When "Kindle Cover Disasters" debuted on Tumblr earlier this year, the Internet ROFLMFAO'd at the truly heinous designs: cheap clipart, effects reminiscent of early Print Shop, clashing pastels, Photoshopping by palsied hands, and fonts so troubling you find yourself celebrating the relative peace of Comic Sans.
But if you were taught anything in this life, chances are it was this: Never judge a book by its cover. Of course, whatever genius came up with that old stinker never laid eyes on a self-published Kindle e-book, so it's fallen on us---well, specifically on me, for reasons having to do either with my generous spirit and love of "bad" sci-fi/fantasy, or some sort of karmic debt---to find out whether the rule still applies. Is it fair to judge e-books by their terrible covers, or does brilliance lurk beneath? For the foreseeable future, I'll regularly be downloading and reviewing a selection of the most eye-catching disasters. Will we find the next Wool, or just the next Fifty Shades of Grey? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.
Having survived the Zorzen War, at least in body, I decide I'm ready to travel to a far scarier land: suburban Russia. My guide is Dragan Vujic, which sounds like the name of a Russian werewolf,* because it basically is, being the nym, almost certainly pseudo, of a Canadian author who self-publishes---rather a lot---on the subjects of Russia and werewolves. (Given the relative expertise, my guess is he's more werewolf than Russian IRL.) Those twin interests combine, to somewhat disastrous effect, in 2002's Tender Kiss of a Russian Werewolf. If you've been following "Kindle Cover Disasters" from the beginning, as I have, you'll remember Tender Kiss as the Tumblr's very first post. Look no further than slightly to your left to see why. That full moon in the top right? It might as well be a gold sticker for truly extraordinary work. So you can imagine my excitement as I download my copy and begin reading. It opens in the Russian village of Osena, where it mostly stays for the equivalent of 192 pages.
*"Vujic," Wikipedia confirms, is derived from the Serbo-Croatian word for "wolf."
Vasil Donskov visits his extended family---maternal grandparents, cousins, cousins' kids who apparently qualify as nieces and nephews, et al., nearly all with disyllabic Russian names ending with "a" which even the author confuses---in Russia, where he meets a beautiful woman with a dark secret. But she is not the woman with whom he shares a tender kiss. That would be the werewolf.
The aforementioned Vasil, who is a second-generation Russian-American, recent divorcee (his wife ran off with a Jamaican), and English prof at William & Mary. He specializes in folklore and legends, a field he hates. He also hates his job/life/times. He is not attractive and has no friends. His fate, for these reasons, does not concern us.
Winner: "Vasil wondered how anyone with so much pulchritude could be so evil in nature."
Runner-up: "He wanted to touch her vagina with his penis."
At its most basic---which, when you're dealing with material that already is the most basic, means we're talking about some sort of pure essence of truth here---Tender Kiss of a Russian Werewolf is an e-book-length exploitation/perversion of that classic rhetorical strategy wherein you bore your audience nearly to the point of death so that when death finally comes (in the book, not for you, but what's the difference at this point?) it's greeted with a kind of terrible, hyper-self-conscious, shameful relief. You need to accept this when you begin reading, because these are the first few sentences:
"Osena was a relatively large Russian village located approximately one hundred and twenty kilometers northeast of Moscow. Although it had never acquired the status of a town, the settlement boasted a population of roughly four hundred inhabitants. Most settlements outside of the larger cities seldom had more than one hundred residents."
Vujic continues in this (for sanity's sake, we'll call it intentionally) mind-numbing way. For page after page, Osena is exhaustively mapped as if Vujic is chronicling the descendants of Esau: central five-acre oval-shaped freshwater lake encircled by concentric roads with perpendicular paths (some paved, others not; some with fruit trees, others not) connecting them to the main highway, etc. and etc. I checked the cover at least three times to make sure I had downloaded Tender Kiss and not Provincial Planning for Dummies. I won't even take you inside one of Osena's modest homes, where details (number of windows, placement of electrical wires, size of washbasins) compete with each other for irrelevance, except to say that this comprehensiveness extends even to the toilets, answering for all time the child's question of, "But don't these characters ever go to the bathroom?" They do, and facing a shortage of toilet paper, use pages from Tolstoy and, when that runs out, the Bible, which is softer anyway.
But again, this must be intentional, because when a werewolf finally does show up, well, we wake up. It's heard before it's seen: "Then, the pig commenced to squeal frantically, as if it were being murdered." In a jarring literalization of a simile, it turns out the pig actually is being murdered! Out back, by a werewolf. In the excitement, the writer can't help but look up other words for "monster," finding all he needs in the A-section alone. In that single scene, our werewolf is called an abomination, an aberration, and an atrocity, again and again and again. Ahhh!
(Speaking of words that begin with the letter "a": "approximately" is used exactly 21 times in this book.)
Vujic's tendency to over-describe everything doesn't stop now, however. In fact, it goes from merely deadening to just plain deadly. Ivan, our patriarch, shoots the werewolf---"BOOM" goes his shotgun, and once more. As he searches a dark yard for the injured abomination/aberration/atrocity, his wife Masha screams from behind, "Ivan! Ivan! Be careful. That creature could still be alive. And you don't have any more bullets." Probably for the best, as he likely would've shot Masha right in the head for that one.
This all happens, believe it or not, before our hero, Vasil, arrives in Osena, where he greets his relatives, eats their food, and drinks their vodka. This is Russia, after all, and we must be reminded of that on occasion. (For a while there, I tried to unpack this book in terms of werewolf-as-metaphor for a rapidly modernizing country, but if that's the correct reading, Vujic would've just told us so. Besides, despite being educated on local plumbing, one comes away from Tender Kiss feeling he actually knows less than he did going in about Russian life.) As for Vasil, let's try to forget him. He quickly proves himself an insufferable dweeb, so it's not surprising, and entirely deserved, when he falls for a woman so clearly evil she wears the exact same red shirt and black skirt every day.
As the exposition continues to deepen and intensify, the werewolf encounters get bloodier and crazier. In a way, it's brilliant. The book ends as it must: in five gory deaths, one so climactic there shouldn't be any recovering from it. Yet you feel nothing at all. It's not a silver bullet that kills the werewolf. Instead, here is a town so desperate to be ordinary that nothing special can survive within its walls.
