Excerpt from DANCE WITH DRAGONS in "Spectra Pulse".

I visited ComiCon in NY on it's last day, and picked up a few
freebies. One was the premiere issue of a magazine called "Spectra
Pulse", published by the Bantam Dell publi****ng group. It includes and
"exclusive excerpt" from DANCE WITH DRAGONS.

It begins with this ... "The rat squealed as he bit into it, squirming
wildly in his hands. The belly was the softest part. He tore at the
sweet meat, the warm blood running over his lips. It was so good that
it brought tears to his eyes. His belly rumbled and he swallowed. By
the third bite the rat had ceased to struggle, and he was feeling
almost content".

Now, this person is supposed to be starving in his cell. As we read,
it's revealed that he has caught and eaten rats before. We find out
that he feels great shame at this, but that the rats have bitten him,
and he had to bite them back. So WHY IN GOD'S NAME doesn't he KILL the
rat before he EATS IT ? He's even biting into the rat's belly, making
it easier for the rat to bite him in the face. It's basic animal
instinct, kill things you eat, before you eat them. Why does Martin
insist on this retardery? Because he's going for the grotesque,
realism be damned. COOL, HE'S EATING A LIVE SQUEALING RAT BY BITING
IT'S STOMACH!. Nothing else matters to Martin. The gross moment is
All, and every other consideration is secondary.

A paragraph later ... " .. his belly was swollen and hollow, and ached
so much that he found himself remembering Lady Hornwood. After their
wedding, Lord Ramsay had locked her away in a tower and starve her to
death. In the end she had eaten her own fingers."

Again, the gross out is the point, and the ridiculousness of an aching
belly making you think about someone eating their fingers is ignored,
in his haste to get to the gross out. If I had an aching belly I'd be
thinking about roast chicken, not some horror.

His rat-eating is interrupted by two small evil boys who sneer at the
rat-eating wretch in his cell. He reveals to them that his name is
Reek, and the boys are named Big Walder and Little Walder, two
squires. Reek is afraid to try and overpower the boys and run, because
he's afraid it's a trap, and he'll have more fingers chopped off as
punishment.

He is brought to Lord Ramsay,  of Castle Dreadfort (give me a break).
Lord Ramsay is dressed in blakc and PINK. (you see, pink is a girlish
color, and all Martin's villains have some evil streak of femininitiy
to them). Ramsay reminds his cronies that he has tortured Reek by
skinning bits of him, and we get a flashback to Reek having to bite
off one of his skinned fingers to relieve the pain after Ramsay had
skinned the finger. Ramsay had punished him for biting off his own
finger by cutting off a toe.

Ramsay reveals his villainy to Reek by declaring that his father is
bringing him Arya, who Ramsay remembers as a small girl, to marry.
Reek is to help him bring home his "virgin bride".

Yeah, well, I saw this coming from the first thrid of "Game of
Thrones" (which I never bothered to finish), and from a random
sampling from "Clash of Kings, where Arya was in danger of being raped
by a troop of soldiers, if they ever saw through her boy-disguise.
Arya  yet again gets to be manaced a perverts! Yay!  How old is she by
this point? Reek thinks "She is only a girl" so I assume she is still
less old than 13 year old  Daenerys, who Martin blissfully lingered on
the seduction and ***ual abuse of in the first volume.

Congratulations, Martin fans. If you like this sort of thing, it looks
like you are going to get it.