Firefly by Piers Anthony

Synopsis

When a fleshless corpse is found on a Florida estate, a reclusive caretaker, an investigative reporter, a police officer, and a woman discover that a creature whose victims die in a frenzied state of sexual ecstasy is preying on human beings.

Edition:

Hardcover

Trigger Warnings:

My Thoughts:

Note: Before I get started on why I clearly (sorry for the spoiler image) hate Firefly and can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone ever for any reason, I want to first let you know that I’m going to talk about some pretty fucked up stuff. I’m going to touch on child sexual abuse, and people who pretty much think that’s a fine thing to do. So be warned.

First things first – the writing in Firefly is truly questionable. I don’t know how Piers Anthony normally writes, but if it is at all like he did here, I cannot fathom how it is that he has had such a long and notable career. Actually, you know what? Just solely based on the existence of Firefly I don’t understand it anyway. but the first thing I noticed in this book was all! the! exclamation! points! There are LITERALLY hundreds. I think that before I hit page 100 I must have passed 200 or more exclamation points. And it never lets up. These people are surprised AF all the time. By everything.

Not here for that.

But what puts Firefly way the hell outside the realm of things I would ever consider recommending is this: the 10 entire fucking pages devoted to a 5 year old girl as Lolita to a grown ass man bit. And I mean movie Lolita, not book. It is posed less as trauma response and more as this girl is just dtf – which is repulsive. And it is GRAPHIC. And 10 pages of a 381 page book is a massive amount of real estate for something so foul. I think I could have accepted mention of the small child as sexually precocious if it had a) not required 10 incredibly descriptive pages and b) made mention of the fact that while yes, this does sometimes happen, it is a trauma response, and one which requires immediate intervention NOT every weird man’s dream. There are at least 2 pages of this horrific bit of writing devoted to this ACTUAL CHILD coercing this grown ass man into having sex with her. Because apparently in Piers Anthony’s crazy-gross-old-man-brain this is an acceptable thing to write. And it gets worse.

I’m sure you’re wondering “how the fuck can this get worse?” The Author’s Note is how. While Firefly is chock full of repugnance, nowhere is it more apparent than in the Author’s Note. Within this bit of near-incoherent bullshit he talks about a convicted and imprisoned pedophile he got to write one of the stories one of the characters tells (and he goes to great lengths to point out that it’s the non-sexual one, lest we judge this poor, beleaguered predator). I want to quote the section of this passage where he talks about this man so you can get an idea for the kind of horror show this story is, and the kind of person Piers Anthony apparently is (and buckle up, cuz it’s gonna be revolting):

“But this is another bit of evidence of the problem in our society: as far as I know, Santiago Hernandez did not hurt anyone. He just happens to be sexually attracted to small boys…It may be that the problem is not with what is deviant, but with our definitions. I suggest in the novel that little Nymph was abused not by the man with whom she had sex, but by members of her family who warped her taste, and by the society that preferred to condemn her lover rather than address the source of the problem in her family…I suspect our priorities are confused. We have problems enough with world hunger and injustice, without making more by punishing people for deviant but perhaps harmless behavior.”

I’m sorry, but FUCKING WHAT?! This dude is clearly out of his mind. This is a dangerous, not to mention completely bizarre way of thinking. Like, ‘People are hungry, so who cares if kids get sexually abused. Bigger problems, people!’ Ummm…nope. Sorry bro. Not how it works. Also, and I can’t believe I have to say this in the body of a god damned book review, but CHILDREN CANNOT CONSENT TO SEX. THEY DO NOT HAVE “LOVERS” YOU UNCONSCIONABLE MONSTER.

I did a little digging, and I did find one Santiago Hernandez-Arenado who was tried for sex abuse of a 13-year old girl in 1984, and if this is the dude he’s talking about, homeboy confessed to having done the crime as well as assaulting “hundreds of others” in Cuba. Now, I know that confessions aren’t bulletproof, but, unless Piers was there, I’m gonna err on the side of ‘he said he did it so he definitely did hurt someone.

I don’t know you guys – the story would have been okay if it had been written by someone with a better grasp of punctuation and less of a penchant for pederasty, but I still can’t say anything positive about this story because it was so horrifically told. Honestly, I am absolutely not precious when it comes to the types of books I’ll read – I read gross stuff, I read things from the POV of extremely questionable characters – I do not read romanticized child pornography. That is a real hard fuckin line in the sand for ol’ Angie.

Rating:

For the first time ever on this blog I’m giving zero stars. I feel like the writing was borderline incompetent, the subject matter delved quickly into a place that made me feel vaguely criminal just for reading it, and the concept wasn’t well thought out enough to make me even consider recommending it to absolutely anyone. I don’t understand why this guy is so adored by his fairly large fanbase.

Firefly
By Piers Anthony
William Morrow
Published: August 1, 1990
ISBN: 9780688097059
Hardcover, Paperback
384 Pages