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Anias posted:Go read the michelle sagara books, first is Cast in Shadow. They're Police Procedurals mashed up with Fantasy City Slice of Life mashed up with Mystery, so they're a very different take on the usual Urban Fantasy stuff. If you aren't bothered by romance in your books, you can also give Illona Andrews a try. They're wildly popular as an author, but I guess I'd suggest starting with their kate daniels stuff for the most clearly UF. (The later books were romantic times bestsellers for UF books, really) They're particularly worth looking into if writing is more on the career side than the hobby side for you, and their blog has some insight into their process on the 'sell the book' side. Kate Daniels as a series is really fun UF. It's about a lady in post-Apocalyptic Atlanta who fights monsters for a living. I've read the first three and while there are some romantic overtones, it's so much of a slowburn that they're not a couple yet. Instead it's been focused on "who killed this dude" or "why is this girl being chased by tentacle demons" or other fun plots.
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Mar 17, 2019 12:04
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So I've been reading a bunch of UF lately and while I could offer recs and such I instead need to explode in rage and horror at the Mercy Thompson series It's the one with the were-coyote and it's one of the most popular ones in the genre and I enjoyed book 1 despite the horror of a werewolf trying to marry a sixteen year old to use her as a brood mare so I'm reading book 2 and - apparently unmated female werewolves belong to the alpha, which means they get raped - but it's "okay" because the "wolf instincts" take over and make it okay - a child werewolf is not exempt from this - there are only 19 alpha werewolves in the entire USA who can be trusted with a girl werewolf without raping or abusing her out of like a hundred my UF friends are trying to tell me to chill, it's okay because they're protecting this one and child werewolves are super rare but this detail is just now there in the world-building. Both details. All details. This universe is full of rape. The author put it there.
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Oct 7, 2019 15:48
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-Fish- posted:Don't worry, it gets WAY worse. If this were a horror series I'd understand why it's so popular, but it's UF! Why is it so popular?? 
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Oct 7, 2019 16:46
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Uh, romance novels have always had the heroine being taken and ravished by a man who she then falls in love with being a big thing. Lots of normal chicks dig this stuff. As a chick: I prefer consent. Kate Daniels was better about this, she got ravished by her big sexy lion man only after she agreed to it and it was awesome. Even Nalini Singh, who writes the most amazingly garbage PNRs, will typically portray consent and her novels are better for it. (She'll then give me some steaming hot sexist bullshit but I keep coming back because hot vampire angels and their stupid stupid plots are compelling) Anyways my favorite UF series right now is the Cast in Shadow series by Michelle Sagara, as I'm up to book 4 and there's still no romance, only murders and weird magic and Kaylin, the world's least competent cop. 
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Oct 7, 2019 18:04
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Exmond posted:I.. freaking hate Kate Daniel's sexy lion protagonist. The whole "I'm a cat, so I'm going to sneak into your house and eat your food and watch you sleep" made me dislike him. Completely understandable. Kate being freaked out about that helped me get over that, and he proved himself to be a cool dude, and not entirely a creeper. anilEhilated posted:I've picked that one up after your recommendation in the last thread (after a fair bit of skepticism obtained by looking at covers) and it's... actually really fun. My one dig is that you keep getting hit by made-up words with very little context that would let you infer the meaning (saying that as a fan of Malazan) but it's a nice, comfy read. Well, as comfy as reading about child murders gets. Oh gosh, awesome! I've recently fallen in love with Michelle Sagara/West's writing and I'm so glad I can share that with someone. 
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Oct 7, 2019 19:07
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Oh oh, the other UF I'm reading at the mo is Working for the Devil by Lilith Saintcrow and it's delightfully 90s punk nonsense. She gets attacked on a subway by street punks! America is racist against psychic people and even used them as slaves (I think)! The devil is real, but god doesn't seem to exist? She prays to Anubis instead (good choice) and it's all schlocky and fun.
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Oct 7, 2019 19:27
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torgeaux posted:Back to the Mercy series for a bit. The part you hate? Part of the series is the use of this particular pack to be the role model for systemic changes going forward from hidebound systems currently in place. Female wolves have status based solely on their mate's status...until the pack at the center of the story changes that. Being upset that the initial status quo is bad is one of the points. The companion series Alpha/Omega explores the same changing dynamic (though the relatively rare sex bits are cringey for other reasons). Interesting, interesting. I've sat and thought about this for a while and I'm gonna read books 1-3 of Mercy, half because I own them and half because they are compelling horror stories. The vampires in book 1 were terrifying and the opening of book 2 with the demon was worse, and I respect an author who can do that to me. With luck we'll start seeing change soon.
