Winamp Shuffle like an old friend.

Stanley is unafraid of the dark night, knowing that his wife is waiting with a delicious cup of hot chocolate and cookies at home. Stanley thinks of how he used to shake the branches of the trees and make scary noises when his kids were walking home at night, afraid, and how he would laugh as they screamed and ran away, because Stanley is a fantastic jackass. Stanley loves the sound of his footsteps on the way home, and thinks of it at night when he can't sleep. Delcat wonders how the hell Darren knows this, as this book is told from a first-person perspective. The author laughs and sticks money in his ears.

Stanley is pulled from his 50's-sitcom reverie by the sound of a snapping twig in the woods. I would too, seeing as despite what city folks think, forest floors are in fact rather soft and you thus have to work pretty fucking hard to actually snap anything on them. Further snapping and crunching reduces him to a quivering mound of man-jelly quite unbefitting a Scoutmaster, and when he runs, the mysterious sound follows him. Oh my God, is it a bear? Is this a book about bears? I would so totally forgive the entire series if they decided to make a book about vampire beaoh of course it's just the twerp.


"Imagine a man his age wearing a Scout's uniform," Mr. Crepsley snorted as he turned our victim over.

"Were you ever in the Scouts?" I asked.

"They did not have them in my day," he replied.


Darren: Then how are you familiar with them?
Crepsley: Intimately.

Darren and Shan are out a-huntin' for "precious red mercury", which they apparently obtain by sucking on the plaque-filled leg veins of old men. Yeah, guys, vampires are just so glamorous and so sexy. Darren whines about not waaaaanting to suck on the old man leg, and Crepsley briefly maintains that it's perfectly good old man leg and will put hairs on his chest and vampires in Africa would love an old man leg like that, then gives up and drools all over the cut to heal it. So sexy.


If he found the scar, he'd be more likely to think it was the mark of aliens than a vampire.

Hah. Aliens! Not many people know that vampires started the UFO stories. It was the perfect cover.
People all over the world were waking up to find strange scars on their bodies and were blaming it on
imaginary aliens.

Mr. Crepsley had knocked the scoutmaster out with his breath. Vampires can breathe out a special kind
of gas, which makes people faint. When Mr. Crepsley wanted to put someone to sleep, he breathed into
a cupped fist, then held his hand over the person's nose and mouth. Seconds later they were down for
the count, and wouldn't wake for at least twenty or thirty minutes.

Mr. Crepsley examined the scar and made sure it had healed correctly. He took good care of his
victims.


...well, we're on page seven and already I'm not sure whether to make the "wait what the fucking fuck aliens" joke, the "But vampires can't HAVE garlic breath" joke, or the "Crepsley is a rapist" joke. I guess my secret hope that the series would increase in quality once the author got his sea legs was ill-founded.

Crepsley tells Darren to go find a fox or rabbit to eat (more like a pussy amirite), and Darren continues to contend he'll never drink human blood. Crepsley wonders out loud if it's all that different from drinking human semen. Darren tells him to shut his fat whore mouth.

Back at the hotel, Darren provides some exposition. He's currently traveling around the country as Crepsley's half-vampire assistant and learning the ropes of being a pale, friendless creature of the night...well, reviewing them, more like. Most of the vampire lore is untrue--while they can travel at high speed, a process known as "flitting", they can't fly or change shape. They can't be hurt by holy water, crosses, or garlic, they cast shadows, they have reflections (probably because the author realized Darren saw himself in the mirror at the end of the last book and went "OH SHI--"), they don't even grow fangs...gosh, guys, I'm starting to wonder why I'm majoring in Vampire at all. Oh well, at least I've still got my Were-lemming minor to fall back on. There are a few nuggets of truth in the lore, though:


A vampire couldn't be photographed or filmed with a video
camera. There's something odd about vampire atoms, which means all that comes out on film is a dark
blur. I could still be photographed, but you wouldn't get a clear photo of me, no matter how good the
light.


