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Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

(October 2007)

"The Soul's Journey: Blood, Sweat and Tears"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 

 

 To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,jl@simegen.com  for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  
Find these books.
Find TV fandoms online

Blood Ties TV Series on Lifetime cable network.

Sebastian by Anne Bishop, RoC HC Feb 2006

Belladonna by Anne Bishop, RoC HC March 2007

House of the Rose Book III Broken Gods by Michaela August, awe-struck.net

Marked, A House of Night Novel by P. C. Cast and Kristin Cast, St. Martin’s May 07.

The Old Power Returns by Morven Westfield, Harvest Shadows Publications, 2007.

According to the theory of reincarnation, the soul’s journey through life may be repeated – even many times.

One theory has it that each journey through life is for a specific purpose, to perfect one or another virtue. If you fail a task, you just get to try again until you succeed then get promoted to perfecting the next character trait.

So "life" then becomes a job – which means it has paydays, vacations, perqs, bennies and 401K. Your karmic path from life to life becomes a career from job to job.

So if that’s true, why does every culture have some fearsome legend of "the vampire" usually including immortality? What’s to be feared in immortality? Modern readers seem to feel immortality would be cool – even if you have to drink blood.

Fiction writers have built whole universes with different laws of magic and science just to tell vampire stories. They’ve changed the legends into every permutation and combination, with and without vampire reincarnation, a finite lifespan and possibility of becoming human. But there is always the fascination with long life. I dealt with it in my novel trilogy, Dushau, Farfetch and Outreach.

What’s so fearsome about death? What would we do without it? Seriously, what if we didn’t die?

Think about the natal chart. Remember in the July 2007 column we looked at the natal chart of Jim Butcher, the creator of The Dresden Files novels and TV show, and noted the chart of George Lucas, comparing them to the stories they are most famous for. (lightworks.com or simegen.com)

The natal chart encodes the issues you must deal with and what channels are open to you for helping others, and yourself perhaps in future incarnations. Astrology detects no difference between fame and infamy; the choice is yours.

The natal chart is "the hand you’re dealt" in the game of life. It’s what you start with, the raw material from which you build yourself. Theoretically, time has no beginning and no end – astrology can project the "life" far beyond death, and in fact death itself isn’t a defined moment fated by the natal chart.

Why would death be a good thing? I have reviewed here most of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain novels, about the immortal vampire lover. Watch for another St. Germain novel this month. Yarbro has captured the essence of what it really means to be immortal – St. Germain never grows, never learns a soul-lesson, never changes though he adapts. His "life" is like a broken record (old vinyl analog type), repeating the same refrain over and over.

If you’re old enough to look back and see "the story of my life" then you know the meaning of the Tarot card the 6 of Swords. No matter where you go or what you choose, the essence of your life’s issues go with you. Working on those issues is your karma, your task, your life.

If you’re very lucky, you’ll resolve some issues and make some progress in this lifetime. If you study old people, you’ll find some who have finished life, who have accomplished most of what their natal chart alludes to, or have written about it and thus taught it to others.

When you’ve mastered your lessons well and lived a hundred years or so, what if you didn’t die and get an exciting new life? What if you had to just keep on doing the same old lessons again and again while all your friends move on? Realistically, that’s what a human turned vampire faces.

Yet fantasy worldbuilders keep finding new twists, and vastly romantic fascination in the vampire’s plight. I can’t resist a good vampire story, so I have a group of them here that I think you’ll like.

The Dresden Files, though it has some vampire characters in it, isn’t actually a vampire series. But as noted last month, Tanya Huff’s series "The Blood Books" have been made into a TV Series for the Lifetime network, titled Blood Ties. In an odd synchronicity, Blood Ties deals with fantasy elements similar to The Dresden Files, such as the Incubus.

