The Space Raptor and Walnut Trilogy by Lindsay "Hotdog" Ellis

[pibbs]

To Lindsay and her mob, book discussion is in the NCunt: Black Cocks Only thread, where you may REEEEE without censorship. A freedom of differing opinion that we grant and that you wouldn't.

Ok. Found a torrent for her book.

Axiom's End by Nostalgia Chick
DHI Book Club by pibbs

Chapter One - a sample, first paragraph

On the morning of the second meteor, Cora's 1989 Toyota Camry gave up the ghost for good. The car was a manual transmission with a stick shift its previous owner had wrapped in duct tape years ago, a time bomb the color of expired baby food that should have gone off sooner than it did. At $800, she had paid more than it was worth

(wrong 89 Camry's are damn near indestructible. I had one)

but back then, she had been a freshman in college and desperate for a car. In the two years since, she'd grown accustomed to the ever-loudening squealing of the fan belt, but on this morning, after she put her key in the ignition and the engine turned, the squealing turned into a hostile screech. A disheartening thunk thunk thunk followed, then a snap, then an angry whirr, all before she could react. But by the time she turned off the ignition, it was clear her first and only car, was dead forever.

Why? The fan belt snapped. Cheap easy fix. Bitch don't know cars and I fear this book will be filled with the everyday crap she doesn't know, because Lindsay's spoiled and pampered ass never had to deal with them. Car trouble? Suck a dick. Can't pay rent? Suck a dick. Want to be a Nostalgia Chick? Suck three dicks.

[Poonoo]

Axiom's End by Nostalgia Chick
PART ONE
Chapter One: Millennial Falcon
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by fair use, bitch

Fan belt breaks on our hero's car,and Lindsay believes this is a permanent catastrophe. So, mother takes our hero, Cora Ortega (ugh, nice jamming that minority main protagonist in there, but you lose points that she isn't trans) to work. Mother/daughter tension established. Mother is bitchy.

Cora is a temp. Early 20-something angsty college drop out. Blew $200 her mom gave her for car repairs on a Neko Case concert, her third this year.

Cora knew it was absolutely on her that she had not fixed the car. The fan belt was just the last thing in a long line of events that only tightened the spiral of powerlessness that was coming to define her existence.

Her fault, but not her fault. The ringing mantra of the human debris known as millennials.

The dialogue is terrible.
They're being tailgated by apparent men-in-black.

“Jesus,” said Cora. “What is their problem?”
“What?” Demi looked in her rearview mirror. “Oh, Christ. Those assholes again.”
Suddenly, Cora was on alert. “What, you know them?”
“Well, I’ve seen them,” said Demi. “More than once on my way to work. They always tailgate.”
“Holy shit,” said Cora

.Listening to NPR on the radio.

“In the three years since it was founded,” said the newscaster, “The Broken Seal has gone from fledgling website to the forefront of the transparency movement.”
The words “The Broken Seal” sent a sharp icicle through her chest, and she momentarily forgot about the tail.
“But one month after the website’s most infamous and controversial leak gave The Broken Seal and its founder, Nils Ortega—”

[A few minutes later]

Cora decided to drop it and tried to keep her focus on the Dodge Stratus in front of them. Living under The Broken Seal’s shadow was a source of chronic fear that had only worsened since the Ampersand Event and subsequent leak of the Fremda Memo. Like the fan belt on the verge of snapping, The Broken Seal was a time bomb that would inevitably blow up in their faces.

What? Some jerk in her creative writing classes told her, drop in mysterious references to things in the world to make it seem authentic. This is some clunky writing, right here. I also hate authors who feel they can;t use normal names (like Lindsay) because it's not creative.

Mary Sue spots the MIB car in a parking lot to her work and runs to the elevator, for no apparent reason On the elevator at work

The door began to close, but Eli smashed the Door Open button, smiling like he’d done her a big favor as the door bounced back open. He fancied himself part of the hacktivist crowd, and, like most of his peers, he adored Nils Ortega.

Ugh.

She wasn’t sure whether Eli was the best person she could have bumped into or the worst. She grimaced, conscious of how suspicious she looked, and moved inside the elevator. “Well…”
His eyes lit up as the doors closed behind her. “Is it something to do with The Broken Seal?”
“Maybe?” she said, now kicking herself for being in a situation where she was trapped in an elevator with this man. Even at a distance of a couple of feet, his eagerness, his overfamiliarity, felt like a violation of her personal space.

LOL
Lindsay describes him as a scene boy. I like Emo Eli better.

