Original Fiction Review #2 – Pierside · 10:28pm Feb 2nd, 2017
You might know Bookplayer as one of the more prominent writers on the site. You might know her as an AppleDash or TwiJack shipper. You might know her as someone who has a deep, abiding love for the character of Applejack. Or you might know her as one of the major literary theorists on FIMFiction who has some very good thoughts about writing.
But she’s also published actual, original fiction – and I happen to have a copy of that book in my claws.
Pierside
by Emily Spahn
Urban Fantasy
197 pages (approximately 75,000 words)A vigilante able to expose the darkest secrets of his victims is stalking the streets of Pierside. Immortal and unstable, he is a spectre risen from the past: an Elevatus – one of the powerful immortals who can only be slain by their own kind.
Ezzy and Maddy are friends who run a small clinic in the worst neighborhood in Pierside. They are drawn into this web of violence when a beat cop brings a wounded victim to their door. But only Ezzy understands how entangled they really are, and she guards both her secrets and her soul from all she meets.
To find their way out they’ll have to confront vindictive immortals, corrupt politicians, and religious fanatics, along with their own troubled pasts and unspoken feelings.
Why I added it: Bookplayer is a good writer.
Review
Pierside is a strange book. While the back cover makes out the vigilante to be the central villain of the piece, what is pretty clear while reading the book is that there is no villain, just a confused bunch of characters.
Pierside is fundamentally a story about five characters. Two of them – Maddy, the country girl, and Ezzy, the clinic worker with a secret – are mentioned on the back. The other three are a beat cop named Roy, a politician’s son named Ian, and a lounge singer who is only known as The Angel.
There are some others - the vigilante mentioned on the back cover is a man named Christopher, who shows up a few times in the work, but doesn’t really get much development, nor does the corrupt politician mentioned, nor do the religious fanatics. While all of them serve as antagonists at various points in the plot, never does it really feel like the story is in any meaningful way a confrontation with those characters – while there are confrontations with each of those characters, none of them really feels like the focus of the book, and while the confrontation at the end with Christopher is the climax of the piece, he slides in and out of the plot too much to really be the focus of it.
There is a lot of stuff that happens in the book – it is pretty tightly packed, with a fairly significant event happening almost every chapter. But I am left feeling at the end like while there was a plot, and a lot of stuff happened, and characters changed, I didn’t quite feel the weight of it all. It made logical sense, by and large, but not necessarily emotional sense.
Early on, we learn that the Saint of Death, an Elevatus who had killed over a thousand people before the start of the story, is actually Ezzy, the nice clinic worker. This is a huge plot point. Indeed, if there is one central conflict to the plot, it is that Elevatus are dangerous, that Ezzy is the proof that they are dangerous, but that Ezzy is not a bad person and has put that behind her. A lot of the story is about dealing with the fact that people are people, not monsters, and that is true regardless of the power they wield.
And here’s the thing – this should be a horrifying revelation, something that is a major gut punch, but I’m not left feeling the weight of that. Someone killing over a thousand people seems like it should have some serious weight, but ultimately it is just a number which I have no connection to. The book doesn’t have enough space to build up the dread around the Saint of Death to make it seem scary or meaningful that Ezzy was the Saint of Death before she became a clinic worker. It is just a faceless multitude of numbers – and worse, Ezzy herself cannot even recollect the specifics, which just leaves me further detached from it.
We’re given these numbers – fifty murdered, seventy five murdered, a hundred and fifty murdered – but, as Stalin once (might have) said, “One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.” Maddy’s own parents were killed by the character in question, which seems like a stronger connection – a way for me to care – but unfortunately, it is an opportunity missed. Maddy’s parents, just like those numbers, are faceless. I don’t remember a single character trait ever being given to either of Maddy’s parents, who never appear on screen, are never (to the best of my recollection) even named, and I’m not sure what sort of people they are, nor of Maddy’s emotional connection to them.
And this makes it hard for me to take a good part of the conflict between Ezzy and Maddy seriously – it isn’t that I can’t understand why Maddy would be angry about it. Furious, even. It makes sense.
The problem is that I don’t emotionally care. Seeing a glimpse of Maddy’s parents while they were still alive, or having Maddy make some reference to them beyond them dying, would have tied me more closely to them. I need to not just know the why, but feel the why. Instead, I am left disconnected from this, and without a real gut-punch here, Maddy’s reaction feels like an overreaction, even though I’d imagine many people would react similarly. But as I don’t care about her parents – indeed, I care more about Ezzy than I do about Maddy’s parents – I’m not left really caring about it, and so the conflict ends up falling flat for me.
This also really messes up my connection to Ezzy’s characterization.
