Crescendo: Prologue
Jan. 16th, 2012 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zelda_queenZeldaQueen: You guys knew it was coming and now it is here: Crescendo, the sequel to the utterly fucked-up novel Hush, Hush. Over the next twenty-five chapters worth of sporkings, we're going to be treated to lovely amounts of hypocrisy, ill logic, slut shaming, general idiocy, and all the previous abuse vibes we know and hate. Not only that, but this book makes it blindingly obvious, if it wasn't so before, that this is all cashing in off of Twilight. That being the case, feel free to take shots when the many New Moon similarities pop up.
Projection Room Voices: Starting Media in 3...2...1...
Prologue
ZeldaQueen: Before we start on the prologue itself, there are a few thank-yous that Fitzpatrick put at the start of the book:
To Jenn Martin and Rebecca Sutton, for your friendship superpowers!
ZeldaQueen: Considering what she thinks an average friendship amongst teenage girls is like, I don't want to know what Fitzpatrick considers "friendship superpowers" to entail...
Thanks also to T. J. Fritsche, for suggesting the character name Ecanus.
ZeldaQueen: Now I can't find much on that name, but apparently Ecanus really was in the Bible and... was somehow connected to the name Ethanus, scribe for Ezra? On a more humorous note, I have no idea how accurate it is, but this site has Ecanus as the angel of writers, giving them original ideas. If that really is the case, then I'm wondering if suggesting to Fitzpatrick that she invoke the name of Ecanus was some sort of hint from the friend on the quality of her writing.
Right. On with the prologue proper!
We open in Coldwater, Maine, fourteen months in the past. It's a dark and stormy night, which is certainly not going to be symbolik or anything, I'm sure.
It quickly becomes apparent that the prologue is centered around Nora's father, one Harrison Grey. Viewers who sat through the Hush, Hush review might remember a few things about him, chiefly that he was murdered about a year before the events of that book, and that he had a rather disturbing habit of chopping down trees with a chainsaw when his favorite teams lost a game. We start off this prologue learning even more about Harrison, namely that he's a moron. We can tell he's a moron because he bought a nine-room, very large house, with apparently no heating system beyond the fireplaces, in fucking Maine, and it hadn't occurred to him that it would take a lot of firewood to keep the place heated. Sadly, this is about on par with the general intelligence level of every other character in this book.
Anyway, after setting up that it's cold, miserable, windy, and so on and so forth, Fitzpatrick informs us that the phone rings. Or rather, we're told that "The phone shrilled". Shrilled? Really? Um, I know it can technically describe the sound a telephone makes, but it really makes me picture less of a ringing sound and more of the sound a shrewish, scolding old lady makes.
So Harrison answers the phone, figuring that it's Vee. Incidentally, he describes Vee as "daughter’s best friend, who
had the annoying habit of calling at the latest possible hour the night before homework was due". So apparently Vee is so irritating that even a side character who will be shoved in a fridge very soon can see it. Lovely.
No, it is not Vee! Instead, we get heavy breathing on the other end andphone sex ensues a Mysterious Person tells Harrison that they need to meet as soon as possible.
Now, I'm going to tell you guys what happens next, in concise terms. Harrison says he can be over there in an hour, and he is very scared at receiving this call. He drinks a few glasses of water, loosens his tie, and informs the readers via infodump that he implicitly has been on the run for the past fifteen years, and while he knew the call would come, he had been secretly hoping it would not.
There. That's what happens. Fitzpatrick stretches that all out for a far too long, and it just gets very boring. "Too drawn out" pretty much describes this prologue, really. It's obvious that this was written to actually tie in to the novel instead of just pounding out an attention-grabbing opening, like she did with the first book. And while it's not bad that she's writing for a series now, it's still a boring prologue and I honestly keep feeling restless during it. That should not be happening.
*shakes head* Right. Harrison sets off to visit the Mysterious Person, who of course lives in the seedy part of Portland. Were you expecting anything other than the usual cliches? We're told that it has been fifteen years since he's been to this place and...wait. Hold on, back it up.
These two - Harrison and this Mysterious Person have been involved in some conspiracy for the past fifteen years.