Nils Ortega is her daddy. He's a master hacktivist or some shit. Basically, an Edward Snowden I guess

People like Eli thought the Ampersand Event was a spaceship or something, a UFO or a scout, or at the very least a probe. Cora, like most people, believed it was a rock that fell out of the sky and landed in the hills north of Pasadena

[Aliens. Kek]

Eli took a deep breath, like he was about to bungee jump for the first time. “Dude. If my dad released the most important leak in human history, no, the most important discovery in human history—”
She snorted and started to respond, but he cut her off.

Snorted?

Emo Eli and Mary Sue argue over the importance of her daddy. She reacts like an anime character shouting her fee fees. She goes to cry on the toilet then goes to find a computer to look up her daddy's website.

She found it immediately, and the title alone made her put off reading it for another minute—“These Disparate Lives.” Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Once again shooting for a Pulitzer for achievement in pretentiousness.

(Says the author of this book)
She establishes we're in the Bush era. Fergilicious (2006) was on the radio earlier. Something shatters the windows and Mary Sue immediately walks over to peer out. Because that's what a post-911 person would do. They think its another meteor.
END of chapter one.

This is a terrible book, BUT it might be a "so bad, it's entertaining". I'll have to read more, but not tonight

[pibbs]

Ok. One more.

Axiom's End by Nostalgia Chick
Chapter Two: The Kitchen
DHI Review by pibbs
Protected by fair use, bitch.

Cora all but fell upon her front door, fumbling out her keys in a frantic bid to shut herself inside and lock the world out. If traffic was forgiving, it took about half an hour to make it the ten miles home from downtown LA. By bus, it was closer to ninety minutes, but panic on the roads had put today’s journey closer to two hours

So, LA is panicking, because of a meteor? And maybe because some nut on the internet (her daddy) said muh aliens?

An initial panic had resulted in several fender benders both downtown and on the 110, although by the time Cora made it to her house, it seemed that the traffic was now back to boilerplate rush hour, perhaps slightly exacerbated due to a higher-than-normal number of car crashes.

Okay. Sure.

...she saw dozens of people tearing by in their vehicles, clogging the streets and one of them nearly hitting her in their fervor, although what they were running to or from, she wasn’t sure, and she suspected neither were they.

And neither do we know the point of all this author. "She's got home late because of traffic." Just saved you 1,000 words.

Lindsay describes the neighborhood, showing off her, “yeah I'm from here” knowledge. She's lived there 2-3 years?

The two family dogs, Thor and Monster Truck...

Monster Truck? That's kinda funny actually. One point, Nchick.

She was so preoccupied that she didn’t even notice that she wasn’t the only person in the house.
“What are you doing here?” Cora nearly screamed when she noticed that there was a person on the couch, and that said person was playing her copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

April?! So, that's where she went. No, it's Aunt Lucianna. Weird reaction for someone who regularly drops by. Anyone got a Aunt that plays Skyrim? Goofy.

Monster Truck, a wall-eyed pug...

A pug named Monster Truck, that's even funnier. Another point.

Cora and Aunty discuss traffic for another page. We opened with a traffic report. That's two pages of traffic reports. Let's describe what happened then have characters repeat information. This is Ernest Cline tier shit here.

Cora blinked, her worry deepening. This was international news. Half of Southern California was searching for fallout shelters to die in, and Luciana wouldn’t even look up from Oblivion. “Lu, a second celestial object just fell from the sky in almost the exact same spot as a nearly identical one did a month ago.”

Some windows shattered in downtown buildings. Calm the fuck down, LA.

Ugh. We're going over the Ampersand/Fremda Memo thing again. Fuck's sake, Lindsay, we get it!

Still yammering with Aunty.

“I think that article Nils published today caught some attention, because I’m pretty sure some guys were spying on me before the meteor hit. There was a black Town Car following us this morning. Demi said it wasn’t the first time.”

WE ALREADY COVERED THIS IN CHAPTER ONE, LINDSAY, YOU VAPID WHORE!! This shows a lack of confidence in the writing. Did you get that? Huh? It may be important. Let me tell you again!

Wait, Cora's dad is half German. This is barely a minority! Does she still get SJW points? Anyway, halfway through this chapter and all that's happened is talking about what happened in chapter one, and that Lucianna was fired from a high security job with guv'ment clearance, because her brother spilled the beans on the aliens.

“Nils said their whole raison d’être was every country besides this one. If we’re being spied on, it should be FBI or NSA.”
Luciana shrugged. “Well, first, CIA involvement doesn’t preclude any other agencies. Second, Nils isn’t domestic. He’s committing espionage against the U.S. government from a foreign country. Ergo, he is a CIA matter.” She looked at Cora, her expression finally changing into something like sympathy. “You okay?”
Cora pursed her lips. “I think he’s challenging me.”
“Who, Nils?”
“Yeah. With this last article. It felt … pointed.”
“Well, of course it was pointed. He has never mentioned you before.”
“No, I mean, the uh…” Cora wrinkled her nose in disgust. “The ‘I hope they join me’ bit.”
“He’s challenging all of us.”
Cora huffed. “No, I mean me. Specifically me.”

