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ayearofpike · 5 years

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Witch World/Red Queen

Witch World

Simon Pulse, 2012 521 pages, 24 chapters + epilogue ISBN 978-1-4424-3028-0 LOC: PZ7.P626 Wi 2012 OCLC: 924501501 Released November 13, 2012 (per B&N)

(HELL YES I DID take this picture in Vegas. Way back in November, underscoring just how behind this entry is.)

Red Queen

Simon Pulse, 2014 ISBN 978-1-4424-3029-7 LOC: PZ7.P626 Rd 2014 OCLC: 1030042441 Released August 19, 2014 (per B&N)

First I have to address the immediate question: It’s the exact same book. Like, down to pagination. (Yes, I read them both. We’ve already established I’m kind of a freak.) I don’t know why it has two different sets of catalog information. I don’t know why they changed the title, but I will hazard a guess that Witch World is a shitty title and it took slow or lacking sales for S&S to convince Pike/Pike to convince S&S to change it. I don’t know why they then picked a title that would be coming out shortly from another publisher, one that would go on to create a much more robust universe and move enough units to muddy any kind of search query. I don’t even really know why I bought them both. I don’t know a lot of things, and I’m not quite masochist enough to find out.

What I do know? This book is more of the same old shit. Like, OK, most people aren’t going to read all 95 of Christopher Pike’s books right on top of each other, so the connections and relationships might slide. But if you do, you start to see that this dude actually has no new or original ideas after ... let’s generously call it 1996. The beautiful girl in the California town in the middle of nowhere who goes on a weekend party outing with her friends, but then meets a dude with mysterious powers and ends up in a fatal situation, only to realize that she’s survived death and now has strength and vision beyond her prior ability or even imagination? A vision that taps her into an alternate parallel universe, where she’s had a child who has the potential to be the most powerful human ever, only evil forces know about this child’s genetics and want to use her for their own selfish and horrific ends? This is The Grave, gang. Well, mostly The Grave, with some Sita and Alosha and, yes, even Spooksville sprinkled in for flavor. But the point is, we’ve seen all of it already.

Pike has previously said that he felt rushed toward the end of his previous S&S days, and that he didn’t put everything he had into the stories he wrote because of being pulled in multiple directions. That’s fair, and it makes sense that he’d want to come back to something he felt wasn’t as good as it could be, something that didn’t get enough care and attention, and make it better. So it’s a little frustrating that this is what we get. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got a lot of potential, but then again, so did The Grave. I can’t help but feel like Pike is still just trying to figure out what has sold, what has been attractive to people who read his books and others like them, and is retreading so much old ground that it’s starting to become flat and uninteresting. (Which might be part of my reticence to finish this project.)

One thing that’s new and notable about WW/RQ: it marks the placement of Pike’s first YA F-bomb. He’s been using “damn,” “hell,” and “bitch” since the beginning, and starting with EoI (eliding maybe one or two in Whisper of Death) he began liberally (not literally, mind) dropping “shit.” But “fuck” has been sacred, hallowed ground, off limits in any but his adult novels, never mind that this is pretty much what all of his characters want to do all the time. So imagine my profound shock when I picked this book up right around its release date* and encountered the word “unfuckable” on page 18. A sign of the times, yes, and of what was becoming permissible in YA, but to someone who had grown up with Pike and expected a certain voice and stance, this felt kind of wrong and out of place. Much like my opinion of Pike in the 21st century in general.

*This was another random club store find in a rural town in southern New Mexico. I don’t know why the store where I mostly bought diapers was getting Pike in hardback on or near release when nobody else even knew these books were available, and can’t imagine I’ll ever find out.

OK, summary time. Jessie Ralle has just graduated from high school and her entire senior class is going to Las Vegas to celebrate. Said entire class is like 200 people — so not only does Pike still not get what a small town is, but he demonstrates increasing disconnect from how young people actually act. Vegas is a two-hour drive from Apple Valley, California (where Jessie’s mom relocated them after her Hollywood doctor dad bailed on them for a hot young nurse, and also where none of this takes place). I barely even wanted to drive across town to my senior party, to say nothing of paying for a hotel and a fancy dinner with a massive group that I barely know. And that was before the Internet and streaming media allowed us to prune and curate what (and who) we interact with so ruthlessly. Like, if this was a class of 40, I’d be on board, but 200?

