Grimlock ♥ Ultra Magnus

Hemlock Grove could have been a five star review - but it became muddled, disjointed, and ableist/misogynistic/homophobic.   Now, since there was a question brought up about this in a comment on one of my updates, I don’t believe this means the author is any of those things.   He simply knows there are some ugly things in life and wrote about them.   Ableism, misogyny and homophobia do exist in the world, and shoving our heads in the ground and pretending they don’t exist isn’t going to help matters.   Talking about the issues will help.  Well, as long as we’re actually talking about them.   McGreevy doesn’t even pretend to turn this into a conversation, however.   What he does is throws out terms like faggot, dyke, or retarded, with such tactless casualty that one doesn’t really stop to think twice about what point  he’s making.   None.  Or at best, characters that are nasty and selfish just come off worse.   There  is one exception - one character that seems, while young, not necessarily evil.   The author may be trying to make us dislike them, despite what he presents as otherwise normal teenage behavior.   This doesn’t work for me, because by making them less crude, and more like a normal teenager, the betrayal at the end would be more emotive because I would have cared about them more.   He lost a chance to turn a convention on its head even more.   

The misogyny is even more prevalent than all this, partly because the ableism and homophobia are made clear via casual words thrown out.   While there certainly is some of this as far as misogyny, there is also the pregnant virgin (the virgin-whore, really), who is also presented as angelic.   There’s a lot of women taking care of men, as if that’s what they’re supposed to do, and the one man who turns out to have a healthiest relationship with the virgin-whore/angelic character thinks about women as manipulating men in relationships.   It’s odd, though, that he has a really good relationship with his mother.   (Unhealthy mother-son relationships are also a theme in this book.)

But in the end, what’s really disappointing is that McGreevy is a really, really good writer when he doesn’t try to hard.   When he doesn’t try by using offensive words for shock value, and as a shortcut to making dislikable characters even more dislikable, or when he’s not trying to hard to be poetic and really just writing purple prose.   His character Shelley may be one of my favorite characters in recent literature: she charmed with me with her insight and gentleness and loving nature.   She was so accepting of her own flaws, too, and I wanted more of her.   (Seriously, even if the other characters acted like misogynistic assholes, but it had been all from Shelley’s point of view, I would have loved this and given it five stars.)   And this is notable as I tend to like crude, blunt characters, and think that characters who censor out swears are dumb and they make me roll my eyes.   Shelley was a bit of a prude, and did censor out swears - but it didn’t encapsulate all of her character.   She was so much more than that, and the fact is that it takes a talented author to take a character I normally dislike and make her, by far, my favorite character in the novel.   I liked her more than a lot of other characters in other books that I’ve read this year, in fact.  

Add to that that if McGreevy had at least made the effort to make a statement about homophobia, ableism, or misogyny, I would have been fascinated.   And while this is a lot of mindfuckery - Frankenstein’s monster meets werewolves meets vampires meets a mystery meets a medical thriller, and Primus, what happened there?  - the biggest mindfuck  is why McGreevy was so casual about such loaded topics.   He’s obviously a smart man, he’s obviously a talented writer, but…

I do think privilege has something to do with it.   Because he comes from a place of privilege, he’s able to trivialize such topics without it affecting him at all.   It does affect others of us.   

One final note - the mythology that he creates is a compulsively readable mashup of classic themes and tropes.   It’s new, it’s fun, and it’s a shame that a blind eye to these important issues diminished my enjoyment so much in the end.   I’m kinda glad he doesn’t have another novel out: I’d read it, but I’d feel guilty as shit about it later.   Here’s hoping to him being distracted by the TV show long enough that he’s off my radar by the time he’s got a second book out!