Our guv'ment spies on me, cuz I'm the chosen one! Probably, right?

Luciana bolted upright on the couch, her attention snapping to the front window. “Someone’s here.”

Bolted... snapping to .. ladies, calm the fuck down. Cocaine, not even once]

Cora moved to look out the window, expecting a cavalcade of black Town Cars barreling in from both directions. There was no Town Car, but there was her mother’s Olds Cutlass, and she could feel a thrum of anger waves emanating from it.

There's a lot of this. EXCITEMENT! SOMETHING'S HAPPENING, oh, nothing. Nevermind.
Mom comes home and is mad because Cora didn't clock out or tell anyone. Remember, their floor's windows were blown out. Typically, the office drones don't keep doing TPS reports with a missing side to the building.

“They didn’t, but you did.” Demi’s voice was tremulous [someone got a thesaurus] with anger. “I know because Kaiser called PMT. You have been removed from staffing lists effective immediately because you left without a word during a minor crisis.”

Aliens, Lindsay. You had aliens, gov'ment conspiracies, and UFOs in your novel, yes? Two chapters, people.
So, mom works at the temp place that got Cora the job, and Cora's people fired that agency because Cora went home. This is what someone who's never worked thinks how business' are run.

Cora has gray eyes. This is important for Lindsay to point out in the middle of this for some reason. I've never met a person with gray eyes. Have you? She's probably a hybrid or something stupid like that.

Here's a sample of this conversation.

“I have a meeting tomorrow with the VP of staffing that may end with my no longer having a job. Because I recommended you to staffing,” Demi said, her anger now cold.
“I left during a crisis. The windows in the entire building had shattered.”
“Was that the noise?” asked Olive [the younger sister]. “The bang?”
“It’s okay, butternut. We’re safe,” said Cora, her tone contradicting her words.
“You still have to play by the rules,” said Demi.
“Can we please have this conversation at another time?” begged Cora, not wanting this to end in a scream-out in front of a first grader. Olive hugged her even tighter.
“No!” said Demi. “No, you do not get to duck out of this.”

And then a stranger at the door...

“Hello?” A man’s voice sounded from the still-open front door.
The three women turned to look at the man standing in the doorframe, looking like he’d caught a fair chunk of that conversation.

How does someone look like they "caught a fair chunk of a conversation?" What's that expression look like?

He was tall and willowy, with full dark hair, a slender face, and a plastic smile.
“Demetra Sabino,” he said as he took off his big, shiny aviators. “You prefer Sabino now, right?”
Monster Truck had calmed, but Thor was still challenging the intruder. Cora put Olive down and moved Thor back. She looked at the man again and nearly choked on her own sharp intake of air.
Aviators.
“Yes,” said Demi. “I’m not giving any press statements.”
“Not with the press.” He pulled out a badge. “Special Agent Sol Kaplan, CIA.”
It was one of the men from the Town Car.

Dun dun duuuuunnnn.....
End of Chapter Two

[pibbs]

Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 3: Men In Flannel
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch

*forgot to mention this section of the book is Part One “The Obelus Event”. Whatever.

This chapter begins with what we already know.

Cora had heard tales of CIA and FBI agents from Luciana...

Yes. Just moments ago. In the previous chapter. WTH, Lindsay?

An MIB appears at the front door.

He looked to be pushing forty, around Demi’s age but more than a head taller than she was, wearing a casual plaid button-down shirt over a Pink Floyd T-shirt, hardly the Man in Black she’d imagined.

MIF, Man In Flannel? Enter Special Agent Kaplan. He introduces himself in the dumbest paragraph I have read so far...

“Sol,” he said, “Special Agent Kaplan is my father.” He laughed, indicating to Cora that he meant that to be a joke. But it didn’t have the tone of a joke, like he wasn’t practiced at joking.

Sol? SOL?
She uses the word “joke(ing)" three times in two sentences. This is a basic creative writing no-no. More dumb writing... Then this.

Demi’s eyes darted between them. “Do you two know each other?”
“I’ve enjoyed the occasional chat with Ortega the Younger,” said Kaplan.

Cringe.

“So how ’bout that meteor?” he said, looking at Demi. “Last time we had one of those, your ex-husband threw a little party.”

Awful, awful writing.
Look, I'm not selectively editing what I quote to make this look bad. This whole scene is this awkward. Man In Flannel, three women, two dogs and two children are just standing around the kitchen here. NOTHING'S HAPPENING!

