Kerry Allen

Demon Moon by Meljean Brook
Mass Market Paperback, 470 pages
ISBN-13: 9780425215760
Available Now
Retail Price $7.99
Second in The Guardians series (Does the series have a name yet? Ha! Ask and ye shall receive!)

I read this book about 2 months ago.  Why is it taking me so long to post this lovefest? It has a lot to do with being unable to skip through it on the re-read and pick out the highlights. I was compelled to re-read every single word because:

1. If you don’t pay attention, you will get lost.

2. At no point did I think, I’m bored, time to skip the rest of this page, because in 470 pages, there isn’t a single wasted word.

3. Colin demands long, lingering stretches of undivided attention.

There’s a huge story here. To keep my squeeing under 20,000 words, I’m going to focus on Colin and Savi and not so much on the Grand Scheme.

After all the elder vampires in San Fran were wiped out by the nosferatu (the ugly, more powerful variety of bloodsuckers) in Demon Angel, leaving the younger generation leaderless, unorganized, and ripe for manipulation, Colin Ames-Beaumont is now the oldest and most powerful (and, it must be said, best looking) vampire in town. The younger vamps want him to step in to fill the vacant leadership position. However, Colin is a solitary creature (to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, alone = in good company), self-absorbed and uninterested in leading a flock of fanged sheep. His philosophy is: “They should look and admire; they shouldn’t expect anything in return.” He is unlike them in ways they can’t possibly comprehend, and he’s not thrilled they’ve been stalking him and noting his recent preference for a certain “type” in his beverage selection.

Savitri Murray (aka the object of Colin’s obsession) is on a transatlantic flight with a nosferatu occupying one of the other seats and suspects she may soon be plummeting to her death along with the other 400 passengers.  She emails Colin to apprise him of the situation, and though assistance is promised, there’s no time to wait for it to arrive. Armed with only a vial of hellhound venom and the guts of her laptop, she kills the nosferatu, ingesting some of its blood and the venom in the process, which makes her terribly ill and has long-lasting side effects.

Colin has been unable to taste anything for the past 200 years, so he gets, um, excited when that’s not the case with Savi post-contamination. There are a number of obstacles preventing him from getting what he wants, though:

1. Mutual friends will eviscerate him.

2. Savi promised her very traditional granny she’d marry a nice boy who would take care of her, and she made that promise in earnest.

3. Vamp feeding and sex usually go hand in hand, and one human can’t sustain a vamp for long—in other words, Colin would have to starve to death in order to be faithful to Savi.

4. Colin can’t turn Savi into a vampire because his blood has killed everyone who’s tasted it. If she had someone else turn her, Colin could feed from her, but she still couldn’t feed from him because he’s toxic, so she’d have to dine elsewhere, and again with the fidelity issue…

5. Not to mention, no one’s sure what vamp blood on top of hellhound venom and nosferatu juice would do to her.

Well, doesn’t that just suck? (No pun intended.) Savi thinks so, too, so she proposes they spend one month together—she can put off her nuptials that long, he can keep his fangs out of other women that long, and the bloodthirsty friends will just have to deal.

At this point, tears were jerked. Because a month isn’t going to be enough, but there is no solution to these obstacles. (Seriously. It hasn’t all been a big misunderstanding. There’s no fortuitous discovery of fine print that changes everything. Their love is well and truly doomed.) Nobody plays it cool (i.e. acting like the typical tough guy) at this point—they’re both completely open with the I love you and the I don’t know how I’ll live without you and the damn this cursed fate stuff.

What is there to do when you’re doomed, other than say Fuck it and risk whatever interminable stretch of miserable life you have left on an astronomically slim chance at happiness? (It’s far more eloquent and romantic in the book, but I’m all sentimented out at this point. It’s an emotionally exhausting story, and I mean that in the best possible way.)

Why I like love Colin: Colin gets his own HOTM spread on November 2. For now, suffice it to say I adore the vain little bloodsucker.

Why I like Savi: She’s smart and resourceful, fearless and curious, always questioning. She doesn’t torture herself with grudges and regrets. Very much a modern girl herself, she honors her granny’s traditional values. And she smiles while her heart is being ripped out and chewed to bits because crying doesn’t make anything better, so what’s the point of it?

Even as herocentric as I am, I found Savi’s POV just as interesting as Colin’s, which (given my state of infatuation) indicates she’s quite a strong character.

My one gripe is with the cover. Dammit, would it be such a crime to have a woman with short hair on the cover of a romance novel?!

And you betcha I have preordered Demon Night, available February 2008. I wonder what demon dog will destroy while I’m immersed in that one…

(We’re spending way too much time at YouTube…)

My favorite word, and my favorite Evil Organization.

What else is there to say, other than “F#&* the f#&*ing f#&*ers!”

