Scareway to Heaven Chapter 3, or Boring Talk

The chapter starts out with Rennie at her brownstone(s), with the horribly overnamed Thane of Gondor (their dog) barking at what is presumably Turk coming home.  This opening paragraph heralds one of her patented time skips, as the next paragraph deals with her annulment, which she wouldn’t have gotten because neither she nor Stephen has grounds for it, but Kennealy-Morrison handwaves that as Rennie is the living Queen Mary Sue.  Stephen has a hilarious reaction to getting shed of this waking nightmare of a wife.

…lavish and lovely parting gifts from Stephen…

Can’t say he doesn’t understand her need to be bribed.

…who had been happy and sad and relieved to finally reach the dissolution of their wedlock.

Then why didn’t he file for divorce at the end of the second book? It was absolutely clear that she would never come back and she’d been nothing but a shitty wife to him anyway.  Plus, he could have gotten a divorce easily as Rennie had deserted him and committed adultery on numerous occasions.  But silly me, Rennie is the living Queen Mary Sue.

Originally I wasn’t sure that Rennie would qualify as a Mary Sue because she has enough flaws that, if you piled them one atop the other, the result would be the size of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. However, Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t think her self-insert has any flaws, no matter how small, but from my point of view she is an irredeemably flawed character.  I guess someone else could read this book and think Rennie is delightfully irreverent and kickass and a Strong Female Character. 

I ran across the perfect description of Rennie on a WordPress site which has a section dealing with Kennealy-Morrison:

“Anita-Blake-esque personality…(inhumanly confident, aggressive, intimidating, unapologetic, smarter than everybody else)…”, and the thing that really underlines what a self-insert Rennie is was the fact that SatireKnight is referring here to Kennealy-Morrison’s own personality as written in Strange Days.

Anyway, Rennie’s having some of the patented artificial conversation on the phone and Turk—through his sheer psychic power—determines that it’s Mary Prax on the other end of the line just because it always is.

There are another three pages of conversation between the Rennieturk that are completely uninteresting and not relevant to the plot at all, except for the information that they’ll attend Mary Prax’s show at the Fillmore East.  I wonder how much of this kind of deadwood her editor at HarperCollins had to convince her to cut.

Then there’s a bit of business which establishes how much better Rennie is than the other wives/girlfriends in the Lionheart circle.  What a surprise, huh?

We get some more pseudo-banter between the Rennieturk before the subject veers off onto the subject of Niles Clay, and the character assassination begins.  I can’t really impeach the timeline here, mostly because I’m not willing to go back into the last three books, but Kennealy-Morrison makes sure to tell us that “Lionheart had already been a major group” before Niles joined the band, but if I remember correctly from the third book (and I’m sure I do), he joined the group for their third album, and the first book in the series was set in 1966 (two years before what the writer gives here as the formation of the band) and at that time the group was only known to “the hippest of the hip,” which argues against them being a major group at that time.

And, of course, there’s some running-down of the character, including “skinny, poorly educated, working-class,” and that Niles isn’t Turk’s equal and they aren’t real friends, which is belied by the last book, where Rennie was quite threatened by his friendship with Turk and jealous that they had experiences before she entered the picture that she couldn’t be part of and accused him of wanting to fuck Turk and takes several shots at Niles’s sexuality despite the fact that he’s never depicted as anything but straight. 

Turk’s aristocratic bona fides are trotted out as well, before Kennealy-Morrison starts insulting Dorothy Manzarek.  Niles’s wife here is called Keitha (terrible name) Shiraz and is called half-Persian.  Why the writer doesn’t describe her as half-Iranian I don’t know.  As Dorothy Manzarek is Japanese, this seems like a move toward indicating who this is while still keeping plausible deniability.  She also describes Niles’s wife as a “featherweight and feather-brained ex-model.” 

So Dorotha and his “hangers-on” are telling him that he could do better if he left Lionheart, which I fully agree with.  In fact, he should have been looking for a berth in a new band since the third book because he’s fully aware of what a bitch Rennie is and the baseless grudge she’s had against him for multiple books now.  His wife and his entourage probably know that too, and want to get out ahead of the moment when Rennie convinces Turk to fire him.  I have trouble thinking they’re being unreasonable here, but Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t have any insight into why people do things, otherwise she might realize how Rennie’s contributed to this situation.  But she’s perfect so that’s ridiculous.

Then she goes on about how much Niles resents Turk, of which we have not been shown any evidence.  Sweetie, the only person in this series that he seems to resent is you, Rennie, because he’s probably figured out that you’re going to break up the band, which is an even better reason to get out now.  But Kennealy-Morrison doesn’t seem to have the psychological literacy to understand that.

Then we get almost two pages with the details of what’s called a “key-man clause,” which is too boring to repeat (but is essentially a non-compete clause–see, I explained that in less than two pages!) and which Niles is refusing to sign.  Mick Rouse, who joined Niles in the third book to try to talk sense to Turk about Rennie in the Centaur Records Showdown, has signed his and is apparently pleased as punch with it.  I guess Kennealy-Morrison forgot he didn’t like Rennie.  And of course there is class (or “caste,” as she puts it) trouble within the band, which I’m sure isn’t helped by Turk doing his “I am the Earl of Wallowinthemire and you will obey, you stinking peasants!” routine.

