tiger_moran | Entries tagged with books

I finished reading the last Frey and McGray book today and to be honest I'm very much 'meh' over it. Sure the ending's fine I guess in some ways (though... where does Frey go from there? It doesn't feel like much of an ending for him really) but it's turned out to be one of those things where I much preferred it when it wasn't about some big over-arching storyline. I just wanted to read Victorian mystery/crime-solving male duo stories and it became... not really about that at all. And it's another one of those things with a random het relationship shoehorned into it out of nowhere despite the characters in question never being shown to have any real chemistry in that way or even much interaction before that I can remember while the two male characters had way more chemistry but then also in this one I felt like Frey and McGray barely got any real interaction.
Also sorry but whatever the truth is the whole het relationship still feels really incestuous and weird as well and having characters trying to explain why it's actually not incest just sort of emphasised how much it felt like it was incest and made it even weirder.
Also it just felt sort of... rushed into, the entire book, even though this seemed to take much longer to write and get published than most of the others?
I may be slightly hampered in that I can't actually remember much of what happened in the rest of the series so half the time I didn't really remember what a lot of the Big Plot was even about, mostly what I remember from the others is I hated the one where they got drugged(?) and treated each other horribly. And there were other elements in others I didn't like at all. And I think there was some stuff with the fortune-teller or something? And something something Lancashire witches? I really don't remember what they had to do with anything though.
I don't really care about Caroline or Pansy either though sorry, I mean I'm sure they're great characters but they just really don't interest me and this book had A Lot about/very much focused on them also so for me that was not a good thing.
so...
meh
I'm glad the dogs survived I suppose. I'm still not sure what happened to some of the horses in it though and I still hate that McGray's first horse got pointlessly killed earlier in the series.
Now I'm not really sure if I want to keep any of the books any more when I just didn't enjoy how it ended up and when it did feel like kind of a downer ending for Frey especially. I think at some point I will have to reread the entire series in one go (rather than them being spaced out for a year or more each time when reading them as they were released) and then decide but at the moment I'm definitely feeling inclined to ditch the whole series.
So that sucks.

Current Mood: disappointed

I can't believe that in a time when there is so much published (and self-published) fiction I still cannot find:

decent queer m/m vampire fiction
Victorian set mystery/detective stuff with male main characters who really are a couple
adult stories about horses that aren't a/ boring [invariably het] romance or ~smut~, b/ about horse racing (fuck the horse racing industry!) or c/ about showjumping
stories involving trains and I mean actually featuring trains not 'this takes place on/around a train but nobody gives a shit about the train only about the characters' also not steam trains
also more stories about the Sherlock Holmes characters I actually want to read about not just yet more usually extremely mediocre Holmes pastiches or Holmes and Cthulhu shit

(I learned recently while trying (and failing) to find fiction involving trains that what I thought was the same series about some Victorian/Edwardian dude investigating stuff around a railway was actually two different series by two different people. You can tell I really didn't like either series.)

Heh, I finally found 2 negative reviews for Caroline Akrill's Courses for Horses pointing out many of the same issues that I had with it (like the email address bullshit for one), amongst a sea of gushing 5 star reviews of it. I hated it and was genuinely really upset about how much I hated it, because this is a series which left off somewhere in the 1990s both in the books and reality. This was a series I first read and loved as a child so I mean... to have the author finally bring out a final book in the series after all this time but then it really felt like she'd forgotten about anything and everything that made the series charming originally, it was really heartbreaking. She didn't seem to know when the hell it was meant to be set so it does not feel remotely like the 1990s when it should be set, it feels totally modern and you get shit like references to email addresses. Plus the humour was gone and the likeable eccentricity of the original series was mostly lacking and when it was there it felt... overdone and stupid now. Not to mention her bringing in a boring unlikeable character who had barely appeared in the series before and having him totally take over everything basically, what they do with their stables, what happens to Elaine's horse, being paired off with one of the women, while almost completely writing out an actually interesting male character. Then there's the tedious pairing off of all the female characters, the silly cowboy character who added absolutely nothing except to inexplicably namedrop Monty Roberts and get paired off with the other female character, the stupid posh massive equestrian centre that is so way way out of character for these characters, or that we're supposed to buy that Elaine sells her supposedly beloved horse who she's terrified of getting hurt or killed to someone who treats him like a commodity, then that she doesn't bother to ask who is actually buying him or who he's going to, doesn't bother to find out where he's going to live, or anything, or the also really silly thing with the ponies and them being given all these thousands of pounds worth of stuff (again! They'd already had the other horses and stuff just left with them) or the stupid Badminton plotline where the new rider magically wins of course despite only just having taken the horse on and just been in a car crash (I fucking cried at this scene I swear because it's just like... why am I supposed to care about this when you've just ripped all this away from Elaine and acted like she and we the readers are supposed to be fine with that? I was so so upset by this because it basically just shit on something from my childhood I loved a lot and just spoilt the entire series, I wish she'd never written another one honestly). Then there's the depressing ending where it's acknowledged that everything has changed which sorry didn't magically become not depressing just because she finally brought the far more interesting male character in for about three sentences and Elaine's (except he's not hers any more though) horse is about to come back but of course only as a livery and she'll now never have any say in what happens to him.