But apparently it’s a close-knit 200 people, even though we only ever meet like six of ‘em. Jessie’s riding in a car with four others: her best friend since childhood, the uptight salutatorian, the class nerd who of course has always had a crush on Jessie, and Jimmy. Jessie has loved Jimmy from afar since the beginning of high school, and from up close for a couple of months this past winter, but he dumped her to go back to his previous girlfriend, who graduated early and hasn’t been seen around town since. That doesn’t mean Jessie is over him — far from it, actually — so this car ride is either going to work out in her favor or be super awkward and uncomfortable.

They get a three-bedroom suite at the MGM Grand for $150 over a weekend somehow. It is all I can do to suspend my disbelief. Like, I’ve been to Vegas (obviously; see top image). Pike obviously has too; his description of spatial mechanics is (mostly) on point, which is what makes this price thing so jarring. I’ve been responsible for booking hotel rooms there off and on for the last 20 years. And the one time we ever got a suite, it was almost twice that PER NIGHT and still only had one bedroom. (We split it six ways, and we all HAD jobs.) And this was in the beat-ass old Luxor in September 2006. Ain’t no way these fucking CHILDREN managed a SUITE in a PREMIER CENTER STRIP HOTEL SIX YEARS LATER FOR LESS. And Jessie has the gall to fucking COMPLAIN ABOUT THE COST.

I MUST STOP YELLING. I am so a dad, right?

But anyway, Jimmy doesn’t have a room — he wasn’t even sure he was coming on this trip. Jessie’s best friend offers for him to stay with them, which Uptight Salutatorian bitches about, but like, chill the fuck out, there’s a couch, right? He and Jessie have to talk about whether this is OK, and it turns out he left her because his ex was pregnant, but the baby died just after he was born. And Jessie isn’t OK. They’d been together long enough that this smacks of either an excuse or a manipulation, and she doesn’t like either option. She kicks him out and cries a lot, and then the gang all goes to dinner at the Bellagio, which is where this starts to get financially realistic when half the class balks at the cost of the meal and fucking bails. Yet the restaurant serves the rest, even giving these (again) CHILDREN bottles of wine, which messes Jessie up enough to kiss Nerd Crush. In front of Uptight Salutatorian, who (it turns out) likes HIM. So everyone gets pissed off at each other and takes off, and then Jessie and Best Friend go see O (the Cirque show inside the Bellagio).

It’s page 35, by the way. Almost 500 to go yet. At least from here the story gets more focused and straightforward.

After the show, they want to gamble. CHILDREN. But they have fake IDs, so they head down to the Tropicana, an older hotel with lower minimums on blackjack, where they bump into a dude who seems strangely familiar to Jessie, even though she’s sure she never met him before. This dude is in town for a medical conference ... Jessie will later learn about his genome-scanning technology and what it implies for people like her, but she’s gonna have to figure it out first. He has an uncanny ability to win, and people start asking him for advice, but he denies them all. Except Jessie. They quickly pile up hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is where she’s hosed because they’ll never let her cash out that much with a fake ID. So the dude gives her his room key (not at this old-ass dirtball hotel, at the Mandalay Bay across the street) and says he’ll get her money and bring it up in a minute, and she should order some dessert from room service while she’s waiting.

No, they don’t fuck. They almost do, but then Jessie remembers Jimmy and realizes she’s still hung up on him, even though he wronged her and left her hanging. But she learns that the dude will cop to some unnatural method of knowing what’s coming next in the deck, which is why he managed to bet properly at the right times. He doesn’t show her, but he does teach her how to play twenty-two. Not twenty-one, which is blackjack: in twenty-two, aces are only worth one, but red queens are eleven. And if you get a natural twenty-two (queen of hearts and queen of diamonds), you win instantly, PLUS your opponent HAS to try to win their bet back in full on the next hand. The dude doesn’t state why these are the strict rules, but he does imply that a portion of the winnings goes to some mysterious party that doesn’t come clear yet.

