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kleenexwomanOne of the good things about spending time on the Pendergast boards, if you are an overinvested fanperson who has an ambivalent relationship with the fandom in general, is that people will get to know you and will agree to send you Advance Reader Copies of the new books that they bought. BOO FUCKING YAH. So now I'm reading Fever Dream, and after this it goes on to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
drworm and then pianolessdevil and then I think rileyc and then the book actually comes out for reals. So I'm telling you all about it first.
We begin in Africa, 12 years ago...and once again, I totally lose track of Doug and Linc's timeline. Helen and Pendergast are hanging out after a long day of shooting at animals, drinking cocktails. Pendergast quotes some poetry, Helen asked him if he stuffed Bartlett's Quotations up his ass and tells him to quit it with the Donne, and Pendergast tells her that John Donne says she's a know-it-all bitch. Nah, I'm paraphrasing, they're really just being disgustingly cute and couple-y. Even Pendergast isn't immune to being a sappy buttmunch when he's in love.
Anyway, there's this red lion going around. I guess there was a famine, so its pregnant mother went and dug up some human bodies to eat, and it was born all red and with a taste for human blood, and now Pendergast and Helen have to go and kill it. Helen fucking loves her gun. Naturally, the lion mauls the shit out of her, and there's a scene where Pendergast finds it eating her body and her head is just lying on the ground staring at him. If anyone's interested, Helen has auburn hair and dramatic purple-blue eyes. Who the fuck has purple eyes?
12 years later, Pendergast is visiting some old family grave to make sure he keeps his inheritance, and he finds out that her rifle was filled with blanks. He immediately deduces that she was murdered, and flips his shit. His first reaction is to go seek out Vincent D'Agosta, who is counseling some cops who shot a dude, and demand that he come with him on an incredibly urgent errand, no dude, I can't tell you what it is, it might take like a year, just trust me. Seriously. I'll pay your fucking salary, dude, this is way more important than giving dudes speeding tickets and shit. Of course, Vinnie agrees, because Pendergast seems really freaked out (his suit is rumpled you guys), and also having your best friend pay you to take a vacation for a year is kind of badass.
Hayward's actually less of a bitch about this than you might think; she's not really happy about it, but she's like, "I know this is important to you, go and help your friend, just call me and stuff, and also if Pendergast gets you hurt I am going to bring the pain unto him." I'm ambivalent towards Hayward because while I like her being smart and psychological and honestly caring about proper procedure on her own, I really don't like what she and D'Agosta dating did to her character and role. The on-again-off-again shit is confusing, the sex scenes are boring, and the raging jealousy over D'Agosta and Pendergast's friendship just flattened her out. But anyway, D'Agosta ends up calling her a bunch of times while he and Pendergast are traipsing around. (I'm beginning to fear that Pendergast's crush on D'Agosta is a little one-sided. At one point, Pendergast tells him that besides Helen, he is the only person that he has ever trusted implicitly, and D'Agosta is like, "Um, thanks.")
Oh, and what a traipse. For the first half of the book, it's nonstop Pendergast and D'Agosta flying all the hell over the place. They go to Africa and interrogate a dude, they go to Georgia to talk to Helen's brother, they go to New Orleans and use that as a base of operations to drive all over the South, and Pendergast sends D'Agosta to Maine to try to suss out what was going on with Helen's family. Helen was totally obsessed with John James Audobon, and Pendergast never knew this, even though his great-grandpa was BFFs with the dude and they met at an exhibit at the Audobon museum, where Helen claimed she was there only for the wine and cheese. Oh Pendergast. Helen is actually kind of fun, and I didn't want to like her, but I do. She has the same car as James Dean and gets a lot of speeding tickets and likes egg creams.
I think Doug wrote a lot of the description, because it is very descriptive--the seedy town of Sunflower in particular is described in great detail, and is reminiscent of the dying town of Medicine Creek in SLWC. And they go to Florida to talk to some forger dude or something, and then they break into the basement of a donut shop...
...and then someone shoots Vinnie in the back and he gets nicked in the aorta, and they rush him to the hospital, and then Hayward comes up and punches the fuck out of Pendergast and he hugs her and it's pretty fucking touching. He lives, but I still sort of teared up. Not when Hayward punched Pendergast. I love Pendergast, but the dude really needs a good punch in the face sometimes from someone who deserves to punch him. And then Vinnie is like, "Hayward, help Pendergast, make sure that my injury was not in vain." And then Pendergast is like, "Oh yeah, you're helping me." And Hayward is like, "Fine, okay, since my boyfriend asked me, but you can't kill the dude you find this time." And Pendergast is like, "Noooo, not killing people is so hard," but Hayward is adamant about it and then he agrees.
oh yeah, and Constance threw her baby into the ocean because she thought it was evil and she was having bad dreams about Pendergast...so they arrested her and Pendergast doesn't seem to care. Jerk. I mean, yes, she's kind of crazy, but that really isn't her fault. It's sort of annoying that they made a big deal about the stupid Diogenes-spawn Rinpoche kid and then just tossed it into the ocean. Like, literally tossed a plot device overboard. Ha.
