When Supernatural Worlds Collide, or Sometimes a Big Bang Is Just a Lot of Noise

by June Pulliam

05/14/2007

Armstrong, Kelley. Broken. New York: Bantam Spectra, 2006. 444 p. Book Six in the Women of the Otherworld Series.

I picked up this novel expecting some continuation of Armstrong’s Bitten, the first and my favorite book in Armstrong’s series, which focuses on Elena Michaels struggles to accept her lycanthropy, the result of being bitten by her werewolf lover. That Elena survived the bite is remarkable, and her transformation into a werewolf even more so, since only males are supposed to be lycanthropes, and they are born that way, to fully human women, and do not receive the condition as a result of a werewolf bite. Elena’s condition makes her a potentially valuable commodity for some unscrupulous werewolves, and she finds herself embroiled in concentric circles of patriarchal battles for control of her with those who want her body for its potential to make a stronger breed of werewolf and those who would keep her under their thumbs for her own good. But Elena was not a typical woman before her transformation, and as a werewolf, she is independent and aggressive. She is able to fight better than most men and bench press more than her own body weight, none of which makes her body any less appropriately feminine or desirable to males. Her lupine body only intensifies these qualities, as well as enhances her desire for sex.

While Elena is one of the main characters in Broken, alas, the story is more similar to Amrstrong’s later novels in the series, such as the paranormal romance Haunted, than it is to Bitten. I found Haunted enjoyable because the novel was an intricate mélange of paranormal creatures traipsing through different realms, and the characters were interesting. However, so much more is happening in Broken that I began to feel broken myself; I was exhausted by the time I got to the ending.

Broken begins with Elena’s pregnancy—something that should not be possible since female werewolves really aren’t possible, and so no one is sure what the outcome will be. But from there it takes off into a plot involving time portals, necromancy, Jack the Ripper and zombies. So far, so good, but the emphasis is more on detection than on horror, or even paranormal romance, which disappointed me a bit. All that aside, what really irritated me was the pacing of the novel: a good deal of action adventure combined with what I call the Dan Brown effect—a character is on the verge of making a revelation when s/he is interrupted in some way—and we have to wait a bit longer to be let in on the secret. This happened just too many times for my tastes, and began to wear on my patience. Also, at the risk of sounding absurd, since I do write about horror, the time portal/Jack the Ripper plot strained credulity. Perhaps that is because Jack the Ripper has been the subject of so much fictional speculation that he has become tiresome, and I just wish he would return to 1888 and stay there.

The pregnant Elena is involved in this plot, and her belly is a site of contestation for many, but her plot thread gets lost in between so many other themes that its climax is anticlimactic. But that’s what happens when supernatural worlds collide. The resulting explosion brings about too many elements to keep track of, and the result is not so much a large and varied buffet to be sampled, but rather is similar to being in a room full of children who are all simultaneously clamoring for attention until you think your head will explode. I hope that if Armstrong revisits Elena in another novel the focus will be more on her and the wolf pack than on the other women of the Otherworld, since she is an interesting character in her own right and worthy of more stories that center on her.