So Jessie goes back to the hotel, where Jimmy is sitting on the floor outside. He’s been sexiled from the nerd’s room, because it turns out he was OK going after Uptight Salutatorian (who I guess isn’t so uptight after all). And he’s crying and he’s apologetic, and this coupled with Jessie’s realization in Mystery Gambler’s room is all it takes for her to accept him back. They have breakfast with everyone the next day (room service, more invisible money spent) and then Jessie and Jimmy drive out to Lake Mead to splash and swim and sex. But what’s weird is that it reminds them both of the first time ... which neither of them remembers the same way. Even more awkward is the ex showing up with a warning: “They never take just one, Jessie. They always take both.” (102)

This doesn’t make any sense, right? Well, Mystery Gambler has planted a seed that things might get confusing pretty quick, and invited Jessie to talk to him about it. So she hops in a cab back to his hotel, except the cab takes her out to a creepy industrial area instead. When it finally stops at a stop sign, she bolts, only she doesn’t know where she is now. Luckily, a beautiful woman in a red Porsche pulls up at that exact moment and offers to give her a ride. Which ... aren’t you even the slightest bit concerned that a strange car brought you out here and now another strange car has just pulled up right when you needed it? Obviously not, which is what leads to her getting tased and waking up in a meat freezer, where the safety ax is of course missing. She wrestles with the door and some meat-hanging apparatus for a while, but can’t get it open and ends up spraining her ankle in the process. And even though it’s dangerous to sit, to slow down, to stop moving in this freezer, Jessie can’t help herself.

She wakes up in a hospital. Only this room doesn’t look or feel like a typical hospital room. Plus, she can’t move. She can’t even blink. She’s briefly relieved when two doctors come in, but that goes away when she realizes they’re here to perform the autopsy. The senior doctor gets called out, which is all the other guy needs to start satiating his necrophilia all over Jessie’s corpse. He’s pretty shocked when Jessie suddenly sits bolt upright and curses him out — enough that he has himself a nice little heart attack right there in the morgue. The other doctor comes back, and she seems to know what happened, and is also weirdly thrilled by the guy’s obvious pain? But she leaves without taking any action, and Jessie sees this as her chance to get out of Dodge.

The hospital is downtown, which is a long way from the MGM Grand but at least it’s an obvious straight shot on Las Vegas Boulevard. Only Jessie doesn’t recognize some of these north-end casinos. She goes inside one to get her bearings and is quickly accosted by three punks, who she casually injures like it’s no thing. What’s even stranger is how quickly they back off and the degree of respect they suddenly accord her. And even stranger than that is that the blackjack tables don’t say “blackjack.”

You guessed it. People in Las Vegas are playing red queen.

So now she has to talk to Mystery Gambler more than ever. She walks all the way to the Mandalay Bay, because fuck a taxi anymore, right? Only it’s called the Mandy, and his room on the top floor is now one floor lower than it used to be. But as it turns out, he does have some answers. He first tells Jessie the truth of why he's in Vegas: his whole medical conference story is just a front. There is some basis in reality, in that his group has identified certain genes that, when awakened, enable essentially superpowers. His genetic sensor identified that Jessie has seven of these genes — but he already knew that. He seems to know a creepy amount for some rando she just met. And also, he keeps calling her Jessica, and she realizes she's using a longer version of his name too, reflexively, even though he never called himself that in their interactions.

This, plus the hotels and the casino game and the fact that, y'know, she woke up on a fucking MORGUE TABLE a few hours ago help Jessie to realize the truth of her situation. With a little guided meditation, which helps her to remember things that never actually happened to her, she learns that there are two simultaneous dimensions happening on Earth, we live two lives in parallel, and the extra genes (when activated) allow people to experience both. These people, historically, are who we think of as witches, so for lack of a better term this second dimension is colloquially called witch world. Like, super lazy writing, right? I guess Pike blew his load inventing names for shit in Alosha and couldn't be arsed to consider that maybe twelve thousand years of connected humans might have named something themselves. (Yeah, I said twelve thousand years. Back at it again with the same timeline.)

