Review: Dead Witch Walking

[megwrites]

Title: Dead Witch Walking
Author: Kim Harrison (KimHarrison.net)
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Eos



Basic Plotline: Rachel Morgan, a runner for Inderland Security, quits her job, taking the IS's top runner, vampire Ivy Tamwood, and the pixy Jenks with her to go independent. Because of this, the IS puts a secret hit out on her and she must survive them while trying to find something big enough to pay off her contract with the IS and get the hit taken off of her. In doing this, she runs afoul of Councilman Trent Kalamack, a mysterious man with dangerous secrets that might just get Rachel killed before the IS can get to her!

The Positives: The positives in this book were so rare as to be non-existent.

I liked the supporting characters, Ivy Tamwood and Jenks. Both seemed to me that they would be far superior protagonists. Ivy, being the last living member of her vampire house, came off as smart, strong, trying her best to overcome an almost irresistable nature and Jenks was loyal, snarky, and deeply lovable.

There ends anything to recommend this book as far as I'm concerned. Both Ivy and Jenks were nice, but reading this book for them would be like buying a brand new car just to get the free tee-shirt from the dealership. Save your money, your time, and the aspirin you'll need to take to get through this book.

And when you do chuck this book, try to sell it back somewhere and recoup your losses.


The Negatives: This may actually be the least enjoyable book I have ever read. I now wish that I had continued on with Eifelheim and given up on this instead of vice versa. At least I would have learned fun new science terms in Eifelheim.

Where to start with the bad?

As a heroine, Rachel Morgan is the utter epitome of everything that annoys, angers, and bothers me about Urban Fantasy heroines in today's market. She is self-absorbed, reckless, idiotic, flighty, airheaded, deeply prejudiced, talentless, moody, thoughtless, and constantly blaming her problems on someone else. And it's not to say you need a perfect angel of a character, but if your character is obviously the cause of all her own problems and takes no steps to correct that, it becomes frustrating. There is no upside to this character. Nothing charming, endearing, or otherwise likeable as far as I'm concerned. I could not relate to, like, or even understand Rachel Morgan most of the time.

The book begins by mentioning all sorts of wacky mishaps that have happened to Rachel on the job (this is before we know that Denon is sabotaging her), yet we're expected to believe that she is a great runner and a talented witch. From there it just gets more illogical.

Even under a death threat, Rachel insists on doing stupid things like taking the bus everywhere, going to the IS library for information that she could have gotten other ways, and going into the home and headquarters of a high powered, dangerous person with no other plan than to get in and hope things go all right. Which they don't.

The plot of the book is meandering and inexplicable and the world is poorly built. The main crux of the plot, the hit put out on Rachel, makes no sense. It is never explained why the IS, who is apparently a big agency, would bother putting the time or resources into trying to kill her, or why they can do that. Their "secret" hit is about the worst kept, least secret thing in the novel and it makes no sense that an agency that big would bother killing employees who didn't fulfill their contracts. Nor does it make sense that anyone would ever go to work for them. What's the point? What do they gain by offing employees who go independent? It would be like the NYPD trying to assassinate anyone whoever quit to become a private detective. They're not competitors. In many ways, PI's are a big help to the police, and they often run in different spheres.

And I kept wondering why these hitmen who were supposed to be the best of the best kept using spells, charms, and fairies when they could have just, you know, gotten somebody with a rifle and good aim and ended their problem right there. Seriously? Did they miss the invention of the automatic weapon? It's called a .45 people. Or a bomb! I could definitely have stood to see this heroine get blown to smithereens.

Apparently everyone in this world is mentally deficient. Maybe the "Turn" took everyone's critical thinking skills and IQ points down about fifty points?

So why would there be any logical reason for the IS and Denon to put this hit out? Besides that it gives our heroine an opportunity to play the spunky, beleaguered heroine and get in wacky shenanigans without having to admit that she's actually too dumb to live and there's no reason to write a book about such a character unless you're purposely being satirical or sadistic.

Most of the threads are left hanging for the obvious sequels, and the one thing that does get wrapped up (Rachel's contract with the IS) feels solved in such a deus-ex-machina that one wonders why the author bothered to write four hundred pages and change about it. Especially since there was never any doubt from the get-go that Rachel was going to get everything she aimed for and get the guy just to boot.

Harrison tries far too hard to magic-up everything in sight, so that everything has a veneer of faux-supernatural danger over it that comes off about as dangerous, mystical and dark as a bunch of toddlers in Halloween costumes. In fact, that's what it felt like. One big Halloween-inspired, tourist-destinationesque milleu. I was neither scared nor impressed. Ooh, they wear black leather. How dark and supernatural!

Just a side note: leather clothing is not as great as you think it would be. It doesn't breathe that well and it makes interesting noises when you move about. Not to mention it can chafe like nobody's business. So, sure, if you want to go around dressed like a hooker and sounding like you have the world's worst case of the farts, by all means, don leather outfits and pretend like they're remotely practical for fighting the legions of doom. But don't expect me to respect you in the morning, okay?

Some of the terminology and phrases in this book were laughable. "Inderlander" looks contrived and the Federal Inderland Bureau "FIB" (gee, I wonder if that's supposed to be like the FBI, but magical!), made me have a hard time taking it seriously.