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Oct 7, 2019 23:11
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torgeaux posted:Mercy doesn't actually become a member of the pack in those books, I think. My friends did warn me about that, I'm not going into mercy 3 totally blind. They also tell me it has realistic fallout which is good, but also gulp. We'll see if I'm up for reading more of that when I get there. Mercy 2 meanwhile: the vampire at the window in the middle of the night freaked me out pretty badly. I was reading outside in the dark with just the outside light and the scene started and I had to hurry my dog up so we could get back inside, because aaaaa Mars4523 posted:I forget the timeline, but doesn’t she get him back for it? It’s been a while but I remember her doing something pretty elaborate and property damaging in return. - Kate does get back at Curran for that, multiple times - UF/PNR written by women sucks when they do that, and the prime contender for it is Nalini Singh's Branded by Fire, one of her Psy-Changeling books. The couple are a pair of werecritters, and in this universe being a werecritter means that you're either dominant or submissive. No, none of these authors have ever heard of switches. Anyways, because Singh has some intensely sexist ideas about how romance works, the woman gets to be a dominant, but she still has to submit to her dominant male partner because gently caress me. There's a whole load of bullshit about how because the dude is a wolf he's protective of his mate, and because she's a cat she's independent up until he smolders at her. When Singh's bouncing her werecritters off of her psychic emotionless people it's more fun to see her contrast "i have no emotions. why am i horny" with "my inner panther demands that I get turbo-possessive and horny around you". Stupid but fun. It's when she's got two weres bouncing off of each other it really reveals that they're not written like were-critters at all. They're just horny people who can't admit to themselves that they have temper problems. Unfortunately the author is 100% unaware of this so it comes across as really, really stupid and not in an entertaining way. So to walk over to Mercy which is clearly better written and at least a little better researched and still run headfirst into "my wolf says I need to treat you like a barefoot pregnant housewife" makes me sad. At least Kate Daniel's werekitty doesn't mean he gets stupid because of his inner lion, he's stupid because he's stupid. For once the alpha dude in the relationship has reasons to be the way he is: he's the violent leader of a violent community of monsters and he's overprotective because he knows what Kate's up against. And Kate pushes and pulls and works with him and it's an equal relationship that I enjoy a lot.
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Oct 8, 2019 02:12
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:But were you really, I said to my magical kittykat boyfriend wait, October Daye has a magical catboy boyfriend? I might have to hurry up and pick it up. ps I finished Mercy 2 and to my surprise it decided to become fullblown horror for basically the entire ride. Good horror at that. Which was great, I loved some of how menacing it was. I'm not ready for Mercy 3 yet so I've been reading Shadow Kin by MJ Scott and it's deliciously trashy. I'll probably rate it a 3/5 on goodreads for overall quality, but man is it a 5/5 on the indulgence scale, I love this kind of romance drama.
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Oct 9, 2019 23:09
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In a fit of stupidity I picked up Dresden 1 yesterday and decided to just get it over with, this sexist junk has been in my room for like ten years now and if the series matures and gets good by book 3, then damnit, I have to muscle through book 1. So I conquered the first hundred pages again (I've read them at least three times before, always ending in me deciding not to continue) and now I'm meeting Dresden's vampires. Flabby black breasts. Yes. Thanks. Anyways, I find it interesting how this is basically a straight noir novel with magic/monsters. I haven't read much dude-written UF yet, but the lady-written UF tends towards... either horror, romantic drama, or other conventions (the more modern you get, the more CSI it trends with the procedural elements). But the dude-written UF is basically hardboiled noir detective novels with vampires. (Dresden, Glen Cook's UF series, Simon Green's Nightside series) Like there are similarities, but comparing those series to Mercy Thompson, Cast in Shadow or even Dante Valentine and the dynamics and plot beats are very very different.
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Oct 12, 2019 13:10
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Anias posted:Yes. Interesting. I still haven't read Anita Blake despite it being a pillar of UF (well, before it descended into sex forever) and I really should fix that.
