Watch This! Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Pt. 1)

This month, I thought I'd dedicate a few posts to one of my all time favorite shows--Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show first started in 1997 (I would have been 7 at the time), but I didn't get into it until around 2000. At that time, I had just discovered Harry Potter and with it, a love of fantasy and all things supernatural. Buffy has a very different tone, but it's similar in that it's grounded in the real world, where most people are not aware that supernatural forces exist, and that the heroes are normal teenagers with normal problems that are only exacerbated by the presence of magic and so forth. Also similar is the "chosen one" premise, the idea that fate picks one seemingly ordinary individual to be the savior. The difference in premise is that while Harry has one singular task to perform (kill Voldemort), which once completed will ultimately leave him free to live out a happy ending, Buffy is stuck killing vampires until she dies. Harsh, yes?

Buffy is the Mother of the Kick Ass Female Protagonists of Urban Fantasy

Oh, there were kick-ass females before her and there have been even  kick-assier females since. Hell, Anita Blake predates Buffy by about four years, and she's certainly earned her alpha stripes (despite enumerable flaws). But what Buffy did, in my humble opinion, is bring the kick ass female into mainstream light. The show is popular, a pop culture phenomenon, and for my generation she was the final word on unlikely female heroines.

Joss Whedon has become somewhat famous for his ability to make petite female protagonists into convincing fighters. Buffy is consciously written to subvert the cliché of the ditsy blond teenager who is the first to die in every horror movie. Her influence has made small-but-lethal ladies into a popular trope in and of itself in urban fantasy. Buffy makes up for her weak appearance with implied superpowers--supernatural strength and speed. Many UF authors do something similar, granting their heroines magical powers or gifts that bely their harmless visages. Others use brains or extreme weapons training, or some combination of all of the above. You can see why this is such a popular premise to launch a series on--it makes for such interesting and varied protagonists, with varying levels of angst and drama.

Buffy suffers from the classic fantasy heroine conflict--she wants a normal life, but she can never have one. Something always gets in the way. But she is, essentially, just like every teenage girl--and thus she goes through all of the same milestones--but on steroids. The loss of her virginity is a huge disappointment, to the tune of her boyfriend turning psycho-killer. She runs away from home and is met with a wake up call, in the form of a bizarre demonic slavery system. She finds that she wants to be popular, and become Homecoming Queen, but ends up fighting homicidal monsters all the way to the dance, only to find that she's not even runner-up. And so on. Buffy is relatable because, like most teenage girls, she feels like nothing ever goes her way and the world is against her. In Buffy's case, her life really is often miserable and the world really is out to get her. The relatability draws you in, her losses and disappointments make you emotionally invested, and her constant triumph over the monsters brings you comfort.

The fact that Buffy was so widely popular and is still remembered fondly (and continues on via comic books and so forth), means that she's often the basis of comparison for any UF heroine. Rightly so. When I read young adult urban fantasy in particular, I'm always looking to see in they included the traditional Buffy character--naïve but not stupid, seemingly and yet actually quite strong, snarky and unexpectedly smart. Maybe she has a group of friends like Buffy, or impossible romantic relationships like Buffy. Whatever variation the author goes with, there's almost always a tiny tribute in there somewhere.

Misc. Monday: Goosebumps

The things you read as a child have a way of sticking with you forever. The original Goosebumps series was the first set of books that I ever read entirely on my own outside of school. My older brother had a decent sized collection that he passed to me, and I promptly whined to my parents until I filled in the gaps. All told, I ended up reading the first 45 books in the series over the course of a year or so (1st-2nd grade). Of course I later reread my favorite ones. So for today's Misc. Monday, I thought I'd go through a few of them and see what memories I could kick to life.

#1, Welcome to Dead House, sparks zero literary memories (I must not have liked it), but I do have memories of watching the TV episode. Oh, that's right, there was a TV series--a cheesetastic TV series with bad effects and bad acting. I was, I don't know, seven when I saw this and it still sticks in my brain as a quintessentially bad haunted house story.