And, since Niles is working-class, Kennealy-Morrison lets out all her snobbery on him.  I would say Rennie does, but there’s no real difference between the writer and the self-insert now.  At least it’s an interesting insight into how she viewed Ray Manzarek.

For the most part, none of them were consciously aware of it.

So they were all idiots, then? Cool cool cool.

Except, of course, when they were—when Niles made them aware—dragging out his mean little working-class inverse snobbery and insecurity and shoving it all up everybody’s nose.

There’s an editing fail here as not even two pages ago she listed the reason for his resentment as being that Turk was drawing attention from him, and now she’s listing the cause of his resentment as Turk’s aristocratic heritage.  Are you even paying attention to what you write from one page to the next? And this is all tell-don’t-show, as the omniscient narrator lets us know this.  I’m not even sure if the writer knows she shifts unpredictably between Rennie’s POV and the narrator’s.

The Rennieturk do a little discussing about what’s to be done regarding Niles but come to no definite conclusions as Turk’s too eager to get laid to devote much time to thinking and Rennie encourages it because she’d better get pregnant as soon as she can before he rethinks the entire engagement.  The last line in the chapter is “Now what did you bring me?”

And—chapter!  I have a hard time believing that any writer couldn’t see what a gold-digging chaos agent she’d created in Rennie, but that sweet, sweet self-insert fantasy must have clouded any clarity she had with regard to this series.

Niles Clay is the only regular character in this series that I like, probably because I’m a contrarian and I see what Kennealy-Morrison wants me to think.  After he’s turned into a helpless serf with the Rennieturk’s boot on the back of his neck, there won’t be one character in this entire series willing to call Rennie on her shit.  It’s sad what’s going to happen to him, but he’ll at least have several more chapters where he can let her know what a slag she is.

Next time, chapter 4, in which a bunch of uninteresting personal shit happens, as well as something which has to do with the murder plot.

Scareway to Heaven Chapter 2, or Rennie Christ Superstar

This chapter really knocked me for a loop.  It’s the worst chapter in the series so far, consisting of virtually nothing except Rennie getting fellated over how wonderful and stainless and the soul of perfection she is, and, combined with the life challenges I was having, it made me take an extended vacation from this hot mess of a series.

Total transparency—nothing important to the murder plot happens in this chapter.  The only important thing that happens relates to the Rennieturk romance, for which I do not care one little bit.  There’s also a tremendous amount of hypocrisy toward the Lacing family here.  Again, I don’t know whether Kennealy-Morrison just forgot what she said in the previous books or hoped we did.

The fact that this entire chapter has a substantial amount of real estate devoted to shit-talking Marjorie Lacing and having Rennie exult in her victory over her hated mother-in-law also makes it pretty hard to swallow.  It’s just the sheer smug obliviousness of it all, but since the writer’s been smug and oblivious for the entire series, I suppose I can’t expect that to change now. 

“Rennie Lacing II,” said the first of that name, with immense satisfaction.

Fuck you, Rennie Stormborn.  The only reason that she’s so happy here is that having Eric and Petra’s daughter named after her is an affront to Marjorie Lacing, who continues her multi-year streak of living rent-free in Rennie’s head.  Then she proceeds to talk to the baby like the baby is a dog, which is off-putting enough that I won’t quote it.  I don’t even like kids, and I wouldn’t talk to one that way.

Eric also continues his multi-year streak of being Rennie’s spineless simp, without even the excuse of a boner as he’s a gay man.  I actually find him more repellent than Turk in this respect.

“Listen, if my brother can be Stephen IV, surely my daughter can be Rennie II,” said her brother-in-law.  “And what an inspiration her namesake godmother auntie will be to her.”

How? Maybe he’s thinking about Rennie’s writer-given talent for evading the consequences of her own actions and marrying above herself, or her talent for surrounding herself with sycophants.  I’ll give her credit—she’s very talented at these things.

Rennie has an unaccustomed moment of subtlety and recommends they keep referring to the baby by her nickname, which is Carly, around Marjorie.  Then there are three paragraphs of exposition which do nothing except provide backstory and establish what Rennie finds commendable in the people of her inner circle:  1) that they fellate her about her own perfection, and 2) physical attractiveness. 

In her descriptions of Eric, Petra (his lesbian wife), and the daughter that is Rennie’s property because of her name and her annoying-Marjorie value, the one consistency is their beauty.  Eric is the “handsome gay brother-in-law,” Petra is the “beautiful lesbian wife,” and the daughter is “gorgeous.”  Shallow enough, Rennie?

Then Kennealy-Morrison takes time out for a lament about how sad it is that Eric can’t marry his lover and Petra can’t marry hers (especially since the lovers married each other) and refers to the same-sex lovers as “their real spouses.”  Dictionary.com defines “spouse” as “either member of a married pair in relation to the other; one’s husband or wife.”  So it’s a term dealing with legal reality.  Being loved by and loving someone you’re having sex with doesn’t make them your spouse.  And, given her reluctance to write any meaty scenes between the couples, or allow Mary Prax to have any scenes with a same-sex lover, this feels like one of those looking-from-the-future moments that the writer does from time to time.