(Going back to edit in that he does get her into the same nice mental hospital where Aunt Cornelia was--old bat kicked the bucket--but he seems pretty relieved that he doesn't have to deal with her anymore. There's a part where the doctor asks her, "Why do you think Mr. Pendergast took you in," and she's just like, "Guilt," and you know, I'm pretty sure that's 100% right.)
And that's where I am now, halfway through the book. I got annoyed that D'Agosta was out of commission and couldn't read it for a couple of days, and now I am going to try to finish it. I'm actually not going to reveal the Big Mystery, because it's a good mystery, and even though I sort of knew what was going on, I didn't expect it to unfurl the way it did and was impressed by how they paced the clues. It's way better than the demon-possession weirdness of Wheel of Darkness, and way easier to follow than the Scooby-Doo crap of Cemetery Dance.
Most of the second half of the book is through Hayward's POV, and it's good. Watching Pendergast through her eyes is an interesting change--we don't just get Pendergast the effective enigma, we get Pendergast the picky diva who wants to drive the Rolls everywhere, Pendergast whose tendencies to break the law and kill his suspects is scary rather than cool and admirable. She definitely gets her own good scenes, though, including using the bad-cop-good-cop routine on a dude (she's the good cop, and she decides that Pendergast would be the bad cop if he took charge of the questioning, which is probably a good assumption considering the way he Stockholmed a wannabe blackmailer PI into working for him earlier, in a scene that was morally shady as hell), but it's mostly Pendergast figuring stuff out, like it usually is.
She's also way more worried about D'Agosta, especially when he takes a turn for the worse. I'll be honest, I knew Vinnie was going to get it and I was prepared for some good chewy Pendergast angst over letting him get shot, but there's not a lot of that. Laura gets to be the one to weep and moan and feel like the world is collapsing around her, while Pendergast is like, "Mr. D'Agosta was poisoned! I know because the authors told me! Now that that's taken care of, Captain, I have ANOTHER clue about blah blah blah..." He's unusually omniescent in this book, and there are some points where it's explicable ("Shit, Pendergast, how do you know so much about this obscure swamp?" "I looked it up on Wikipedia instead of sleeping!"), and some points where he seems to pull it out of thin air.
Aah, and there's an upsetting scene where a bunch of creepy angry rednecks are going after them out in the swamps, and they make her strip and want to rape her, and Pendergast saves her and she's like Now that there are a bunch of creepy violent rapists and we have no backup, Pendergast's way of doing things totally makes sense.
While I'm on that, and taking a break from reading to let myself stop being scared, there's a passage where two cops who are assisting Hayward are described approximately thusly: "The white one" and "the other one." I note this because I've never seen peoples' races described like this before.
Okay. Wow, um. Pendergast is scary in this. I mean, people have been doing horrible things to him and the people he cares about (oh yeah, Laura gets shot in the leg and then bitten by an alligator. NO SERIOUSLY. LIKE, PRACTICALLY ON THE SAME PAGE) and just horrible things in general, but he talks an incredibly sick man into killing himself, goes and shoots up a bunch of boats and then explodes a bar by shooting its propane tank and is just totally cool about it, like you would expect. And Laura is like, "Huh, I'm enjoying this too much." I don't even know. It's very cinematic. And actually, the scene where he shoots up the boats is just fucking hilarious.
And of course he gets the Big Boss and most of the flunkies, but ONE DUDE is left for him to chase during the sequels, and why he specifically is in on the murder is not explained, especially because specifically it's really weird that he would be, so I guess we're going to find out more about him. I'm looking forward to it :D
drworm and then pianolessdevil and then I think rileyc and then the book actually comes out for reals. So I'm telling you all about it first. We begin in Africa, 12 years ago...and once again, I totally lose track of Doug and Linc's timeline. Helen and Pendergast are hanging out after a long day of shooting at animals, drinking cocktails. Pendergast quotes some poetry, Helen asked him if he stuffed Bartlett's Quotations up his ass and tells him to quit it with the Donne, and Pendergast tells her that John Donne says she's a know-it-all bitch. Nah, I'm paraphrasing, they're really just being disgustingly cute and couple-y. Even Pendergast isn't immune to being a sappy buttmunch when he's in love.