Those fifteen years, at least for Harrison, involve staying hidden and running. From what we'll learn later, the Mysterious Person has every reason to do the same.
And yet apparently this Mysterious Person has the luxury of staying in one spot for fifteen years. Really.
Erm, am I the only one who finds that stupid?
Well, in any case, Harrison heads on up and brings his... car gun with him. I call it his car gun because we got no mention of him taking it out from the house, so I can only conclude that he keeps it in his car. I might also add that he claims he never fired a shot since college (when he practiced in a shooting gallery) and generally acts like it's unexpected to have to use it, which implies that he doesn't keep the gun for standard safety, but instead just has it randomly lying around.. Was Fitzpatrick trying to reinforce the idea that Harrison Grey was insane?
So, car gun stowed at the back of his pants waistband (really), Harrison goes up to the door. We get some SUBTLE FORESHADOWING about how he might be being followed up there, and "a shadow move behind the lace curtains". *snerk* Yes, lace curtains. Lace curtains, on the windows of a house on the wrong side of the tracks, owned by a Mysterious Person who is heavily into secrecy and keeping off of the radar. Lace curtains on the windows of that house.
God, this level of stupidity does not bode well.
So the Mysterious Person steps out, and tells Harrison that Nora is in trouble. Well, he doesn't come right out and say that it's Nora. There's a lot of dithering around and vague talk about how an unnamed sixteen-year-old associated with Harrison is in trouble, but c'mon. We all read Hush, Hush, we know who Harrison's sixteen-year-old daughter is, and we know how everyone, apparently including the Suethor, is trying to kill her. So I'm not going to insult your intelligence and pretend we don't know who it is. It's fucking Nora.
Still speaking in vague terms, which are supposed to be cryptic but are just annoying, the Mysterious Person lays out the plan
"'Once she turns sixteen, he’ll come for her. You need to take her far away. Someplace where he’ll never find her.'
Harrison shook his head. 'I don’t understand—'
He was cut off by a menacing glare. 'When we made this agreement, I told you there would be things you couldn’t understand. Sixteen is a cursed age in—in my world. That’s all you need to know,' he finished brusquely."
ZeldaQueen: As you can see, the characters in these books still have nary a frigging clue as to how to hatch a decent plan.
That quote up there? That's all we've gotten so far as to what's going on. The Mysterious Person has told Harrison that Nora will be pursued by unnamed parties when she turns sixteen, and apparently the Mysterious Person knew of this risk since she was born. Soooo... if the Mysterious Person is so determined to head the evil people after Nora off at the pass, why didn't he warn Harrison of all of this fifteen years ago, when Nora was born? There's no reason why he couldn't! He clearly already told him that something would be happening! Why didn't he take the opportunity back then to say "When she turns sixteen, someone will come after her. When that time comes, you'll need to pack up your family, cut the ties to whatever life you're leading, and go into hiding". Heck, if he had done that, it would have let them be even more prepared, because Harrison would already know what was going to happen, and would already be getting ready to take his family and run! Seriously, are these people not aware that plans tend to go better when people are given more time to prepare for them?
*shakes head* No, clearly they don't. I guess that between Mrs. Grey's terrible taste in husbands and Mr. Grey's utter cluelessness, we can see where Nora inherited her general idiocy.
So the two men fart around for some time, until Harrison finally says that he understands and will do everything the Mysterious Person has said. At this point, Harrison notices that the Mysterious Person is just as young now as he was when they were rooming together in college.
I must stop for one more minute. This dude is pretty clearly a Nephilim. He's not aging, he knows about fallen angels, and he's trying to protect Nora from them (and yes, we know that's what that is, because we read the first book). He's not aging, so he's a Nephilim who has sworn an oath of fealty to a fallen angel (word of Fitzpatrick is that the age a Nephilim is at when the oath is sworn is the age they are stuck at for an eternity).
Once again I must ask, do the fallen angels just not care what the Nephilim get up to when it's not the two week when they're being possessed? Because apparently the fallen angel that this Mysterious Person is sworn to doesn't care that his vassel is off attending college and whatnot.