Eric, fulfilling his character function of being a spineless simp, underlines how beautifully things have turned out for Rennie, which is the overriding concern of each and every book.  There’s also some food porn that isn’t interesting enough to get into.  Petra isn’t involved in this conversation because she’s having “a liedown,” because if she were present her claim on Eric would supersede Rennie’s and no one can ever be allowed to have more of a claim on a man than our protagonist, including a wife.  And in the next couple of paragraphs does admit this by saying she “…never did share well with the other kids.” 

Then we get into more backstory about the status of her relationship with Stephen (still her husband) and the Rennieturk relationship.  In the way she’s been doing for the last few books, she advises Eric her annulment from Stephen is “just a question of signing the papers,” which it totally isn’t because neither of them has grounds for an annulment, and even if it were a divorce, Stephen is the one who would be granted it since Rennie is the party at fault, and no-fault divorce wasn’t readily available in 1969.

As far as the Rennieturk relationship goes, she’s having major cold feet because of the unconsidered hasty marriage to Stephen that she made and Eric fulfills his spineless-simp position again by giving her a pep talk, assuring her that everything will turn out beautifully for her.

Let’s take a moment to examine Eric’s character, shall we? From what Kennealy-Morrison has written, all we know about him is that he’s homosexual, that he has a long-term lover, is the heir to the Lacing family fortune as the older son, and capes relentlessly for Rennie.  He’s a pretty flat character, but there are things we can deduce based on the writing.

Eric has no familial loyalty to his brother Stephen, Rennie’s husband.  We saw how she put Stephen through the emotional wringer in the first book with her desertion and her adultery and her inability to make a clean break, and his brother’s anguish means nothing to Eric.  This isn’t because they have a bad relationship because we’ve been told by the writer that their relationship is good, so this is just an odd little blip on the radar, which turns into something else when we realize that he also feels no familial loyalty to his nameless sisters (relegated to walk-on, nonspeaking extra status in the books) or his parents.  Based on the text, I’m uncertain how much loyalty he feels to his wife and his children. 

There’s no suggestion that Robert and Marjorie Lacing have been bad parents to their children; indeed, Marjorie seems like a good parent in her attempts to protect Stephen from the suffering that Rennie is causing him, although since Stephen’s also a Rennie-simp he doesn’t appreciate her efforts.  Robert Lacing seems to be a remote father, but neither the writer nor any member of his family take him to task for it.  A case could be made for them not accepting him as homosexual, but they don’t know this.  In fact, Eric has taken steps to actively deceive them about his sexuality by getting married to a woman and having children with her.  That reads as if he’s protecting his position as the heir to the family fortune, more than trying to spare them from a reality they might find unpleasant.  Again, based on what’s in the text, it doesn’t seem that Eric loves either of his parents (and actually runs down his mother at every opportunity to curry favor with Rennie), his nameless sisters, or his brother.  Or, really, his wife and children either.  He’s a cardboard cheerleader wish-fulfillment character whose only function is to cheerlead for our protagonist.

Anyway, the exposition and backstory of Rennie and Eric’s conversation takes up fourteen goddamn pages.  FOURTEEN GODDAMN PAGES!

It’s all boring as hell so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail.  Mostly it’s about Rennie expressing doubts about marrying Turk because he’s a rich titled nobleman and Eric pooh-poohing her concerns.  And this goes on for fourteen pages.  There is no reason for any of the books in this series to be as long as they are, other than the writer’s reluctance to edit her work and kill her darlings.  I guess she must have had enough of that at HarperCollins.

Despite how much Rennie hates the Lacings, she won’t stand on her oft-stated principle of not taking their money to turn down the money General Robert Lacing offered her.

“Not alimony.  A buyout.  Or a startup.  Possibly a reward.  Or a bounty.”

Jesus Christ, this is why this book is 462 pages long.

She continues, of course.

“Whether I remarry or not, it’s mine.  I don’t know why the General would do that at this juncture, considering how I wouldn’t take a penny of filthy Lacing lucre when I lived in your midst at Hell House, or even when I moved out to starve hippishly at the Haight.”

Well, if you ignore all the times she took Lacing money and rationalized it to herself as something else with logic so labyrinthine that if you turned six corners the Minotaur would bite off your head.

And, funnily, I don’t remember Rennie doing any starving when she was living in her six-room apartment with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that she somehow could afford when she was flat broke.

So Eric the Spineless Simp insists she take the money—why the hell wouldn’t she, as she’s greedy as a pig—and there’s some wordplay where Rennie decides her father-in-law thinks she’s a whore.  No, Rennie, he thinks you’re a greedy, sexually incontinent social climber and is dealing with you accordingly.

Then we get a page-long recap of the epic five-page fellating General Lacing gave her at the family ball in the first book because his son’s suffering means nothing to him compared to an opportunity to suck his daughter-in-law’s dick about her unique special wonderfulness.

And she’s also in his will, you guys!  Which Eric says upsets his mother, but he’s a terrible child and doesn’t care.  I bet Marjorie wishes she’d swallowed.

