Kim Harrison's EVER AFTER--Complex, Competent, But Disappointing

Kim Harrison, Ever After. Harper Voyager, 2013

 The ever-after is in deadly peril. Tiny imbalances in the ley lines have caused it to gradually bleed into reality.

 But now, someone or something has interfered with the imbalances, combining them in a horrific way, and inch by inch, foot by foot, the ever-after is disappearing, threatening the very existence of its inhabitants and of magic itself. The perpetrator has arranged things so perfectly that blame has fallen on one person, the witch-demon Rachel Morgan.

To make matters worse, all of the magical races are not only being driven slowly crazy by the hideous disharmonies among the lines, but they are also warring against each other. Demons, elves, fairies, pixies, gargoyles, vampires living and dead—none can be trusted even to try to fix the lines.

Then there are the kidnapped babies, survivors of a genetic glitch that offers salvation and threatens extinction.

Everything becomes personal when Rachel’s close friend and one of her goddaughters are kidnapped in an attempt to alter forever the relationships among races in the ever-after.

Rachel suddenly discovers that she has four days to fix everything…or die. She does not have the tools or the knowledge to repair the lines herself, and she does not know who—or what—she can trust. Everyone around her is enmeshed in the danger, and it seems that everything she tries just makes things worse.

And—horror of horrors—she doesn’t have a thing to wear.

 

I anticipated some difficulties in reading New York Times bestseller Kim Harrison’s Ever After, since it is the eleventh in the popular Hollows series and I had read none of the previous entries. To her credit, Harrison is aware that some readers might come to the book cold and does a creditable job making the intricacies of the Hollows and the relationships between the ever-after and reality as clear as possible. At times, the references to past volumes seem gratuitous, especially when they are introduced in a word or phrase as a kind of allusive in-joke, but on the whole, Ever After makes sense on its own merits. It introduces a serious problem, one with life-and-death consequences, and ties together all of the elements of a complex fictive universe to resolve it. At the level of story, the book works.

 

At other levels, however, there are disappointments. The most frustrating thing about Ever After is not the frequent appearance of characters from previous books, with all of their physical dilemmas and psychological baggage, but the pacing of the storytelling itself. Most writers know that one technique for ascribing dialogue to characters is to follow the lines with a sentence showing that character in action, suggesting tone of voice or other key features.

Harrison does this often. Too often. One can open any page at random and find examples, as when one character tries to reassure a child:

      “Ray,” he breathed, and suddenly I felt her absence keenly as he took her. “Your daddy is going to be okay, I think.” His eyes rose to mine. We got him there in time. Ten more minutes and they might not have been able to stop the cascading reaction.” He blinked fast, then looked away. “That’s twice you’ve saved Quen’s life. Thank you” (76).

The narrator’s constant intrusions, concentrating on the state of the speaker’s eyes, do little to heighten the emotional content; in fact, they diminish it. Now compound that example with similar intrusions in nearly every verbal exchange, multiple examples on page after  page, and the story slows until it seems to take forever for anything to happen.

In another instance, a telephone rings, wakening Morgan. She doesn’t want to get up to answer it—fine, she is exhausted and wants to sleep. But it takes more than a page for her simply to  answer the call, during which time readers are treated to rather unsophisticated jokes…and when she does answer, it turns out that the call is crucial to the plot. There seems no reason to prolong the process. Throughout, Harrison focuses attention on the disposition of every coffee cup on every table, on the level of tea in tea pots, on the presence or absence of cookies and petit fours…on everything except moving the story forward. 

The writing itself is mostly competent and adequate for the narrative, but there are sufficient glitches and wobbles to similarly slow the pacing. A sentence begins “If I didn’t know better, Felix had taken Quin away intentionally…” (21). Clarity might suggest something like: “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that Felix….” Further down on the same page, we find a comment about the missing babies: “Eight total across the United States, but the I.S. is only admitting to those that get leaked to the press. The one just before this was a set of twins from a prominent political figure.” The dialogue establishes that the speakers are discussing babies not incidents; the second sentence starts with a reference to a single baby—“The one”—as is indicated by the verb was, then slips into plural with “set of twins,” itself a redundancy. Neither instance is crucial, but they create momentary hesitance in reading.

So—complex, competent, but disappointing. Moments of high tension deflated with throw-away jokes, dialogue constantly disrupted and trivialized, allusions introduced for comic effects rather than to propel the story. Writing generally in hand but not always appropriate to the moment. And multiple layers of events and characters that must be brought into line before the climax—when representatives all of the races of ever-after must work together to defeat the menace.

My final impression of Ever After: it had moments of interest and excitement, but it didn’t stimulate me to want to go back and read the previous ten stories.

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Michael R. Collings is the Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publishing; an Emeritus professor of English from Pepperdine University; author of the best-selling horror novels The Slab and The House Beyond the Hill, as well as other novels and collections of short fiction, poetry, and literary essays; and an inveterate fan of all things grammatical and syntactical. His writings are available here, at starshineandshadows.com, at journalstone.com, at hellnotes.com and in the horror-magazine Dark Discoveries.