Okay, okay, nearly done here. Harrison is not able to see well enough that he passes off the Mysterious Person's youth to being a trick of the shadows. Somehow though, he does see well enough to notice all of the details of a tiny burn in the shape of a clenched fist on the Mysterious Person's throat. Harrison goes all wibbly at this because OH NO, A SMALL BURN! HE HAS BEEN BRANDED LIKE CATTLE! The Mysterious Person clearly thinks that it's no big deal, and says that he and a friend have formed a group to fight back against the fallen angels. Again, they don't just say they're fighting the fallen angels, but we already know this stuff. Harrison keeps being freaked out, saying "They branded you". I really don't get why this is so horrific to him. The Mysterious Person is the one who started the group, so one would think he voluntarily burned himself. It clearly doesn't bother him, and it's not like it's a gruesome disfigurement. Near as I can tell, this is more SUBTLE FORESHADOWING, this time to let us know that OH LOOK, THIS GROUP IS SO RADICAL, THEY HAVE THEIR MEMBERS BURN THEMSELVES LOOK AT THAT!
I think Fitzpatrick needs to get out of the house more, or at least look up some of the more extreme things people have done for initiation into gangs.
So Harrison tries to tell the Mysterious Person a little about Nora, only for the Mysterious Person to cut him off and remind him that dude, evil fallen angels after her? The less he tells people about his daughter, the better? Yeah?
Finally, they conclude their little chat. Harrison sets off for his car and all seems relatively well until suddenly, a shot rang out. Really. And wouldn't you know it, it came from the Mysterious Person's house.
Of course, Harrison jumps up and runs back to save the Mysterious Person. He sneaks around to the backyard, because apparently the Mysterious Person went in the backyard for no reason in the middle of the night? The intruder that shot the Mysterious Person dragged him out in the space of time it took Harrison to walk half a block? I honestly don't know. In any case, Harrison readies his gun, only to be interrupted by the Mysterious Person mindraping him a message to get the fuck out of Dodge. Like I said, Nephilim. Harrison refusing, not wanting to let his friend die, and shoots the intruder twice.
As everyone might have imagined, this does nothing but get the attention of the intruder. We're told that the intruder is a young man with dark hair, which is pretty obviously Fitpatrick waving around a red herring. It might actually have worked well, if she didn't spend the entire last book trying to trick us into thinking Patch was the one trying to kill Nora (That is to say, he was the one trying to kill Nora that anyone actually focused on. Yes, I'm well aware that murdering Nora was his plan for the first half or so of the book).
Apparently there's an allyway directly behind the Mysterious Person's backyard, because the shooter drags Harrison into it. No, I have no idea how that works. He just drags him. It's not like he pulls him over a fence or anything. Regardless, Harrison is all upset and knows he's dying, and is all worried about Nora. He tries to find out that intruder's identity, because "Maybe he could warn Nora from the next world—a world that was closing in on him like a thousand falling feathers painted black".
You can tell the first part of that quote is meant to be SUBTLE FORESHADOWING for later, because it comes right the fuck out of nowhere. Seriously, that's the first time we've ever had Harrison think about the possibility of an afterlife or contacting the living from it.
You can tell the second part is being symbolik, because that's the first time the third-person narrator has told Harrison's story in such pointless and random prose.
So the intruder tells Harrison that "You thought wrong. It’s definitely too late". Harrison freaks out that the guy can seemingly read his mind and wait what??? Since when can fallen angels (and again, yes, we know who the immortal bad boy with a gun is, Fitzpatrick) read minds? It was established in Hush, Hush that they could plant images into human minds, but they can also read them? Well shit, that somehow made Patch's interactions with Nora a whooooole lot creepier. Thanks Fitzpatrick, I needed that!
Even ignoring that random revelation though, the fallen angel's response doesn't make much sense. Harrison is thinking in the present. He is thinking "Maybe I can warn Nora from the afterlife!" The fallen angel's response is in the past tense, implying that Harrison had already had such thoughts before that moment. Wouldn't it be more accurate for teh fallen angel to say something like "Think again. It's definitely too late" or "You'd like to think that, but it's definitely too late"?
Bah. Whatever. Harrison gets plugged and dies, the end, sad story.
