“This one was good, but I liked the Encyclopedia of Early Earth better. I think because it was wackier.
This is kind of a retelling of the whole Scheherazade thing, the idea being that a woman puts off a man by telling stories, and he gets so wrapped up in the shit that he keeps her alive or, in this case, unbanged for another night. It’s a great concept, for sure.
EEE was more fun. I think it was meant to be, especially with the way the story was of ancient times, but the characters spoke in a modern style.
I think this was meant to be a little more serious, a little more “ladies doing it for themselves!” stuff, which is fine. I don’t know, what do you want me to say? That I’m bored with stories about men being dickheads because they’re men? Because I am. I’m not offended, not angry, just kind of bored with it.
If you want to write a character who’s a jerk, especially one who’s a male jerk, all you have to do is set it a ways in the past, make the man some kind of earl or duke or comptroller or alderman or whatever, and then he can run around and just be like, “Everyone have sex with me, there are no consequences.” And…I guess that’s probably been true in the experiences of a lot of people, so it’s not the truthiness of it that bores me. Maybe I just feel like there are SO MANY stories with bad male characters who act this way, and it’s not interesting.
You know how you can tell a ghost story, and the ghost story can be about a ghost who wants something, some kind of thing like their body put in a proper grave or some light revenge or whatever? And so someone stumbles into this ghost, then figures it out, then is like, “Oh, this ghost ain’t evil, she just wants something and tried to express that to me by scaring the bejeezus out of me?” That story is also boring. Just because we’ve seen it, we’ve seen the ghost that wants to be buried in a proper grave, and unless you’re going to put a twist on it (like The Ring, where it turns out the ghost is just really pissed off and wants to keep killing people and horrifying the world), maybe don’t waste my time.
Anyway, 100 Nights of Hero is charming, Isabel Greenberg is awesome, and a lot of the smaller stories contained in the larger story were captivating. So it gets a pass from Pete’s new standard of not loving books where the motivation of the villain is that he’s old-timey and he’s male.
But the rest of you writers: be warned.”