Ezzy feels a huge amount of guilt for what she did – she blames herself, even though she was a child who was being forced to do it under torture. But, again, with it just being a faceless multitude, I’m not really left feeling a strong emotional connection to it – I feel a stronger emotional connection to the torture than to the murders, because we actually see that on-screen, and see the insane man who was forcing Ezzy to commit said murders as a child.
My lack of connection to the deaths makes Ezzy feeling guilty about the murders feel distant – the torture is something we can understand, the murders aren’t something we have such a great emotional grasp on. Ezzy’s guilt about the murders and her refusal to kill again or even use her powers as a result of what she did makes logical sense, but from an emotional point of view, I was unable to grok it. The murders never felt as real to me as the other things, and consequently, it was hard to really properly assign emotional weight to them.
And this is a recurring theme.
The Angel is an Elevatus with the power to control minds, but she veers from being a soulless villain to being much more of a wild card at the end. While there are some conversations with her, I really don’t understand her behavior at all. She seems to take joy in sadism from time to time, but by the end has given that up, and I never really understood why she changed. Ezzy showed her mercy, and this could have been a redemptive moment – but no one ever trusted her, as well they shouldn’t, and as a result her conversion from evil to neutral feels weird. I do get her central desire – she wants to be loved, and her ability to control minds undermines that because she can tell anyone to love her, but they won’t really do so – but on the other hand, in the very beginning of the book, she forces her boyfriend, Ian, to shoot his father so that he might take his position, so I’m not left really feeling that desire on her behalf.
Other characters describe her as a spoiled child – most notably Ian himself – but while she comes off as a scared, spoiled child at times, at other times (particularly in the beginning and the middle of the book, when she controls Ian and Maddy) she seems to just be a bog standard heartless, soulless villain who seems to revel in being evil for the sake of being evil. She has Ian shoot his father because she claims she’s impatient, but I never really get much of a sense of that, and when she has Maddy beat people up for funsies, I’m confused to why she started doing that now, with Maddy, when earlier on she didn’t seem to engage in such behavior. If she had a long history of doing stuff like that, it would make sense – but the book makes no indication of that, so I’m left with either the sense that she’s been a villain for a long time, which makes her change of heart that much less convincing, or that she went wild with power with Maddy, which seems a bit unfounded.
Maddy, the country girl who came to the city with Ezzy, is a good country girl. She has the strongest voicing of any character in the book – her dialogue is the most distinctive, and I’ve got the strongest sense of how she sounds as a person, as well as the strongest mental image of her in my head (even if it is likely corrupted a bit by shades of Applejack). She isn’t Applejack, though – she’s got a violent streak to her, is a drunk, is quite impulsive, struggles to deal with the revelations of the book the most, and lapses into not thinking about anything for a while and letting someone mind control her because she becomes wholly focused on how much she is hurting and how she can stop it by hurting other people.
And the thing is, while I can get someone letting someone else steer their life and drowning themselves in drink and sex so they don’t have to think about what they’ve done or their personal responsibilities, I’m not left really feeling the weight of it. I get that what she did was horrible, but given her general stubbornness and her earlier support of Ezzy (as well as generally stated willingness to shoot people – and indeed, she does in fact shoot The Angel earlier on in the book), when she just gives up and drowns herself in sex and drink, it feels strange. In the end, she gets back her grit and grim determination, but for a large portion of the middle she willingly gives up all personal agency, and it just feels a bit off. Her life did get totally messed up, but the revelation of Ezzy’s previous misdeeds didn’t feel like they had enough weight by the time we got them, and so Maddy careening around just feels strange. And indeed, when Maddy commits a murder around the 2/3rds mark of the book, her reaction, which is supposed to be pretty traumatic, isn’t really any worse than it was to everything else which happened, which undermines Ezzy’s subsequent speech about how murder is traumatic even to the murderer.
Morally speaking, Ian is the best person in many ways throughout the book. It is quickly established that he is one of the Good Guys – he is the son of a corrupt politician, and he is intent on bringing down the corruption of the city’s upper class.
Then he is mind-controlled by The Angel to have to attack his dad in the second chapter.
Ian then starts focusing on revenge on The Angel, before reverting back to his more moral self as we saw at the beginning after helping Ezzy escape from her kidnappers, a group of crazed religious fanatics.
His character arc, again, makes logical sense. But I never really felt it. The scene where he discovers that Ezzy had become the Saint of Death because she was a scared kid who was being tortured all the time, and the only way she could avoid torture was by murdering people on behalf of the cult she was being held by, should have been a pivotal scene. His realization that Ezzy, despite how wronged she had been by that cult, didn’t want to kill anyone and was willing to accept torture or even death rather than kill again, was the turning point for him to turn his back on revenge and turn towards being a better person once more, and indeed, seemed to help him forgive himself for being forced to attack his own father by The Angel.