Then we get over a page of backstory about the Lacing ancestor who inspired the misunderstanding, whom we don’t give a shit about as the Lacing arc should have been done three books ago.  Rennie keeps calling this ancestor and herself whores before she redirects to her Murder Chick rep, which doesn’t seem to bother her too much as she keeps bringing it up to people who know about it.  Oh, she always fronts that it bothers her, but ignoring it would be a better coping tactic.

Kennealy-Morrison, through her self-insert, gives us a tally of the murder victims up until now, which comes out as twenty-two because the writer keeps sticking in non-canonical murder cases that are only mentioned in the narrative and not written.

And somehow in the backstory Kennealy-Morrison tells us that Rennie and Stephen together “decided on annulment rather than divorce” for no reason that we’re given.  Although, as I’ve read all the books up until this point, it’s a retcon because Turk wanted the annulment in the fourth book for unclear reasons.  And then the writer gives us evidence that she did absolutely no research at all into annulments, since she doesn’t even know there have to be grounds like fraud or that one party was underage, in addition to others.

Here’s what she says about why her perfectly legal marriage could be annulled.

“…the wedding was just that little justice-of-the-peace elopement to Maryland, super-easy to nullify…”

Not if there was no reason at the time the marriage was contracted why it would be invalid, but we’re in the Kennealy-Morrison wish-fulfillment fantasy universe here, where everything turns out the way Rennie wants it to, for no other reason than she wants it.

And then we slog through another two pages of exposition and backstory and she hits again that the annulment makes her “a never-married woman,” which provides more proof that Kennealy-Morrison is continuing to try revirginizing Rennie for Turk because sexually active women are all sluts in her eyes.  Think I’m exaggerating? Check out my posts for Love Him Madly, where she foamed at the mouth over groupies and any possible access they might have to Turk.

Petra and Turk both show up for a page or so and Turk says he wants a lot of children.  In the fourth book, Rennie told his grandfather that the nannies would raise her children, so I doubt she actually wants any, but she’ll make the sacrifice to cement her position.

Now we spend another three pages with all the other characters jerking Turk off about how handsome and talented and rich and saintly and perfect he is.

After that a section break covers a time-jump of three days, when Turk is leaving for Atlanta to make one of his band’s tour dates.  He makes a remark that causes Rennie to slip and indicate that she’s lying to him about what’s going on with the annulment but he lets it go, just like he’s let every red flag in their toxic relationship go.

And—chapter!  Man, I should never have taken a break from this because it’s even worse when you come back to it.  As I said earlier, this is the worse chapter of the entire series (as far as what I’ve read up until this point).  Yes, it’s even worse than the chapter in the third book where Rennie gets ripped to the tits on cocaine and beats up a cop, and not only doesn’t get arrested for it but the sheriff makes the cop apologize to her for the entire incident, and the writer plays it for laughs.  Rennie is Leopold and Loeb rolled into one.

I did some reading ahead during my hiatus, and I do believe this book will be the hardest one for me to take due to the punishment dished out to Niles Clay for not sucking Rennie’s dick and turning into a brainwashed cultist.  I may start calling him Nilemond Clayzarek.  I think Ray Manzarek really managed to piss off Kennealy-Morrison by dismissing her in two lines in his autobiography, so literary vengeance must be taken.

Next time, chapter 3, during which the writer commences a nonstop character assassination against Niles, in addition to vomiting up a lot more recapping of the events of the previous book, and Rennie gets her annulment papers between chapters.

Scareway to Heaven Chapter 1, or Stayed in Manhattan

The chapter heading indicates it’s three weeks before the night of the murders.  Wait, you mean we have multiple chapters to go before we finally get to the action?

And it’s a big flaw of this series that my first reaction to seeing that heading was to scream “Wait, you mean we have to spin our wheels for four or five chapters before we get to the murders?” (Future Me:  I did some flipping through the book to see how much wheel-spinning was in store for us, and we don’t get to Niles arriving at their door until the end of chapter 7.  So seven chapters of wheel-spinning.  The Madison Square Garden Concert takes up about three chapters, which is insane.)

All that’s going to be in these first few chapters is personal would-be drama about Rennie and Turk and their perfect imaginary relationship that holds no interest for 98% of the book’s readers.  In other words, a little less talk and a lot more action, please.

Total transparency—nothing at all happens in this chapter except for Rennie having a brief exchange with Turk about how wonderful New York City is, and then we get eight pages of summary about their house, their life in New York, how they made the decision to move, and some residual Stephen Lacing-bashing.  NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS!  This is not how you start off a book, people!

So the chapter starts out the way anyone who’s familiar with Rennie would expect:  she lets her New York provincial flag fly.

God, she loved New York.

This was a joke in one season of Archer, when Ray’s brother kept calling it “New York City,” and Archer saying he could just say New York.  In my opinion, that’s a New York provincial attitude, as a person can say that they’re from New York and not be from New York City (Ithaca, Rochester, Albany, Syracuse, the Finger Lakes region are all covered by “New York”).  It implies that there’s nothing of note inside the County and State of New York other than New York City.

Why is she so crazy about New York City?

…this was her home:  clever, vital, grimy, sublimely uncaring of anything beyond its rivers.

If you take out grimy, you might as well be describing Rennie, or Rennie as she sees herself.

Turk, who’s with her, serves as her sounding board and simps for her love for New York City.

