I’ve read 13 Jayne Castle novels in the last 10 days, and I regret nothing. (3/42)
It’s time for a conversation about dust bunnies.
Most of you know that I am both obsessive and an avid reader. Sometimes these two characteristics collide impressively, especially when my library has every book of a series available in ebook format. It’s always great fun to read 15 or 20 years’ worth of someone’s writing in a fortnight or ten days, as I have done here.
If you don’t know who Jayne Castle is, that may be because she’s actually Jayne Ann Krentz (who is also, plot twist, Amanda Quick). I own fewer pairs of blue jeans than the number of this woman’s pen names. (JAK has used seven pseudonyms in total but only currently uses three.) Jayne Ann Krentz has written over 50 titles on the New York Times bestsellers list and has published at least 3 books a year for over 40 years, and she still maintains this publishing schedule in her 70s. This lady has had the kind of success I can only dream about. (I’ll revise those four shitty first-draft novels one day, I promise.)
Jayne Ann Krentz started writing contemporary romances in the late 1970s*, but somewhere along the line, she started writing historical romances under the pseudonym Amanda Quick. That’s how I started reading her work. Many of her early historical romances were both Regency period and funny, which is my favorite combination in that genre. (Give me Loretta Chase over Mary Balogh any day, IYKYK.) So I read almost all of those titles. She later switched to writing Victorian romances with a paranormal twist, and I thought, yeah, why not? So I read all of those, too. There had been a whiff of the paranormal in some of the Regency stuff, but it really intensified in the Victorian books, with secret societies and dastardly villains and clockwork toys that kill. (Like, the good stuff, right?) She has since started writing books in this same universe set in California in the 1930s, which are glamorous and fun. Are these novels literary masterpieces? No. Are they really entertaining? Yes. Yes, they are.
Her contemporary suspense-romance titles increasingly had psychic or paranormal angles, too -- and sometimes involved the same secret societies and wicked cabals as her Victorian/Golden Age of Hollywood novels. So I started reading those, too. I’ve devoured as many of her Jayne Ann Krentz (contemporary romantic thrillers) and Amanda Quick (historical romantic thrillers) titles as I could find. I have read A LOT of her work.
I was more resistant to her Jayne Castle series, though. It’s a little more offbeat. Most of the Jayne Castle oeuvre is set in the future on a planet called Harmony. But it’s still the same stuff that JAK always writes about, only with a sci-fi twist. Something about the planet itself gives humans a weird psychic boost, so pretty much everybody has some level of paranormal talent. Technology is pretty close to the 21st century as we know it (the backstory explains this), though it’s all based on amber and crystals. Like most sci-fi/fantasy, it comes complete with its own vocabulary and world-building quirks, including giant complexes of abandoned, underground alien structures. But the stories are, at their core, pretty much what you’d expect: A couple of hot people with strange psychic gifts meet, have an adventure together, solve a mystery, then decide to get hitched in a happily-ever-after kind of way. I read one a long time ago and kind of shrugged. I didn’t get it. But I think I was focused on the wrong details. I was paying too much attention to the humans and not enough attention to the dust bunnies.
“What do dust bunnies have to do with ANYTHING?” you may be shouting at the screen. I’ve already rambled through four paragraphs of information about an author that probably only two of you have any interest in reading, and now I seem to be veering suddenly into a cleaning issue, but bear with me. In this context, a “dust bunny” is an animal on the planet Harmony, and dust bunnies are the best thing about this series.
First of all, I can’t figure out what the hell dust bunnies look like. I’ve read 13 of these books, but I’m still unsure. I’m not even completely clear on how big they are. Henchmen often exclaim things like, “Is that a rat?” So I know they’re not that big. They also like to ride around on human shoulders, so they’re surely not larger than a parrot. Add in the fact that the colonists called them “dust bunnies” -- emphasis on the bunny part -- and I guess we can assume that they’re bigger than a hamster and smaller than a cat. They’re often described as being very fluffy (when not threatened or hunting) and resembling large balls of dryer lint. They have 6 limbs and claws (but also grabbing ability) and two sets of eyes (though the second set is only opened in certain situations). They’re predators who “sleek out” when hunting: Their second set of eyes (amber in color, as opposed to their blue daytime eyes) pop open, their fur smooths down, making their ears and nose more visible, and their sharp teeth become apparent. Dust bunnies are described as extremely cute (they chortle a lot) but also dangerous, as in the oft-quoted phrase, “If you can see a dust bunny’s teeth, it’s already too late.” They form psychic bonds with certain humans (and they choose the human, usually by showing up at their house one day out of the blue) and often carry around a small item like a clutch purse or an action figure that acts as a personal talisman. Basically, dust bunnies have Big Baby Yoda Energy: They’re wee, adorable, psychic, and they can fuck you up if they’re pissed off.
What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m an armchair xeno-biologist now, and dust bunnies are my specialty. That’s right, I’ve read 13 novels and counting just to learn more about a fictional alien animal. Dust bunnies are highly social and seek out other dust bunnies in both human and wild environments. They share resources (and doughnuts, and sometimes steal doughnuts to share), and unlike the humans of Harmony, who abide by some pretty weird marriage rules (the backstory explains this, too), dust bunnies only seem to pair up long enough to raise rapidly-maturing offspring. They’re not pets; they’re companions and sometimes co-workers. Dust bunnies are obviously intelligent, resourceful, and brave. Dust bunnies are the best thing Jayne Ann Krentz ever invented, and I don’t understand why there isn’t fan art everywhere and an animated series. One of these dust bunnies is named Vincent! He wears a beret and paints modern art! I am not making this up!! Jayne Ann Krentz made this up, and she is the unsung genius of dust bunny lore. GIVE THIS WOMAN AN AWARD. We stan a writing queen with 3 pen names who writes paranormal adventure-romances in various time periods!! I like my trash to span CENTURIES! And who doesn’t want to read about genetically engineered mirror-scaled alien dinosaurs that USE PSYCHIC MUSIC to LURE PREY?? That was an actual plot point, and I AM HERE FOR IT. But dust bunnies are even COOLER than those dinosaurs, FULL STOP.
Pardon the text shouting. My bad. I don’t have any other points to make, only an obsession, so I have no way to conclude this rambling nonsense. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
*I don’t recommend JAK’s earliest work, for the most part. It was pretty standard fare for the time (think those ubiquitous Harlequin and Silhouette paperbacks), and a lot of it isn’t appealing to a current reader. The romance tropes of the 1980s were… different.
I’ve read 13 Jayne Castle novels in the last 10 days, and I regret nothing. (3/42)
I never have heard of that author before. I admit that I never have heard about the author of Beard Science before, either. But, guess what happened after that piece you wrote about that series last year ... and guess what will happen now. 😅