This was the first paranormal romance I ever read, the book responsible for bringing me back to reading romance after a years-long hiatus, the book that made me squeal, “Oh my god, you can do that in a romance novel now? Awesome!” If not for this book, I wouldn’t be writing what I write. My excitement at discovering things that go bump in the night now deserve happily ever after, too, hasn’t waned a bit in the five years since.
Fantasy Lover by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Mass Market Paperback, 307 pages
ISBN: 0-312-97997-5
Available Now
Retail Price $7.99
Dark Hunter Series (First or Prequel, depending who you ask)
Grace Alexander’s fruity friend Selena gifts her with an old leather book containing an exquisitely rendered drawing of an ancient warrior she claims is “a Greek love-slave who is completely controlled by, and devoted to, whoever summons him.” Grace laughs it off as yet another of her friend’s misguided and endearingly deranged ideas, but later that night, loosened up by junk food, wine, and classic chick flicks, she succumbs to Selena’s pleas to try the summoning ritual, laughable though it may be.
Selena laughed. “Stop it. This is serious!”
“Serious? Please. I’m standing out here on my twenty-ninth birthday, barefoot and in jeans my mother would burn, holding a stupid book to my chest in an effort to summon a Greek love-slave from the great beyond.” She looked at Selena. “I know only one way to make this even more riduculous…”
Grace held the book in one hand and implored the sky above, “Oh, take me, great gorgeous love-slave and have your wicked way with me. I command you to rise,” she said, wagging her eyebrows.
Nothing happens, and Selena leaves disappointed. A few minutes later, however, a naked guy appears in Grace’s living room. (There’s transit time from the great beyond, natch.) Being a sensible woman, she screams and heads for the nearest exit.
Julian of Macedon is cursed, imprisoned in a scroll (later bound in hardback for safekeeping) after he invaded Alexandria—not the city (if you catch my drift). For two thousand years, he’s been released for a month at a time to serve as his summoner’s sex slave. Lest you imagine this fate is a man’s dream come true, while he’s able to perform in that capacity, he’s not allowed to enjoy it (if you catch my drift), not to mention the isolation, boredom, darkness, and starvation that accompany his periods of confinement, the most recent of which was over a hundred years in duration. He’s also been denied death as an escape from his curse, so it pretty much sucks to be Julian.
Grace is the first of his summoners who hasn’t dragged him immediately to bed, and the first woman to ever refuse him sexually because he doesn’t “care” about her. He doesn’t want to care about anything, which would only make it more painful when he’s returned to the book at the end of the month. He’s there to please her, and all she wants to do is talk. She clothes him, feeds, him, teaches him to read English, and tries to teach him to drive a car. He’s alarmed by the changes he sees in the world the first time he’s allowed outside the bedroom, but even more afraid of never being released from the book again, eternally deprived of basic comforts and the deeper need for the sort of companionship Grace has shown him.
Grace is determined to break the curse. Selena, mistress of all things weird, suggests Julian request aid from whatever patron god he had back in the day. Julian picks Eros, not because they were especially chummy but because they’re half-brothers. Julian was cursed because he pissed off his other half-brother, Priapus. Eros says there is a way to break the curse.
“You know everything in the universe is cyclical. As it began, so shall it end. Since Alexandria caused the curse, you have to be summoned by another woman of Alexander…”
By golly, Grace Alexander fits the bill. There’s more to it, of course: Julian and Grace can’t have sex until the last night of his incarnation, and on that night, penetration has to last from midnight to sunrise. (What do you expect when cursed by the god of hard-ons?) Oh, and just to make it more fun, since Julian exists only as a sexual plaything, the longer he goes without, the crazier he’s going to get. By the end of the month, he’ll probably be psychotic.
Grace isn’t keen on being used sexually—potentially violently so—to gain Julian’s freedom, but she can’t leave him enslaved. He’s suffered long enough. Julian finds the yearning for freedom he’s experienced for two millenia challenged by his brand-new desire not to hurt Grace, physically or emotionally. There’s time before the deadline for interference by various deities (helpful and otherwise), for plenty of everything-but-penetration fooling around, and for lots of contemplating the right course of action when you care more about another’s happiness than your own fate.
There are chuckles sprinkled throughout some pretty dark and heavy bits, and then I got a little watery-eyed toward the end when it was time to make the difficult decisions. Since I’m not real sentimental, any book that strikes a chord hard enough to make me cry goes up a notch in my estimation and usually lands on my list of faves. (Sometime I’ll do a writeup of Kenyon’s Dance with the Devil, which made me bawl like a jilted prom date.)
Why I like Grace: She doesn’t pooh-pooh danger like the TSTL heroine we all know and loathe. When she sees a naked stranger in her house, she heads for the door. The first time one of her clients crosses the creepy line, she calls the cops. When Julian’s losing his grip and tells her to run, she takes his word for it. She’s not kickass, and she has no delusions to the contrary, which is the right way to do a not-kickass heroine.
Why I like Julian: I’ve always loved a tortured romantic hero, but he took it up a notch by being my first supernaturally tortured romantic hero. A brutal childhood, a career as a merciless soldier, betrayal by almost everyone he’s ever known, and two millennia of enslavement haven’t made him cruel or uncivilized, and he struggles to maintain his dignity in a situation that leaves him little of that commodity. The only thing he has ever wanted is one person to truly love him. (Awwww.)
Drawback: There’s an awful lot of “OMG, he’s so hot” early on, which grows a little tiresome, but it’s fitting in the context of Julian being an irresistible love-slave and son of the goddess of hotness herself, Aphrodite. Julian doesn’t enjoy the effect he has on women (or on men, who are hostile toward him), and Grace must overcome that superficiality to get to know him as a person, so there’s some point to it beyond gratuitous slobbering.
This book is listed as the first in the Dark-Hunter series, but it’s more of a prequel by virtue of embedded series bait, with nary a Dark-Hunter appearing within. (Or is there…?)
