An Officer and a Crook: Chapter Three

The last chapter was pretty light on religious tones--this better pick up or I'll really be scraping the bottom of the barrel for it.

Elizabeth isn't disappointing:

"He sighed and pushed back on the irritation."

He has a rash?  Why is he pushing on it?

"... brains that were fried from highs".

Elizabeth, I know what you're trying to say, but it isn't getting high that fries a brain.

It's the skillet.

As personality Crystal takes over, Deanna goes against her prior convictions to not accept food or drink and make nice-nice with the po-po and accepts the offer of food and rest.

Deanna prays for a moment and follows John Peterson.  He escorts her away with her hand on his arm, which I guess is a standard police procedure in this universe.

John gets her some coffee and takes her to... the police station's break room to continue working on her statement.  Just a standard procedure, nothing to see here.

Deanna apparently has the hots for John, because she laments for a while about his wedding ring.  Because she's a nosy asshole who needs to take her meds regularly, she makes it her life goal to know if he is married or not.

Now, a normal human might just casually ask about his family, but Deanna has all the social graces of a dead cat.

She asks outright if he's married and then demands to know why he would wear a wedding band if he's not.  She literally bullies him into telling her about his two years deceased wife.

Step one:  Normal.  Step two:  Floppy.

Works for non-babies too.  May need to shake harder and more frequently.

Without warning, John yells, "Dick!"

I got excited for a moment--I honestly thought he was loudly proclaiming that the passing of his wife meant he could be true to his own sexual desires, or that he was calling her a dick.  Instead, he was calling to a coworker, whose name is Richard, in the hopes of moving her from the John to a Dick.  Dick refuses.

Because Deanna thinks that all things in life are related, she surmises that John's dead wife has something to do with Crook McCartney, because no cop ever wants to catch and condemn a criminal unless it's personal.

An Officer and a Crook: Chapter Two

Crystal switches perspectives to the "Crook", McCartney.  I honestly want an entire (short) book written by Crystal.  She fills her prose with cliches and sentence fragments, not like a dash of pepper in an omelet, but more like egg in an omelet.  Not only was she excited (longest section yet) and jumped to a brand new character with gusto, she is responsible for this:

"He laughed to himself. How could he pin this on her? There was always a fall guy, well, in this case, a fall girl. He was doing his best not to crack a smile. Looking at her, he could smell the fear she had of him. That made him relax."

What a wild fucking ride you've taken us on, girl!  Is he laughing?  Is he trying not to smile?  Is he relaxing?  More fascinating, he can smell by looking.  That is pure talent, right there.  Humans smell fear?  Maybe he isn't human!  After The Werewolf and His Boy, I am half-convinced that it is just normal for people to smell emotions, sexual orientation, and possibly thoughts so sure.  Why the fuck not.

Then, in the very next paragraph, Crystal unexpectedly switches perspectives to Deanna, whose name I forgot so had to look up again.  Apparently she's scared.

I still don't know why it's apparently standard protocol to have the two perps meet.

"Her trembling was a sign of fear."

I am just going to assume that Deanna has Parkinson's at this point.

Deanna has apparently been bleeding from a head wound this entire time, sitting in the police station, not handcuffed to a chair sitting beside the officer's desk.

It switches again to Officer Petersen's prose, where he beats himself up over her snapping at him and blaming him for her head wound.

With a mere eight sentences in contribution, Rachel scribbles in Deanna's new personality, this one bold and decisive.  Rachel Personality takes charge and bolts from Officer Petersen, running down a doorway to escape the popo.

However, Sarah Personality rears her malformed head and has Deanna inhale paint fumes, which makes her faint.  Petersen for worst cop ever?  He let a suspect get away, after all.

The Painter Man whose paint had made Deanna faint goes to her and starts... dragging an unconscious woman across the floor by her arms.  That seems healthy.  Petersen hears Painter Man call for help and runs off toward him.  Deanna must have gotten farther than any author has bothered to mention, because there are suddenly more officers that spawned from somewhere, all running toward Painter Man.  Petersen overtakes them and arrives on the scene first.

Depicted:  Child abuse.

Painter Man, I have to assume, is still dragging her across the floor when Petersen gets there, because no one ever mentions that he stopped.  In fact, he is not mentioned again.

