A story about coffee and some other stuff

After again falling behind on paying attention to my Bane Chronicles news, I picked up the lengthily titled What to Buy the Shadowhunter Who Has Everything (And Who You’re Not Officially Dating Anyway), by Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan.
This one is about Malec! Malec is the semi-official ship name for Magnus Bane and Alec Lightwood; they are generally pretty cute in the novels, in a sort of mismatched way. This short story takes place about the time that Magnus and Alec have started seeing each other/going on dates, but are not really a couple yet. (Still cute though.) The main conflict in this plot is largely internal, Magnus’ feels for Alec versus his uncertainty about their relationship, manifesting as a dilemma over whether to get Alec a present for his eighteenth birthday and, if so, what it should be.
The story takes place over about two days, during which Magnus intersperses wibbling over the present thing with random absurdities, providing a vehicle for lots of jokes. He has to summon a demon for a particularly irritating but wealthy client; the demon in question is slimy, nonthreatening, and a bit stuck in the eighties (kiiiind of doesn’t mesh with what we know of demons in the Shadowhunter universe like at all, but I don’t care, Fleetwood Mac jokes FTW). He calls his two best warlock friends, both of whom basically tell him to stuff it. There are lots of jokes about Ragnor Fell and Raphael Santiago’s friendship, which might be my actual favorite part of the story. Magnus’ internal narration is still so… affectedly judgmental that I cannot even see him as whiny no matter how much he complains, because he seems to just be telling himself jokes about everyone and everything, rather than actually being particularly down about stuff.
Then there is an appearance by ISABELLE! YAY! Where we get the important stuff about love and family and the best gifts being what the people they are given to actually want, and all that meaningful stuff, but there are still some jokes. (Can you tell I am not in a feelingsy mood right now? I may have spent all my capacity for feelings watching Frozen. Jokes only from now on.)
I am definitely noticing a continuance of the trend where the stories co-written by Maureen Johnson seem to be short stories that contain jokes, and the stories co-written by Sarah Rees Brennan are comic stories; i.e., the point is really the jokes, and the story serves largely as a vehicle for jokes. I lean somewhat towards Team Jokes in this sort-of-split (it is not as great a split as I make it sound), since I am an unromantic little nutter. 

The seventies are bad, mmkay

The latest installment of the Bane Chronicles that I’ve picked up is Cassandra Clare’s and Maureen Johnson’s The Fall of the Hotel Dumort, sequel of sorts to The Rise of the Hotel Dumort. It is, of course, about vampires, and specifically about the vampires of New York, and even more specifically about the NY clan that is led, at various times, by Camille and Raphael, and who live in the former Hotel Dumont, now the Hotel Dumort.
The Fall of the Hotel Dumort takes place in the seventies, which surprised me initially, because the vampires are still living in the hotel for decades afterwards, but I guess that’s vampires for you. We get a lot of Stuff About New York In The Seventies (another trend in Bane Chronicles authorship: the Maureen Johnson ones seem to be more… historically grounded? Like, they all tie into or at least reference the important historical events going on at the time, which follows in an esteemed tradition in fantasy of using immortal characters to Explore Interesting Time Periods. I am a huge sucker for this tradition), like that it totally sucked; nobody was picking up the garbage and the Son of Sam was murdering people in the face all the time and everyone was on coke.
This story is largely about cocaine. While it does involve some fairly serious discussion about addiction, it avoids after-school-specialness by largely being about vampires on coke. Now, vampires can’t actually do coke… but they can feed on people who are on coke, and then apparently all hell breaks loose, even by vampire standards.
One of the things I like about the vampires in the Shadowhunter world is that, while in most aspects they fit the modern literary vampire mold of being elegant, fashionable, worldly, usually well-travelled, seductive, etc. etc., they are also often really gross. From all accounts they seem to eat very messily, and they tend to live like the craziest, most dysfunctional kinds of rock stars, moving into lavish expensive apartments and completely trashing them, somehow miraculously managing to keep super stylin’ wardrobes at all times despite housing themselves and therefore, presumably, their clothes in utter squalor. Apparently the squalor and trashing-of-the-places gets ten times worse when all the vampires are on drugs.
This story is tense, with Magnus and a bunch of werewolves trying to rein in the vampires before the Shadowhunters realize how out of control they’ve gotten and taking care of it in their Shadowhuntery way; within that, Magnus, who still cares about Camille even though they’ve been broken  up for like a hundred years, tries to reason with Camille and get her to dry herself and her clan out, while the werewolves play bad cop and basically say that it’s war if the vampires don’t shape up pronto. The last chance for the vampires happens during the New York City blackout of 1977, where the widespread arson is used to cover up the last and most brutal spate of coked-up-vampire murders.
Overall, it was much more serious than I would have expected a story about “Magnus Bane and coked-out vampires” to be,  but that is probably a good thing. Not as tightly plotted as some of the other Maureen Johnson co-authored Bane Chronicles stories, but a good story all the same.
PS I am glad I did not live in New York City in the seventies; it sounds terrible.