This board is the only place on the 'net that I can admit this: I am a sucka for a BtVS novel. A big, fat, old-fashioned P.T. Barnum-style sucka.
It all started when my friend Rebecca got me into the T.V. show. Around the same time, I was spending a lot of time down at Dixon’s Used Book Store, which heretofore had been catering to all my comic-book-geek needs. They also occasionally had a pulpy (literally) novelisation of one Madonna movie or another, which kept me combing the shelves every now and then.
Then I saw it, shining, beckoning, promising more from that Scooby gang I had come to know and love: Obsidian Fate. The best part was the Scoobies’ reaction when they found out exactly why The Aztec dude had kidnapped Willow: to deflower her in a ritual that would bring him to his power. Especially Oz’s.
Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder are the superstars of BtVS books. Golden has created familiar places, like The Fish Tank and Weatherly Park, that appear in all of the books penned by him (and some that weren’t, which goes to show ya). Rebecca Rand Kirshner also earns a thumbs-up for her brilliant War Between The States, from Tales Of The Slayer, Vol. 2. Jane Espenson’s Again from the same book is a great piece of SF. That one is one of the tearjerkers.
When Buffy writing is good, it uses the canon (and in the case of Golden, adds to it), makes you feel more familiar with the characters than you do already, pulls at your heartstrings and gives you the shivers. When it’s bad, it’s cardboard, boring, generic and pointless. About 30% of it is bad and another 35% is just unsatisfying.
I’m going to wait for other posts to this thread before I say anything else. I’m sure this is pretty masturbatory already.
My personal favourite of the Buffy authors is Ellain Cunningham, who I consider to be the Queen of Licenced Properties (she also wrote some of the best Forgotten Realms novels).
Although my favourite of the novels is by Golden. Spike & Dru: Pretty Maids all in a Row. Spike and Drusilla are among my favourite characters in the series, and I love seeing them developed more. And the (other) villain is a pretty kick-ass demon, to boot. I adore evil-vs-evil stories.
Oooh yeah. The Raid on the Watcher’s Council is one of my fave scenes from a BtVS novel ever. When I was reading it, I could see it in my head like a movie; all the breaking glass and the blood and the scared little girls running everywhere. Classic mayhem.
My favourite of all time is Child Of The Hunt. I like the pathos in it, and the way the story is structured like an epsiode. The Book Of Fours was great too, I loved the epic-ness of it and the dialgoue is really up to scratch. I wish there really had been three other books. The Lost Slayer serial was delightful as well. I just realized now that all of these books had Lucy in them. I do love that character. I think she works in the novels, but she would have seemed cheesy on the show. I enjoyed Blood and Fog too, but I’ve only read it once. I want to see if it stands up a year from now.
If I want the crap scared out of me I read The Evil That Men Do or Immortal. Resurrecting Ravana and Paleo are as gory, but not so well-written, I find.
I just finished book 1 of the Wicked Willow trilogy and I’m dying for the next one to appear on the shelf of my local Chapters. I was worried about it not going anywhere, but the introduction of the “pets” really pulled it from the fire, IMO.
I’ve only read Pretty Maids, which was amusingly awful. Got me through that plane ride, though, so no hard feelings on my end. I have been wondering if it was considered to be one of the good Buffy novels or one of the bad Buffy novels. If it’s one of the good ones… well, I’ll pass on the rest.
That said, the big final battle in that book,
Where the demon is fighting the Slayer and all the potentials, and kills the Slayer, and all of a sudden one of the potentials activates, so he kills her… and another one activates, and so on, until the demon is worn down by fighting so many Slayers and is finally defeated
would have been a much cooler way to end the TV show than what they did instead.
It really depends on which characters you like the best. Pretty Maids bored me a little because I’m not a big S/D shipper.
I insist that the best BtVS novel all-around is Child Of The Hunt. If you can get it at the library, give it a try and then see what you think. Next in line is the Lost Slayer serial. Pretty Maids is a stand-alone (until someone decides to write more Spike-centric novels), and not really representative of the other novelisations. Tales Of The Slayer (any volume) is hit-and-miss, but again, if you can peruse them for free, they’re worth your time. I prefer Vol. 3.
I entreat any and all to stay far, faaaaaar away from Chosen. That book is what the “craptacular” in my thread title was referring to. I have a pretty high tolerance for garbage writing, but that thing was just slapped together like a Big Mac.
I hated this book so much that I couldn’t even finish it. Why? Well, I lurve Evil!Spike and Evil!Drusilla. I especially like Spike’s style. You know, fist and fangs, up against the wall, nothing but him versus the mob. Spike is wonderfully impetuous and most importantly he’s incapable of making a plan and sticking to it. As he said in School Hard “I was going to wait until Saturday, but I just got so bored!”
Golden demonstrated to me that he had no idea who Spike was. There are many, many different forms of evil in the Jossverse. The Fanged Four all of their own style. But above all, Spike is not Angelus. Spike is not methodical like Angelus. Spike is not patient like Angelus. Spike doesn’t plan like Angelus. Spike enjoys the kill for the kill itself. Angelus was all about the art. “No. A real kill. A good kill. It takes pure artistry. Without that, we’re just animals.”
Do you see what I’m getting at? Golden thought he could write Angelus, call him Spike, and get away with it. If I wanted to read a book about Angelus, I would have bought a book about Angelus. Sorry, the way he killed the potentials were too thought-out and sadistic for Spike’s taste. He would have snapped their necks, drained them dry, and moved on. If you can point out one time in canon where Spike did anything other than smash, bash, and bleed, well…I don’t think you can.
Plus, from the various interviews of Golden I’ve read, it seems he’s stuck in BtVS S2. The characters changed. A lot. Reading a book set post S2 with s2 characterizations would just piss me off. Of course, judging from the way he wrote Spike (and Dru. Dru is crazy not stupid) then I guess it’s silly to expect any sort of characterization from him at all.
You know, pepper, reading your post, I’m starting to realize why I didn’t like Golden’s stuff beyond Child and the Gatekeeper trilogy. Even his short story for the Tales, which I was so excited for, fell flat with me.
I’m really grooving on Ghosts of Albion, but the more I look at the titles on my bookshelf (I have a whole set of shelves for my BtVS books) , the more I realize that his works aren’t in my “most read, readable and best loved” section.
Miller, someone on the Net (maybe it was the All Things Philosophical Buffy discussion board) proposed a similar end for the final episode- Buffy tells the Potentials they can all be Slayers, and then adds “Just one thing- you all have to die”, and basically they have a daisy-chain of kill the Slayer, activate the next one, resurrect the killed one, kill the newly activated one, activate the next one, resurrect etc.