It’s a real city, like London…[l]ike Rome must have been, back in the day.

The saying “back in the day” is a mild anachronism, but I’ll let it go because we have more of Rennie’s New York chauvinism in store for us.

“Oh, we’re better than Rome.  We’re the mightiest city that ever was.”

One just knows that if Patricia Kennealy-Morrison had been born in Washington, DC, or Chicago or New Orleans, Rennie would be saying the same thing about those cities.  But fuck North Babylon, NY, right?

Since Kennealy-Morrison lived in the East Village for almost her entire adult life, we now get some local color, as the Rennieturk are coming back from the Second Avenue Deli with food.  Apparently it’s half a block from their brownstone(s).  Then the writer uses the word “wodge,” which I wasn’t familiar with but is used correctly, even though it is another Britishism that Rennie shouldn’t know and is not appetizing in terms of a sandwich (it means lump or wad). Then we find out it’s mid-November, as if to rub the reader’s nose in how much wheel-spinning is in the offing.

And now, an entire book late, we get a reason for why the Rennieturk moved to New York City.  It’s because New York City is closer to England than Los Angeles is and Turk has aristocratic responsibilities since his grandfather died.  But he didn’t have those responsibilities when they first moved there, at the start of the last book, so this explanation doesn’t hold water.  Besides, we all know the real reason is because the writer is a New York chauvinist and Turk is a cardboard automaton simp who would never stop her from doing anything at all because she calls all the shots in the relationship, just the way she’s done with every man she’s been involved with.

In order to divert us from Turk’s simp status, the writer tells us that “he intended that he and Rennie should live like grownups: six months a year in New York, split the rest of their time between L.A. and England, schedule subject to change without notice.” Something I’ve noticed Kennealy-Morrison does a lot—eschews the use of the word “adult” in favor of “grownup.”  It just makes her characters sound more childish.  Plus, why does he want to go to Los Angeles at all? Didn’t he have that wealth flex about having home recording studios at his each and every home? At least we find out that Rennie, after three years, has finally given up her impossible six-room apartment across the street from Golden Gate Park with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge that she could afford when she was flat broke.

The writer then gives us some info about Rennie’s native New Yorker status.

Not without some snobbishness about Staten Island, though.  And that’s our segue into Rennie’s scheduled Stephen Lacing-bashing for the evening!

Then she’d met and eloped with young corporate lawyer Stephen Lacing, and he’d made her drop out of grad school and dragged her out west to his hometown by the Golden Gate. 

In Ungrateful Dead, the first book of the series, there is no indication that he forced her to drop out of graduate school.  It was never spelled out for us that she’d dropped out, as she’d been either a year or two ahead of schedule because she was so ungodly young when she started college.  She did leave during the spring semester, but since he’d left her there to follow him to San Francisco, one could assume that he’d allowed her to finish out the semester (or the quarter, depending on how the school was set up). 

The case for him forcing her to move to San Francisco is a little more solid, but only because neither of them had any discussions prior to the wedding about where they would live, whether Rennie would work, and/or whether they wanted children.  Because they never had one conversation of any substance before they got married, this is really on her.

It hadn’t taken her long to cut herself loose,

Kennealy-Morrison’s trying to make Rennie sound like a decisive badass Strong Female Character here, which she is not in any way.  If she’d been as decisive as this makes her sound, she would have been divorced from Stephen way before Turk told her she had to get an annulment and the writer somehow thinks there’s such a thing as a no-fault annulment, which there isn’t.  Again, because I don’t think I can stress this strongly enough, an annulment is only granted by the judge if there are grounds why the marriage was invalid at the time it was contracted.  In Rennie’s case, there are no grounds.  Stephen does have grounds for divorce (adultery and desertion), but he can’t get a divorce on his own initiative because Kennealy-Morrison says no and doesn’t seem to understand that no-fault divorce also wasn’t a thing in the late Sixties.

We get some more unintentional insight into Rennie’s character when Kennealy-Morrison tells us that Turk had given Rennie a list of neighborhoods where they might buy a house, and she checked them out with no intention of living in any of them and presenting the East Village place as the only option, “when they ended up living where she had planned on them living all along.”  Rennie has disregarded Turk’s input in the fairly weighty matter of where they will live and done exactly what she pleased, the way she always does.

And now she starts running down New York neighborhoods that don’t measure up to her standards.  But I thought New York City was the bestest ever place in the whole wide world, Rennie! Don’t expect me to believe that any part of it is less than perfect in your eyes!

It had been great fun imperiously ruling out vast tracts of Manhattan real estate.

Just like the queen she will never be in reality. 

Upper West Side:  too uptown.  Upper East Side:  too uptight.  West Village:  possible, but only with care—Near West Village:  smug; Far West Village: thugs.  Gramercy Park:  gorgeous houses, but however much Turk and Rennie might pretend that they were quiet and well-behaved…

Here Kennealy-Morrison gets in a flex about how many castles Turk owns; no word on whether that includes the not-castle in Nichols Canyon.

Anyway, this running-down of wherever Rennie doesn’t want to live goes on for another half a page, then the East Village is introduced and gets four and a half pages about how it’s the hippest possible place for hip people to live and they go looking for houses and find them and then there’s renovation and blah blah yada yada yada bored skipping.

