Scorpianne

OK, I plead guilty, I do often judge a book by its cover (and films by the poster) but  I’m not the only one. Look at this cover, and tell me it didn’t help Follow The Stone become the first ebook to sell a million copies.

A propos, I think I’ll post a few of my favourite covers here on this blog – ones where the book or film or whatever did live up to the promise of its cover.

But to get back to Scorpianne. It is SF – Speculative Fantasy, my cup of tea, rather than hard SF – and when the story opens our heroine, Lucy (no, not Scorpianne – she’s – well, you’ll see) is working as a “video-whore” with a machine supplied by Machine Co – the machine being operated not by Lucy herself but at a distance, from his own apartment or office, by the John.

Nothing can go wrong. The machine had a built-in fail-safe mechanism.

Only this time, it does. Her machine has been tampered with. A blade emerges from the tip of the penis … I am not going to tell you the story. Suffice it to say that Machine Co. is being taken over by Designer Gene Co, an interplanetary corporation  based on Mars which will, at a price, transform you into anything you fancy (any age, either sex, select your enhancements) or provide you with anything you fancy (from a mermaid – yes! – to a devil with hooves). And when it transpires that the machine had not been tampered with but rigged specially by Machine Co technicians and that Lucy should never have survived to tell the tale, she finds herself running for her life – on Earth and on Mars.

I loved it. And I must tell you it shocked even me!

More on the Vampire For Hire series

I wrote that I was reading and enjoying Vampire Moon, and that it was the first in a promised series. It turns out that four books have already been published on Kindle and a fifth one is due out very soon. So, as  I was well and truly hooked, I kept downloading them to my Kindle Reader, and reading them as fast as I downloaded them.

I’m not going to write reviews, or even give you outlines of the stories, I’m simply going to say that this is not more of your typical mass-produced teen urban fantasy. It is adult (by which I mean – here – for “grown-ups”; Samantha is a divorced Mom with two children), it is gripping, it is often moving, and it is frequently very funny.

I also discovered that J.R. Rain is a man. I always said that men write the best female protagonists (ie heroines) – Samantha Moon is one of the very best! – just as women write the best heroes – look at Lindsey Davies’s Falco, for instance (here). And thinking about it now, I realise there are no real MEN in Dickens, but look at the MEN in the novels of the Bronte sisters’ and the other 19th century women writers.

Morgan le Fay

I’ve been working on Book II of The Chatelaine and, although Morgan le Fay plays quite a large role in Book I and, being a very visual writer, I know exactly what she looks like, I found myself in an idle moment searching for images of her to  get me started on the next chapter. And I knew as soon as I saw these that this was not only exactly Morgan as I see her but surely the definitive Morgan.

It is Eva Green, of course, apearing as Morgan le Fay in Camelot. Now I’m going to watch the DVD!

Vampire for Hire

Am reading – and enjoying enough to post this! – J.R.Rain’s novel Moon Dance – Vampire for Hire – apparently the first of a promised series.

I was having trouble picturing Samantha Moon, the aptly-named heroine, then came across her describing herself (it is first person narrative and viewpoint throughout) as squatting on top of the wall “like an oversized – albeit cute – frog”. Now doesn’t that ring a bell?

Oh, and I came across a mermaid quote I rather liked. “The fountaim was of a mermaid spouting water. She easily had double-D breasts, which were probably a distinct disadvantage for real mermaids.” Something to think about.

You can find out all about the book here. And it’s available on Kindle.

TG Captions 2

Here’s another one I particularly like – perhaps because the setting is so medieval. It could come straight out of THE CHATELAINE.

The Singer rather than The Song 2: Mylène Farmer

A great favourite of mine!

 

 

 

 

 

Here she is doing a big show

And here she is, all alone and taking her clothes off slowly one by one in true French style

And here she is as a mermaid! How could I resist that?

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT

One-time super-model Geena Davis is super-sexy as amnesiac Samantha, the cute New England small-town home-maker and school-teacher making the switch to indestructible killer bitch, Charly Baltimore, her previous self. Both Hal (Tom Amandes), her small-town husband, and Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson), the street-wise private eye she teams up with, have to adjust to this change. Hal less so. He is simply shocked. But Mitch has to live with it 24/7 while they are on the run from the CIA together. “I liked Samantha,” he says at one point, shocked too. Yes, but he is falling in love with Charly.

For Charly is something of a superhero. Indestructible, as I say. And able to hold her breath for five minutes underwater (which reminds me of my previous post!) tied to a wheel in ice-cold temperatures – and after three immersions come up and kill the man who is doing this to her.

I remembered it from years ago. When I watched the DVD last night, I was particularly struck by one minor but it its own way stunning example of the contrast between Samantha and Charly, a modern and ultra-feminine Jekyll and Hyde.

Samantha 

It is the scene with the neighbourhood fat boy who is in the class she teaches at school.Early in the film she catches him smoking, speaks to him kindly, tells him smoking is harmful to his health. Later, sneaking into the town gun in hand to pick up something she needs, she catches him smoking, says, “What did I tell you about the dangers of smoking? Give me that,” takes two deep drags, passes it back to him, says “If you tell anybody you saw me here I’ll blow your head off,” and strides away. We watch the terrified kid piss himself.

Charly

Such details are the mark of a great screenplay (by Shane Black) as is the climax – one of the most dramatic climaxes I have ever seen in the cinema (don’t watch it if you have a dodgy heart) and the way that in the end she manages to integrate the two sides of her personality. Result: the perfect woman – as you see her on the farm at the end in this video clip.