But one of those things Jessie remembered is having a baby. This is where her father (remember, the dude who bailed on Jessie and her mom) suddenly shows up. We learn that he left (in the “real” world, not in witch world where he’s still present in her life) because he realized the importance of Jessie and her fate, and hoped that his absence would protect both her and the baby to come. (He has the "seeing-the-future" gene, I guess?) According to Dad, this baby is potentially the most important person in the history of both worlds, because she's the only one to have ever been born with all ten extra genes. It's also a weird connection, because this is the only occasion that anybody knows of where a child has been born to different parents in the two worlds. (The kid is an entirely different person because of that, so that's weird too.) But, just like the boyfriend's ex-girlfriend warned, "they" have taken both.

"They" turn out to be a cadre of witches who want to use their powers to elevate themselves rather than ... well, it's never really made super clear what the "good" witches do. Like ... hang out and be immortal? Oh yeah, I didn't mention that once you're awakened you can't die of natural causes. I guess the dad says that sometimes they'll interfere when shit is really going sideways, but for the most part they want regular humans to regulate their own affairs. It's the Telar again! Only, no, wait, they call themselves the "Tar" in this book so it's obviously totally different. And yeah, both babies have been taken; they let the boyfriend think his son died in infancy so that he'd eventually be a lever to manipulate Jessie when he realized he had two living children. But it sounds like the daughter is already causing trouble for her kidnappers, without even being aware of her ten genes, which ...

I don't know, it doesn't make any sense now that I'm writing about it. Like, I'm cool with the parallel dimensions, I'm on board with dying to become awakened, I'm down with extra powers and whatever. I'm even mostly OK with this story reusing so many assets from all these past books. But like ... how does the baby have some (even unconscious) control of her locked genetic powers when her counterpart in the real world is not only still alive, but had a different MOTHER and is therefore a totally different PERSON? The first chapter of the sequel (all I’ve read of it so far) doesn’t make it look promising that we’re ever gonna find out, so just keep suspending the shit out of that disbelief, I guess.

But anyway, now that Jessie’s connected, she’s hell-bent on rescuing her baby. Which I think she would have done even if she were still separated, but whatever. And I know, easy to think that not actually having a memory of the baby might make it difficult, but these memories are slowly bubbling up and emerging, especially strong ones like parenthood and family. She’s been warned against contacting Jimmy (or “James,” I guess) in witch world, but she doesn’t hesitate to tell him all the crazy shit that’s happened to her in the real world.

(This is another reason I have a problem with the lazy naming conventions on display. To witches, “witch world” is the most real. Each day takes place first there in their perceptions, followed by the same day in the “real world.” We’ll also see how events in witch world have a stronger effect on events in the real world; namely, if you die in witch world you pretty much always die in the real but the inverse is not true. So, once again, why wouldn’t witches have come up with some more appropriate naming patterns at least, given how old the oldest is? Just more lazy crap we gotta swallow.)

So anyway, Jimmy doesn’t believe her; he thinks someone drugged Jessie with a hallucinogenic and now she’s having altered state memories. So she gets out of the car they’re driving to the desert and picks it up to prove her new strength. Why are they driving in the desert? For some reason, Jessie is drawn to the power associated with the nuclear tests that the government ran in the barren nowhere that is most of Nevada. There’s gotta be a reason, after all, that the centers of witch power are here. So they bust into the deserted testing ground, only to discover it’s not that deserted — there’s a kid out there apparently living by himself. He takes to Jimmy immediately and agrees to come back to the city with them, where they’re going to talk more to Jessie’s dad.