Anyway, there's this red lion going around. I guess there was a famine, so its pregnant mother went and dug up some human bodies to eat, and it was born all red and with a taste for human blood, and now Pendergast and Helen have to go and kill it. Helen fucking loves her gun. Naturally, the lion mauls the shit out of her, and there's a scene where Pendergast finds it eating her body and her head is just lying on the ground staring at him. If anyone's interested, Helen has auburn hair and dramatic purple-blue eyes. Who the fuck has purple eyes?
12 years later, Pendergast is visiting some old family grave to make sure he keeps his inheritance, and he finds out that her rifle was filled with blanks. He immediately deduces that she was murdered, and flips his shit. His first reaction is to go seek out Vincent D'Agosta, who is counseling some cops who shot a dude, and demand that he come with him on an incredibly urgent errand, no dude, I can't tell you what it is, it might take like a year, just trust me. Seriously. I'll pay your fucking salary, dude, this is way more important than giving dudes speeding tickets and shit. Of course, Vinnie agrees, because Pendergast seems really freaked out (his suit is rumpled you guys), and also having your best friend pay you to take a vacation for a year is kind of badass.
Hayward's actually less of a bitch about this than you might think; she's not really happy about it, but she's like, "I know this is important to you, go and help your friend, just call me and stuff, and also if Pendergast gets you hurt I am going to bring the pain unto him." I'm ambivalent towards Hayward because while I like her being smart and psychological and honestly caring about proper procedure on her own, I really don't like what she and D'Agosta dating did to her character and role. The on-again-off-again shit is confusing, the sex scenes are boring, and the raging jealousy over D'Agosta and Pendergast's friendship just flattened her out. But anyway, D'Agosta ends up calling her a bunch of times while he and Pendergast are traipsing around. (I'm beginning to fear that Pendergast's crush on D'Agosta is a little one-sided. At one point, Pendergast tells him that besides Helen, he is the only person that he has ever trusted implicitly, and D'Agosta is like, "Um, thanks.")
Oh, and what a traipse. For the first half of the book, it's nonstop Pendergast and D'Agosta flying all the hell over the place. They go to Africa and interrogate a dude, they go to Georgia to talk to Helen's brother, they go to New Orleans and use that as a base of operations to drive all over the South, and Pendergast sends D'Agosta to Maine to try to suss out what was going on with Helen's family. Helen was totally obsessed with John James Audobon, and Pendergast never knew this, even though his great-grandpa was BFFs with the dude and they met at an exhibit at the Audobon museum, where Helen claimed she was there only for the wine and cheese. Oh Pendergast. Helen is actually kind of fun, and I didn't want to like her, but I do. She has the same car as James Dean and gets a lot of speeding tickets and likes egg creams.
I think Doug wrote a lot of the description, because it is very descriptive--the seedy town of Sunflower in particular is described in great detail, and is reminiscent of the dying town of Medicine Creek in SLWC. And they go to Florida to talk to some forger dude or something, and then they break into the basement of a donut shop...
...and then someone shoots Vinnie in the back and he gets nicked in the aorta, and they rush him to the hospital, and then Hayward comes up and punches the fuck out of Pendergast and he hugs her and it's pretty fucking touching. He lives, but I still sort of teared up. Not when Hayward punched Pendergast. I love Pendergast, but the dude really needs a good punch in the face sometimes from someone who deserves to punch him. And then Vinnie is like, "Hayward, help Pendergast, make sure that my injury was not in vain." And then Pendergast is like, "Oh yeah, you're helping me." And Hayward is like, "Fine, okay, since my boyfriend asked me, but you can't kill the dude you find this time." And Pendergast is like, "Noooo, not killing people is so hard," but Hayward is adamant about it and then he agrees.
oh yeah, and Constance threw her baby into the ocean because she thought it was evil and she was having bad dreams about Pendergast...so they arrested her and Pendergast doesn't seem to care. Jerk. I mean, yes, she's kind of crazy, but that really isn't her fault. It's sort of annoying that they made a big deal about the stupid Diogenes-spawn Rinpoche kid and then just tossed it into the ocean. Like, literally tossed a plot device overboard. Ha.
(Going back to edit in that he does get her into the same nice mental hospital where Aunt Cornelia was--old bat kicked the bucket--but he seems pretty relieved that he doesn't have to deal with her anymore. There's a part where the doctor asks her, "Why do you think Mr. Pendergast took you in," and she's just like, "Guilt," and you know, I'm pretty sure that's 100% right.)
And that's where I am now, halfway through the book. I got annoyed that D'Agosta was out of commission and couldn't read it for a couple of days, and now I am going to try to finish it. I'm actually not going to reveal the Big Mystery, because it's a good mystery, and even though I sort of knew what was going on, I didn't expect it to unfurl the way it did and was impressed by how they paced the clues. It's way better than the demon-possession weirdness of Wheel of Darkness, and way easier to follow than the Scooby-Doo crap of Cemetery Dance.
