Ursula Katherine Spiller, $3.99
Fantasy, 2018
It wasn’t how a doomsdayer would have imagined the world, but there were no roses to put on beds or elsewhere. After the End of the World™, there wasn’t a whole lot of anything for a while, except for humans trying to survive, displaying a choice selection of their baser instincts. Confusion was available in huge quantities as well, largely due to the fact that basic instincts are not conducive to critical thinking. That and the bloody world ending. It didn’t help that people had always imagined what the Apocalypse would be like in gory detail, because their imagination would come up with a big war with terrible weapons, a big asteroid, a big flood, a big pandemic – all the good stuff. But that’s not what happened, or at least nobody remembered any better. The earth used to be riddled with instantaneous information, and people had kind of just assumed that the End of the World™ would be reported in realtime and around the globe. It gets somewhat tricky when the End of the World™ comes with the inconvenient collapse of networks. All of them. Some said it happened all at once; some said it started somewhere in Russia or in the United States, because it was always either one or the other to the world at large. Or it used to be. The “world at large” got a whole lot smaller with the Big Change almost two centuries ago, and since there was no global communication to document that change, nobody ever got to know what truly happened. Those who lived in the location where everything started to fall apart were also in the prime spot to be hit by whatever was hitting the earth and were therefore the first to die, hold their peace, and take the information they had to the metaphorical grave (because there was nobody to bury them in an actual grave). There wasn’t much travelling to be done anymore either, and therefore nobody to spread news. So, putting information pieces together was significantly hindered in that post-apocalyptic world, because people never quite managed to put up networks again, except perhaps for a radio with very limited range. There was electricity if you had a little creatively-powered generator to call your own though, so it wasn’t all bad. No television (at least no programmes to receive), but if you were lucky enough to get your hands on a physical copy of a film, and you had a player device that hadn’t been stripped apart for its components, it would entertain you for a while. Perhaps you could catch some form of play at Crossroads Market, even if it was possibly more animated storytelling, because there weren’t many open spaces to put on a performance. That was all you could get entertainment-wise in that new world. Because not only were there understandingly few tourists where Quentin had set up his home, there were few people, period. And those that were around were either holed up in the palace of the Ruling Four, or part of the market with its craftspeople. The scattered few who didn’t have a home tended to not live very long in the everlasting, post-apocalyptic winter that had swallowed the sun.
The opening paragraph, ladies, gentlemen, and whatever you choose to identify as.
How a Post-Apocalyptic Vampire Librarian Saved the World is… I guess, the story of Quentin, a vampire librarian who… do something. I gave myself a few days to finish this thing, but eventually I have to stop and take a deep breath. Quentin meets some people, and they do things. And really, all I want to do is anything else.
You see, this is one of those stories that can only exist as an independent publication, because it’s clear that the author is writing this one for herself first and foremost. Nothing wrong with this, usually, as people shouldn’t force themselves to do things they don’t love unless they really, really need the money and there is no other option available. In the case of this story, though, the author doesn’t seem to be thinking of her audience at all. There is a very strong stench of self-indulgence here, as the author writes about whatever that amuses her without pausing to wonder whether the reader would be on the same wavelength as her.
Take the opening paragraph. It’s a garbled mess of running sentences and “Look at me! I’m quirky!” show-off phraseology, which ends up using so many words to say very little. The rest of the story is like this. The author isn’t telling a story as much as she is on a stage shrieking at the top of her voice through a megaphone that she is very, very quirky and her readers have better laugh uproariously at her verbal diarrhea or else. The story would move in a crawl as the author throws waves after waves of running sentences and QUIRKY!!! phrases and conversations at the reader. Who cares about whether letting the reader know whether the story is going anywhere or whether there is even a point to the story. The reader’s time is unimportant and invaluable – all that matters is that the author gets to show up how FUNNY!!! and QUIRKY!!! she is.
It’s fine if the story had been indeed QUIRKY!!! and FUNNY!!! Unfortunately, well…
Quentin had expected that question, and, honestly, now that he was confronted with it, it was satisfying to be able to say, “I killed him.” Strange. That was a memory that had never managed to fade. Not one bit. It had faded even less than the atrocities that had been done to him by his own personal monster. “Back then, it was mostly believed that a vampire couldn’t kill their own creator.” A dark smile pulled at his lips before it turned rueful, and he looked at Paxton. “In case you ever feel the urge, unfortunately for me, that belief is nothing but codswallop.”
Paxton didn’t comment on that. He had something else on his mind. “I don’t know much about your creator,” he treaded carefully, “but I think I’ve managed to catch enough to say… good riddance.”
“Excellent riddance, in fact,” Quentin amended, making them both snicker.
When their amusement quieted down, it left only the silence of the chilly night.
Uh, why are they snickering? Is there something funny in the exchange? Is it that “excellence riddance” thing that should be causing me to roll in uproarious laughter for five days straight?
There is the problem, right there. The author really wants to me to be painfully aware of what a brilliant story this is, that she even points out when and how I am supposed to react to her story.
“It’s been a really long time. I’d describe it, but the words would hold no meaning for you.”
“They say the sun was much brighter than all the lanterns of the market put together,” Paxton said, obviously trying to wrap his head around the image.
Quentin smiled a bit. “That’s true.” He pointed towards the sky. “Imagine a light so bright that it still lets us know when it’s day and when it’s night, even through the thick clouds.” He gazed unseeingly into the distance, lost in memory. “Your skin warms when the light touches you, as if you were in front of a fire.” He remembered his vampire eyes being a bit sensitive to its full force, but then, everyone’s eyes were.
Paxton nodded, accepting the words, but having no way of knowing.
Here’s the thing. I exist in this world where sunlight dances down onto Earth and warms my skin. Therefore, while Paxton can’t imagine such a thing, I can. Therefore, there’s no reason for the author to keep hammering three times that Paxton can never imagine such a thing. That scene would have been so much more powerful if Quentin had just explain it and Paxton were left to ponder what he had heard. The author doesn’t trust her readers to exercise their own agency – they must respond in ways that she wants them to, so she is going to spell out every thing the reader should glean, read, get, and feel while reading the story.
Oh, and the author tries to pull an Anne Rice in the ending, leaving things hanging in order to open room for potential sequels, but come on. Whatever Anne Rice’s fault is as a writer, one thing she can do well on a good day is to use walls after walls of words in her story and still create evocative settings and mythology. She also manipulates, via words and atmosphere building, the readers into experiencing the emotions she wants them to feel, instead of grabbing them outright by the throat and telling them, “This part is funny, the characters are laughing so you must too. That part is sad, because the character tells you so, so damn it, now cry!” Let’s just say that the author has some way to go to get things right.
The best thing about How a Post-Apocalyptic Vampire Librarian Saved the World is probably the title. So read the title, quietly wish the author best of luck in her future books, and move on quickly.
