The Outlaw Demon Wails...and So Do I.

One look at the title of this book is probably enough to identify it to anyone who's been in the Fantasy section of their book store in the past few years as part of the series that includes books with such titles as "For a Few Demons More," "A Fistful of Charms," and "The Good, The Bad, and the Undead." Even ignoring how painful and insulting this is to all the fine people who made (and enjoyed) those actually rather good Clint Eastwood movies the series so blatantly steals its titles from, its obvious these titles are this way to make a point. It wants to give the reader an idea of what kind of story takes place upon those pages. It wants to give you the impression that it's going to be an incredibly stylistic story about an uncouth hero(-ine, in this case), with powers almost supernatural (but wouldn't you know it, in this book, they are!) with a take-no-prisoners, no-holds-barred attitude towards getting the job done.

"Kim Harrison" the cover says next. These letters are big and bold - bigger and bolder, in fact, than anything else on the cover - a slightly lighter shade of grey than the title, and stand out against the background a lot better. This makes the browser go, "Oh, look at that! This Kim Harrison must really be something." But the fact of that matter is: she's not. This is done because when it comes to the realm of fantasy novels, which book in the series it is doesn't matter in the slightest. If you've decided you like one book from a fantasy author, you like all of their books. This is because every book a fantasy author writes is the exact same story, with the exact same characters (mainly because the author can often times only write one character), with the exact same plot twists, developments, and resolutions. If you've read a Kim Harrison book in your lifetime, you've read The Outlaw Demon Wails, even if it wasn't called that at the time.

Next the cover goes on to proclaim that this book is "From the New York Times Bestselling author of For a Few Demons More." Which just goes to show you what an absolute JOKE that list is. I mean, Dr. Phil is on that list for a diet book. A diet book.

...

Well...let's just say he's not exactly in shape himself...

Anyway, done with the front cover, let's go ahead and move inside the book.

It only takes you about a single page in to realize that despite the oh-so-clever title, this book has absolutely no style whatsoever. Actually, given the title you probably won't be surprised to discover that at all. There's none. It's just straight prose with no witticisms, grace, airiness, introspection, anything that might make the words less difficult to actually sit down in read. Despite the action-based plot of the book, the utter lack of style leaves the book more boring than a newspaper. At least the occasional newspaper story will have some sense of poetry to the writing, or some kind of insight into human life.

It also shouldn't take long for you to realize that every single character in the book is written exactly the same. This is an incredibly common problem of bad fantasy. Each character is basically composed of "clever" little mannerisms that greatly amuse the author writing them, but just makes them seem flat and one-dimensional to the reader. And the biggest trouble with this is that each "good" character in the book, then will do things the author considers good - or basically that the author themselves would do. Essentially it's self-insertion fantasy in an almost-as-creepy-as-woody-allen type way. Whereas he wrote movies of him getting to make out and have sex with "le hot chicks" because he's just some creepy ugly dude who wouldn't have gotten any otherwise, Kim Harrison writes books where a character that is quite obviously her makes out and has sex with her idea of what a perfect guy is. And her concept of what a perfect guy is doesn't exist, because the males in her books are just her, only with muscular bodies and convex genitalia.

Oh yes, her character has latent sexual fantasies about her pixie friend that maybe is the height of her hand. A pixie. Height of her hand. Just try and tell me that's not disturbing. Just...just try.

Then, right at the very beginning of Chapter Two, is a Cardinal Sin of writing. In the very first fucking paragraph you find the wonderful line "It hurt enough to."

Despite myself, I'm reminded of the Beavis and Butthead movie, where the guy from the FBI says something along the lines of, "Bork! You're a federal agent! You represent the United States government! I don't ever want to hear you ending a sentence with a preposition again!"

You just don't fucking do it. You just don't fucking do it. The reader expects there to be more to that sentence. But then it just ends. Any good writer, any writer with a fucking modicum of talent is never, ever, going to make that mistake. It would just seem far too unnatural for them. They would only do that if they were intentionally trying to make a character seem like an idiot and have them ending a spoken sentence that way. But this wasn't spoken, and it wasn't from a character that was supposed to look foolish or even dumb. It was the main fucking character's poor excuse for introspection.

I'll admit, I haven't finished this book. Maybe it actually gets better. No. No, that's not even a possibility. So I'm not going to finish this book. I'm gonna toss it where I've left off - the first couple pages of chapter three - and not come back to it ever. It's far too painful.

The back cover contains the typical "praise" for the author, though from just what loony bins they dug up someone fucking insane enough to say anything good about this author, I don't even want to know. "Her work can read like a smoldering combination of Alice Waters and Ozzy Osbourne" says some "connoisseur" from the New York Times Book Review.

WHAT
THE FUCK
IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Ozzy Osbourne? Are you fucking KIDDING me? Where the FUCK did you even come up with that? What, just because her work talks about demons and magic, that means she's just like OZZY FUCKING OSBOURNE?

Look, Mr. Fucking Crazy Pants at the New York Times Book Review, let me lay just one little tidbit of information down for you. At his worst, at his absolute worst, and yes, I'm talking about the early 2000s after his brain had been completely fried from having done just 1 (billion) too many drugs, Ozzy's writing contained a sense of style and poetry that Kim Harrison could only ever fucking DREAM of having. If she had a quarter of the style that Ozzy had, I probably wouldn't be writing this blog right now. I'd have read the book (the whole book), shrugged my shoulders, and put it away. I wouldn't have loved it, but I wouldn't really have complaints. But she doesn't. And she never fucking will. Because the fucked up, super lonely goth loving sycophantic losers who constantly buy this shit every year as if its water from the Holy Grail itself tell her that she's doing fucking great, and not actually writing so painfully bad that it's almost tragic.

Kim Harrison, you're writing is fucking horrendous. You owe every person who ever was forced to spend money on your terrible books some sort of restitution. While no amount of money can ever heal the wounds you have so callously inflicted upon your readers, it can maybe at least ease their suffering a little. I accept cash or check.