look away if you're a fan of the Wraeththu books
i am about to be mean and ranty. please look away if these books are special to you, i have unresolved literary trauma to work through.
these books are basically “sexy gender-ambiguous goth boys ahoy” porn from constantine as early ‘80s goth girl. apparently originating in a short story she wrote in 1973 at age 17, so david bowie porn too.
i read these things when i was shacked up with a goth (of course) who was a writer (yes, i should know better than to hook up with artists) and the owner of literally a bookcase full of every vampire and vampire-adjacent novel she could find, of any quality or none. storm constantine got points for being a goth herself of course.
these were constantine’s first published works. she apparently wrote much better stuff later (which i haven’t looked at and probably never will), but unfortunately none of it sold very well, so milking the wraeththu fans with dismal and unbelievably shitty spinoffs (e.g. that second trilogy) is what she has for a living now.
the climax (ahahaha) of the second trilogy is, no exaggeration, a weapon of mass destruction made of collected crystal jizz.
there is also an even worse role playing game, basically author-blessed fanfic (“GIVE ME MONEY”), originally written as a fanfic resource guide, which is best experienced through the glory of the McLennan rpg.net review. (
arkady has played the game and attests to the accuracy of the review.)
on the divabot trashy glitz scale, i somewhat enjoyed the first trilogy as sexy-goth-boy-porn. but they were incoherent books that made no fucking sense, and even less fucking sense on a second reading. i didn’t give them a third. i didn’t read the second trilogy; Arkady did, and remembers it with a shudder.
the worst thing is the wraeththu books are quite definitely goth as fuck, much as i might wish otherwise.
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