Only....

Words can be frustrating. Sometimes they are funny. A few are even whimsical.

Here's my favorite bit of whimsy:

In general, English depends on word-order for meaning…and in general, most words fill a limited number of positions. If you take the following everyday-type sentence—“The carnivorous rats surrounded the blood-red barn”—and shift the main parts, chances are you will end up with:

Gibberish—“Surrounded the carnivorous rats the blood-red barn” and “Surrounded the blood-red barn the carnivorous rats”; or

Surrealism—“The blood-red barn surrounded the carnivorous rats”; or

A vague kind of Yoda-speak (and to get even that much sense you have to add a word)—“Surrounded the blood-red barn did the carnivorous rats.”

On the whole, subjects of sentences come first, followed by the action (the verb), and completed by whatever words or phrases are required by the verb. Adjectives usually come before nouns; adverbs before verbs or adjectives. There are, of course, exceptions to all of these generalizations, but following these conventions will usually result in intelligible English-sounding sentences.

 There is one word, however, that basically ignores most of the accepted rules for its designated parts of speech. Only carries a wide range of meanings: as an adverb, it suggests ‘solely,’ ‘alone,’ ‘as recent as,’ and other possibilities; as an adjective, it emphasizes singularity—the only child, the only survivor, the one and only….

As an adverb, it should precede its verb or another adverb: “the only blue book.” As an adjective, it should precede its noun: “the only book.”

But the curious thing about only is that—unlike its fellow adverbs and adjectives—can often appear almost anywhere in a sentence, and with each new appearance it alters meanings and interpretations.

Let’s take a simple sentence: “I went to the store to buy a loaf of bread.”

Now watch the permutations possible when only shows up:

“Only I went to the store to buy a loaf of bread”—no one else accompanied me, I was by myself, since everyone else was too frightened of the carnivorous rats to go.

“I only went to the store to buy a loaf of bread”—that’s the solitary place I went, nowhere else. Don’t blame me if the bank down the street was robbed. Or, it could mean that buying bread was my solitary purpose for going there. I promise I didn’t by a Snickers bar along the way.

“I went only to the store to buy a loaf of bread”—again, the store was my solitary goal. I’m still not responsible for the bank robbery. And, no, I didn’t stop at the cleaners to pick up your laundry.

“I went to only the store to buy a loaf of bread”—as above, I visited no other outlets of commerce, but this time I’m more emphatic in saying so. This version sounds slightly non-idiomatic so it would probably not occur often.

“I went to the only store to buy a loaf of bread”—here I am, stuck in this hick farm town, surrounded by blood-red barns and carnivorous rats, and there is but a single store anywhere to be seen.

“I went to the store only to buy a loaf of bread”—I could have been shopping for a shotgun or a bazooka to take out the carnivorous rats, but all I actually wanted was a loaf of bread.

“I went to the story to only buy a loaf of bread”—Similar to the one above, less idiomatic, however, in part because of the apparent split infinitive, but more so because the structure places two vowels next to each other. To speak it requires a glottal stop—an awkward pause between the vowels to keep them from sliding into each other.

“I went to the store to buy only a loaf of bread”—an emphatic assertion. No matter what else might be offered on the shelves, I will be blind to all but that loaf blasted of bread.

“I went to the store to buy a only loaf of bread”—as it stands, this one is not English. However, with two small emendations, it become perfectly acceptable, and only fits comfortably in the slot. First, a and only begin with vowels. We could insert a glottal stop, but the conventions of English have long since provided a neater solution for a—add an n to the article, making the phrase the easily pronounced “an only.” Then, since the two resulting words contradict each other—a means ‘any one of several’ and only indicates singularity, and grammar won’t accept both—shift the general article a  to the specific article the and we get the perfectly grammatical, “I went to the store to buy the only loaf of bread”—the single remaining loaf in the whole place. Whew! Took some work, but there is only, working hard for us as usual.

“I went to the store to buy a loaf only of bread”—That’s all, just bread. No cinnamon swirls, no raisins, no nuggets of unground wheat, just bread.

“I went to the store to buy a loaf of only bread”—This seems to  mean the same as the one above, but it also seems awkward. Still, pronounced with sufficient emphasis on only, it does work...after a fashion.

“I went to the store to buy a loaf of bread only”—Nothing, not a half-price package of Gummi-Bears or a brand-new box of dynamite to blow up the blood-red barn and slaughter all of the carnivorous rats will deter me from my purpose. Just the Bread!

And there we have twelve out of twelve. And, as far as I know, only only can do that.

At least, I can only hope so.

And with that: "Happy Christmas to All, and to All a Good Night!"

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Michael R. Collings is the Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publishing; an Emeritus professor of English from Pepperdine University; author of the best-selling horror novels The Slab and The House Beyond the Hill, as well as other novels and collections of short fiction, poetry, and literary essays; and an inveterate fan of all things grammatical and syntactical. His writings are available here, at starshineandshadows.com, at journalstone.com, and at hellnotes.com.