So, SOL (I can't get past how stupid that name is) is making a case against daddy hacktivist. Apparently, I left something out that Lindsay is really hammering home. Daddy posted on his website some diatribe with the words “I'm doing it for the children, I hope they join me.” Cora became emo over this several times, because daddeh is now in hiding, and abandonment issues. Agent Flannel is now drilling the family over the “I hope they join me” bit.

Lindsay is a real adjective whore, because her overuse of them is making this a real slog. Not to mention her word choices and insignificant details.

The spike of fear sharpened, drilled deeper. She swallowed and replied, “No, nothing.”
Kaplan’s gaze was implacable, but it lingered on Cora. “That’s interesting.”

Interesting? No. It's not. Nothing has happened in a chapter and a half. We are stuck in this damn kitchen!

...Luciana, the only person in the room who didn’t seem remotely threatened by the man. Cora tried to latch onto this; if Luciana knew him and wasn’t threatened, there was probably no threat.

That's right, Lindsay. Can't let your strong independent womyn seem weak before a ebil man.

He moved toward Demi, resting his arm on the doorframe. Feeling like her mother’s personal space was being invaded, Cora stood up, Thor whining as she rose.

Slog, slog, slog. Sol the MIF leaves, nothing is accomplished. Guv'ment wants daddeh, Cora wants nothing to do with him. The stupid bitches drink a box of wine. Exactly what Lindsay was doing while writing this, I assume. Mommy stumbles off to bed drunk. It is this scene Lindsay writes with the most expertise and confidence. Aunty gives Cora a burner phone, then bugs out to some remote cabin somewhere.

Cora snorted. “Aw, my own Bat-phone. I’m a woman now.”
“Bat-phone?”
“You know.” She recalled the old ’60s Batman theme: “Da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.”
Luciana chuckled, but the tension in her voice only made Cora more uneasy. “Ah.”
“Da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.” Cora eyed the phone...

Cringe. And Cora snorts a lot in this book.
Later that night, Cora hears her mom drunk and crying in the other room. A common sound in Taj Ma Ellis, I'm sure. Cora knows she should comfort mom, but doesn't. She catches herself in the mirror and notices the weight gain, and circles under her eyes, confirming what DHI already knew, Cora is Lindsay. And BTW despite all that strong indie woman crap, what's Lindsay's Mary Sue concerned with? How pretty she looks. She notes make up will cover up those imperfections, just like Lindsay IRL.
Cora plays and sings Avril Lavigne for her younger sister. KILL ME. Cora once again recounts with the six year old what WE JUST READ!!! Losing the job, daddeh being on the lam. She gets emo over an old letter from daddeh, and decides to mail an angry reply to the return address somewhere in Germany. As she's out in the rain, she thinks she sees something skulking around an empty house.

Whatever she had seen, it was only her subconscious reacting to an unusually stressful day. A big white cat or something. There couldn’t be any meteor-related beings in the suburbs, snooping around here looking for Nils, because there was no way her luck was that bad. Right?
There was

See, here, Lindsay is aware and embarrassed she's using the most common scifi trope, and we all know Cora is about to be E.T.ed, so she makes a point to let us know she knows.
End of chapter.

[pibbs]

Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 4: A New Dope
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch

This chapter opens with Cora tossing and turning for hours, emo-thinking about daddeh. (And I just posted a tweet where Lindsay called bullshit on men saying her character has daddy issues. Ok, then) BTW Cora calls her dad by his first name, Nils, but that don't mean nothing.

The scuffling in the computer room didn’t wake her up; she’d been awake for hours. She’d been trying to clear her mind and get to sleep but always came back to Nils’s letter, how it ripped open wounds she’d deluded herself into thinking had healed years ago. She didn’t know why she had kept it for the last two months; it was too uncomfortable to merit introspection. She wondered what he wanted, what he really, honestly expected her to do.

Nope. No daddy issues here.

Anyway. Something's fucking about in the kitchen. Gee, what could it be? A rat, a bat, a long-haired cat?

Or an alien.

Oh.
Again, nothing but a conspiracy nut on the internet (her dad) has suggested there's an alien on Earth. Even so why would Cora think in a city of 4 million an alien wandered into her house? Not since Abrams' Kirk finding old Spock in the cave has such plot convenience been so blatant.
Though it's probably because Lindsay is so insecure in her writing she tries to acknowledge that she's aware of the same familiar tropes that's obvious to the reader. But skipping over the process she makes the mistake that these things should'nt be obvious to the character, because it wasn't earned in the narrative. But I ask, if she's worried about recycling those tropes, then WHY USE THEM?!

“Felix,” she whispered, hoping to God he was the culprit. “Felix? You know you’re not supposed to be in there, you little pervert.”