The kid can’t speak, but he can write — with a prehensile tail that he has heretofore hidden by wrapping it around his waist. He tells them about the other freaks that live out in the nuked test cities, as well as the mean man who brings him food. The rationale isn’t clear, and the kid isn’t talking ... well ... you know what I mean. But this is where Jimmy finds out his son is still alive and being used as bait. And dude fucking TAKES it: as soon as his ex calls and wants to discuss what she might know about the children, not only does he refuse to step back and let the powerful people handle the rescue, but he actually wants to go through the death process in order to awaken his awareness of both sides.. They don’t let him do that, because apparently our good guys are not allowed to actively connect more witches, except when they are. So all they can do is talk to the ex and learn that she doesn’t care who she sells out to as long as it saves her son, which ... fair. But Jimmy isn’t willing to go that far, and they head back to her dad’s house to regroup, where they realize they’re being watched.

Or they were, I guess. There’s a car with two obvious spies in it, but they’re dead, and the killer is hanging out nearby. This dude is, we learn, second-in-command of the Tar leadership, a five-thousand-year-old Celt who wants to take a more proactive approach in encouraging good and deterring evil in both humans and witches, mostly with his sword. He’s a Highlander, is what I’m trying to say. He takes Jessie out to a sacred spring in the mountains, where they swim naked together, as you do when you first meet an ancient Celtic swordsman, right? But there’s some cliff writing out here, written by the ancient people in a script the Highlander knows, having been taught it by the man who turned him so many years ago. It describes a woman who will have such power that she controls the destiny of the world, and it’s essentially Jessie’s daughter. So like ... tell me something I don’t know, right? What’s more new and unusual is the Highlander’s description of red queen, how it was taught to him and spread throughout ancient Rome, and how a certain percentage of all winnings, no matter who takes it, has to ultimately return to his benefactor, who we’ll call the Alchemist because that’s what Pike calls him.

We’re going to have to wait on more description, because the Highlander takes Jessie home and we skip-cut forward to the next night in witch world, where she’s meeting the leadership council and discussing their intents to rescue the baby. Mystery Gambler is there too; he's going to act as Jessie's liaison to the bad guys, having served as a double agent since the Civil War. This scene seems like it might be superfluous, except that you mostly only retain the memories from the dimension in which you die, and so the council knows that Jessie needs some backstory. (Don't we all.) The main thing we get out of this is that they've kind of figured out that WANTING to activate their witch genes has a high correlation with witches going bad at all, especially when they try to engineer the birth of high-number witches. So Jessie's contact with Jimmy was carefully arranged so as to appear NOT engineered, because even though the future sight told them that these two were compatible and would fall in love and make a power baby, any appearance of forcing it could make things all fucked up.

So Jessie's entire life is a sham, manipulated by sources of power she was never supposed to see, one of those being her own goddamn father.

What next? Well, on to the other purpose of this meeting: prep for said meeting with the bad guys. The council expects that they're going to offer Jessie her baby back, as long as both of them live under bad-guy control, and they want her to string them along while they figure out what to do. Great fuckin' plan, guys. You've been trying to make a power baby for how many thousand years, and you didn't have a contingency plan if it got kidnapped?

But so Jessie and Mystery Gambler go to the next meeting, and this is starting to sound like work. As it turns out, the leader of the bad guys is (plot twist that surprises nobody!) the coroner who was unfazed when Jessie sat up in the morgue. She's making this deal because the baby is difficult, and they think that if she has her mother that they'll be able to control her and her powers. They let Jessie hold her, which activates even more of those mom connections, but when they go to take her away the baby cries and creates almost a physical wall, which the big strong guard man has to fight with all his might to overcome. President Coroner has no qualms with the possibility that she might have to kill both baby and mom if they don't cooperate. In fact, she invites Jessie to die right here and now, by forcing her to fight for her life against Mystery Gambler. For Jessie, this is proving her worth and her importance in being allowed into the bad-guy circle. For Mystery Gambler, it's a step up to a higher ranking of leadership. For President Coroner, it's TV. So they have a monster sword fight ... well, Mystery Gambler has a sword; Jessie has a bamboo stick that proves its power when she somehow shoots fire out the end and totally incinerates the dude. Which is cool by the bad guys, because they already knew MG was a double agent and wanted him dead anyway. And then there's another kid ... this one with a tail ... only instead of a blunt prehensile end, this one has a stinger like a scorpion's. Guess whose kid THIS is.