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Oct 12, 2019 17:08
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The funny thing to me is how little "urban fantasy" sticks with the noir mode. The only one that really sticks hard to the magic crime deyectuve thing is Rivers of London, everything else goes off the rails. I read somewhere that the role of sword & sorcery as a genre has been taken over by UF - because the hallmarks of s&s are overpowered, clever characters, surmounting obstacles, and we can't really go to exotic africa and tame it anymore, we instead have the masquerade and taming exotic vampires/werewolves/fae/etc.
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Oct 12, 2019 17:52
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well the love potion scene in Dresden 1 is easily one of the most garbage things I've read in this genre, so good job for that I guess (what the gently caress, jim butcher! what the gently caress!)
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Oct 13, 2019 01:12
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There is something very very very jarring about how Dresden is one of the most popular UF series, if not THE most popular UF series and the first book doesn't just have the love potion thing in it, it also has Harry breaking into a dead woman's house and sleeping in it what a creeper
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Oct 13, 2019 03:43
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Finished it. There were hints of good things: the entire scene where Harry confronts the mob boss, the vampire bit. But everything else in Dresden 1 was overshadowed by the sexism and the unoriginal plotting. I like cliches as much as the next person, but wowee was that unoriginal. And then you mix in the love potion and the sleeping in a dead woman's house bit and I'm a bit grossed out. Next up: keep reading and finish Dante Valentine 1, get a bunch of UF #1s in the mail monday, pronounce judgment over series as I keep breezing through them. This genre at is best is really really good, whether it be horror or high fantasy or punk. This genre at its worst is, well, see the above paragraph.
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Oct 13, 2019 04:36
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Daric posted:Your goal is to read a bunch of #1s before you ever get to experience the joy of the later books in the series? That sounds like a nightmare. I am an extremely ADHD reader (i'm currently reading like ten books) and I like starting new things, so this isn't so much hell as a happy experience getting to know new things and deciding if I want to bother picking up the sequels. UF is nice in that I can breeze through it in a few days and use it as a counterbalance to heftier works. e: Oh and there's no rule saying I can't stop and read like, Mercy 3 before I continue on the #1 parade. This is a fun excursion, not suffering.
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Oct 13, 2019 12:52
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Exmond posted:Oh boy, Book # 1 always has problems. Bitten has, well alpha wolf mcrapey stuff, Dresden has the love potion stuff, October Daye has paranormal romance X1000 in it. If I stopped reading at book #1 I would have missed out on a lot of great series. You say this, but Mercy Thompson's book 1 was pretty promising, and Cast in Shadow is perfect, and so far Dante Valentine 1 is solid. Book 1s give me a good snapshot of what to expect from an author and the characters, I find. It at least tells me if the writing is garbage (Greywalker for example, I tried that but wowie the writing was flat flat flat.)
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Oct 13, 2019 23:22
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:I didn't much care for Anita Blake 1 or 2, not because they were bad, but because they read a little limp and there were more than a few anti-climaxes. It read like a draft that needed a solid punching up. Where do the next few books of Mercy go? There's like, zero romance in Mercy 2 (that I saw) Magic Bites has a romance, but it's a slow burn, doesn't become a thing until like, book 3-4 and I felt it was well-written. If you want UF with no romance, try the Cast in Shadow series by Michelle West/Sagara.
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Oct 13, 2019 23:23
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wheatpuppy posted:While I agree that Patricia Briggs leans way too hard on rape as a plot point, one thing I like is that early in the Mercy series she flatly refused to do an Anita Blake-style love triangle. Part of the creep factor in book one is that the publisher insisted on multiple possible love interests . But once Mercy picks one, the others basically go "darn guess I will start looking elsewhere now". oh. Oh I'd already blocked out that rape pops up in the next book. I've been warned about it twice and my brain is determined to not know that. 
