You Suck Review

You Suck, Moore. No. I didn’t hate this so much that I stopped reading it, but I would have if I had had anything else to read. The dedication reads “For my readers, by request,” which may be why the whole thing feels rushed or forced or otherwise off-putting. Here’s a passage that struck me as particularly egregious on first reading, though it doesn’t grate so badly now (maybe I’ve just been beaten into submission):

She was enjoying teaching Tommy about the particulars of vampirism, just as she enjoyed teaching him how to do grown-up human things like how to get the power and phone turned on in the loft—it made her feel sophisticated and in charge, and after a series of boyfriends for whom she had been little more than an accoutrement, whose lifestyles she had affected, from heavy-metal anarchists to financial-district yuppies, she liked being the pacesetter for a change.

Really? There was no better way to get that information to the reader than just laying it out there all at once? And do we really care? I suspect that it’s tempting to indulge in this sort of acceleration in a sequel, where you might want to bring the new readers up to speed without boring the readers who remember the character from the previous work, but I remain unconvinced that it’s a good idea: first, it’s easier to care about the character’s motivations if we have to tease them out of the narrative than when they’re vomited in our laps; second, if the character already has that level of self-knowledge at page 30, how much development can we expect? The story was mostly harmless, though there was a weird bit of gratuitous backstory ex machina, and I found the playing of non-consensual sex for laughs to be rather distasteful.
Update: Google leads me to believe that I have invented the phrase backstory ex machina. First “Buddha attack”, now this.