BLACKWOOD FARM, CHAPTER 45
Mar. 27th, 2018 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_sporking_ratPoor Blaze has a swollen paw! He’ll be okay, this has happened to him before. I don’t know why he’s the only rat who has this issue, but he gets his foot caught in the cage bars; he broke his back foot last time and the vet thought he might lose it! This looks WAY less serious though, luckily, so I think he’s gonna be fine. Poor baby though!
BLACKWOOD FARM, CHAPTER 45
It's sunset. Quinn wakes up. He's hungry, but he decides to take care of business first and go to the funeral. Tommy and Nash have flown in but they're of no importance in this chapter. There is an "enormous crowd" at the funeral, and Patsy is there, which surprises Quinn because apparently she's a big one for skipping funerals, according to him. I suspect this may be because he only has that of his grandparents and Lynelle for reference and I don't recall if Patsy was at theirs. What surprises ME is that Patsy isn't demonized, there's no bits where we're reminded she's a big nasty slut, etc. Instead, she's dressed "soberly" in black, it's "plain" that she's been crying, and she doesn't make any mean remarks when she hands Quinn a photocopy of Aunt Queen's will. She says that AQ left her "plenty" and that it was "a damn nice thing for her to do" in a way that, to me, reads as her being emotionally touched by this surprise rather than greedy over it like I recall she was with, I think, Pops. This hints to me she probably had a better relationship with AQ, but didn't realize how much AQ cared for her in return.
Quinn mentions everyone who is there--Jasmine, the other staff, Terry Sue and her kids, and, for some reason, Michael and Rowan. He describes what everyone is wearing and I am having Anita Blake flashbacks, especially with how he sees fit to focus on how Rowan's bobbed hair highlights her high cheekbones, because NOW is definitely the time to notice that. Quinn does not think they realize he is a vampire yet.
He goes to look at Aunt Queen. He recognizes her cameo as one she gave to Petronia, and wonders how she got it. Oh, Petronia is there at the foot of her coffin, "looking sad and forlorn". I guess Petronia got uber attached to this one single mortal she met for a single night. Totally believable for a callous, capricious, cruel killer vampire who has been around thousands of years and surely known many mortals! She tells Quinn this way Aunt Queen can be buried with something worthy of her, then she's gone.
There's some more stuff about how Aunt Queen looks. Some discussion between Jasmine and Quinn about when the Mass is and asking Jasmine to handle the people who want to give condolences. The "fine elegant ghost" Julien Mayfair shows up since AQ was really his daughter. He telepathically tells Quinn "never my beloved Mona" which I think means don't turn Mona into a vampire. Or just don't fuck her. Which is rich when you consider, I'm pretty sure Julien has?
Jasmine, who cannot see Julien, kisses Quinn on the cheek to bring "Little Boss" back to reality. Dr. Winn is there, as is Oliver Stirling, who is "gazing at me as if he accepted me when that was utterly morally impossible" which to be honest is a pretty dumb assumption. The Talamasca may want to study vampires, but I see no evidence they hate them, they're not hunters. Indeed, I don't think vampire hunters exist in Rice canon? I mean, how could they even, given the power of her vampires; not that vampires in other canons don't have equal or greater powers, but they're still usually not the strongest beings in their canon, which Ricean vampires are.
Quinn decides to go feed. "It was a night for special killing" and "I wanted a drug dealer, a wanton killer, a fine repast, and I knew where to find one. I had passed his door on gentler nights. I knew his habits. I had saved him for a time of vengeance. I had saved him for now."
Okay, so basically this undermines any attempt for the whole "kill the Evil Doer" to be in any way about morality. Because Quinn is about to describe all the awful, awful things that this "wanton killer" has done, including the murder of children.
And he says he was saving him.
Meaning, Quinn let him live, continuing these awful crimes, up until Quinn felt like killing him because he was in a pissy mood and wanted to take it out on someone with a murder.
