Sorry, I just have to get this out

[hummingwolf]

Now, I realize that as someone who hadn't read any novels from the romance section of the library in quite a few years, I am not in a position to judge whether a book is a good example of its genre. Still, I feel compelled to babble a bit about the book I finished yesterday. Spoilers for Lori Handeland's Hunter's Moon behind the cut. This will make more sense to the Buffy fans among you.

Okay, so this petite blonde former cheerleader comes to a new town and starts to kill vampires werewolves, under the direction of an older Watcher Jäger-Sucher. Having decided that it's a bad idea for a Slayer werewolf hunter to form attachments--anyone who gets close to her will be killed--she finds herself becoming friends with two outcasts other Jäger-Suchers she just met anyway. Yay. In the meantime, a mysterious stranger catches her eye and even seems to be helping her out in some small ways. Eventually she learns to her dismay that this man she's been falling in love with is really a soulless vampire werewolf. Oh noes! But wait--is he really soulless? How can he be? Well, as it turns out, he used to be like all the other soulless vampires werewolves, offering an ugly death to everyone he met, and he did it with a song in his heart. But then one day a Gypsy an Ozark magic woman cursed him by returning to him his soul, dooming him to an angsty and guilt-ridden and frequently bare-chested existence. Fortunately, Angel Damien doesn't lose his soul when he has sex. This is a romance novel, after all.

Also in the book we have the charismatic villain, the Master alpha werewolf who is consuming the energy of as many beings as he can before The Harvest the Hunter's Moon so he can rise up and lead his army to take over the world. He is, of course, defeated, but he does take a big bite out of our heroine first. She dies starts to turn into a werewolf, but thanks to the help of her friends, she gets better.

If the Western I'm starting today starts to sound too much like Firefly, I'm gonna go back to reading about quantum physics.


(The fact that Launch played a Christophe Beck track as I posted is just too perfect.)

Comments

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Well, in the book's defense, there are differences from Buffy. For one, the lead characters are twenty-somethings as the book starts, not teenagers (the heroine is a former cheerleader, not a current one). For another... um... oh, there isn't one Slayer per generation or anything like that. These werewolf hunters are a group of people without superpowers, a secret part of the U.S. government who have been researching scientific means of dealing with demons since about World War II. Okay, they're the Initiative without the military discipline. This book isn't easy to defend.

[sp23.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah. Joss should sue. :)

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Heh. I hope Joss has better things to do with his time these days. Then again, one would hope he would be able to find a good lawyer to do this stuff for him by now.