Felix, her kid brother. Pervert? That's pretty judgmental coming from an empowered aborter, Lin-lin.

The computer is on, but dismantled. Oh, I'm hoping this thing looks exactly like ET (since this could be a scene from that movie) and Lins is just fucking with us.

For the space of a heartbeat, she thought she saw a dark silhouette on the other side of the living room, distinctly inhuman, a massive reptoid thing in a crouch. She definitely saw eyes, black orbs imbued with the faintest of golden glows.

Damn.
So, what does our strong independent female protagonist, written by a strong-independent woman, do?

She goes screaming down the hall.

She cowers in her mom's room with the two kids and the pug named Monster Truck. Thor is left out in the hall. Fuck that dog.

She turned and looked at the one small window in the room, wondering if there was a glimmer of hope of getting all four of them and the dog out through the window before that thing broke down the door, when she felt a high-frequency noise ringing inside her head. She tried to say something but fell to her knees. She sensed the dog stop barking, her sister stop crying. The noise was telling her to close her eyes, go to sleep.

End chapter.
Thank God, this was a short chapter.

[pibbs]

Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 5: Thor:RagnaBARK
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch

Opening sentence.

Monster Truck was awake and alert by the time Cora regained consciousness, snorting bravely in pug.

What's brave about this snorting? This dog was cowering with the rest of the family just a page before. What does snorting bravely sound like? And why all the snorting? Find a new sound, Lindsay.

Anyway, the family, including the dog (no word on poor Thor yet) all collapsed together. (Trope #162) Probably in slow motion. I don't know. Fuck this book.

Ah, now we spend a page and a half talking about Thor's absence. Where's Thor? Thor's not barking. We should go look for Thor. Our feelings about Thor. Oh, and the phone's not working. (Trope #275)

Then this lovely dumb sentence:

At that moment, she was more concerned with her dog’s well-being than the broad, sweeping philosophical implications of the existence of extraterrestrial life, or the even more profound implication of Nils’s lifework and reason for abandoning his family in the first place being completely validated.

Back on daddeh again.

Cora slips out, and ET is gone. Door is open.

throwing on her old, peach-colored Disneyland hoodie and grabbing her cell phone

Fucking hell, Lindsay. We get it, you like Disneyland.

No Thor. Poor doggie.

What hideous lies movies peddle, she thought, the idea that dogs survive home invasions.

Is this a dig at Doge's “Independence Day” review where he tried to force meme the dog surviving? “Boomer lives!”

Look at this lovely example how Lindsay builds tension then immediately deflates it.

The thought filled the pit of her stomach with ice. She didn’t accept that yet—if the creature had killed her dog, there would be a body or at least a dog-sized pile of ash. No, that was a thought she could not entertain. Olive would never forgive her for that. After a few more minutes and another block scoured, she turned another corner.
There was Thor, sniffing something in one of the rich neighbors’ corner yards.

Detective Mary Sue finds a clue.

...she saw what the dog was sniffing.
It looked like part of a footprint.
She shook her head, thinking her mind was seeing what she thought an alien footprint might look like. It looked like a bird’s footprint, if the bird weighed three hundred pounds and only walked on its toes.

BIG BIRD, get your drunk ass back to Sesame Street!

It had a texture to it, upon examination, like creases, joints leaving their imprint in the sand.

Yes. Hence the term footprint.

Velma here follows the footprints but sent Scooby home.

...she caught the distant blues and reds of police lights about to round the corner toward her. On instinct, she ducked into a yard, slipping through an unlocked gate and hiding behind the brick wall

Why? No, really, WHY?!

The po-po go to her house. Mary Sue worries about paw-paw's letter with the return address in Germany.

A string of cold wire wrapped around her stomach and squeezed;

What a weird metaphor.

what if they found that returned letter to Nils in the mailbox? Forget alien home invasions; what would they do if they had found out she’d lied about Nils never contacting her?

Here's another example of setting up a scene with tension to only immediately undercut it. Writing is hard!

She flipped out her cell phone and called her mother’s phone—straight to voice mail. “Shit,” she hissed, dialing the landline. Also out of service. “Shit, shit, shit!”
It took another three tries on her mother’s cell before it stopped going to voice mail and actually rang. Her mother picked up almost immediately.

