Early (Book) Review: "Blood and Silver" By James R. Tuck (No Spoilers)

Today's your lucky day, folks, because I'm reviewing a book that won't even be out for two more weeks.  It's Blood and Silver, the second novel in James R. Tuck's "Deacon Chalk: Occult Bounty Hunter" series.  Let the record state that I critiqued an early draft of this in my Kennesaw writing group (and am listed in the Acknowledgements section for that reason) and that James gave me a signed advance copy.

The Plot

A few months after the first Deacon Chalk novel Blood and Bullets,Deacon gets involved in the internal and very bloody politics of the lycanthropic community. 

The Good

*For starters, it's a very quick read.  It only took me a couple hours to finish, and that included taking the time to write much of this blog post and make dinner last night.

*Since this is a sequel, James needs to retell the back-story and reintroduce the characters for anyone who hasn't read the first book.  And he does this without being info-dumpy.  On the first page, Deacon reveals the death of his family using a metaphor involving pet rattlesnakes that I liked.

*Although the beginning isn't as immediately grabby as Blood and Bullets(which begins with Deacon pointing a gun in the face of a vampire in a parking lot), the mayhem starts pretty quickly when Deacon comes across a man beating a dog.

*Blood and Silver, like Blood and Bullets, has some very good descriptive language.  One particularly good passage is when Deacon has to sneak into a house that's quiet--too quiet.  The whole scene takes several pages and the diction is very ominous, including corpse metaphors.

*When I first read the story in my writing group last year, one of the things that most impressed me was the variety of lycanthropes James wrote about.  Most fiction dealing with lycanthropes focuses on werewolves.  Not this book.  A trio of the main lycanthropes are were-lions, there's a very heavily-armed community of were-rabbits, and some were-critters I'm not going to describe because actually meeting them is an awesome surprise.  Actual werewolves play only a very minor role.

*The narrative is really funny.  Deacon's responses to meeting particularly powerful and dangerous lycanthropes (two different scenes) are amusing, as is the verbal bomb he drops on an odious moralistic were-lion later in the story.  His threat to make a rug out of a traitorous were-creature was amusing.  And I laughed at Deacon's recounting of how an evil vampire wanted her to do his bidding...by "doing" her.

The Bad

*There're several instances of repetition in here.  I recall at two different lengthy descriptions of Deacon's car and two fairly similar descriptions of firearms (the thing about them being the standard weapon for American soldiers for a certain length of time).  A character's past as a prostitute for vampires is described twice.

*One character is a were-predator who preaches against were-predators mistreating were-prey.  I would expect him to be more conflicted--he is basically going against his nature.  There's a reference to him using his "predator dominance" to coerce another character into having sex with him and he seems ashamed of that, but this could be elaborated more. 

*This may be a personal quirk of mine, but I like my flashbacks self-contained.  Deacon's flashback to when he first had to deal with lycanthropes begins in the middle of one chapter and ends pretty close to the end of another.  I enjoyed the fight scene, but it would have been better to contain it within one chapter.

*Not all of the dialogue works, especially Kat's "laugh and smile" comments re: Larson.

*Early in the story, we learn Deacon's associate Larson has been practicing ritual magic.  Deacon HATES ritual magic, to the point he pulls a gun on Larson when he starts reciting a spell.  However, given the reasons Deacon hates magic, I would have included references to that incident later in the book.  Given his severe dislike for magic, it seems like something that would make Deacon suspicious of Larson for awhile afterward.

*Lycanthropy is transmitted through bodily fluids and is compared to HIV, necessitating the cast wear biohazard gear to the final battle against some evil lycanthropes.  However, they don't bother with this for the first battle.  If there were some reference to how they'd ordered biohazard gear but they hadn't arrived yet and they didn't have time to wait, that would have been better.

*There're some editing problems, including a sentence broken up and indented halfway through on page 246 and words mashed together at least twice.

The Verdict

A worthy sequel to Blood and Bullets.  8 out of 10.

Thoughts On Writing And Length...

Last Tuesday I went to the Foxtale Book Shoppe in Woodstock for the release party of Blood and Bullets by James R. Tuck.

Once there, I made the acquaintance of one of James's friends, another writer named Janice Hardy, who did a reading of The Healing Wars Book One: The Shifter.

After the readings were done, I asked both of them how long their books were.  I think both of them were in the neighborhood of 81,000.  Blood and Bullets is 351 pages long, while The Shifter is 384.

At present, Battle for the Wastelands is around 97,000 words long and that's with several remaining chapters partially finished.  I was hoping to keep the first draft below 100,000 words, since I remember hearing somewhere that publishers don't want to risk a too-long book from a first-time author and 100,000 is a good ceiling to set.  However, with the addition of a new chapter of politicking to break up what a member of my Lawrenceville group called "battle fatigue," it seems I'm going to break the 100,000 word ceiling.

Although James and Janice didn't seem to think this would be a problem, Janice offered me a tip for cutting word count without cutting characters or scenes.  Instead, cut 10-20 words per page.  That's a couple of sentences.  In a 500 page book, this amounts to 5,000 words being cut at least.

