Tanya Huff, Smoke and ... series
Apr. 9th, 2007 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraThese are spin-offs from her Blood series (see earlier entry), which are urban horror/fantasy set in Toronto and feature the vampire bastard son of Henry VIIIth and ex-cop PI who’s going blind teaming up to fight crime, a combination which induces a certain amount of eye-rolling in this particular readership segment. The Smoke series follows Tony, who’s a street kid in the first Blood book (the only one I’ve read) and ends up in a relationship with the vampire bastard (bastard vampire? Where’s my list of adjectival order when I need it?) sometime later. He’s broken it off by the time this starts, which is the first thing that got me interested – it’s presented as your standard very intensive blood feeding/dominance thing, and it’s all too common for that to be the ideal vampire books strive for. Tony, however, has obviously found this a little too overwhelming and claustrophobic (yes, yes, projecting, I know), and has moved on, albeit with regrets. Instead, he works as a production assistant on Canada’s highest rating syndicated vampire detective show...
Smoke and Shadows. Tony starts seeing shadows – evil shadows – on set. The fantasy concept behind this, with the Shadowlord from another dimension attempting to invade, doesn’t really fit with the horror sensibilities of the characters, and the special effects wizard never feels real as a character (too much mentor plus woman who ran before but must now stand strong or lose all integrity) but it’s fast-moving and fun, and I like Tony.
Smoke and Mirrors. On a location shoot at a house with a bloody history. Ghosts start appearing, bad things start happening (over and over) and the crew and cast are trapped inside.
I loved this one for not entirely book-related reasons. Some years ago I spent quite a few months working through the computer game Seventh Guest (and its not quite so successful sequel, The Eleventh Hour), in which you find yourself in a house formerly owned by an evil toymaker (Stauf – sadly, I had to check the Wikipaedia article to find that this is an apparently obvious anagram of Faust). As you go into rooms ghosts appear and replay horrible events, and you solve puzzles, all of which gradually unlocks more and more of the house in terms of rooms accessible and nasty stuff taking place between the six guests invited there many years ago for some unspecified ritual (I had to cheat on the laboratory blob puzzle, about which I still feel guilty). Playing this late at night in a creaky house, when I was never sure what was going to happen and even the décor of the rooms was creepy was startlingly atmospheric. Bits of the game got into my brain, basically, and I can still see some of the visuals when I think about it. (the eyeballs. The doll's house. Those excessively annoying cans in the pantry).
Reading Smoke and Mirrors brought the whole thing back to me. I think it’s a good book despite that – it has the strongest horror plot of the three, with some genuinely upsetting sequences (the burning baby) – and the tension within the group is also well-done, with many members distrusting Tony for what he knows, and what he sees when the ghosts appear. Tony’s magic powers are severely limited – he’s grasped one spell by that stage – and the romantic tension between him and Lee, the supposedly straight male co-star, is also well done. I could have done with less of the producer’s bratty kids, but that was really my only problem with this. Well, that and the fact that now I really want to play Seventh Guest again, and even if I find my copy it will be a) for the PC and b) oh hell, probably on floppies or something.
Smoke and Ashes. There’s some good stuff here, and I still really like Tony, but the main concept with the annoying immortal priestess/demonic gateway really didn’t grab me, largely because she is, as mentioned, annoying. It’s one of those books where the stakes are, again, the world, and the powers are stacked up way beyond human – and that’s why I liked the second one, because it has far more boundaries operating, and does well within them. Still good, though, and the team on a hopeless mission thing works for me.
Apparently there won’t be any more of these unless sales suddenly pick up, which I think is a shame. What I’d like would more ones about Tony, on the small-scale horror level, with no overwhelming demons or transdimensional portals (and ideally no vampires, but Henry as a walk-on's fine), but that is apparently not what the market wants.
Smoke and Shadows. Tony starts seeing shadows – evil shadows – on set. The fantasy concept behind this, with the Shadowlord from another dimension attempting to invade, doesn’t really fit with the horror sensibilities of the characters, and the special effects wizard never feels real as a character (too much mentor plus woman who ran before but must now stand strong or lose all integrity) but it’s fast-moving and fun, and I like Tony.
Smoke and Mirrors. On a location shoot at a house with a bloody history. Ghosts start appearing, bad things start happening (over and over) and the crew and cast are trapped inside.
I loved this one for not entirely book-related reasons. Some years ago I spent quite a few months working through the computer game Seventh Guest (and its not quite so successful sequel, The Eleventh Hour), in which you find yourself in a house formerly owned by an evil toymaker (Stauf – sadly, I had to check the Wikipaedia article to find that this is an apparently obvious anagram of Faust). As you go into rooms ghosts appear and replay horrible events, and you solve puzzles, all of which gradually unlocks more and more of the house in terms of rooms accessible and nasty stuff taking place between the six guests invited there many years ago for some unspecified ritual (I had to cheat on the laboratory blob puzzle, about which I still feel guilty). Playing this late at night in a creaky house, when I was never sure what was going to happen and even the décor of the rooms was creepy was startlingly atmospheric. Bits of the game got into my brain, basically, and I can still see some of the visuals when I think about it. (the eyeballs. The doll's house. Those excessively annoying cans in the pantry).
Reading Smoke and Mirrors brought the whole thing back to me. I think it’s a good book despite that – it has the strongest horror plot of the three, with some genuinely upsetting sequences (the burning baby) – and the tension within the group is also well-done, with many members distrusting Tony for what he knows, and what he sees when the ghosts appear. Tony’s magic powers are severely limited – he’s grasped one spell by that stage – and the romantic tension between him and Lee, the supposedly straight male co-star, is also well done. I could have done with less of the producer’s bratty kids, but that was really my only problem with this. Well, that and the fact that now I really want to play Seventh Guest again, and even if I find my copy it will be a) for the PC and b) oh hell, probably on floppies or something.
Smoke and Ashes. There’s some good stuff here, and I still really like Tony, but the main concept with the annoying immortal priestess/demonic gateway really didn’t grab me, largely because she is, as mentioned, annoying. It’s one of those books where the stakes are, again, the world, and the powers are stacked up way beyond human – and that’s why I liked the second one, because it has far more boundaries operating, and does well within them. Still good, though, and the team on a hopeless mission thing works for me.
Apparently there won’t be any more of these unless sales suddenly pick up, which I think is a shame. What I’d like would more ones about Tony, on the small-scale horror level, with no overwhelming demons or transdimensional portals (and ideally no vampires, but Henry as a walk-on's fine), but that is apparently not what the market wants.