Most of the second half of the book is through Hayward's POV, and it's good. Watching Pendergast through her eyes is an interesting change--we don't just get Pendergast the effective enigma, we get Pendergast the picky diva who wants to drive the Rolls everywhere, Pendergast whose tendencies to break the law and kill his suspects is scary rather than cool and admirable. She definitely gets her own good scenes, though, including using the bad-cop-good-cop routine on a dude (she's the good cop, and she decides that Pendergast would be the bad cop if he took charge of the questioning, which is probably a good assumption considering the way he Stockholmed a wannabe blackmailer PI into working for him earlier, in a scene that was morally shady as hell), but it's mostly Pendergast figuring stuff out, like it usually is.
She's also way more worried about D'Agosta, especially when he takes a turn for the worse. I'll be honest, I knew Vinnie was going to get it and I was prepared for some good chewy Pendergast angst over letting him get shot, but there's not a lot of that. Laura gets to be the one to weep and moan and feel like the world is collapsing around her, while Pendergast is like, "Mr. D'Agosta was poisoned! I know because the authors told me! Now that that's taken care of, Captain, I have ANOTHER clue about blah blah blah..." He's unusually omniescent in this book, and there are some points where it's explicable ("Shit, Pendergast, how do you know so much about this obscure swamp?" "I looked it up on Wikipedia instead of sleeping!"), and some points where he seems to pull it out of thin air.
Aah, and there's an upsetting scene where a bunch of creepy angry rednecks are going after them out in the swamps, and they make her strip and want to rape her, and Pendergast saves her and she's like Now that there are a bunch of creepy violent rapists and we have no backup, Pendergast's way of doing things totally makes sense.
While I'm on that, and taking a break from reading to let myself stop being scared, there's a passage where two cops who are assisting Hayward are described approximately thusly: "The white one" and "the other one." I note this because I've never seen peoples' races described like this before.
Okay. Wow, um. Pendergast is scary in this. I mean, people have been doing horrible things to him and the people he cares about (oh yeah, Laura gets shot in the leg and then bitten by an alligator. NO SERIOUSLY. LIKE, PRACTICALLY ON THE SAME PAGE) and just horrible things in general, but he talks an incredibly sick man into killing himself, goes and shoots up a bunch of boats and then explodes a bar by shooting its propane tank and is just totally cool about it, like you would expect. And Laura is like, "Huh, I'm enjoying this too much." I don't even know. It's very cinematic. And actually, the scene where he shoots up the boats is just fucking hilarious.
And of course he gets the Big Boss and most of the flunkies, but ONE DUDE is left for him to chase during the sequels, and why he specifically is in on the murder is not explained, especially because specifically it's really weird that he would be, so I guess we're going to find out more about him. I'm looking forward to it :D
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-12 06:41 pm (UTC)lololololol he is such a bastard.
we get Pendergast the picky diva who wants to drive the Rolls everywhere
This is so true and I kind of love him for it.
Oh god the rape scene, wtf. Okay, fine, just know that any redneck group that large would have been sexually assaulting Pendergast too. It verged a little bit on sexy Hayward violence, which is uncool.
There were some points where I think Pendergast's methods would have actually seemed less morally horrible if he had been with D'Agosta and not Hayward, since D'Agosta was prepared to watch him kill people (the right people) and Hayward was not. I don't know why that bugs me, but it does.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-12 07:49 pm (UTC)this is so true. SQUEAL LIKE A PIG.
I think that's mainly what unnerved me about it. Like, I was really fine with her getting shot and having the gator bite her, because that stuff just happens when you are hanging out with Pendergast, but there were some points where it did seem sexualized beyond what it would have been, and that made it really unpleasant to read.
Hmmmmmm. This is a good point.
I'm not really sure if it's just her POV or the fact that she really was more squeamish about killing people and going along with Pendergast's creepier methods. D'Agosta going along with Pendergast's ideas and schemes does make a lot of difference, I guess, because he's usually the relateable POV character, and you kind of take your cues from what he's willing to accept. (
On the other hand, Pendergast dragging her into this and going ahead and basically killing people anyway when she said that she wasn't willing to be a part of that is way not cool (even if he technically didn't kill Slade, come on, he did, whatever). I think because he's not really working with D'Agosta or Hayward, he's getting them to go along with them...and D'Agosta is okay with that, Hayward less so, and it seems like as acknowledgement that she's doing something she really doesn't want to do, the right thing to do would be to cooperate with her morality. She wasn't willing to kill people or get them killed, and he's using her goodwill and her efforts to help him in a way she expressly didn't want, and maybe even partially implicating her.
lol, major tl;dr, but these are extremely morally grey books.