Mom tells her to come home. Then tells her to stay put. Black SUVs!! Something's happening at the house. We don't know, and I don't care. Cora runs off into a marsh. In L.A. I'll have to defer to Lindsay expertise of the geography of Los Angelos, because that seems stupid to me.
Now a helicopter. Oh no!
They don't want witnesses? Will they make poor Cora disappear? We don't know, Cora runs off anyway. Because one thing we know from the flannel and Pink Floyd teeshirt Man in Black, these are some cold-hearted, killer bastards. ACTUAL LEE that wasn't established. Not even a little.
She calls mommy again. After 2/3rds of a page from talking to her before.
Aaaand trope #25

“Good,” Demi replied. Then she was silent, as though on the other end of the line there were some maniac with a gun to her head. Then Demi whispered, “Run.”
Cora froze, unsure whether she had heard her mother correctly, then threw her phone into the marsh, stumbling back into the brush, powering through the long, tall grass.

I just found the funniest sentence so far.

She started back toward the direction of the Circuit City, or at least what she thought was the direction of the Circuit City, before she stumbled into the marsh part of the marsh.

The marsh part of the marsh! Next to the woody part of the woods! HAHAHAHA! She should have cut through the parking lot part of the parking lot! HAHAHA! What a dope! How did this get past an editor?

Then she gets George Floyded into the marsh. No seriously.

She struggled to free herself from the mud and had only just made it back onto solid ground before an unseen force pushed her back into the muck, flat on her face... She convulsed as though electricity were flowing through her, turning her nerves into jelly. She felt a deep pressure on her neck as though something were trying to burrow in between her vertebrae. Her brain demanded that her voice produce some noise, any noise, but her body wouldn’t obey.

And that's how the chapter ends.

[pibbs]

Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 6: Bard to the Future
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch

Fellow DHIers. I want you to try and picture this opening paragraph in your mind. And then set the “Chicken Dance” music to it.

Cora’s eyes shot open, and she released the scream she’d been trying to produce. She clapped her hand over her mouth and shot to her knees, breathing hungrily. She’d blacked out, but only for a few seconds, perhaps. She slapped her hand on the back of her neck where she’d felt the pressure... She coughed in horror, scanning the marsh to look for where the thing had gone, seeing nothing... She stood up, choking on her own ragged breathing as she rose, her legs wobbling... She smacked the back of her neck, now unable to shake the idea that the thing had laid eggs in it.

Cora again does stuff without really doing anything.

Between the flowing lavender pajamas, the Disneyland hoodie, and the filth, she couldn’t have been more conspicuous if she had been wearing clown makeup.

“Or coming home at 4am,” as Lindsay would call it.

She wanted to run back into the arms of the Men in Black, screaming that an alien had just injected her with something and she’d give up just about any measure of civil liberties if they would please get it out.

Why is Lindsay sharing details about her abortion? Read it again.

Anyway, Cora, still in the marsh part of the marsh, calls her Aunty, and recaps the crap WE JUST READ IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, yet again. The Aunt sends her friend Bard in a white van to pick her up. She must go to the Denny's to wait.

And then this dumb sentence.

“So when I see Bard’s murdervan coming around the bend, my prince has come for me.”

Bard picks her up AND THEY REHASH THE SHIT THAT HAPPENED IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER!!!! FUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK!!!!!

I guess this is important. Or it's not. I don't know. It's the only new thing in this chapter.

“Why are you all going to San José?”
“To lie low.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why now?”
“Because everyone at ROSA was laid off yesterday, and some of our colleagues never came home last night,” he said. “That’s why.”
By this point, she hadn’t yet been able to process the now-obvious fact that Luciana and her former coworkers had everything to do with the Fremda Memo.

End of Chapter.

[pibbs]

Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 7: I Left the Plot in Ole San Jose
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch

We travel to San Jose. Wait sorry, no, kinda, fuck it. Lindsay...

The house was not in San José. In fact, it wasn’t fair to even call it near San José—it was closer to Santa Cruz, up in the mountains between the two metro areas on one of those back roads where the second homes of wealthy Silicon Valley folks were comfortably separated by large, vacation-sized distances.

THEN WHY MENTION SAN JOSE, YOU VAPID WHORE??!!

Luciana gawked at her niece like her skin had been removed in its entirety.

Something a little less gory, Lindsay. Your fan base will get triggered.

Reunited with Aunty Lucianna, guess what they talk about? Yup, crap that happened two chapters back, that was already revisited TWICE one chapter back. Then amazingly, out of nowhere and unexpectedly, some new information.

“You have to tell me what’s going on,” said Cora.
“I can’t,” said Luciana without pause.
Cora threw up her hands, exasperated. “Then why are you here? Does this have anything to do with Ampersand II?”
“Obelus.”
“What?”
Luciana pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “This one’s called Obelus.”

So Aunty doesn't quite believe that an alien injected her with something, because it doesn't fit with what they know. What do they know? I don't know. She won't tell. Why? Fuck you, that's why. Maybe Lindsay hadn't figured it out yet.