In fact, except for an upcoming flashback to a conversation that Rennie has with Mary Prax and the conversation with Turk at the beginning of the chapter, this entire chapter is nothing but summary about how beautifully things are turning out for Rennie.  Since it’s as boring as it is, I’m only going to pick out a few more highlights because this has no relevance to the actual plot of the book except that the Rennieturk lives in the East Village and Niles will come knocking on the door with murder fears at the end of chapter 7.

Rennie has another flex on how rich Turk is, with the wording being almost exactly the same as another flex from the previous book on how rich the Duke of Robinhood is.  There’s a perfunctory demur about how Rennie has always paid her share in past relationships—I guess Stephen Lacing just slipped her mind—or at least offered to pay her share and the men would never let her.  Strong Female Character, y’all!

There were also tenants in all three of the brownstones Turk blew his cash on who had to be “relocated” and paid “colossal bribes” to get the proles out of their would-be castle.

At least we do find out what the live-in assistant’s husband got hired for—he’s a “handyman.”

And she calls their would-be castle “a brilliant investment for the Duchy of Locksley.”  How so? The fucking duchy won’t see a penny—pardon me, a pence—out of it.  It’s just the author jacking off about how much money her self-insert has access to through her adulterous lover.

Both of them have left their sports cars in Los Angeles as they don’t want them getting stolen, as there’s no real need to have them in New York City.  Turk loves the anonymity, except when he doesn’t.  And we get some more violent psychotic fantasies and talk out of Rennie, mentioning putting bear traps in their garbage cans to thwart fans searching through their trash and their poor sad doggo “rip[ping] their (note—anyone who “tries to mess with” Turk) throat out.”  Mary Prax calls Turk “a stud” for taking the subway.  How Rennie doesn’t kill her on the spot out of terror and paranoia is a mystery to me. Then there’s some uninteresting stuff about the tour and Rennie wanting to “be on a beach in the Bahamas,” which is a foreshadowing for Daydream Bereaver.

And—chapter!  The chapter isn’t as hard to take as the one in the previous book, where it was nothing but Rennie and Baron Hollywood Hogan jawing at each other and him fellating her for her awesomeness, but it’s plenty bad on its own.  We don’t need all this detail about the house and all its works—it contributes exactly nothing to the plot. If someone picked up this book and hadn’t read any of the rest of the series, I can’t imagine many people would make it past this chapter.  It’s that dull.  So not only are the last chapter and the epilogue now reserved for how beautifully things turned out for Rennie, it’s also the first chapter now.

Next time, chapter 2, during which the Lacing family—minus Stephen and Marjorie—come to visit and Rennie is psychotically hypocritical about how she feels, and Stephen is going to give her all the money in their divorce—pardon me, revirginizing annulment—because he’s just that whipped and that’s what the Queen Emma Peel deserved.  The wish-fulfillment is embarrassing here.

Scareway to Heaven Prologue, or Snow Night

The book does start off with a page and a half of “Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements” where Kennealy-Morrison lets her New York chauvinist flag fly.  She also thanks Lenny Kaye and Bebe Buell, who provided the blurbs on the backs of two of the books in the series. 

And now I see the most shocking thing I’ve read in the entire series:

Thanks to the Usual Suspects, my eagle-eyed betas who are really alphas…

And I’m choosing not to list the names, but how the hell could any of these people have read these books and not pointed out any of the numerous flaws?

After that are the lyrics for the “Walking with Tigers” song, and then the dedication.  It seems to be dedicated to her nieces and nephews, as well as the children of a few friends and makes a “The Kids Are Alright” reference.

Now for the prologue itself!

The place and time are established as “New York, December 1969.”  In case I haven’t advised of this previously, the entire prologue is in italics and has been in all the other books.

My supposition about the cover, that it’s meant to convey a snowy atmosphere, is borne out by the text, as we wait for the doors of the Fillmore East to open with the crowd, which consists of “…young people, in Navy peacoats and Army-surplus jackets and long Victorian cloaks and vintage furs and embroidered sheepskin Afghan coats…like steerage passengers on the Titanic…” We’re also told they’re waiting for the last show of the night.  Then there’s a little historical background about the building before the doors open in the next paragraph.

The next paragraph is color detail about the venue, including a “VIP hideaway” in one of the lighting and sound booths so “visiting notables” can watch the show without having to mingle with the common rabble.  I have to think this will be important in terms of the murder plot, but who knows.

The narrator is snotty about the dressing rooms, calling them “utilitarian” and sniffing at “the kind of dreary décor that would not be out of place in a politburo meeting hall in a drab city in Bulgaria.”  Well, it isn’t New York City, so how could it be anything but drab?

The next section introduces us to Bill Graham, the owner of the Fillmore East, and someone named Kip Cohen, who is the theater’s managing director, and someone else called Kim Yarborough, the security chief, who’s in the “Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements” section and whose inclusion is explained by “for keeping the peace and being from the ‘hood.”  Graham goes onstage to open the show and we don’t find out who’s playing, except that they’re nervous. 