There is literally like... one minor detail in it I liked (that the black horse is finally given a name). Everything else was just... awful, and went totally against everything that had gone before in that series and everything that made it endearing to me despite it largely featuring two things I hate (hunting and eventing). But so many of the comments about it are genuinely just gushing over how amazing it is and how well it finished off the series and I'm thinking what the fuck story are you reading that you think it's so amazing and well written and satisfactory?

I've been re-reading Michael Kurland's Moriarty novels for, uh, quite a long time now (some of them are pretty hard going to be honest since I couldn't care less about his original characters and unfortunately some of them spend a long time talking about those OCs and take a long time for Moriarty to actually show up or do anything). I have no memory at all of Who Thinks Evil even though that was the most recent one. I'm glad it has Moriarty in it a lot more than some but I'm still bitter about the lack of Moran meanwhile Barnett shows up yet again (I don't care! I don't care about boring Barnett (nor do I understand still why Moriarty ever wanted him in his employment or what he ever actually did for Moriarty) and his equally boring wife no not even if you keep on telling me how amazing and wondrous she is!). And it's like that in most of these stories, Moriarty interacts with the OCs I don't like (I don't really actually like any of them, they're all annoying) who all effectively replace all of Moran's roles and also Moriarty has loads of interaction with Holmes which is probably great if you're a Holmes/Moriarty shipper or something but really bloody irritating if you actively dislike Holmes/Moriarty.

And I'm re-reading The Empress of India now since I saved the best one for last. But even so... it still annoys me so much that Kurland barely uses Moran throughout the series and even in this book, instead of having him as Moriarty's close acquaintance, right hand man, bosom friend, whatever else, he's still just one of many random acquaintances. Yes Moran is finally a major character in this but his canonical role throughout has just been ignored, written out in favour of Kurland's tedious original characters who I genuinely can't stand instead, and even in this book it's just... nothing like the canonical relationship between them. And I mean this is essentially the best/only published book that actually has them both in it and interacting in a pretty positive way so that's kind of a massive downer really, that it still gets it so off from what should be and disregards this thing from the canon that is so horrendously overlooked and ignored by almost everyone else as well, that Moran was Moriarty's friend, his very close friend, and his chief of staff and probably his assassin sometimes too and there is a strong basis also to think they could have been lovers, and this gets ignored or denied over and over again and even Kurland, who unlike a lot of authors who use these characters does actually seem to like them and also unlike a lot of authors doesn't come across as a homophobe who feels a burning need to claim Moriarty is a Manly Virile Heterosexual every five minutes (*glares really fucking hard at John Gardner*), even he does it. It is so so disappointing when this is practically all there is, for someone who loves Moriarty, who loves Moran, who loves Moriarty/Moran, and it's not enough, because it still doesn't get the characters and the relationship right, it's barely even close really. Yes they seem to get along OK and that's great but... it's still so far away from what it should be, meanwhile I seem to be supposed to care not only about the original characters and their relationship but also about another relationship involving Moriarty which is basically my NOTP.

Also this doesn't actually make sense that Moriarty's butler doesn't recognise Moran yet he knew who Moran was in the only other book in the series that Moran appeared in (very very briefly) a few years earlier. The lack of continuity makes it feel even more than I thought before that even within this universe this Moran isn't actually the same character who appeared earlier and is even more suggestive that... Kurland never really knew what to do with Moran, like it never really crossed his mind how important Moran was to Moriarty canonically, he was just a random name to toss into the mix occasionally, that was all. And it is hugely disappointing because I would have loved these books so much if he'd just got Moran right throughout.