#2, Stay Out of the Basement, is about a freaking plant monster. Plants are not scary, even to a seven year old, and even back then I remember thinking this one was funny. The protagonists, Margaret and Casey, go down as the stupidest children in the world for not immediately making the connection between their missing BOTONIST father and the plant monster.

#3, Monster Blood, OH GOD, I loved this little book. It's about a boy who buys some flubber that grows and grows and starts consuming things. I'm not sure why this excited my seven-year-old brain, but it did. I remember using my allowance to buy green Gak so I could rein-act the story.

#5, The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb, was another one of my favorites. I remember fixating on it because it's about a boy who ends up wandering through an Egyptian tomb on his own. I also became fascinated with the intensely gross facts of how mummies were made.

#7, Night of the Living Dummy...Umm, Dummies are freaking scary, I don't care how old you are. This is the only one that I remember kind of scared me a little.

#14, The Werewolf of Fever Swamp--Again, I don't so much remember the book as the TV show. I remember that it made me suddenly aware that werewolves were cool and scary. I asked my brother about them, and like all good big brothers, he proceeded to try to terrify me by introducing me to "real" werewolf movies.

#19, Deep Trouble--I remember really liking that there was a mermaid in this. The details are fuzzy now, but I know this was a favorite because of the deep sea theme.

#21, Go Eat Worms--I remember this one because I found it gross. It didn't scare me, it just...creeped me. Worms show up in this kids food and...yeah, EWW. Years later, in college, there was a lab involving mealworms which were being held in pie plates. I had a flashback to THIS BOOK and mentally flipped out a little.

#24, The Phantom of the Auditorium--This was my introduction the The Phantom of the Opera. I read this, and then I watched the Wishbone episode about The Phantom of the Opera, and I was promptly obsessed. Of course, I didn't actually get to see a production of any kind until years later, but I owe the idea of seeing it to Goosebumps.

#34, Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes--This is the last one I can actually clearly remember reading. Gnomes are funny to me. My grandparents always had them, and I think it amused me to think of them as evil instead of adorable.

So that's my little trip down nostalgia lane for the week. Does anyone else remember these books? Do you remember finding them funny, cool, or scary?

Happy Reading!

On Brats: A Review of Symphony of Blood by Adam Pepper

When I started this book, I knew two things: It was supposed to be horror/urban fantasy, and the main character was a PI. The first made me optimistic, because I love urban fantasy and I love a little blood and gore. The second made me weary because I am not by any means a mystery fan, and I tend to grade mysteries very harshly.

Hank Mondale is a private investigator in dire straights. His gambling addiction and poor management skills have put him in the kind of debt that could threaten his life. So, when a rich man hires him to investigate a case in which his daughter is being harassed by some unknown "creature", he takes the job. Hank assumes that the daughter is truly insane and/or on drugs (she is), and that the creature cannot possibly be real (it is).

Positive Comments:

The book had great set up. We learn that Hank is something of a screw-up, which is perfectly fine by me. I live to sympathize with screw-ups, provided they have other likeable qualities or get on the road to redemption at some point. The investigation surrounding the creature was interesting, because even though I'm not a mystery fan, I like to see fictional characters murdered in interesting ways. I'm messed up like that.

The monster was oddly appealing. I enjoyed learning about it's nature and it's dark, messed up thoughts.

Critical Comments:

The story started to break down for me as soon as we were introduced to Mackenzie, the rich guy's daughter. She's a brat of colossal proportions. She's an idiot. She is selfish. She has no morals. She clearly, clearly deserves to die horribly. If her life being on the line was supposed to alarm me, it didn't. I wanted her dead.

Furthermore, I never felt like I did find or connect with Hank's sympathetic side. There's no meaningful character development. There's no meaningful anything with this character. He exists, he does things, he survives. Good for him, but I need more than that to get me through a story.

Recommendation

You have to like horror, and you can't expect much in the way of depth. It's a semi-interesting, shallow horror story. I can't say I'd strongly recommend it, but I don't warn against it either. 2.5 stars.