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Oct 14, 2019 00:10
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Khizan posted:I tried this series out and I thought it was horrible. It felt like the kickass magic mercenary lady was constantly getting in over her head, and that she always ended up having to be saved by her Millionaire Super Alpha Pack Leader Boyfriend, even in the early books where he was just a Millionaire Super Alpha Pack Leader Obvious Love Interest. Super disappointing. That's... not what I got out of the series. She needs saving a few times but like, not constantly. But okay: if Kate Daniels isn't for you, it isn't for you, no biggie. Khizan posted:It's worth noting that the first Dresden book was released in 2000. I didn't find the series till it was on book 4-5 or so, but I was ~18 back then and I just honestly didn't care enough about things to find things like that bothersome. As a fellow teenager who tried Dresden, there were reasons I haven't read the entire book until now, because it's so drat sexist. I know I'm an outlier here, but christ almighty I don't like to put up with sexism in my reading. I would kill for a UF genre map/timeline because of things like War for the Oaks, Gossamer Axe, the Sonja Blue series. I want to trace the evolution of the genre leading up to its crash, and perhaps in time I'll put it together myself out of desperation. I love how it evolved out of horror and fantasy kind of at the same time. I love how it merged with paranormal romance, because a genre with women writing for women! Yes! And then of course the rebound against that - I have suspicions about its crash. And then there's the Twilight element. And the OP is kind of a reaction to that, too - it recommends mostly the dude-centric stuff, the direct Dresden Files stuff, not the Anita Blake or Mercy Thompsons or anything by Lilith Saintcrow. And I'm not asking it to rec those things, but acknowledge that there's another angle to the genre. (which yes, I suppose it does by mentioning October Daye, but that's not the only one out there) torgeaux posted:I suggest you read it anyway. Briggs version of the fae is really developed in this book (significantly better, more nuanced take than Butcher). When you get to the dinner scene with the antagonist, skip to the aftermath, which is also plot important going forward. If I'm stupid enough to read Dresden 1 and plan to read Dresden 2, I can make it through Mercy 3. Soonish. ImpAtom posted:It's weird but by and large I find myself just not enjoying Fae plots in urban fantasy (or even regular fantasy) stories. I think the only fae I've ever really liked was The Man With The Thistledown Hair from Jonathan Strange. The Fae have a distinct flavor and set of rules to them so they're kind of like vampires but not in how capricious and vicious they are, and I always get nervous when protagonists mess with them. Which means I'll get to be nervous when I read October Daye 1, haha. Apparently that series has a lot of fae in it.
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Oct 14, 2019 01:43
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Cythereal posted:The genre also tends to be really weirdly conservative. I've worked in libraries for most of my career, and I'm not sure I ever crossed paths with an urban fantasy series with a LGBT protagonist (bar the odd male author wanking about a female protagonist who boinks other women but their only actual relationships are with men). The only UF I can think of with a queer main character is Gossamer Axe and that's from the early 90s.
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Oct 14, 2019 18:18
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Necrotizer F posted:"I am Strongjaws, Alpha of the Steeldick clan. You are my soulmate. Let me rape my way into your heart. My inner sexual assault wolf demands it." This made me laugh, thank you. Also you're describing bad paranormal romance there, not UF.
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Oct 15, 2019 15:00
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I am 54 pages into Kitty and the Midnight Hour and this is the kind of nonsense I'm loving, and I'll love it even more when she boots Carl out of her life. There's a CIA-adjacent vampire plot, faith healers, and she's taking awesome self-defense classes. Hell yes.
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Oct 16, 2019 18:42
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Daric posted:If you started Sanderson with Elantris you’d probably drop him too. You can’t judge an author or a series by the first book alone. Oh man I wish I'd started him with Elantris, I wouldn't have had to put up with Mistborn. Not my type of book at all.
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Oct 17, 2019 14:17
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Dresden 2 has arrived in the mail! Now it's only a matter of time before my curiosity overwhelms me and I get to read what is reportedly one of the worst werewolf books ever written. I'm ready to be mad and fascinated and secure in the knowledge that with one more Dresden down, I can get closer to the actually good stuff.