Petersen kneels beside her and examines the head wound, presumably crawling along beside her prone form as Painter Man continues to drag her.  Deanna wakes up and thrashes at Petersen.  He restrains her and picks her up, bride over a threshold style.  Did he and Painter Man have a tug-of-war about this?  

I'm sure the paramedics, and other officers and her court-appointed lawyer, will be pleased at his behavior.

Deanna and Petersen fight childishly; she whines about wanting to go home and he... won't let her?  He claims that because her story and McCartney's don't match up, she can't leave.  No words on being arrested or not.  She accuses him of being a bad cop.  That's true anyway.

And that's it.  I still can't figure out why the authors thought that cops regularly introduce possible cohorts to one another, nor do I understand why they think it's appropriate to drag around someone who just fainted by the arms, or pick them up without waiting for a paramedic.

An Officer & a Crook by More Than Novellas--Chapter One

This little 6 chapter novella was published in 2006.  It was a group effort by several people.  Each different person writes in a different color and conveniently writes their name and date on the upper right hand corner of their section, like any good middle school student.  The authors are Rachel, Crystal, Sarah, Elizabeth, and an incredibly vague Mrs. Brown.  So, yeah--it's written like those "chain" stories bored English teachers had you do.  It may or may not take place in 2005.

The scene:  In a police station, a young lady in a denim jacket sits on a chair with uneven legs.

Except it's not written that well.  It's cancerous.  To spare you the cancer, I won't have a caption.  Fuck it misery loves company.  Group chemo!

"Her hands were cold. She slid them into the pockets of her denim jacket and wished for her leather coat she'd bought last year. Temperatures were dropping. It would be cold when she went outside."

I actually stared at the page for over a minute just trying to decide which sentence to force on you.  You're welcome.

Was anyone still wearing denim jackets in 2005?  And was there a reason we needed that much garbage to communicate that "it's cold"?  It looks like she's cold now--so why say she would be cold when she went outside?  Do you mean she'd be colder?  It goes on to describe how cold she is presently in the most boring way possible:

"She was so cold."

No shit.

I'm really not cherrypicking here--there isn't a good description of how she can use her nose drippings as a pair of chopsticks or that she's shivering--just ordinary "She's cold" bull shit.

She begins a prayer that kind of peters out pointlessly.

Rachel is a bit better at writing.

The character (whose name we still don't know) is cold and a police officer gives her his jacket and asks if she'd like some coffee.  He just... walks up to her and wraps his jacket around her shoulders without asking.  What a fucking creep.  She gives it back to him.

Mrs. Brown is the brains of the operation, finally giving the character a name:  Deanna.

Brown cuts to a flashback of Deanna getting arrested and brought in for questioning.  Seriously--a flashback only a few paragraphs into the book.  Why not just start with the flashback and move forward in time?

There's a bit of an action scene here, but not enough drama to be absorbed in it:  Deanna witnesses an attack.  Two larger guys with a high sneak creep up on a smaller guy and club him in the back.

Acting on superhero instincts, Deanna runs to the rescue with her trusty briefcase, which she hits the thugs with.  So this chick has a briefcase and wears a denim jacket.  Where the fuck are you going needing a briefcase where you wear a denim jacket?

Just hurry up and take the fucking picture or I swear to fuck I will cut you.

Apparently, this chick is buff too, because she "knocked him sprawling" with one hit from her briefcase.  What the hell is in her briefcase?  Later on, Rachel describes her as "small and frail", so make of that what you will.

The victim runs away and one of the attackers gives chase, but the other grabs her and forces her to the ground, which is when I start to think maybe this isn't the right book for this blog, then it says she "barely had time to start praying".

Police show up, so apparently someone did the responsible thing and called the police instead of attacking two armed, violent people with a briefcase.  The police, for some reason, arrest her along with the attacker and she, per previous narrative, has deemed it in her best interest to not cooperate with the police and refuse to talk.

Then we learn--the people she attacked were plainclothes officers arresting someone.  With a club.

This was apparently written in Canada.  Is it perfectly legal and okay for police officers to walk up to someone they are trying to arrest and club them from behind without the other's knowledge?  I feel like this is an "excessive force" issue.  I briefly looked up taser laws and while they aren't a club, apparently that's only okay if someone is resisting arrest.  Somehow, I feel like Mrs. Brown didn't spend the two minutes of Googling that I did on the subject.