I'd just like to end this by pointing out that it's specifically stated in Hush, Hush, that Harrison Grey's death was considered a random act of violence, with nothing suspicious or strange about it. Here, we see that he left his house in the middle of the night, with no explanation or attempt to tell his family why, went to a place in Portland he really would have no reason to go to, and was murdered in the backyard of the house his friend from college lived in.
Yes, that certainly doesn't seem suspicious in the slightest.
God, the stupid hurts!
Onward to: Chapter 1
Back to: Table of Contents
Projection Room Voices: Starting Media in 3...2...1...
Prologue
ZeldaQueen: Before we start on the prologue itself, there are a few thank-yous that Fitzpatrick put at the start of the book:
To Jenn Martin and Rebecca Sutton, for your friendship superpowers!
ZeldaQueen: Considering what she thinks an average friendship amongst teenage girls is like, I don't want to know what Fitzpatrick considers "friendship superpowers" to entail...
Thanks also to T. J. Fritsche, for suggesting the character name Ecanus.
ZeldaQueen: Now I can't find much on that name, but apparently Ecanus really was in the Bible and... was somehow connected to the name Ethanus, scribe for Ezra? On a more humorous note, I have no idea how accurate it is, but this site has Ecanus as the angel of writers, giving them original ideas. If that really is the case, then I'm wondering if suggesting to Fitzpatrick that she invoke the name of Ecanus was some sort of hint from the friend on the quality of her writing.
Right. On with the prologue proper!
We open in Coldwater, Maine, fourteen months in the past. It's a dark and stormy night, which is certainly not going to be symbolik or anything, I'm sure.
It quickly becomes apparent that the prologue is centered around Nora's father, one Harrison Grey. Viewers who sat through the Hush, Hush review might remember a few things about him, chiefly that he was murdered about a year before the events of that book, and that he had a rather disturbing habit of chopping down trees with a chainsaw when his favorite teams lost a game. We start off this prologue learning even more about Harrison, namely that he's a moron. We can tell he's a moron because he bought a nine-room, very large house, with apparently no heating system beyond the fireplaces, in fucking Maine, and it hadn't occurred to him that it would take a lot of firewood to keep the place heated. Sadly, this is about on par with the general intelligence level of every other character in this book.
Anyway, after setting up that it's cold, miserable, windy, and so on and so forth, Fitzpatrick informs us that the phone rings. Or rather, we're told that "The phone shrilled". Shrilled? Really? Um, I know it can technically describe the sound a telephone makes, but it really makes me picture less of a ringing sound and more of the sound a shrewish, scolding old lady makes.
So Harrison answers the phone, figuring that it's Vee. Incidentally, he describes Vee as "daughter’s best friend, who
had the annoying habit of calling at the latest possible hour the night before homework was due". So apparently Vee is so irritating that even a side character who will be shoved in a fridge very soon can see it. Lovely.
No, it is not Vee! Instead, we get heavy breathing on the other end and
Now, I'm going to tell you guys what happens next, in concise terms. Harrison says he can be over there in an hour, and he is very scared at receiving this call. He drinks a few glasses of water, loosens his tie, and informs the readers via infodump that he implicitly has been on the run for the past fifteen years, and while he knew the call would come, he had been secretly hoping it would not.
There. That's what happens. Fitzpatrick stretches that all out for a far too long, and it just gets very boring. "Too drawn out" pretty much describes this prologue, really. It's obvious that this was written to actually tie in to the novel instead of just pounding out an attention-grabbing opening, like she did with the first book. And while it's not bad that she's writing for a series now, it's still a boring prologue and I honestly keep feeling restless during it. That should not be happening.
*shakes head* Right. Harrison sets off to visit the Mysterious Person, who of course lives in the seedy part of Portland. Were you expecting anything other than the usual cliches? We're told that it has been fifteen years since he's been to this place and...wait. Hold on, back it up.
These two - Harrison and this Mysterious Person have been involved in some conspiracy for the past fifteen years.
Those fifteen years, at least for Harrison, involve staying hidden and running. From what we'll learn later, the Mysterious Person has every reason to do the same.
And yet apparently this Mysterious Person has the luxury of staying in one spot for fifteen years. Really.
Erm, am I the only one who finds that stupid?