In the Blood Ties episode, Love Hurts, an Incubus causes trouble which reveals the blazing jealousy between the vampire Henry Fitzroy (bastard son of a King who now makes his living drawing comics – in the novels he’s a romance writer.) and Vicki’s ex-partner the cop Celluci. The best scene is at the end where Vicki watches Henry and the Incubus trade tips on seducing human women.

Later, in a two parter, Heart of Ice; Heart of Fire, Henry gets kidnapped by a vampire hunter and tortured. Celluci and Vicki have to rescue him. This parallels the earlier episode where Vicki has to rescue her ex-boss who dislikes Vicki’s freehand interpretation of the rules.

Clearly the good guys, rescue even people they dislike from ugly if justifiable fates. But vampires have more to lose if they die.

Anne Bishop brings us a very complex, multi-dimensional fantasy world (with vampires) in her series from Roc, Sebastian and Belladonna. Sebastian is an incubus half-breed with magical power galore that he is only now growing into. The story is full of dark danger and sexual variations, friendship and family hatred, putting it somewhere on the gray edge of the horror genre with romance – or romance with horror.

Sebastian tells Sebastian’s story mostly from his point of view and introduces Belladonna who controls the shape of their world. Belladonna follows Belladonna’s efforts to defend the worlds of Ephemera from an "eater of worlds." A dream call brings Michael to aid Belladonna and love her with mad intensity equal to his monumental magical powers. What will they risk to save their world?

House of the Rose: Book III: Broken Gods by Michaela August, from Awe-Struck E-books is a vampire historical fantasy romance for $4.99 and is available in file formats HTML for the computer, PDF for the computer, MS Reader for the PC and Pocket PC, Mobipocket for Palm Pilot. It’s a long novel, so while lugging it around to read, I was glad it didn’t weigh anything!

Remember Dallas? It was the first prime time soap – nobody thought that concept could possibly work. But the episodes were like peanuts – once started you couldn’t stop.

House of the Rose is a multi-generation karma/ re-incarnation vampire novel series with the strangest sexual relationships you can imagine! Vampires reincarnate and regain memory of their past lives and loyalties. The series is set in the time of the Crusades and involves an immortal vampire who has lost his memory but hasn’t died – and another vampire who is systematically preventing certain memories of past lives from being retrieved.

This makes the political game of who’s who and who’s sleeping with whom and who actually committed which crimes – if there even was a crime – more complicated than Dallas fans could imagine. I recommend you start with Book I and read them in order – Book IV is due out in 2008, so you have time to catch up on weightless books.

P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast have a somewhat juvenile series from St. Martin’s called House of Night. Book I, Marked, walks us through Zoe Redbird’s being infected with the vampire change while in High School. She must move out of her parent’s home to the House of Night. Many teens die during the change, and others acquire magical talents.

We follow Zoe who has been chosen by the Goddess Nyx and given the power to summon the 5 elements. She uses this power to displace the current dominant girl among the students. The book ends with the hint of ghosts, mysteries, and bloody mayhem to come.

In Nov. 2005 I reviewed Darksome Thirst, the prequel to The Old Power Returns by Morven Westfield. I wanted to read the sequel because I had been so enchanted with the "historical" vampire novel set in the 1970’s computer labs where you had to heave magnetic tape around. The print is very small, so you get your money’s worth in this $15.95 paperback. It’s not very heavy.

We follow Alicia who now has her programming degree and a new job. By odd co-incidence, many of her old co-workers gather at her new company. We follow Alicia as she searches for the truth behind her experience of being bitten by a (real) vampire, and we get hints of the adventures of both of the evil vampires from the first novel.

She becomes involved with the Wiccan coven we met in Book I, and together with their most powerful, she and her new lover face the two vampires who have made the supernatural intrude into their reality. This is the story of humans fending off evil.

All the stories I’ve discussed here make it clear that without blood, sweat and tears, (i.e. risk, effort and pain) your soul’s journey can’t progress.

To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,  jl@simegen.com for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  

 

 

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