Quinn may feel that this man's crimes entitle him to kill him, but he clearly doesn't feel any compassion or care for the victims of those crimes, because he was apparently happy to let them keep piling up without a second thought until he was in a mood to eat him. You can't even call this any sort of vigilante justice at this point.
The bad man lives in a big two-story house that looks shabby on the outside but is rich inside, with "electronic gadgets and wall-to-wall carpets". From here he makes his "executions and purchases" and apparently even puts hits on children who refuse to run deliveries for them. To show they have been killed, he has their sneakers tied together and thrown over telephone wires, to let the other kids know what happened.
...I feel like Anne Rice probably got this idea from an urban legend of some kind. Like "oh those shoes you see on telephone wires are from DEAD KIDS A CRIME LORD KILLED!" sounds like something people would spread around.
Quinn goes in, kills the man's two "drugged-up stumbling companions" and then the man himself. He does this because "I didn't care what the world thought." Ah, yes, the world does frown so on murdering people who kill children.
He drinks from the man, tasting how evil he is in very poetic descriptions, though with a brief bit of humanization when there is a mention of "mother and kindergarten" when he gets all the way back to the man's childhood. Then the man dies and Quinn puts two bullets in his head to make it look like a mundane murder.
Then Goblin shows up to drain him, Quinn telepathically shouts about how he's a murdering devil, and randomly has flashbacks to being an infant, and these flashbacks include Aunt Queen, which makes him even angrier of course, but then "I was with Goblin and loved Goblin and nothing else mattered" but then he tells Goblin to get off him, calls him a devil, says he's going to end him. Then Goblin is gone and "I was in the lair of the drug king, amid the rotting bodies."
...rotting? Wait, are their bodies putrefying ALREADY, or did they just have a ton of bodies in their nice house because they don't have a dumping ground or the guy is just that evil or something?
He thinks about how Aunt Queen is dead, and her cream-colored satin dress and ropes of pearls and little eyeglasses and Chantilly perfume, just a bit of Chantilly perfume, and how she is dead and there is nothing he can do about it.
BLACKWOOD FARM, CHAPTER 45
It's sunset. Quinn wakes up. He's hungry, but he decides to take care of business first and go to the funeral. Tommy and Nash have flown in but they're of no importance in this chapter. There is an "enormous crowd" at the funeral, and Patsy is there, which surprises Quinn because apparently she's a big one for skipping funerals, according to him. I suspect this may be because he only has that of his grandparents and Lynelle for reference and I don't recall if Patsy was at theirs. What surprises ME is that Patsy isn't demonized, there's no bits where we're reminded she's a big nasty slut, etc. Instead, she's dressed "soberly" in black, it's "plain" that she's been crying, and she doesn't make any mean remarks when she hands Quinn a photocopy of Aunt Queen's will. She says that AQ left her "plenty" and that it was "a damn nice thing for her to do" in a way that, to me, reads as her being emotionally touched by this surprise rather than greedy over it like I recall she was with, I think, Pops. This hints to me she probably had a better relationship with AQ, but didn't realize how much AQ cared for her in return.
Quinn mentions everyone who is there--Jasmine, the other staff, Terry Sue and her kids, and, for some reason, Michael and Rowan. He describes what everyone is wearing and I am having Anita Blake flashbacks, especially with how he sees fit to focus on how Rowan's bobbed hair highlights her high cheekbones, because NOW is definitely the time to notice that. Quinn does not think they realize he is a vampire yet.
He goes to look at Aunt Queen. He recognizes her cameo as one she gave to Petronia, and wonders how she got it. Oh, Petronia is there at the foot of her coffin, "looking sad and forlorn". I guess Petronia got uber attached to this one single mortal she met for a single night. Totally believable for a callous, capricious, cruel killer vampire who has been around thousands of years and surely known many mortals! She tells Quinn this way Aunt Queen can be buried with something worthy of her, then she's gone.