(Interactive Fun: If you say it often enough and fast enough, you sound like a fowl-mouthed chicken.)

(I heart Axel.)

No.

No.

No, you did not just make that character look in a mirror and describe herself.

*sigh* Yeah, you did.

I have never read a book in which a character’s appearance was of such crucial significance that I couldn’t wait for it to come up naturally in the narrative. Her “thick, auburn mane” can be blowing wildly in the wind. He can have a premonition of dread when she turns her “heavily lashed eyes of guileless sapphire” upon him. There are a million ways to convey that information, some better than others, none as godawful as the hold-up-while-I-admire-my-reflection method.

(Have you noticed the dramatic increase in Reader Peeves lately? That happens when I’ve had things out on submission for a loooooooooooong time. The thought process is something like, “Hey, person with my manuscript on your desk, my writing might be crap, but you gotta give me credit for not doing stupid shit like this.” It doesn’t make me feel better—worse, actually, since the stupid shit in question made it into print while my uppity, superior ass languishes in anonymity—but I find it nicely rounds out the cycle of self-flagellation.)

When a book starts out really strong, sucks me right in and keeps me glued to the page, I get excited. Even as I’m intensely involved in the story, there’s a part of me pumping its fist and doing the Snoopy dance in the background because I found something good, and if it’s a series that already has subsequent books up for grabs… ah, bliss.

A book last week had an exciting start. Interesting character. Blood and guts. New take on old mythology. First in an established series. I was completely stoked.

And then a third of the way through… it unraveled into a string of illogic and convenient coincidence.

I don’t mind if a character makes a mistake or does something misguided or even downright stupid in the heat of the moment. It makes them more human. But there better be a good reason for it other than “I can’t make this next plot event happen unless my highly educated and presumably intelligent protagonist spontaneously loses a hundred IQ points here.”

I don’t mind coincidences. They can be especially powerful if they’re of the bad variety. But if you pull a blatant deus ex machina to bail a character out, that character better acknowledge it with a “dumb fucking luck” remark, it better be followed by a torrent of woe that makes the lucky break nothing but a cruel joke, and you better not keep using the same trick over and over again because the characters are incapable of staying alive without divine authorial intervention.

I’m all for a kickass heroine, but when she is smaller and younger and less experienced and physically and spiritually weaker than any of the big, strong men who are trained assassins but still got their asses handed to them by the bad guy’s bodyguards, you can’t seriously expect me to believe she takes baddie out all by herself, even if baddie conveniently misplaces his brain and even more conveniently has a sentimental fugue in the middle of the battle.

When a book starts out with a bang and then goes awry, it’s worse than if it was bad from page one. It’s like the difference between watching Wil E. Coyote fall off a cliff and going rock climbing with your best friend, reaching the top, giving him a congratulatory high five, and watching him fall off a cliff. With one, you know it’s going to be a train wreck all along. With the other, everything is going great until a tragic turn of events, and all you can do is watch helplessly while something you once cared for plummets to a grisly end.

Be consistent. Give me either a crappy book or a book that’s good all the way through. Don’t get me all excited and then do a bait-and-switch. That makes me grumpy, and when I get grumpy, I’m inclined to drive to the bookstore—not to buy your books, but to hide them behind Linux technical manuals and histories of Finland.

Lover Unbound by J.R. Ward
Mass Market Paperback, 502 pages
ISBN: 0451222350
Available Now
Retail Price $7.99
Fifth in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series

(I feel my commentary is superfluous at this point, since the interwebs will do everything but tuck you in and read the book to you for a bedtime story, but being superfluous has never stopped me before, so here goes.)

Vishous is the Brotherhood’s tech expert. He has a glowing hand of death and a pied-a-terre where he ties up his dates and shags ‘em rotten, baby. His sole emotional attachment is to his roomie, Butch—newly wed, newly transformed into a vamp, and dependent on V’s magic hand for a spiritual colonic after he sucks the sludge out the nasty Lessers.

V gets a visit from the Scribe Virgin, who reveals the identity of his heretofore unknown mama and lays the future of the Brotherhood on his grudging shoulders. She wants a Brother to come to Virginland and knock up all forty of the Chosen to ensure another generation of warriors. Since his life is in the shitter and there’s nothing for him in this world, V agrees to be the prize stud. Ensuring the survival of his race is a reason to live, at least.

In a pissy mood after the SV’s visit, he goes out hunting Lessers on his own, drops his guard, and gets shot in the heart.

Dr. Jane is an ambitious trauma surgeon who intends to leave behind her nonexistent social life, her joyless apartment, and her go-nowhere job to head up her own department elsewhere. A freak of nature with fangs, an unidentifiable blood type, and a bullet in his six-chambered heart ends up under her knife. She’s so excited about the latter, I was a little surprised she didn’t dissect him on the spot, but she’s a good doc and patches up all his boo-boos instead, saving his miserable life.