Well, in any case, Harrison heads on up and brings his... car gun with him. I call it his car gun because we got no mention of him taking it out from the house, so I can only conclude that he keeps it in his car. I might also add that he claims he never fired a shot since college (when he practiced in a shooting gallery) and generally acts like it's unexpected to have to use it, which implies that he doesn't keep the gun for standard safety, but instead just has it randomly lying around.. Was Fitzpatrick trying to reinforce the idea that Harrison Grey was insane?
So, car gun stowed at the back of his pants waistband (really), Harrison goes up to the door. We get some SUBTLE FORESHADOWING about how he might be being followed up there, and "a shadow move behind the lace curtains". *snerk* Yes, lace curtains. Lace curtains, on the windows of a house on the wrong side of the tracks, owned by a Mysterious Person who is heavily into secrecy and keeping off of the radar. Lace curtains on the windows of that house.
God, this level of stupidity does not bode well.
So the Mysterious Person steps out, and tells Harrison that Nora is in trouble. Well, he doesn't come right out and say that it's Nora. There's a lot of dithering around and vague talk about how an unnamed sixteen-year-old associated with Harrison is in trouble, but c'mon. We all read Hush, Hush, we know who Harrison's sixteen-year-old daughter is, and we know how everyone, apparently including the Suethor, is trying to kill her. So I'm not going to insult your intelligence and pretend we don't know who it is. It's fucking Nora.
Still speaking in vague terms, which are supposed to be cryptic but are just annoying, the Mysterious Person lays out the plan
"'Once she turns sixteen, he’ll come for her. You need to take her far away. Someplace where he’ll never find her.'
Harrison shook his head. 'I don’t understand—'
He was cut off by a menacing glare. 'When we made this agreement, I told you there would be things you couldn’t understand. Sixteen is a cursed age in—in my world. That’s all you need to know,' he finished brusquely."
ZeldaQueen: As you can see, the characters in these books still have nary a frigging clue as to how to hatch a decent plan.
That quote up there? That's all we've gotten so far as to what's going on. The Mysterious Person has told Harrison that Nora will be pursued by unnamed parties when she turns sixteen, and apparently the Mysterious Person knew of this risk since she was born. Soooo... if the Mysterious Person is so determined to head the evil people after Nora off at the pass, why didn't he warn Harrison of all of this fifteen years ago, when Nora was born? There's no reason why he couldn't! He clearly already told him that something would be happening! Why didn't he take the opportunity back then to say "When she turns sixteen, someone will come after her. When that time comes, you'll need to pack up your family, cut the ties to whatever life you're leading, and go into hiding". Heck, if he had done that, it would have let them be even more prepared, because Harrison would already know what was going to happen, and would already be getting ready to take his family and run! Seriously, are these people not aware that plans tend to go better when people are given more time to prepare for them?
*shakes head* No, clearly they don't. I guess that between Mrs. Grey's terrible taste in husbands and Mr. Grey's utter cluelessness, we can see where Nora inherited her general idiocy.
So the two men fart around for some time, until Harrison finally says that he understands and will do everything the Mysterious Person has said. At this point, Harrison notices that the Mysterious Person is just as young now as he was when they were rooming together in college.
I must stop for one more minute. This dude is pretty clearly a Nephilim. He's not aging, he knows about fallen angels, and he's trying to protect Nora from them (and yes, we know that's what that is, because we read the first book). He's not aging, so he's a Nephilim who has sworn an oath of fealty to a fallen angel (word of Fitzpatrick is that the age a Nephilim is at when the oath is sworn is the age they are stuck at for an eternity).
Once again I must ask, do the fallen angels just not care what the Nephilim get up to when it's not the two week when they're being possessed? Because apparently the fallen angel that this Mysterious Person is sworn to doesn't care that his vassel is off attending college and whatnot.