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Oct 19, 2019 19:46
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Oh hey I can help here, give you a brief overview of the UF I've read/am reading: Mercy Thompson: is good, is very good. I've read the first two, but have been warned that 3 contains graphic rape. I'm going to read it still but not yet, am reading a buttload of other stuff first. Chicagoland Vampires: This is very pleasant fluff, and probably closer to PNR so far. While it's about a college student who gets attacked and turned into a vampire, and she's coping with her changes, in this universe vampires are hot, powerful, can eat food normally, and are basically superpowered hotties so she's honestly better off than she was. In this universe she's being trained to fight with a sword because proper vampires don't fight with guns, it's not honorable. Oh and when she finally accepts him, she'll become a sworn member of House Cadogan and get telepathy with Ethan, lord of the house and super insane hottie. They're fighting the attraction they have for each other but yeah. This book is stupid and I'm delighted, it's pure popcorn fluff. Chronicles of Elantra/Cast in Shadow: My favorite UF, I've posted about it before but tl;dr it's a fantasy hybrid where our heroine is a cop trying to solve murders in a city ruled by a dragon. I'm into book 4 and there is no romance, only cool/weird fantasy races (to the point that it's more like sci-fi in some regards), and the magic is weird and awesome. Hollows by Kim Harrison: After killer tomatoes decimated the human population in the 60s, supernatural races revealed themselves and now in modern day america a witch named Rachel works for the IS, who are basically magic cops. While arresting a leprechaun for tax evasion, she decides that she hates her job, frees the leprechaun in exchange for a wish, and moves in with her vampire friend Ivy in an abandoned church. One problem: the IS sends super-assassins after anyone who tries to quit, so Rachel is going to die. Or she should, she's probably the biggest moron of a protagonist I have ever met, but she's funny and I'm enjoying watching her get into and out of scrapes. I'm a hundred pages into the first book so if it goes bad I don't know yet. World of the Lupi: This one has strong PNR hints through it (the heroine spotted the hero and instantly got horny) but so far it's sticking to solving the murder of a dude, dealing with werewolf discrimination, and the politics of the werewolves themselves. It's well-written, which is a nice bonus! Dante Valentine: The most 90s novel so far - I'm 200 pages in - a couple hundred years in the future, we have flying cars, hoverboards, licensed necromancers, confirmed that Lucifer is real but God isn't, and our heroine gets a demon pointing a gun at her face. Lucifer, you see, wants her to track down a rogue demon. He's granted her a demon familiar (who is very hot) and well, she can't say no. At all. So now she's hunting a demon, hating her new demon familiar, and calling in all of her contacts to help her find this demon. No romance so far (though he is hot) and it's been focused on Dante being a badass and dealing with problems instead. I cannot describe how 90s punk it is. I love it. Half-Light City: ... yeah sorry this one is PNR. It pretends to have a plot (and for what it's worth, the plot is fun. Vampires versus fae vs humans), but it's all about getting the heroine and hero to bone. Kitty and the Midnight Hour: God I devoured this. A werewolf starts a night talk radio show about supernatural problems and accidentally winds up becoming the voice for the supernatural community as it struggles with itself + coming out to humans. But it's also about the werewolf and her messed up situation - she starts the book as a wimp in an abusive situation. Her pack alpha rapes her on a regular basis, she hates being a werewolf, and when she starts her radio show her pack tries to make her stop...which leads to her starting up self-defense classes and beginning to find a way for her to grow up and get out. I was rooting for her so much and by the end of the book she's in a much better place and I'm so relieved. There was murder to solve along the way, but this book was really about Kitty growing a spine and getting the hell away from her abusers. Good stuff, and yes: no romance! Hints of it at one point but it was way more about her growth and I loved that. Will the rest of the series hold up? Not a clue! Books I have sitting near me, ready to be read when I can get to them: Night Huntress, Jane Yellowrock, Anita Blake, Dresden 2, Imp, October Daye, Blood Destiny, Kitty 2, Mercy 3, Alpha & Omega, Bitten. Plus more of my favorite PNR author Nalini Singh. She writes quality garbage!
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Oct 21, 2019 17:12
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aers posted:It's very good as long as you can handle the magic explanations getting weirder and weirder (and somewhat harder to follow) as the story progresses. Definitely one of my favorite UF series. It's also like, the only long running fictional world UF with a singular female protagonist, so it's got that going for it. I will read literally anything Michelle Sagara/West writes from what I've read of her so far. She's insanely talented. Also I'm excited to start October Daye! I just need to finish one more book so my stack doesn't get TOO high. Chicagoland Vampires: Finished book 1 last night, and lord almighty it decided to double-down on the stupid. The heroine walks in on king vampire having sex, the heroine hassles one of her coworkers about why she's not dating her boss like she should be (WTF), she gets a sentient katana, she turns a tense political moment into another vampire turning a political favor into forcing her to date him, and she tries to get out of it by turning to king vampire for help but he decides it'd be politically useful so she has to do it, and basically the entire book is high-school level drama but with more graphic sex. And katanas. The mage genuinely has a more fulfilling and communicative relationship with his katana than with the girl he's banging. Pure stupid, and my UF-loving friend has assured me that the finale of the series ends in the most stupid way possible so I'm committed to reading the entire thing... but not yet. Book 2 will arrive in the next week or two and I'll get to it when I'm ready for this kind of fluff. In the meantime I'm focusing on Hollows 1 (thanks for the rape warning, Wizchine, I'll be braced when I get to it), Dante 1, Lupi 1, and stuff I should talk about in the fantasy thread instead of this one. I'm reading as fast as I can, all the time.