The next section takes up after the show, at two AM, and we get three paragraphs of description of the street that I will admit is pretty, along with two paragraphs about where people have gone and what they’re doing after the show.  The writing here is fine, probably because it has nothing to do with Rennie or her cultists.

Finally, we get two paragraphs related to the upcoming murder plot.  Three people, whom the author sees fit to call out as “stoned,” are on East Second Street and have arrived at “the old cemetery,” so I have no clue as to the name of this place.  Servant series flashback!

So they climb over the cemetery gates—if they look like the one on the back cover, it doesn’t seem like a big deal—and we find out the three consist of “two young men, and a young woman whom they both pull up after them.”  We know one of the men is Niles Clay (presumably), and the other two are the first two murders of the book.  We also know Murdered Girl is a proper, unathletic woman who can’t climb a fence without help.

And they pulled her up by the arms, which makes me wonder why she doesn’t have two dislocated arms.  Fuck us, that’s why!

Anyway, they arrive at “the lee of one of the largest and most dramatic monuments” and sit down.  Of course it has to be a dramatic monument.  What else is good enough for Rennie fucking Stride?

Then we have a three-sentence final paragraph, which isn’t awful but there could be a little more detail to tantalize a reader.

After a while, it grows quiet.  One figure leaves; another enters, and leaves again shortly after.  Then everything is very, very quiet.

I have to say I’m rather surprised that Kennealy-Morrison hasn’t made Niles either a murder victim or a bad guy, but I guess the thrill of making him essentially the slave of the Rennieturk was too appetizing a prospect for her to turn down.  My preference would have been for him to die, but that wouldn’t be enough of a punishment in the writer’s eyes for daring not to worship her or fear her.

Next time, chapter 1, wherein we get a metric fuckton of New York chauvinism, some retconning about the Rennieturk’s move there, and another metric fuckton of boredom about their neighborhood and the purchase of the brownstone(s) and this entire chapter could be cut without damaging the book.  Back to the multi-chapter wheel-spinning, I guess.

Part the Tenth, or Scareway to Heaven

Intro, or the Stuff Before the Book is Opened

Scareway to Heaven:  Murder at the Fillmore East, the sixth book in the Rock & Roll Murders, was published in 2014, according to the copyright page.  Amazon.com lists the publication date as October 27, 2014, and this book again doesn’t have the ISBN number listed except for in the bar bode.  This was almost two years after the publication of the previous book in the series, Go Ask Malice: Murder at Woodstock.  Between that book and this one, she published the books Rock Chick:  A Girl and Her Music:  The Jazz & Pop Writings, 1968-1971, on July 11, 2013, and Tales of Spiral Castle:  Stories of the Keltiad, on June 19, 2014.  Son of the Northern Star, her historical novel about Guthrum the Dane, was listed in the Also By page of the last book as coming out in 2013.  The Also By page in this book just lists the book title without indication that it’s forthcoming or when it might be published, which implies the book is already published.  That particular book never was published.

On the Also By page, the author lists herself as Patricia Kennealy Morrison, and the Keltiad books are listed first, under the heading “The Books of the Keltiad.”  There are now eight books in this series, as Tales of Spiral Castle was the last Keltiad book.  The Beltain Queen and The Cloak of Gold exist, if at all, in only fragmentary, unpublished form.

Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison is listed after the Keltiad, then ROCK CHICK: A Girl and Her Music: The Jazz & Pop Writings 1968-1971 (the all-caps is an interesting choice), and then Son of the Northern Star.

And after that comes The Rock & Roll Murders: The Rennie Stride Mysteries.  All books in the series are listed, including the last published book in the series, Daydream Bereaver, which is listed as forthcoming, with no specific publication date.

The title of this book is a twist on the title of the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven,” which strikes me as odd since there seems to have been some one-sided bad blood between Patricia Kennealy-Morrison and Robert Plant, according to a story in her interview in the book Rock Wives. Plus, the song wouldn’t be released for another two years.

The Psychedelic Art lettering and the Blood Guitar, the two consistent motifs of the series covers, are both back.  This time the title, subtitle, and author name are in the upper left-hand corner, with the title in violet, the lines between the title and subtitle and subtitle and author name in teal-green, the subtitle in yellow-green, and the author name in a darker lavender than the series title and subtitle at the bottom of the page.

The central image of the cover is the marquee of the Fillmore East, with the façade of the building itself only solid-looking and detailed where the light from the marquee strikes it.  Otherwise, the building is insubstantial and sketched in.  A group of gray and black silhouettes of people are clustered around what we can only assume is the front entrance to the building, beneath the marquee.  A row of tiny lit bulbs is at the bottom of the marquee and the Blood Guitar mimics the vertical lines of the marquee:  the top of the guitar is at the top of the sign and the body of the guitar is at the bottom of the marquee.  The Blood Guitar is not done as well on this cover; I can tell it’s a Fender Stratocaster, but the actual shape of the guitar is warped.  It also drips onto the pavement but none of the silhouettes notice.

This is the weakest cover of the series, as far as I’m concerned.  Visually, it’s uninteresting as the only colors used on the cover, aside from the Blood Guitar and the title, subtitle, and author name, are variations on black, white, and a blue-toned dark gray.  The book is set in winter, so the artist is probably trying for a cold feel, but interesting things can be done with a limited color palette.  This isn’t it.