But the problem is, while all of this makes logical sense, I’m not given an immediate sense of it in the book, and it is only a few scenes later, where he gets to talking with Roy, the honorable cop, that we really get to see the shift in his character.
Roy, the cop, is another moral weight on the team. He is a good guy, and he actually cares about doing the right thing – but in the end, I’m left throughout the story feeling like he’s just along for the ride. He does stuff, but he doesn’t feel like he actually develops much as a person. I get him, I grok his desire to do the right thing – but I’m not left feeling like he really changes much over the course of the work. His main point of character development happens very early in the book, and then he doesn’t change much at all after that, simply sort of going along and being helpful (but not too helpful) without much weight to him. He ultimately feels like a stock character.
The villains, too, feel kind of muddled. Christopher the vigilante is given the most development of them – he is a psychopath who can read people’s thoughts, and because he sees so many people think about bad things (or having done bad things), he thinks it is okay for him to kill them all.
One of the themes of the book is that people are people, and that all monsters are people, and early on, we see that with Christopher – he has a conversation with Ezzy and actually seems to take her thoughts into account, and we also see him forgive Roy, who had previously been just a little bit crooked but who straightened up after his encounter with Christopher.
This is great, but at the end of it he seems to be back to being a total psychopath, undermining the whole “even monstrous people are still people” thing.
And this comes back to the other antagonists as well – the religious cult leader, Hal, is another psychopath, and he has no redemptive traits and doesn’t really seem like a person. Likewise, Ian’s corrupt father is very selfish but doesn’t really seem to have much depth to him.
This ultimately feels like it undermines the idea that people are people, and can choose to be different, because we’re not given much of a sense of two of these people being people, and the last one seems to just turn into a monster again for the final confrontation, without much clear reason behind why they changed.
The “murder is horribly scarring” theme gets undermined by one of the characters in the book killing someone and not seeming to be affected by it. The “people are people” theme seems to be undermined by the three monstrous antagonists. And the horror of Ezzy’s past feels undermined by the fact that I never really felt the emotional weight to the murders. And given that the former two are the major themes of the book, and the last is what the other two are built on, this ended up undermining almost everything for me.
The emotional disconnect was also mirrored by something of a visual one.
What does the town of Pierside look like? I never got a good mental image of what the town was really like as a whole.
What are Elevatus, really? They’re immortal people, and there’s mention of a ritual to make more of them (indeed, the ritual is mentioned more than once), but despite all that, they might as well be random, as this bit of flavor text never really has any relevance.
Both of these come up early, and they niggled at me even as the book moved on to greater, more important things.
I did get some sense of what Maddy, Ezzy, and the Angel looked like, and a lesser extent the vigilante, but I seldom felt the sort of “in the scene” thing I get sometimes while reading particularly evocative writing. The first two chapters had some reasonably evocative stuff; I particularly liked the scene where Maddy and Ezzy’s means of sitting on furniture was contrasted, and the characterization it lent Maddy that she sat on furniture more like a log than a couch. Likewise, when The Angel is introduced, we get some sense of the kind of person she is when she is standing in front of a bunch of mirrors. And the description of Ian going into his father’ house gave me some idea of what he was looking at and lent some weight to his surroundings.
But the rest of the book didn’t quite end up as evocative, and I think that might have combined with me never really feeling the weight of the deaths to further distance me from it.
All of this might make it sound like I hated the work. But I didn’t. I thought that there were some good ideas here, and the semblance of something that worked. But at the same time, I was left feeling like it never really followed through on them – there was the shape of all these things, and it clearly all made sense to the writer, who knew what the characters were like and what they were feeling and thinking, but I didn’t feel like the writing evoked that same sense in me.
I wanted to like this work, but in the end, I left Pierside feeling like while the writer could see the world and story they built, I could only watch them from a distance.
Thanks for the review! I appreciate you taking the time to both read and review it.
4407224
You're welcome! I'm sorry I didn't get around to it sooner.
Hi, this may be a silly question, but does the review have spoilers? Cause I started reading and the review was a general enough but then some phrases gave me the idea that it may contains spoilers, this seems a really promising story and I woldn't want to lost the suspense of the story
4407326 There are a lot of spoilers
4407326
There are some spoilers in the review I'm afraid, mostly concentrated on the first half of the book.
Wait. Lemme get this straight. Titty D doesn't like Pierside.
THAT MEANS IT'S GOOD GO GO GO BUY BUY BUY
:3
At first I misread that as "saidism".
("The fiend!" I opined.)
4410052
Oh, you!