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Oct 22, 2019 15:53
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VanSandman posted:There's a really good thread here on these very forums that's Urban Fantasy set in the Shadowrun universe. Blake Island, it's called. Multiple novels worth of plot so far. Can you link it? I can't find it. Dante Valentine: my god, her life sucks. Just got the bit where Lucas went "you're after who? oh god, you're dead. goodbye. you don't have to pay me for info."
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Oct 22, 2019 19:11
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Daric posted:Anyway, so the thread is on fire and it's all of y'alls fault This is what happens when y'all read only Dresden and none of the other UF out there. Like Kitty Goes to Washington! This easily has the most realistic horror sequence I've seen in one of these yet: the horror of being pulled over by a cop at a traffic stop. And then the MIB come and take you away to meet Queen Vampire of Washington DC.
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Oct 25, 2019 18:36
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Exmond posted:BRB ordering a book. Start with Kitty and the Midnight Hour, that's the first in the series.
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Oct 25, 2019 19:30
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holy poo poo there's a crooked cop in World of the Lupi. I mean maybe I should have expected this but I did not expect full on bigotry and a false arrest and our heroine realizing that she's in a crooked department.
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Oct 25, 2019 19:40
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Necrotizer F posted:The problem with that is that he doesn't seems to be expanding what he knows. He stays in his comfort zone and his map of "story space" seems to be filled with cautions and warnings of "Here Be Monsters." I think he avoids people of other races, cultures and sexual orientations not so much out of bigotry but because he fears getting them wrong. Because he learned a long time ago to "write what you know." As a dabbling writer myself, it scares the poo poo out of me to try to write non-white non-Americans because while I can fake it, oh god you can tell it won't be authentic. I am the whitest goon from the whitest part of New York state. And I don't want to offend or appropriate anyone! I can't speak for Butcher yet, but if he wants to change this in himself, he should try writing more short stories, pushing his own boundaries. I need to do the same.
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Oct 25, 2019 20:29
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Daric posted:Have you ever worked a job where different people came in every day and argued with you about the same poo poo? If not, consider yourself blessed. It’s hard to have the same arguments for 7 years, with no minds being changed on either side. It gets old. Maybe put it in the OP "newcomers not allowed to mention how Dresden has problematic stuff in it" or else I'm going to retread the same ground when I read Dresden 2
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Oct 25, 2019 23:51
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To be 100% clear I want to come back here and be all "I really loved Dresden 2". From what I've been told I probably won't, but I want to try to stay positive and be able to tell you guys what I think about these werewolves because I love werewolves, I'm a sucker for seeing them portrayed in almost anything. I'll probably rant about the problematic stuff because like, I can't let it go easily, it bugs me a lot. I wish the market were such that Butcher could rewrite these early Dresden books so they're less... rough, for lack of a better term, but c'est la vie. I'm holding out hope that I'll hit Dresden 4-5 and love it as much as you folks do, and keep reading. Anyways, as I continue my tour of UF, I cannot stop thinking about how brutal and fitting it is that Rosemary and Rue opens with Toby's life being destroyed through a time-slip as a fish. It's so perfect evil and fitting with what the fae do. I'm probably going to focus on it next after I finish Lupi 1, as I need to see what happens next. ("aren't you reading werewolf goes to dc" yes yes I am, I'm trying to stick to a focus on one book, with jumps into another, but given my ADHD tendencies I will probably read both concurrently. anyways.)
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Oct 26, 2019 00:03
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torgeaux posted:For all the criticism of books one and two of Dresden, they're still fun. You can see the clumsy writing, you can see where he hasn't got his craft yet, but they're action movies on the Sci-Fi channel good. Boiler-plate noir detective plot may be derivative as hell, but cliches are cliches for a reason, yeah! And there's some flash to the writing so without the flaws it'd be plain fun. With the flaws it's still fun but I have to hold my nose. 