V wakes up while Jane’s boss is propositioning her across his hospital bed, and his first thought is “Mine… And if you touch her, I’m going to bite your godforsaken arm off at the socket.” Possessive bunch, the Brothers, so when his homies come to retrieve him before the humans figure out what he is and V says he’s not leaving without his doc, Hollywood slings her over his shoulder and hauls her back to the compound. King Wrath wants her removed immediately but is persuaded V needs continued medical attention that only she can provide because Havers is such a bitch.

Jane feels a duty to her patient, but she’s pissed about being abducted and arms herself and gets mouthy with V, who has dominance issues and thinks she needs to be taught a lesson about obedience—a naked, sweaty, Richter-triggering lesson unlike anything either of them has experienced before.

The need to take care of Jane is foreign to V, as is the desire to give her something of himself. The dude recognizes the symptoms of falling in love, having watched almost every dude around him succumb to the same malady within the past couple of months.

Too bad he promised to be the Chosen’s whoreboy and can’t keep the love of his life for more than a weekend.

I cannot go on without addressing some of the “issues” raised elsewhere. I’m pretty sure the rest of this is spoiler-free (if you’ve somehow managed to remain unsullied), but just in case, it’s below the fold and just vague enough to confuse you. If you’ve read the book, you’ll understand my vague references just fine.

See the rest of “Lover Unbound by J.R. Ward (Let’s try this again…)”

Or, in my case, 13 Things in Your House that Expose Your Multiple Personality Disorder or 13 Things in Your House that Confuse the Hell Out of Unsuspecting Visitors.

1. Season 2 of Robot Chicken waiting to be returned to Netflix. 

2. Monet prints on the living room walls.

3. Nine Inch Nails and Kelly Clarkson on rotation in the CD changer.

4. Romance novels stuffed onto shelves, stacked in precarious towers, and otherwise occupying the majority of horizontal surfaces.

5. Other kinds of novels and nonfiction (The Ultimate Guide to Guns, Poisons, Pointy Things, and Bombs) stuffed onto shelves, stacked in precarious towers, and otherwise occupying the majority of horizontal surfaces.

6. Five computers and a wealth of associated peripherals (although the overpriced Dell XPS, which stands for Xtreme Piece of Sh!t, is strictly for batting practice).

7. A gilt-framed, pink-matted print, handed down from my mother and her mother before her, depicting three poofy-dress-era women, one at the pianoforte, one at the harp, one enjoying their little concert. (I wouldn’t read the book, but damn, I love the picture.)

8. All the good episodes of Bleach on TiVo. (Renji better not be dead, you doily-headed m*#%&r f#*%&r, or I will see you in fanfic with your new cell mates, who do not believe in lube!) (Despite assuring my child that nobody important ever dies on Bleach, I was screaming at the television when my darling Renji collapsed the final time. Who’s next, 69 Guy? Just rip my heart out, why dontcha?)

9. A fan in every room for those days the air conditioner just can’t keep up with my hot flashes.

10. A notebook in every room because I forget things if I don’t write them down NOW. (Although I can never seem to find a pen…)

11. Collection of high-end fountain pens in an equally high-end display case. (Can’t have them out for use in the presence of a kid known to grind through solid wood with the pressure she puts on a writing implement. Oh, my poor precious nibs!)

12. Dust. Lots and lots of dust.

13. Lots and lots of video games, ranging from Barbie Horse Adventures to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. (Guess which one I’ve played all the way through?)

Ergo, my reflection is that of a 12-year-old boy/middle-aged woman with simultaneously refined and frat-boy sensibilities, as well as memory and housekeeping deficiencies.

Yup, that’s pretty accurate.

Are you schizo, too, or does your environment reflect a sane, integrated personality?

I prefer the direct approach to a man’s heart—right through the sternum—but going through the stomach is nearly as effective. Here’s another weapon to that effect, thoroughly field tested and guaranteed to incapacitate the target with paroxysms of ecstasy. 

Frosting of Love 

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup Nutella
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, at room temperature 
2 cups powdered (confectioner’s) sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons milk

Blend peanut butter, Nutella, and butter with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk. Mix some more. Add another drop of milk if too stiff (frosting is one of the few things that can be “too” stiff). Slather on the sweet of your choice (which does not necessarily imply “baked goods,” does it?).

Does the trick for a 13 x 9-inch cake or brownies (and also those non-baked goods). I’d double the recipe for a layer cake, simply because I’ve never met a frosting recipe that delivers a nice, thick coat on a layer cake.

I can vouch that this frosting transforms a devil’s food cake prepared from a mix into an Object of Power. Slather it on Brownies of Love, and you have everything you need to overthrow the government of a smallish country and install yourself as the benevolent (or not so) dictator.