This week I have three Dr. Greta Helsing novels to discuss. These books are sort of a cross between cozy mysteries and urban fantasy, with a lot of medicine tossed in as well. Shaw takes familiar monsters from classic literature, the bible, and movies and treats them like regular, if marginalized, people. While on one hand, this is a clever elevator pitch for a story, and can be used as a metaphor for other marginalized people, it also strips from these characters their identity as monsters, demons, devils, which is to say, the thing that makes them special. It is a fine line to walk. I think if you are familiar with the literature of vampires, and classic horror as well as all the monster movies Hollywood has churned out over the years, you might enjoy the stories more than I did, who is not familiar with the stories and who last saw a monster movie some 60 years ago.
A fourth novel and a novella are slated to be released in this series in 2024/25.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw C+
This is the first book in the Dr. Greta Helsing series. The story is set in contemporary London, where Dr Helsing, like her father before her, is a Harley Street doctor to monsters. You know, movie type monsters; vampires (famous in film and fiction), werewolves, mommies, gremlins, and various other familiar and unfamiliar monsters and demons. She is called to the home of Lord Varney, an old friend and vampire in order to treat another famous Vampyre, one Sir Francis Varney who had showed up at his door, having been attacked in his flat by garlic and poisoned knife wielding monks in brown habits, inflicting a wound on him that he was unable to heal on his own. The story turns into a sort of cozy mystery when the Doctor, and an assortment of monsters and regular people who know about them, try to track down the order of monks responsible for attack. Since I don’t like to go into spoiler territory, I’ll leave it there, except to say that the story moved along, while introducing a cast on monsters and demons.
Unlike several of the urban fantasies I’ve read, Shaw understands that you can’t have magical things happening on any sort of scale and expect people to be ignorant of the existence of magic. So for the most part, the events in this story are low key affairs, involving only a few people who are in the know, the good monsters and the bad ones, without involving the police. However, for some reason, perhaps to raise the stakes that didn’t need raising, she also includes an unnecessary string of 11 Jack the Ripper like killings undertaken by the monks in the book. Because the good guys and monsters deal with the monks on their own, these murders never get solved – undermining her reasonable premise that monsters need to stay hidden for the premise to work reasonably well. She also left another thread dangling… but here I am nitpicking, as usual. Never mind. If you enjoy urban fantasies with likable characters and an inventive treatment of monsters, I think you will enjoy this book.
Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw C+
This is the second volume of three in the Dr Greta Helsing series. This time Dr Greta travels to Paris for a monster medicine doctor’s conference and soon finds herself neck deep in a cove of bad vampires. Some old characters, some new characters, a little more of the magical world. I think this one was a little better than Strange Practice. But I have to admit that I found it maybe a little over wrought and, and as you can see from my grade above, there were long sections of Greta making her through underground Paris, with bits and pieces of the Phantom of the Opera tossed in, that got tedious, which I ended up skim reading. Indeed, perhaps even the author felt it was getting tedious as well, since she shifted to another the viewpoint of Greta’s friends to have her emerge from the tunnels – only to then go back, and continue the trek, even after she had shown how it all ended. Curious. I just didn’t get wrapped up in the characters as much as I would’ve liked to.
Grave Importance by Vivian Shaw DNF 85%
In this third installment, Dr. Helsing is asked to take over a clinic for mummies located in the south of France for 4 months while its medical director does something in Cairo. Many of the main characters from the first two books return in this story. In the story mummies around the world are experiencing fainting spells that can damage their frail bodies, or what is left of them. And we have agents of an alternative heaven who are working to rend the dimensional wall between their universe and ours in order to bring about the end of the world as described in the bible. Those two plot threads are linked, as we jump from those two viewpoints, and others as well, all the while being treated to an inside look at the care and treatment of mummies.
Spoilers ahead.
It was okay for awhile, but as the plot heated up and we neared the final grand climax I found that, despite my the best of intentions, I was starting to skim read more and ever more as the final crisis built to its climax - and not in a good way. I wasn't on the edge of my seat because couldn't wait to find out what happens next. Rather I found that I didn't care what happened next and just wanted it to be over. In the end, I simply gave up skipping whole pages, so I have to call this a DNF, somewhere around the 85% mark. So why did it run off the rails for me?
It starts with characters. As you can see from my review criteria, l like pleasant characters. Shaw's characters are all peasant, The problem for me is that they are, in fact, too pleasant. Something I wouldn't have thought, possible. They're all goody-two-shoes, too sappy sweet, too self sacrificing, too serious, too heroic for my taste. I mean, even the devils are polite, concerned, and helpful. I guess I never quite connected with her characters in previous books and by this book, I simply found them so sticky-sweet as to be actually annoying.