So, naturally, the police suspect her to be in cahoots with the "dangerous criminal" and was defending him so he could make an escape.

This is the problem with a collaborative work:  They're already contradicting one another.  Rachel wrote that Deanna (then nameless) was determined not to speak to the police, then Brown says that Deanna happily gave a statement.

I'm perfectly willing to accept Deanna having a few split personalities--it makes each author make more sense too.

Rachel, deciding we need some drama, writes Deanna suddenly growing a backbone.  She tells the officer that the police are acting like criminals.  She's not wrong--they just attacked a guy with a freaking club.

Sarah takes the wheel, switching perspectives to the officer Deanna is speaking to (John) and there is so much wrong with the narrative.

First, she describes the police as "The Order of Police", which by the way is a Fraternity.

Not culty at all.

Next, she describes a fear of the police as "healthy".  I recognize that it's healthy for most black people to historically fear police, considering how likely they are to be murdered by them, but the character just thinks it's healthy to be afraid of the police, which is... kind of psychotic, frankly.  Respect is fine, but why the fuck would you want people to be actively afraid of you?  That just means they're less likely to ask for help--isn't that what you're fucking for?

I digress.

Then Sarah has an entire paragraph of sentence fragments that I won't make you suffer through.

Brown to the fore:  This author writes like she wants to do the whole thing herself but apparently doesn't have the imagination to do it.

For some reason, they just let a suspect that assaulted two police officers sit in the waiting room, not even cuffed to a chair, and think it appropriate to bring her to face the real criminal.

Apparently, Deanna is a young girl, possibly a teenager from the sounds of it, and an orphan.  Why a teenager is wearing a denim jacket and has a briefcase is beyond me.  According to the opening section, she also owns a leather jacket--much less strange--but the implication here is that she's poor, dude.  It's almost like they never even spoke to one another about the direction they wanted to take this.

Brown reuses the "began to shake" twice in this chapter--yawn.

Deanna starts reciting the Lord's Prayer and they put her in front of the "dangerous criminal" so that the arrested man can identify her.  I was under the assumption that this was done with photos in literally every other form of media, but that is too realistic isn't as dramatic.

Will Deanna be accused as an accomplice?  Will John stop being a dickhole?  Will the criminal be able to smell her pussy?  Find out next week on Holy Shit Literature!

A Father's Discipline: Chapter 11

Last chapter!  Woo!

Serious business!  James prepares for some "political fallout" over owning a business in the past that LGBT people used.  This is a strictly uber-religious person problem with no real grounds in reality, as the past few years have proven.  I was a teenager in 2006, though--was it really political, social, and business suicide to be connected to LGBT people?  Holy fuckwaffles, no wonder they have the highest suicide rate out of anyone else.

The main character calls for a press conference, because we hate LGBT people but we desperately need drama, to announce that he is pulling out of the political landscape and will blow his load elsewhere.

"Jim's face took on contortions that indicated that his mind was in a stressful state."

Dude, Proctor, you are the author.  This is in Jim's POV.  Why not just say how he feels instead of that garbage sentence?

It goes on to discuss how Jim Watkins had become "an icon of promise of and stability".  Yeah, you keep saying that, man, but you've only said it.  You've never said how this is or who it effects or what it means.  You just assert things and "this is how it is in A Father's Discipline world" without ever going into detail about it.  As an author, you can write "she has brown hair" and that's a fact in your world.  What makes this word vomit rather than quality reading material is "Watkins is the greatest person ever" without ever expanding upon this idea.  From what I've seen, he doesn't do anything that would live up to that title.

The crowd at the press conference "voice their disapproval" when Watkins announces the end of his political career.  Fuck, Proctor.  What did they say?  Was it a quiet grumble?  There are reporters there--did they really just stand there stunned?  You really think they had no questions?  Not a one of them?

He says that instead of spending all his time on politics, he'd like to spend his time on his son and get some cold hard facts behind him.  Since all the government is a secret cabal of space lizards in human skins, they don't really need to spend much time with their humans families.  That's why they can have families and still stick their scaly...  Oh, right--lizards have cloaca.  Not as funny.