Editor: Sir, this part is a bit dodgy. You can't just shoehorn the word "atoms" into something and make it sound scientific.
Author: IS SO SCIENTIFIC! LOOKEE SEE!
Editor: ...sir, this is just a copy of the Periodic Table of the Elements with "Oxygen" crossed off and "Vampirium" written in. ...and, I notice, the entire Lanthanide Series scribbled out so someone could write "I AM SO FUCKING AWESOME" over them.
Author: WELL MAYBE YOU SHOULD LOOK AT ELEMENT NUMBER 18 AND SEE WHAT HE SAYS
Editor: I don't believe "Yousuckium" is a noble gas, sir.

The tl;dr goes on--dogs and cats hate vampires, but rats and bats will cuddle them at night (I think that says more about your personal hygiene, Darren), it takes four or five hours for sunlight to crispy-fry a vampire but they sunburn within fifteen minutes, they're vulnerable stakes and drowning and bullets and knives and electricity and certain diseases (clearly not rabies, but the jury's out on the HIV), and--


There was more I had to learn. A lot more. Mr. Crepsley said it would be years before I knew
everything and was able to function by myself. He said a half-vampire who didn't know what he was
doing would be dead within a couple of months, so I had to stick to him like glue, even if I didn't want to.


--and that isn't creepy at all, no, no. I have an underage boy totally dependent on me myself and I don't let him out of my sight either. That's why the lock to his door is on the outside, because I have to keep him safe from all those horrible outside people because he's my PRECIOUS LITTLE BOY AND I WILL NOT HAVE HIM TAINTED BY THOSE FILTHY WHORES IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD AND HE'D BETTER NOT CALL THE POLICE OR

...sorry, where was I?

Meanwhile, in the manga, I'm torn between thinking their depiction of Crepsley is kinda cute and being freaked out by the size of his shoulders. We all know what rapidly expanding shoulders means, right? I will note that Darren and Crepsley have much more of a rapport in the manga, actually talking to each other beyond "I HATE YOU" "STFU I HATE YOU MORE". I really wish someone would scan the rest of it, this is the last chapter available.

Oh hell, we're back to exposition. If vampires don't drink human blood, they age at twenty to thirty times the human rate--hey, that's one way of getting through puberty. Vampires can drink the blood of most animals, but there's a highly arbitrary list of animals they can't drink from--cats, monkeys, frogs, most fish, and snakes. Most fish. Pufferfish are fine, guppies are okay on alternate Tuesdays, and putting blobfish out of their misery is considered a polite social act.

Back on the topic of exposition that we might actually be forced to care about, vampires who drink only when they must are more likely to fall into bloodlust, "sucking wildly". ...too easy, too easy, too easy oh hell I'm allowed I GUESS THIS SERIES HASN'T BEEN GETTING ENOUGH BLOOD LATELY sorry I had to sorry. Blood goes bad like milk goes bad when someone dies...I guess that's...kind of accurate, sort of...Crepsley keeps bottled fresh blood on hand and can survive on it for a while, how the hell does he keep it from clotting...oh my God we just spent an ENTIRE CHAPTER JUST TALKING ABOUT BLOOD. DO SOMETHING.

Finally, after revealing that he doesn't like Madam Octa anymore (your fucking loss, you ingrate) and that he often thinks about staking Crepsley while he sleeps, Darren goes into town. Surely this has to lead to some kind of action.


I stopped to watch, and after a few minutes one of the guys came over to me.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"Out of town," I said. "I'm staying at a hotel with my father." I hated calling Mr. Crepsley that, but it was
the safest thing to say.


That is not the kind of action I was talking about. I did not need to know that Crepsley makes Darren call him "daddy". Gah.


I had a great time for a while, dominating play, rushing back to defend, picking players out with pinpoint
passes. I scored a couple of goals and set up four more. We were leading 9-7 and coasting. The other
team hated it. They made us give them two of our best players, but it made no difference. I could have
given them everybody except our goalie and still kicked their butts.


Oh great, becoming a vampire doesn't preclude the author whacking his little Dracula to overblown sports Stu-ness. Wait, I thought it did. Wasn't there a reason Darren stopped playing? Something important? Something like...like...