Next up is the romance elements in the story. This too, I found to be annoying, for I felt that all the romances were unearned, in that they all were love at first sight, and even months later the relationships were lovey-dovey to be rather icky. Being both a fan of romance in stories, and pleasant characters, to find myself disliking both the romance elements and the characters in a story, they'd have to have been written over the top. And I found them so. They were so sappy. So soapy. So unconvincing. Nope.
As you might have already gathered, believability, was, for me, totally lacking in this story. Take the medical practice in this story. Its main focus this time is the medical practices regarding mummies. Mummies, it seems, are mostly wrapping and frail bones, and in this story they are animated and conscious via unknown magic, as they don't even have anything like a working brain, or body for that matter. And yet Doc Helsing spends her time gluing their bones and tendons back together along with pest control for their wrappings, as if their physical condition would matter to creatures animated by magic. If these magically animated beings needed healing, magic would be the way to heal them, one would think. Didn't make any sense, except to high light Doc Helsing's devotion to caring for her monster patients. She's wonderful.
My next complaint is, well, as you recall from what I said in my review of Dreadful Company, is how I liked it that the author kept the story grounded by keeping the presence of monsters and their problems very low key, and thus, out of the public eye. This greatly contributed to my ability to suspend my disbelief concerning the premise of the story. Well, that reasonable restrain was tossed over board in this book. We have a story where the end of the world happens just as it is described in the bible,(or so I gather anyways) complete with angels with fiery swords and raining blood. I found the ending increasingly frantic, silly, sappy, soapy, cluttered, melodramatic, and simply way too too much to be even remotely believable. I ceased to care about it. Since I was skim reading and then not reading the story by the time we got to this point in the story since I can't say too much about how it all ended up, save that I gather that this end of the world somehow gets magically reversed, with a 300 point bold "No" in the text, so that in the end, all that the people of the world might remember of the climatic ending of the world, is as a strange dream. As far as I'm concerned, the series, even granting its rather silly premise, jumped the shark in this book, big time.
In the end, the gimmick of this series is making monsters into ordinary, if marginalized people. While it is a cute idea, making them so ordinary and oh, so nice, strips them of their essential character, as I mentioned previously. Take Hell for example. While a good part of this story takes place in Hell, I don't recall any mention of all the damned souls being tortured for eternity there, which is the biblical reason for Hell, even though she frames the story with the trappings of biblical mythology. Shaw makes Hell an ordinary place with some interesting scenery and portrays devils/demons as pleasant, ordinary people just like us. There are harried demon doctors and bureaucrats, pastry chefs and TV anchorpersons, all living the ordinary 21st century life just like we humans. Apparently they get sick, go to spas, watch TV, they even have cell phones with service to our world. I can see that Shaw may've been making the point that our understanding of the devil, seen as evil, just like all the monsters, has been twisted by the tellers of ancient stories. But if you are going to make them so mundane, so familiar, why bother making them devils at all? And why bother concocting some sort of vague, hand waving, pseudo-scientific explanation of Heaven(s) and Hell(s) as some sort of inter-dimensional locales when you include magical creatures and employ all the trappings of biblical stories, including angels with flaming swords and the apocalypse? She seems to be trying to have it both ways, science, magic, myths, and that doesn't work for me. The story becomes just one big McGuffin, an excuse for drama that doesn't the least matter in the end.
So, to sum up the series, while I never connected with the characters, the first two stories were interesting enough, if a bit too soap operatic for my taste. Seeing that elements in the first two stories were used to set up the final apocalypse in this last story, I have to believe that it was always her intention to have this vast melodramatic ending to the series from the get-go. Too bad. And given that five years will have elapsed between the third book and the fourth, I have to suspect that she had planned only three books. But I guess they proved popular enough that she and her publisher find that it would pay to put out several more.
In the end, thinking about it, the main problem for me was that these stories, with their pleasant monsters and loving vampires, are small, cozy adventure/horror stories, and as such, the vast, fiery world ending apocalypse fought mostly in Hell was out of character. It was just too much and in the end, it had to be dealt with by being, in essence, "just a dream" for just about everyone in the world, which is, in my opinion, a cheap cheat.
Your mileage may vary, but I can mildly recommend the first two book if you're into cozy urban fantasy, but I'd say skip the third book and wait to see what the next two bring to the table.
No comments:
Post a Comment