Okay, okay, nearly done here. Harrison is not able to see well enough that he passes off the Mysterious Person's youth to being a trick of the shadows. Somehow though, he does see well enough to notice all of the details of a tiny burn in the shape of a clenched fist on the Mysterious Person's throat. Harrison goes all wibbly at this because OH NO, A SMALL BURN! HE HAS BEEN BRANDED LIKE CATTLE! The Mysterious Person clearly thinks that it's no big deal, and says that he and a friend have formed a group to fight back against the fallen angels. Again, they don't just say they're fighting the fallen angels, but we already know this stuff. Harrison keeps being freaked out, saying "They branded you". I really don't get why this is so horrific to him. The Mysterious Person is the one who started the group, so one would think he voluntarily burned himself. It clearly doesn't bother him, and it's not like it's a gruesome disfigurement. Near as I can tell, this is more SUBTLE FORESHADOWING, this time to let us know that OH LOOK, THIS GROUP IS SO RADICAL, THEY HAVE THEIR MEMBERS BURN THEMSELVES LOOK AT THAT!
I think Fitzpatrick needs to get out of the house more, or at least look up some of the more extreme things people have done for initiation into gangs.
So Harrison tries to tell the Mysterious Person a little about Nora, only for the Mysterious Person to cut him off and remind him that dude, evil fallen angels after her? The less he tells people about his daughter, the better? Yeah?
Finally, they conclude their little chat. Harrison sets off for his car and all seems relatively well until suddenly, a shot rang out. Really. And wouldn't you know it, it came from the Mysterious Person's house.
Of course, Harrison jumps up and runs back to save the Mysterious Person. He sneaks around to the backyard, because apparently the Mysterious Person went in the backyard for no reason in the middle of the night? The intruder that shot the Mysterious Person dragged him out in the space of time it took Harrison to walk half a block? I honestly don't know. In any case, Harrison readies his gun, only to be interrupted by the Mysterious Person mindraping him a message to get the fuck out of Dodge. Like I said, Nephilim. Harrison refusing, not wanting to let his friend die, and shoots the intruder twice.
As everyone might have imagined, this does nothing but get the attention of the intruder. We're told that the intruder is a young man with dark hair, which is pretty obviously Fitpatrick waving around a red herring. It might actually have worked well, if she didn't spend the entire last book trying to trick us into thinking Patch was the one trying to kill Nora (That is to say, he was the one trying to kill Nora that anyone actually focused on. Yes, I'm well aware that murdering Nora was his plan for the first half or so of the book).
Apparently there's an allyway directly behind the Mysterious Person's backyard, because the shooter drags Harrison into it. No, I have no idea how that works. He just drags him. It's not like he pulls him over a fence or anything. Regardless, Harrison is all upset and knows he's dying, and is all worried about Nora. He tries to find out that intruder's identity, because "Maybe he could warn Nora from the next world—a world that was closing in on him like a thousand falling feathers painted black".
You can tell the first part of that quote is meant to be SUBTLE FORESHADOWING for later, because it comes right the fuck out of nowhere. Seriously, that's the first time we've ever had Harrison think about the possibility of an afterlife or contacting the living from it.
You can tell the second part is being symbolik, because that's the first time the third-person narrator has told Harrison's story in such pointless and random prose.
So the intruder tells Harrison that "You thought wrong. It’s definitely too late". Harrison freaks out that the guy can seemingly read his mind and wait what??? Since when can fallen angels (and again, yes, we know who the immortal bad boy with a gun is, Fitzpatrick) read minds? It was established in Hush, Hush that they could plant images into human minds, but they can also read them? Well shit, that somehow made Patch's interactions with Nora a whooooole lot creepier. Thanks Fitzpatrick, I needed that!
Even ignoring that random revelation though, the fallen angel's response doesn't make much sense. Harrison is thinking in the present. He is thinking "Maybe I can warn Nora from the afterlife!" The fallen angel's response is in the past tense, implying that Harrison had already had such thoughts before that moment. Wouldn't it be more accurate for teh fallen angel to say something like "Think again. It's definitely too late" or "You'd like to think that, but it's definitely too late"?
Bah. Whatever. Harrison gets plugged and dies, the end, sad story.
I'd just like to end this by pointing out that it's specifically stated in Hush, Hush, that Harrison Grey's death was considered a random act of violence, with nothing suspicious or strange about it. Here, we see that he left his house in the middle of the night, with no explanation or attempt to tell his family why, went to a place in Portland he really would have no reason to go to, and was murdered in the backyard of the house his friend from college lived in.
Yes, that certainly doesn't seem suspicious in the slightest.
God, the stupid hurts!
Onward to: Chapter 1
Back to: Table of Contents