She even gave me some words that are basically filler--"that, had, just, only."  I remember going through Battle cutting the use of "had" already, which I've gotten into the habit of using in a journalistic fashion--simple past tense to describe something that just happened and the past perfect tense (the one using "had") to describe things that had happened at some earlier point.  Some uses of the past-perfect survived, but others did not.  And I've been trying to keep use of "that" to a minimum for the last couple of years, ever since one of my editors at The Griffin Daily News pointed out how useless "that" is in most contexts.

We'll see how it goes.  The goal is to finish the first draft of Battle within the next couple of months.  If I push myself, I think I can finish three chapters in fairly quick succession for the Lawrenceville group, although my last "creative spurt" when almost entirely into a short story I'm writing to "invert" the trope of Doomed Home Town.  Writing 2,000 words in a single night is great, but those 2,000 words could have completed one or two chapters and gotten me closer to finishing Battle, which is a much bigger deal than even a successful short story.

Book Review: "Blood and Bullets" (NO SPOILERS)

James R. Tuck, a member of my Kennesaw writing group, premiered his first novel Blood and Bullets in early February.  He was so kind as to supply me with a signed advance copy at the last meeting of our writing group, which I finished fairly quickly.

Now for the review.  Given how new the book is, I'm going to try to keep it spoiler-free:

The Good

The book starts out with an epic grabber--protagonist Deacon Chalk is in the parking lot of the strip club he owns, pointing a handgun in the face of a teenage vampire who looks disturbingly like his dead teenage daughter.  Most writing guides say to begin en media res (in the middle of things) or "when the story begins" and he does the latter well.  Plus having the vampire resembling his dead daughter allows the reveal about Deacon's dead family without being info-dumpy.

The descriptive bits are really good.  James does a good job of using verbs to describe a scene so the descriptive passages aren't boring.  One passage that stands out is when Deacon is waiting for another vampire-hunter in an abandoned industrial park--he describes in detail overgrown bushes and a plastic bag drifting on the wind and it isn't slow.

The narrative is laugh-out-loud--a lot.  There's a scene where Deacon is discoursing on vampires and how they're all evil in which he takes a major shot at Twilight.

"And vampires never sparkle unless they just ate a stripper."

There's another comment where Deacon talks about staking vampires during the day and how bloody it gets.  When I read the line "I usually wear a raincoat," the way it was delivered was hilarious.

And here's one from Father Mulcahy--yes, he is a shout-out to MASH.

"No, Father, I am cursed.  I am unworthy to be anointed with the cross."
Father Mulcahy sighed loudly.
"Are you fighting evil tonight?"
(Name redacted for spoiler reasons) nodded slowly.
"Then you are doing the Lord's work.  Shut the fuck up."

Also, James clearly knows his way around Atlanta.  There's a scene where Deacon and another vampire hunter go to downtown Atlanta--to get take-out and then an anti-vampire mission and he knows the area of North Avenue and Georgia Tech rather well.

And one of the more interesting parts of the book is the origin of vampires.  James ties it in with the Crucifixion, although not in the same manner Dracula 2000 does.  Not going to give this one away because it's one of the more creative elements of the book.

Finally, although lycanthropes are touched on more in the upcoming novel Blood and Silver than in this one, James includes were-gorrillas and were-spiders.  That's a lot more creative than just werewolves.  And although I don't want to get into too much detail just now, there are a lot of kinds of were-critters in the Deaconverse.

The Bad

The ending is a bit anti-climactic.  Not going to go into a lot of detail to avoid even dropping hints.

Deacon references knowing another vampire hunter and how the two of them help each other out sometimes.  He encounters said hunter later, in a rather sticky situation (not going to go into detail to avoid spoilers) and having more of a reaction to it would have been good.

There's an editing glitch on page 126.  Instead of "a were-gorilla," it's "a WWere-gorilla."  Three times.  I know this is a glitch because on page 127, the critter in question is referred to as a were-gorrilla.

The Verdict

A fun little monster-hunting rampage.  8 out of 10.

Now to discuss some related matters.  James brought a prequel novella entitled That Thing At the Zoo to the writing group for us to critique.  This one features Deacon investigating diabolical doings at Zoo Atlanta.  The novella ended up being sold as an eBook and released before Blood and Bullets.  There'll be another e-novella called "Spider's Lullaby" that has not yet been released.  He had to write that one in two weeks (!), so it never went before the group.

That's pretty clever.  When I was in high school or college, I wrote a short story set in the "Wastelands" universe around 100 years before the story began.  I never finished it and the "Wastelands"-verse has changed so much since then that the story is pretty much obsolete.  And Stephen King has written a Dark Tower short story called "The Little Sisters of Eleuria."

However, I'd never thought about releasing them in advance of the main product as a buzz-builder.  That partial story cannot be salvaged (in fact, I might have deleted it), but I could always write a new one.  I'll need to think of a storyline first--if I followed James' pattern, it would be something that takes place just before the story begins.

Either way, I think this is a pretty clever idea.  And with Kindles, e-publishing, etc. it's even easier to implement, since there won't be printing costs.

BTW, anybody want to start a TVTropes page for the series?  Between Blood and Bullets, "That Thing At The Zoo," and the free fiction available on his web-site, there should be plenty of material.