Not to mention that some of the dialogue that passes through Rachel's lips is utterly ridiculous and I'm not sure it would be something that any human being on the face of Earth would actually say. My favorite being this jewel:

"Tag!" I screamed into his unconscious, narrow, ratty face. "Do you hear me you sodden sack of camel dung? Tag! You're it!" (page 378)

This is in addition to the use of the word "Turn" as a curse word, in reference to a plague (brought on by bioengineered tomatoes) called the "Turn". Of course, our heroine must make a big deal about how she eats tomatoes and disdains the humans who are now afraid of them. Yes, those silly humans, wanting to stay away from the thing that nearly caused their extinction as a species.

There are very few places where one can get away with making up fake curse words. Battlestar Galactica is the exception that proves the rule. When in doubt, just use the good ol' fashioned George Carlin Lexicon that we all use.

The word is fuck, all right? Fuck. As in: fucking, fucked, fucker, motherfucker, clusterfuck, fucked up, fuck me running, fuck it, fuck this, fuck you. It's a versatile word, and can be used in many inventive ways. There is no good reason to invent laughable new ones when you have such a classic at hand.

If the completely unconvincing world and characters weren't enough, the love interest feels terribly pasted on. Nick appears 2/3rds of the way through the book, escapes from a rat fight with Rachel and instantly they're making googly eyes at each other and Nick is suddenly Rachel's appointed protector even though they've only know each other for a grand total of a few hours. When Ivy suggests that maybe you should take more than twenty minutes to decide that some random guy is trustworthy, Rachel blows her off.

This book is a complete mess. Rachel is far too dumb to live, and yet survives, mostly because she has other people doing the hard work and then she whines about it when they dare to have their own problems or to tell her that she's being an idiot.

For instance, when Rachel is being held captive as a mink in a cage in the office of the man she's trying to tag, Trent Kalamack, after nominal hour or two of trying to escape, she gives up and starts rating the various parts of his body from 1 to 10 and thinking of how dreamy he is.

Even after he lets his assistant torture her and then puts her in a fight to the death, she still can't stop thinking about how hot he is and how it's too bad that he's evil because he's just so cute.

On a note of my own personal annoyance, the occasional fat-phobic hints were really annoying. Between Rachel's "fat jeans" and Ivy's comments about "a moment on the lips...", I wanted to strangle someone. You want fat jeans? Bitch, please. Come shopping me with sometime when I'm forced to make the Bataan Death March through the Fat Woman Store of Shame with Forever 21 and Abercrombie and Fitch on either side doing the Nelson Muntz at me.

As a woman of 240 pounds? I really have no desire to see a size two character bitch about her body and how fat she feels after eating constantly for the last four chapters, secure in the knowledge that she won't gain a pound. I have no desire to hear about her complete contrived insecurities about her body, which she seems secure enough to flaunt in what, if the cover is any indication, would make most twenty dollar hookers try to give you fashion advice.

I get that the skinny girls have their body hang ups, too, but don't try to convince me that I should feel sympathy for a character who's insecurities are, like the rest of her personality, only skin deep. I have no problem empathizing with thin/ner folks, but only when I'm convinced that their complaints aren't just so much bragging.


CoC Score: 2. There were exactly two characters who I think were CoC's. Maybe three. Depending on whether Ivy is Asian or just "exotic looking" - and I'm inclined to believe that Ivy is Caucasian/White, and that Harrison has skanky race issues. Especially since Ivy is described as such:

Her slightly Oriental cast gave her an enigmatic look, upholding my belief that most models had to be vamps. She dressed like a model, too: modest leather skirt and silk blouse, top-of-the-line, all-vamp construction; black, of course. Her hair was a smooth dark wave, accenting her pale skin and oval-shaped face. No matter what she did with her hair, it made her look exotic. (page 9)

The helpful neighbor may be a person of color (he is described as having dark hands), and if so, he's pretty much the epitome of every Magical Negro You Ever Read, because his purpose seems to be to come in and help Rachel out and then piss off to Magical Negros Who Aren't Helping Their Special White Person Land, where all the good Magical Negros go to wait until the White One calls on them again, dontcha know.

The only person who is definitely a CoC is the evil ex-boss Denon who puts the hit out on Rachel in the first place, and he is described as:

Put simply, the boss looked like a pro wrestler with a doctorate in suave: big man, hard muscles, perfect mohogany skin. (page 42)

and

He had that throaty low voice only black men and vampires were allowed to have. It's a rule somewhere. Low and sweet. Coaxing. The promise in it pulled my skin tight, and fear washed through me. (page 44).

And it is the same scary, sexy monster of a Black man who is hounding Rachel throughout the book and bears a grudge against her for no reason that is ever explained besides he Just Doesn't Like Her.

So we have the "exotic", high sexualized Asian (or psuedo-Asian) woman stereotype and the big Black buck stereotype and the Magical Negro trope. It's a three-fer!

If you're sensitive to skanky race issues, or just have read one too many racist portrayals in SF/F, only buy this book if you need a substitute for firewood. Because otherwise it will just give you blood pressure problems.


GLBT Score: 0. Nobody is openly GLBT in this novel, and I find it really funny that when a girl vampire does her thing near the heroine, she's freaked out - but she'll happily flirt with a male vampire in a shoe store. Hetero dominance and subtextual homophobia abound.

Gender Score: 4. The main protagonist is an insult to women and witches alike. She needs constant protecting from others, is too-stupid-to-live, full of sexist cliches, and generally abysmal. The other women in this story are no better, and Rachel is too busy thinking about boys to really pay attention to anyone else with a vagina.