Dumb sentence of the chapter alert:

“If we’re all on the run from the government already, what difference does it make?” Cora thundered, her words reverberating through the trees, through the atmosphere, through the entire galaxy, through space, through time and into eternity.

Lindsay, I'm going to need you to take it down a notch.

Cora is ordered to the showers, and is paraded through the living room past

several thirty- and fortysomethings and one older man who had the sort of agelessness that could have put him at forty or seventy, and but for his eyebrows he had no hair on his head.
…
She gestured to her ex-coworkers in turn. “Cora, these are some of my former coworkers: Harris, Shaun, Natalie, Stevie, Dan-O, David, Joel, Sarah, Maria, and Dr. Sev.”

I'm reading this in Lindsay's snarky, monotone voice.

“Dr. Sev,” Cora repeated. He nodded at her warmly and shook her hand, and she couldn’t help but get tripped on whatever Dr. Phil-by-way-of-California persona he was going for.

I'm SO bored

Cora showered off, then went hunting for clothes, a much more time-consuming endeavor than she had anticipated. None of the clothes fit—she was too big for all of them.

Fat ass Cora can't find clothes? Lindsay's gripping narrative!
Eventually, Cora finds a dress. Crisis averted.

Luciana had Cora calmly, carefully rehash the whole thing again for everyone in the room.

That's it? You're not going to go through it bullet point by bullet point?

The group like her Aunty don't disbelieve her, but it doesn't match with what they know. And they still not telling.
Cora and Aunty tiff over this.

“No!” Luciana clapped back, surprising Cora. “Did you read the Fremda Memo? They don’t engage with us! They don’t touch us, they don’t look at us, they don’t talk to us! We’re not even sure if they can communicate with us. And they sure as hell don’t understand English!”
“You’ve tried?” she asked.
Luciana’s eyes popped. “My job for seven years was to try.”

Ok, dumb, but we're getting somewhere.

Then everyone talks and talks about everything that happened up till then.

Cora walked down the wood stairs of the deck and onto the driveway, taking a short walk to clear her head. This time, she was so distracted that she missed the flash of iridescent skin slinking back into the trees.

Chapter Seven, everybody.

[pibbs]

Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Chapter 8: Alien vs Prima Donna
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch

Cora goes wandering down the driveway, then turns around back towards the cottage. All the while going over everything ONCE AGAIN! So far, I think there's actually only about three chapters of actually new stuff.

She had to do something.

You're just now figuring this out now?

Unfortunately, the most obvious course of action was also the most unsavory: Nils.

She ponders how to see daddeh, and gawps at the trees. Nature is calming. Look at all the nature. She flashbacks to a time her and her family go camping and – DO SOMETHING, YOU WALNUT!!

and that was when she saw it, between the trees, stony and still, staring at her from about fifty feet away.
It was the creature. The alien. In full view and, this time, unmistakable.

FINALLY! FUCK!

Contest time. Draw this thing from the description.

The creature was tall, even in a crouch, firmly inhuman, with a shell that shone silvery white in the twilight. Its body leaned forward like a raptor, despite the lack of anything behind it like a tail to balance its center of gravity, with long arms curled in front of it like a praying mantis. It had an oblong head like a dragon, if the dragon had no jaw and no nose, and even had a sort of crest that jutted out from the back of its head like a feather headdress. But it was the eyes that were most striking, the only part of it that wasn’t some shade of that iridescent white silver, big almond-shaped things situated on the sides of its head like a wasp, amber colored and seeming to glow as if there were a dim, internal light illuminating a gemstone, and those eyes were focused on her...It didn’t resemble the prototypical Roswell alien at all, save perhaps in its color and even then only distantly. It was in the strange construction of its joints, the construction of its hands, which sported six digits that resembled spider legs rather than fingers, the shell-like nature of its skin. It didn’t seem to have a mouth at all.

Lindsay uses an entire page to basically say, they gawked at one another. It moves to stand before her. It's 9 feet tall. She tries to talk to it. It injects her with something. She goes limp, it implants something behind her ear. Basically, its like the babble-fish from Hitchhiker's Guide and let's them communicate.

“Still.”
Her body became still.
The word was phonetic and mechanical. Though the voice wasn’t human, the software certainly was—the alien must have co-opted text-to-talk technology. It sounded like the voice from a standard Macintosh.

And it tells her “Silent” she shuts up, and that not only ends chapter 8, that's ends part one. Holy shit, this book is bad.

[pibbs]

Axiom's End by HotDog Girl
Part Two: Billions of Flesh-Eating Aliens
Chapter 9: Invasion of the Bawdy Snatchers
DHI Book Club Discussion by pibbs
protected by Fair Use, bitch

*A side note: I'm giving the chapters snarky titles, but the “Billions of Flesh-Eating Aliens” is the actual title she gave this section.