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Oct 26, 2019 01:44
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Okay, because it was funny to horrify my friends, I started reading Anita Blake despite so many warnings, and I.. did not expect it to start with a vampire strip club. Pros about it so far in the first thirty pages: it feels very 90s, to the point that it feels almost exactly like Vampire: the Masquerade, so...kudos? for capturing that so perfectly. Vampires are both hot and horrifying. Cons: Anita's a gigantic moron to let herself be guilted into going to a vampire strip club. Like wow, you could have just said "hell no" and walked out, but instead you even let them take your cross. Good job!
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Oct 26, 2019 18:31
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sharknado slashfic posted:It's been so long since I've seen this thread near the top of my bookmarks I had completely forgotten about it. Wait, since when is Lies of Locke Lamora UF?
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Oct 26, 2019 20:48
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sharknado slashfic posted:2000 posts ago there wasn't a super strict filter on exactly what constituted UF that I recall, but if that's changed then so be it. Sorry, didn't mean to gatekeep. Tell me about Lies, I own it and haven't read it yet.
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Oct 27, 2019 00:33
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Necrotizer F posted:Okay, we've discussed Paranormal "Rapemance" books in this thread. Given me some titles. And no obscure stuff or full on porn. Give me stuff that could (and has) shown up in a Barnes and Noble or Books-a-Million. I'm thinking of doing a "Let's (or just I) read [insert paranormal rapemance book]" thread. Anything by Nalini Singh, but my favorites by her are Slave to Sensation, Archangel's Kiss, and Archangel's Blade. Which is to say bits of her Psy-Changeling and Guild Hunter series. Both series are long-running PNR featuring usually a different couple each book. Every character has a traumatic past, some of them have magical powers, there's some kind of murder plot to solve, and they're addicting as hell. There's usually 2-3 sex scenes per book, which means they're not bad on the plot-to-porn ratio. They have problems with sexism (Men Must Protect, Women Must Be Small) but if you can hold your nose they're fantastic doritos reading, and they got me through my midterms last year. The WORST PNR I've ever read all the way through (WHY) was Midnight Hunt by LL Rand. You'd think I'd be a complete sucker for lesbian werewolves, right? WRONGO. Not like this, god not like this... ahem. The "plot" is that every werewolf in the world is insanely horny literally all the time. So they're constantly having sex. But alpha werewolf has decided not to have sex because she doesn't have a mate. Alpha werewolf is a moron, because werewolves in this universe will literally go insane and kill people if they don't have sex on a regular basis. And alphas in this universe share their emotions and sensations with their pack telepathically, so she's not just risking herself, she's risking 100+ people by refusing to have casual sex. So she meets a medic at the local hospital due to plot, gets horny for medic but controls herself, and medic (due to plot) gets bitten and turned into a werewolf by villains. Which is weird, no one's become a werewolf because of an attack like this before! Oh no! Alpha is DESPERATE to have sex with her but won't because once they mate, it's For Life so she wants her medic to have a choice about it. Which is weird because literally one of the first things the werewolf medics did upon realizing that the medic was a werewolf was teach her how to masturbate with her new clitoris-dick. Did I mention that werewolves in this universe are horny literally all the time? They are. It devolves from there. There's supposedly more plot but it's buried under an avalanche of horny werewolf clit-dick sex. ahem Finally the last thing I have read from the PNR pile is the recently finished World of the Lupi by Eileen Wilks, and um, I misfiled this. It has some stereotypes of PNR but is mostly plot, some romance, and like two pages total of sex. It's also really good, with genuinely good writing. The plot's kinda cliche - supernatural murder, then a kidnapping - but the execution was so fun and there's a grandma were-tiger - that I'm eager to read more.
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Oct 27, 2019 02:54
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torgeaux posted:Keep throwing yourself on those grenades for the group. You read those books, and now I will never have to even start them. If only someone had done the same for the lame "Charming" books. While I prefer to read actually good/entertaining books, there's nothing quite like reading a garbage book and complaining about it to your friends while you read it. And I read a lot and I have unlimited curiosity, so... yeah. Anyways, "Wizard Cops or Sexy Werewolves, Pick One (1)" is wrong, World of the Lupi has a wizard cop banging a sexy werewolf, you don't have to pick! I mean technically she's a magic sensitive and doesn't cast any spells, but whatever, close enough.
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Oct 27, 2019 03:09
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