Back in the real world, Jessie and Jimmy go see her dad, who confirms that there was a mysterious fire on the top floor of the Mandalay Bay the night before, with one fatality. Which ... does this even come close to matching the timeline? How could it have already happened if the day hasn't happened yet? But whatever — the important thing is that the council wants Jessie to accept the bad guys' offer and go live with the baby. The tail-boy is still here, though Jessie's dad says he's riddled with malignant tumors and can't possibly live too much longer. But they realize that if he can tap into those cross-dimensional memories, the way Jessie and Jimmy were doing when they argued about fucking all the way back ... two days ago, then maybe they can use him to triangulate the area where witch-tail-boy lives, presumably with President Coroner. He leads them to a gated community at the base of a mountain, which they figure is good intel to take back to the council even if they're not ready to investigate yet.

Jessie does want to try to find the area where she got dumped and zapped the day she was killed, for ... you know, reasons. She hears cries of pain coming out of the sewer in the general area she thinks it was, and in investigating she runs into the big mean guard from the bad guy meeting. He thinks it's been a waste of time trying to get her on their side and is just about to kill her when the Highlander shows up and unceremoniously lops off his head. He has some more info about what might be going on down here, and it has to do with his dearest and oldest love: that’s right, President Coroner.

They met in ancient Rome, around the turn of the calendar, but every effort they made to procreate ended in tragedy. One son was killed in battle fighting the Huns, one daughter (and her children) died of the plague, and a final son (who, let it be known, they named HERME) disappeared during the US Revolutionary War. All this loss made the poor woman so bitter and angry that she naturally began striving for control, including supporting Hitler (like, literally helping him) during WWII. The Highlander thinks there's another dimension to her having gone there, though: somehow she can feed off the pain of misery and death, and is addicted to it. Also, it gives her another power of being able to confound people, which the Highlander experienced when trying to reason with her around the time of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion and again when the power baby was kidnapped. Is it helping anybody that he's holding out on the council with this info?

So he takes Jessie back to the hotel, where she owes her best friend an explanation — only she already knows. Turns out that this dude she's been hooking up with in Vegas is a witch too, and has explained to her the ins and outs and difficulties of what's going on with Jessie, up to a point. Turns out this dude is ALSO a double agent, here supposedly on assignment from the bad guys but just about ready to turn face, at least partly because he's found himself in love with the friend. After two days. His primary power is the ability to change his appearance at will, which Jessie learns in a jarring fashion upon waking up in witch world and finding a tall hunky dude in her suite in place of this pudgy nerd. She has that gene too, he says, and helps her start down the path of disguising herself. She quickly gets good at it and then realizes: couldn't I use this power to sneak into that gated community and steal back my baby?

Obviously it's not going to be so easy as walking into the joint and walking back out with The Special, even disguised as President Coroner as she is. First of all, she doesn't even know for sure that the baby is here now, and she does know that the actual boss is in town, not here. (Lucky thing, right, when she goes through the guard shack in full makeup.) So instead she goes to Jimmy's ex-girlfriend's place. Don't ask me how she knows that THIS is an option, or that the girl is indeed even home, or that she is living there at all. There's not even really a reason to believe that she can help, or that she even KNOWS anything about the baby. But Jessie's concerned about the competition, and fairly confident that her target doesn't have the strength gene and will therefore be easy enough to overpower. It proves true in terms of tying the girl up and throwing her in the trunk of her car, but Jessie isn't counting on being lied to. The ex kicks through the backseat and forces Jessie off the road, where they have an epic Matrix battle that culminates in Jessie punching a hole in the gas tank and exploding the thing with an emergency flare. She feels a surge of pleasure while the ex-girlfriend dies, which is ... creepy? Shows some link to President Coroner? What else does it mean?