Each of these parts begins with a fake article. Probably to fill in the holes of her weak narrative

SpoilerShow

Mountain View, California
September 24, 2007
NASDAQ: 2,241.05
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 11,572.16

Little attention has been paid to one of the more significant implications presented in the Fremda Memo, which is the suggestion that, despite the fact that these ETIs are ostensibly alive, there has been no successful attempt at communication. This raises a multitude of questions wholly separate from issues of government transparency, some technological, some ethical, some philosophical. They do not respond to our attempts to communicate, despite the fact that the greatest minds that have succeeded in slipping through the filter of government clearance have been trying to get them to respond for decades. Why?
I find the explanation that we are unable to fathom any intelligence advanced enough to develop interstellar travel reductive and inadequate. If I can teach my dog to high-five, an alien smart enough to travel hundreds if not thousands of light-years can at least bang out five notes on a Casio. This barest minimum should be possible if there were curiosity or intent on the part of the ETIs, if there were a desire to communicate, but there appears to be none. And if that is the case, why? It’s an exercise in futility to speculate, of course, but it does open the door for some civilization-wide self-reflection on our part.
If these ETIs really do exist, most of us would have to admit that they have terrible timing. Humanity is fractured, bellicose, paranoid. It’s the cosmological equivalent of having a guest come to the door when you’re in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight with your spouse, there are lines of coke on the coffee table, and your pants are down around your ankles. It isn’t the failure to communicate that fascinates me; it’s the implication that these ETIs appear to have no interest in communication at all. And we humans, vain, egotistical creatures that we are, can’t help but take that a little personally.
It may well be that, regardless of why these ETIs are allowing themselves to be held in federal custody, they are well aware that at this stage in our development, we are not yet ready for First Contact. If that is the case, we can probably assume that our guests will not start talking to us anytime soon.
And if that is the case, there is probably a good reason.

Mazandarani, Kaveh. “Is Humanity Ready for First Contact?” The New Yorker. October 15, 2007.

Anyway, on to our “story”. I'm going to sum this up. Cora is at Google headquarters, Googleplex, being controlled by the alien.

“You’re not even on the right floor, I think,” said the man. He had soft brown eyes and dark skin. She tried to wiggle her pinkie and succeeded.
“Speak: Which floor?”
Please, man who is probably not an alien, help me.
Cora spied a bag of peanuts on a desk nearby

She tries to fight it with the power of peanuts.

“Speak: How does one travel to the basement?”
Peanut. She tried to say only one word that was hers. Peanut, peanut, peanut!
“How does one travel to the peanut?”
Now Cora felt adrenaline begin to bubble in her blood. Success. She was breaking out of the spell.
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“How does one travel to the basement?”

So, the alien is trying to control her, but has a poor grasp on human behaviour blah, blah, blah. And then we get this nice little descriptive:

She was still in that too-short chiffon tiered maxi dress. She wasn’t even wearing a bra. She could smell herself, a funk resultant of god-knows-how-many days without bathing. Without washing her hair for who knows how long, it must have looked like two flavors of ice cream melted together.
Cracks in this alien’s plan, whatever it was, were beginning to show.

ET wants her to go to the basement. So she tries to go to the basement. A LOT of words are used to describe Cora's thought processes here. I'm only giving one example of this.

The most obvious thing to do would be to turn herself in right here and now, but then she traced that possibility to its logical conclusion; she’d beg sanctuary from the security guard, then from the police, then she would fall right into the hands of the feds, another pawn in their epic war against Nils. At best, she’d have no memory of any of this; at worst, her whole family would have their brains scrambled. And if they took her mother and siblings away for practically nothing, what would they do to her? That thought alone made her tempted to just ride this out.

That right there is the crux of this fucking novel. Cora's thoughts and fee fees. It's why it has taken 8 chapters just to make first contact. Lindsay writes like a self-absorbed girl, which she is. This ibook reads like “Twilight” but with aliens, and I wouldn't be that surprised if Cora eventually falls in love with it. That is the most simplistic, cliche, retarded plot I can think of and it is fitting for level of story telling that I'm reading here.

Here's more of this shit. Remember, Cora is standing in front of a security guard asking where's the basement, and sounding like a retard.

But on the other hand, was it any wiser to throw herself on the possible mercy of the alien, a creature that, for all she knew, was the first of a swarm of superbeings bent on world domination? In any circumstance... and on and on and on.

And that's the chapter. I'm not kidding. An entire chapter of this asinine stream of consciousness, until we finally get to a sentence with substance.

Cora steeled herself, took a deep breath, and said, “There’s a bomb in the building.”

END CHAPTER, I'm not kidding.
Fuck this book.