Apparently, his announcement is so stunning that even the reporters are silent.  Proctor, you realize it is literally in their job description to not be silent, yeah?

Watkins finds some solace in the time-honored traditional religious thought of "it's all in *insert deity's name here* hands/noodly appendages/trunk/wings/tentacles/whatever".  If total lack of control is comforting (it is to some people), good for you I guess?  I'd rather not feel like a helpless ant at the mercy of a psychopathic child, but that's just me.  We create our own destiny, blah blah blah.  Soapbox.

Then the very next paragraph has him finally freak out.  Ha--so much for peace through submission to deity.

He goes into his office and packs up his crap, then apparently becomes catatonic until well after the building has closed and the janitor knocks on the door.  Being a janitor, he has a key so he just comes in.

Apparently, Janitor Bruno and Watkins are friends.  There is no explanation other than "strange how it even developed".  Really, Proctor?  You're that unimaginative?  He didn't say, stay up all night at the office, working long hours into the night and the kindly janitor brought him a cup of coffee and the warmth of the coffee-flavored water (cream and sugar served by a smiling woman would be best, remember) and they bonded over an act of human kindness?

Proctor insists that Janitor Bruno is "sort of an armchair philosopher".  Dude, you really don't have to tell your audience that.  You can fucking convey that through things the guy actually says.

Well then, interesting revelation:  Janitor Bruno has been the only character who speaks in slang, outside of the phrase "hang out" that was in quotations that I mentioned in an earlier post.  This literary tool works well to hammer home a person's accent and whatnot.  In this book's case, every slang word is put in quotations, so I am just imagining the character overemphasizing every slang word as if they are quoting some movie and only using slang "ironically".  Everyone officially has a hipster 'stache in my mind's internal theater.

Proctor, you are a pretentious used catheter tube.

Reflect on your shitty pissy life choices.

Like my own life choice to read your garbage, so I'm not sure what that says about me as a person.

Before I have a crisis of identity, let's move on to the subject at noodly appendage.

Does Bruno have any sagely advice?  The wise janitor trope has become a bit cliche at this point, but Proctor likes cliches as much as the gods in American Gods and it's practically expected, so I anticipate his janitorial advice, like how to properly wax floors or something.

...

Words cannot express my disappointment.

Proctor is so fucking unimaginative and has so little to say, in terms of wise words, that Armchair Sage Bruno just says some generic shit like "The Lord is 'gonna' work things out, okay" and goes off to get doughnuts to cheer up Watkins.  If this is Watkins' idea of a janitorial sage, I am not terribly surprised that he is so stunned by Rose Ann's lackluster shell of a personality.

When Bruno the Wise leaves, Watkins "sensed a divine touch on his shoulder".

There's a line of dialogue that the prose never quite addresses.  I think the reader is supposed to infer that it's Christian God talking to Watkins, but it never distinctly says so.  Never says there's a disembodied voice, or a voice in his head.  So I'm going to assume that in this world, schizophrenia is contagious, and he caught the demons of mental health issues.

So from his perspective, he "hears":  "See there.  You're all right after all."

What a fucking wise deity you worship, man.

But from my perspective, his voice altered like a cartoon voice actor's and he spoke that out loud himself.

Proctor could have had Wise Bruno come back and finally deliver some copy pasta of sagely advice, but he never does.  That might require work and we can't overtax idiocy brilliance, can we?

So all of this garbage has boiled down plot to what Proctor no doubt intends to be some really dramatic moment where, for some insane reason, Watkins is allowed to deliver a speech to the court before the trial commences.  He spouts some reiterated trash about how he's given politics a miss and then does the unthinkable and tells the entire court that he used to *gasp* own a men's bathhouse and his son was being blackmailed about it.

"The courthouse, by this time, was filled with emotion."

Was it boredom?  I felt boredom.  And confusion.  I also wondered if Proctor had ever read a book in his life, seen a movie... had a conversation with an adult.

"I was not part of that life style but simply saw a way to earn a substantial amount of money from the behaviors of many men."

Picking at the grammatical errors is too easy at this point.

Proctor, man, you really could have been more dramatic about this.  It could have been his big reveal--ermahgerd, the District Attorney "used to be gay" or some other fictional nonsense word diarrhea.  No, no--that might be too heavy for you, so Watkins was still straight of course; he would never be a part of that "life style".  The scandal!