It at least means that Jessie should be prepared when she goes to talk to President Coroner tonight. She buys a handgun at a pawn shop, then meets Jimmy James in front of the Tropicana, where the big ugly bodyguard picks them up in a limo. James takes a little while to get in the car, and he doesn't sit right next to Jessie for some reason. The car takes them back to the gated community, to the biggest house, where President Coroner is waiting. Negotiations don't really go as well as could be hoped, since the boss already knows that she's not the one who kidnapped the ex in the trunk of a car. But while they're working out their threats and measuring their dicks, who should walk in but the Highlander. He's finally talked the Tar council into using brain powers to murder his dearest love, and as one person has to be present to make it work, guess who volunteered. Only the big mean bodyguard is holding the baby, and he'll rip her in half if they make a move against his boss. This is a good time for the best friend's boyfriend, the shapeshifting teacher, to appear out of thin air, grab the gun out of Jessie's waistband, and cap the bodyguard in the head. Yeah, he was sitting between them for the whole car ride, like there's not enough seats in a limo for him to stretch out somewhere else. Cockblocker.

But here's the weirdest part: President Coroner recognizes him. That's right, bitches — Herme lives! He has seen the evil his mother is doing and has finally come out of hiding to try to help put a stop to it. And James helped him because he knows what's going on in both worlds. He's experienced it, actually: after Jessie fell asleep, he killed himself (with Herme's help) so he could be fully present and help in witch world. I have more timeline problems and concerns, obviously, starting with the question of how Jimmy could possibly be here today if he hasn't yet killed himself, but that's not where the characters are right now. Right now they're concerned with stopping this ultimate evil who doesn't seem to care about murder. So Herme and his Highlander dad point blue brain lasers at President Coroner, who generates a red bubble to stop them, because everything we have to know about good and evil energy colors we learned from Star Wars.

And now Jessie finds herself inside the red bubble. She's been the most susceptible of those exposed to PC, after all, and so she might be convertible to the pain-suckers. She relives all of the memories that our dear villain has of her children dying and of how the pain could be turned into a pleasurable sensation, and it's just hypnotic enough and convincing enough that, as Jessie finds herself back in her own body, she can be persuaded to take her gun back from Herme and shoot the Highlander. He doesn't die, but he's weakened enough that President Coroner can steal his sword and stab him in the heart.

So now what? Well, it's a good thing Jimmy's here to save everybody! What would we do without a white dude who's barely aware of his powers? But he knows that together, with Jessie and the baby, they have a strength that is impossible to overcome. So they manage to paralyze our villain, but now her scorpion son shows up and wants to murder too. Only — plot twist! — he murders his mom! Turns out that when Jimmy killed himself, he also killed tail-boy in the real world, and now HE'S got good-guy memories. This is really telling about President Coroner's parenting skills that all of her living children not only think that she has to die, but show up to help DO IT.

But now all is good and we can move forward as a family, right? Totally! At least until Jessie wakes up in the real world and finds Jimmy lying beside her, still and cold and dead.

This would have been a good place to stop, right? Of course he doesn't. Two days later, Jessie and her best friend are home from Jimmy's funeral, talking about what's going on and all the implications, when suddenly there's a sound at the door — the mail box. (Does anybody still have one of these shits in 2012? Most rural neighborhoods are going to the community box.) Jessie collects the mail, among which is a red envelope containing a letter from the Alchemist (remember that dude) anticipating a future meeting and sending best wishes from ... President Coroner.

And that is the end of Witch World! Or Red Queen, whichever one you picked up. Like, are we starting to understand how Pike has so little grasp of world-building that he has ALREADY killed his main antagonist AND the potential monkey wrench in Jessie's future relationships? Doesn't he realize none of us are going to get invested in a world where you don't stay dead after you die? I mean, except zombies. But since that's not what we're talking about, I can't possibly imagine where Black Knight is going to take us. I mean, I can, because I've read the back copy, and it doesn't look remotely related. Maybe that's one more reason I've been stalling on this entry: to keep me away from the annoying-looking next one.

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