I’d rank the book covers as follows, from worst to best.

1. Scareway to Heaven
2. Love Him Madly
3. Go Ask Malice
4. Ungrateful Dead
5. California Screamin’
6. A Hard Slay’s Night

Patterns with the covers are becoming clear enough for me to predict what would have been done with the cover for Ruby Gruesday:  Murder on the Rock Limited.  The first two books of the series had blue as a background color and an object as the central image.  The next two books had brown as a background color and used interior settings with a central object.  The next two books had outdoor settings with a multicolored background for one and a monotone background for the other and a vertical central image located at the right-hand edge of the cover.  The first three covers did not have people; the next three covers do.  Since I haven’t done Daydream Bereaver yet, which would be both the first book in a new two-grouping and a new three grouping, I’ll hold my thoughts about Ruby Gruesday’s possible cover.

Something different on the back cover:  there’s a little wrought-iron fence with a gate, which I can only assume is the gate to the cemetery which will be mentioned in the back cover text.

As always, the back cover text starts out with a variation on a well-known Timothy Leary saying:  “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead…”

Reporter Rennie Stride and her superstar guitar-stud and part-time aristocrat fiancé, Turk Wayland—

Too many descriptors for Turk here.  And how can you be a part-time aristocrat? That’s like being a part-time Caucasian.  You either are or you aren’t.  And the writer overused the word “superstar” in the last book to the point where it looks like poison ivy to me.

–have settled down in a historic brownstone in New York’s East Village…

Uh, no.  We were told at the start of the last book that the Rennieturk liked this brownstone, but Turk wanted to flex on what a big…fortune he has, so he bought two other brownstones on either side of the one they wanted because it wasn’t big enough.  And if this was a historic home, wouldn’t they have had to get permission to make changes to it? By “historic” I have to assume it was designated a historic landmark, which would have put the kibosh on the whole renovation enterprise.

…following Turk’s band Lionheart’s…

That’s a remarkably awkward phrasing, but she does those sometimes.

…epic tour closer—a shockingly spectacular four-hour Madison Square Garden concert.

Man, I hope that Madison Square Garden concert doesn’t take up the first four chapters of the book. But I guess Kennealy-Morrison had to make up for giving Lionheart a bad performance at Woodstock in the last book, as he’s the “co-protagonist” of the series.  Despite being sidelined for most of the last book.

Even more shocking…

That’s an awkward segue there, but please continue.

…two dead people in a snow-filled cemetery, and they didn’t end up there the way you’d think.

What, you mean they didn’t die? Then how are they dead? And I don’t like the use of “you” here.  It seems too conversational.

More shocking still:

Lionheart’s lead singer, Niles Clay, comes pounding on Rennie and Turk’s door the day after the Garden concert, confessing that he may have been the one who killed them.

This in itself indicates that Niles isn’t the killer, despite the fact that Rennie hates him more than Marjorie Lacing, her possibly ex-mother-in-law—no word on where the divorce, oh pardon me, the groundless annulment, is—and I would think he’d get killed so Rennie can be the lead singer for Lionheart and get all the attention, forever and ever, amen, but somehow that’s not going to happen.  And he hasn’t confessed to anything—he’s just told them he might have killed them.  In other words, he doesn’t know.

Nothing new, for Murder Chick…

For somebody who took offense on the regular at being called Murder Chick, she’s adopted it with gusto to show her essential specialness and superiority.

So Rennie’s task, at Turk’s desperate behest…

I love this—it proves that, if left to her own devices, Niles Clay would fry in the electric chair at Sing-Sing while she roasted marshmallows on his smoldering corpse.

…is to prove Niles didn’t do it.

Really, though, isn’t investigating a murder the job of the police?  But there I go with my pesky logic again.  When will I learn?

Though since the two loathe, detest, hate and despise each other…

All four of those words mean the same general thing, but why use one word when four will do?

…that may be more of a problem than any of them thinks…

So she can only prove someone didn’t commit murder if she likes them? Looking back on the rest of the series…

The canned bio is the same as the one on the back of the fifth book, and the author photograph is the same.  The interesting bio was on the back of Rock Chick, where the author was called a “Celtic priestess,” which doesn’t mean anything.  Celtic isn’t a religion.  She stopped called herself a witch, never called herself a Wiccan, and seems to have stopped calling herself a Pagan by this point, so I don’t know where she is religion-wise here.  The portrayal of Rennie seems to indicate she may have returned to Catholicism, but I have no proof of this so take it with a grain of salt.

While I was looking for the publication date of this book, I went over to Amazon.com and found her author page.  Here she is listed as “Chevaliere the Rev. Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, DTJ” and gives Jim Morrison (called here “her husband” without any caveats or addendums) credit for her writing fiction, as he “encouraged” it.  That’s not the way she portrayed it in her memoir, but whatever.

The songs that bookend the book are “Walking with Tigers” and “Steel Roses,” both of which are far too long to get radio airplay in the Sixties, as is traditional for the songs that the author writes.

Next time, the prologue, in which we get a description of the Fillmore East, meet Bill Graham in passing, some local color, and a mini-summary of the murders.  Cool, last time she forgot the murder info in the prologue.