#strange practice

[captain--miracle]

"Yes, sir, I will walk, I will talk, I will walk and talk with you.”

I love them, your honour

[maddiesbookshelves]

Fav books of 2024 (in no particular order and including only one re-read that I had actually never finished so it doesn't count, shush)

[surfeit-of-stoats]

“Imagine you’ve prayed all your life,” he continued, “that you’ve been taught to pray, taught to believe that you must give praise in prayer and that you are not to expect the blessing of hearing anything ever answer back—that expecting anything to reply to you is hubris and wickedness—but one day there’s this little voice, this still small voice, that does reply. And you believe it and you love it and you worship it, just as you have been taught to all your life … and it shows you wonderful things inside your head, and takes away your fear and pain. And it tells you how to make things … and where to go … and what to do to people with those things, once you get there.

— Strange Practice, Vivian Shaw

[lierdumoa]

Read Strange Practice the first in the Greta Helsing series. It wasn’t bad but like … why doesn’t this woman have any female friends? She has like one female colleague she deliberately keeps out of the loop for reasons I don’t fully grasp and that’s it.

If I pick up a book with a woman on the cover I kind of expect that she’s not going to be the *only* major female character in the central found family group.

[lauralot89]

Incidentally, my introduction to Lord Ruthven was in the 2017 novel Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw, and here are a few of the reasons why I'll never be able to take him seriously as a threat:

He handed her a large pottery mug. She recognized it as one of the set he generally used for blood, and had to smile a little, looking down at the contents—and then abruptly had to clamp down on a wave of thoroughly inconvenient emotion. There was no reason that Ruthven doing goddamn latte art for her at half-past four in the morning should make her want to cry.

He was good at it, too, which was a little infuriating.

—

"Really," Ruthven had said when the question of his nature had first (awkwardly) arisen, early in their acquaintance, "the easiest thing is to think of me as a large well-dressed mosquito, only with more developed social graces and without the disease-vector aspect."

—

Slightly cheered up, Greta went to check on her latest patient and found Ruthven sitting by the burned monk's bed reading, yesterday's tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Some of his hair had even escaped its usual aerodynamic styling process and drooped over his forehead. Absurdly and suddenly she wished she could draw, wanting to catch the scene on paper: Casual Dracula.

—

She hurried down the steps, and then had to stop for a moment, blinking, to fully take in the sight of Edmund Ruthven cradling a very small ghoul in his arms. His expression was not one Greta could ever recall having seen on those patrician features before: a kind of besotted astonishment. Tiny green hands clutched at his shirt.

[wanderingstormjen]

Somehow stumbled upon Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice book series not long ago. Different than most anything else I usually read. But I haven't been so thoroughly hooked by a book series in a good long while. I have added them to my "characters I must protect at all cost".

[judge-books-by-their-covers]

Okay but Ruthven and Varney would be such a fun couple though

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

In Strange Practice when Varney was introduced, the exposition was very angst filled but it made me perk up also because... Past victim? This crime haunting him above all? Female vampire "crying out for retribution"?? Him unable to move on from this?

Not only the fact of his unholy nature, but the terrible deeds he had done, cried out for retribution. Any one of them would damn him to the fiery pits, but one in particular cried out for vengeance: the episode in his existence he could hardly call it life he most regretted; the turning of Clara Crofton. Of all the foul, indefensible, destructive, unforgivable acts he had perpetrated on the world during his various sojourns in it, none could be worse than the sin of changing a human being into a damned, parasitic horror such as himself. To doom her to an eternity of pain and loathing, to take away the last sweet gift any human could receive, the gift of absolution – no, Varney could not forgive himself for that, and would not try. Redemption was beyond him.

I kept waiting for their meeting but alas! This reads like SUCH a build up for confrontation.

i'm so glad there's an author out there who Gets varney. (while also purposefully throwing out everything about ruthven, which polidori honestly deserves.)

it would be fantastic if strange practice used clara as a character, though. she's so criminally underutilized in varney the vampire, she deserves a chance to shine