There was a sharp snapping sound. Danny screamed and went down. Play stopped immediately.
Everybody in the game knew the difference between a yell of pain and a scream of real agony.
I scrambled to my feet, already sorry for what I'd done, wishing I could take it back. I looked at my
stick, hoping to find it broken in two, hoping that had been what made the snapping noise. But it wasn't.

I'd broken both of Danny's shinbones.

His lower legs were bent awkwardly and the skin around the shins was torn. I could see the white of
bone in among the red.


...like he got a note from his mom? Yeah, that was it--what? Not that? The bone-snapping thing? Oh! Oh yeah, that! I can see how that might be a problem, yeah.

Darren laments being a monster, then runs home and tells Crepsley that they have to leave before the fuzz shows up to harsh their buzz. Taking this to mean that the authorities have realized that Darren's his "special friend", Crepsley flees with him to an abandoned church, where Darren takes his mind off his troubles by cleaning headstones and being a fantastic jackass to cute bunnies. No, seriously.


A family of rabbits lived in a nearby burrow. As the day went by, they crept closer to see what I was up
to. They were curious little guys, especially the young ones. At one point, I pretended to be asleep and a
couple edged closer and closer, until they were only a few feet away.

When they were as close as they would probably come, I leaped up and shouted, "Boo!" and they went
running away like wildfire. One fell head over heels and rolled away down the mouth of the burrow.

That totally cheered me up.


Darren, you are officially no longer protagonist material. Either a) go all the way and start kicking puppies, b) stop being an asshole to small animals, or c) become awesome enough to graduate from "fantastic jackass" to "magnificent bastard". If you refuse to comply, we may be forced to pants you and drag you around the track on general principle and a daily basis.

He does give the rabbits the scraps when he makes stew in Crepsley's Amazing Foldable Plot Device Cookware that night, which totally makes up for little Thumper rolling down a steep burrow and snapping his sweet little neck. When Crepsley wakes up to dinner freshly-made, he comments that he "could get used to this". And here he thought Darren would only take care of that other wifely duty! But things quickly turn sour, as Darren starts whining about how he can never be nooooormal or have any frieeeeends and Crespley "pumped his stinking blood" into hiiiiiim and wrecked his liiiiiiiiife, BAWWWWWWW. There's a silence, in which Crepsley probably wonders why he didn't go with a nice, smart kid like Annie and Darren tries not to cry like the little pussy he is. Sensing he'd better patch things up or he's not gonna get any tonight, Crepsley at last speaks up.


"I am sorry," he said. "I should not have blooded you. It was a poor call. You were too young. It has
been so long since I was a boy, I had forgotten what it was like. I never thought of your friends and how
much you would miss them. It was wrong of me to blood you. Terribly wrong. I …"

He trailed off into silence. He looked so miserable, I almost felt sorry for him. Then I remembered what
he'd done to me and I hated him again. Then I saw wet drops at the corners of his eyes that might have
been tears, and I felt sorry for him again.


Crepsley: Well, nothing for it. I'll just have to put you out of your misery like the last five boys.
Darren: NO LONGER FEELING SORRY FOR YOU
Crepsley: HOLD STILL AND LET ME SNAP YOUR NECK THIS HURTS ME MORE THAN IT HURTS YOU


"Still," he said, mulling it over, "it is not as bad as you think. Perhaps …" His eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

"Perhaps what?" I asked.

"We can find friends for you," he said. "You do not have to be stuck with me all the time."

"I don't understand." I frowned. "Didn't we just agree it wasn't safe for me to be around humans?"

"I am not talking about humans," he said, starting to smile. "I am talking about people with special
powers. People like us. People you can tell your secrets to …"

He leaned across and took my hands in his.

"Darren," he said, "what do you think about...


Crepsley: ...meeting the rest of my pedophile ring?
Darren: What?!
Crepsley: I mean, joining the Cirque du Freak. ...why, what did I say?


Next time: The series remembers it's about to be a freakshow and junk! Sorry if this one was dull, guys, hopefully there'll be more to work with once the book picks up steam.