There's some more stuff about how Aunt Queen looks. Some discussion between Jasmine and Quinn about when the Mass is and asking Jasmine to handle the people who want to give condolences. The "fine elegant ghost" Julien Mayfair shows up since AQ was really his daughter. He telepathically tells Quinn "never my beloved Mona" which I think means don't turn Mona into a vampire. Or just don't fuck her. Which is rich when you consider, I'm pretty sure Julien has?
Jasmine, who cannot see Julien, kisses Quinn on the cheek to bring "Little Boss" back to reality. Dr. Winn is there, as is Oliver Stirling, who is "gazing at me as if he accepted me when that was utterly morally impossible" which to be honest is a pretty dumb assumption. The Talamasca may want to study vampires, but I see no evidence they hate them, they're not hunters. Indeed, I don't think vampire hunters exist in Rice canon? I mean, how could they even, given the power of her vampires; not that vampires in other canons don't have equal or greater powers, but they're still usually not the strongest beings in their canon, which Ricean vampires are.
Quinn decides to go feed. "It was a night for special killing" and "I wanted a drug dealer, a wanton killer, a fine repast, and I knew where to find one. I had passed his door on gentler nights. I knew his habits. I had saved him for a time of vengeance. I had saved him for now."
Okay, so basically this undermines any attempt for the whole "kill the Evil Doer" to be in any way about morality. Because Quinn is about to describe all the awful, awful things that this "wanton killer" has done, including the murder of children.
And he says he was saving him.
Meaning, Quinn let him live, continuing these awful crimes, up until Quinn felt like killing him because he was in a pissy mood and wanted to take it out on someone with a murder.
Quinn may feel that this man's crimes entitle him to kill him, but he clearly doesn't feel any compassion or care for the victims of those crimes, because he was apparently happy to let them keep piling up without a second thought until he was in a mood to eat him. You can't even call this any sort of vigilante justice at this point.
The bad man lives in a big two-story house that looks shabby on the outside but is rich inside, with "electronic gadgets and wall-to-wall carpets". From here he makes his "executions and purchases" and apparently even puts hits on children who refuse to run deliveries for them. To show they have been killed, he has their sneakers tied together and thrown over telephone wires, to let the other kids know what happened.
...I feel like Anne Rice probably got this idea from an urban legend of some kind. Like "oh those shoes you see on telephone wires are from DEAD KIDS A CRIME LORD KILLED!" sounds like something people would spread around.
Quinn goes in, kills the man's two "drugged-up stumbling companions" and then the man himself. He does this because "I didn't care what the world thought." Ah, yes, the world does frown so on murdering people who kill children.
He drinks from the man, tasting how evil he is in very poetic descriptions, though with a brief bit of humanization when there is a mention of "mother and kindergarten" when he gets all the way back to the man's childhood. Then the man dies and Quinn puts two bullets in his head to make it look like a mundane murder.
Then Goblin shows up to drain him, Quinn telepathically shouts about how he's a murdering devil, and randomly has flashbacks to being an infant, and these flashbacks include Aunt Queen, which makes him even angrier of course, but then "I was with Goblin and loved Goblin and nothing else mattered" but then he tells Goblin to get off him, calls him a devil, says he's going to end him. Then Goblin is gone and "I was in the lair of the drug king, amid the rotting bodies."
...rotting? Wait, are their bodies putrefying ALREADY, or did they just have a ton of bodies in their nice house because they don't have a dumping ground or the guy is just that evil or something?
He thinks about how Aunt Queen is dead, and her cream-colored satin dress and ropes of pearls and little eyeglasses and Chantilly perfume, just a bit of Chantilly perfume, and how she is dead and there is nothing he can do about it.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-27 06:22 pm (UTC)The more of this I see the more I agree that it seems like Quinn et al started life as some kind of pre-Civil War family with actual slaves, but Anne decided to shoehorn the Mayfairs in. All the "Little Boss" and making servants sleep with you stuff fits with that, along with the unnatural way the characters speak and their interests.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-29 01:10 am (UTC)