Loosely speaking, hookup culture is a lifestyle, sure.  Being gay is exactly like being straight, dude.  It's not a fucking "life style".

My incredible straightness prevents me from wearing color or glitter.

This is how they give you the gay.

"Behaviors of many men."

Behaviors.

How dare someone have anonymous sex with someone with the same genitals.  Or really, anonymous sex in general.  Celibacy, yeah.  Castrate the deviants.  They don't use their body in godly ways anyway.

Moving on before I make a nice long rant to people who've heard it all before...

After Watkins' comparatively long speech, Proctor describes the trial in a seven sentence summary.

A summary.

Once again, we skip over any real action and just have a damned summary of what could have been interesting events.  I know I certainly would have enjoyed watching Proctor's anal seepage of words creep across the page and slither into my brain.  With a sick delight, I might have reveled in his uneducated attempt at speaking legalese.  I must remain disappointed.

Worse, rather than any despair at all that his son was sentenced to ten years in prison, Watkins just whines to himself about how he won't be seeing Rose Ann any longer.  What a fucking selfish little lobster dropping.

I suppose his "Prize" wasn't much of a Precious, was it?  It's like Gollum deciding, nope, not worth it.

"Gross darkness closed in as--"

As opposed to net darkness?

"--as Jim Senior trudged out of the courtroom into what seemed like empty air."

Air isn't exactly empty, dude.  It's filled with dust particles, pollen, countless molecules, but we all know he's referring to the Holy Spirit being ever-present, wrapping the entire universe in an eternal, everlasting, all-encompassing full-bodied hug.

Jim Watkins has now hit rock fucking bottom.

Did he lose his house?  Do people picket his business?  Did he go bankrupt paying for Rose Ann's half-assed legal defense?

No, no.  The idea of being poor is so alien and unbelievable to Proctor that he can't even imagine it happening.

Jimmy Manchild just opened his own law firm, and apparently being a business owner is "rock bottom".  Dude, you quit your job of your own volition within this same fucking chapter.  You get no pity.  It's not even some ratty one-room office either; it has a lobby that seats eight people, a secretary office, and an "empty inner office".  It must be lovely to think this is poverty, Proctor.

Who else shows up to his new law firm but Rose Ann:  "'Yes, it's me, the Counselor,' Rose Ann said humbly."

Yeah, that just screams "humble".

It seems like she has found it in her heart to forgive him for owning a sex club for LGBT people.  What a kind, wonderful, loving person she is.

She hires herself to work at his law firm and he says he needs her to act as secretary and a paralegal (not that Proctor knows that word--he used the term "investigator").  She says it's better than "office girl" so apparently that's the most a mere woman can hope for.

Also, apparently asking someone to be a "helpmate" is a proposal of marriage, according to the author.  "Cunningly romantic", isn't he?

Rose Ann asks if they can call the firm "Rose Ann and Husband", which is the worst thing I've ever heard of, to which Jim replies that "Man is the head of the household."

Rose Ann thinks this is just darling of him to say and reminds him that the office isn't a house.  She relents and decides the name should be "Watkins and wife" with a lower case "w" to show her submission, I assume.

They ultimately agree to "Watkins and Watkins".

Most fucking romantic marriage proposal ever.

So, in summary, since summary is Proctor's favorite thing:  Watkins' son went to jail.  Instead of placing a phone call, he and his two-dimensional love interest book a flight to Colorado because phones exist but there are no phones in Colorado.  This succeeds in wasting time and being totally irrelevant to what I assume passes for plot in an alternative universe.  Once owning a business that caters to gay people will ruin your career and get your son involved in drug peddling, ultimately landing the poor kid in prison for 10 years for a first offence as a minor, but Watkins prayed to Baby Jesus, so it's all okay.

My rating:

On a scale of tulip to powdered wigs, I'd have to say "because jet fuel can't melt steel beams."  That's how much fucking sense this book made.

Say something fucking nice, you whore:

Proctor did a great job of writing an example of an extremely sheltered average middle schooler's grasp of politics, adult conversation, and real life.

If you want me to review anything specific, just let me know.  It needs to be badly written and religious, but doesn't have to be Christian to fit my parameters.  I have a preference for "free" and "short", just like I prefer my victims.