The Haunting of Beatrix Greene – Episode 1

Genre: Gothic Horror Romance

Pairing: M/F

The Haunting of Beatrix Green Episode 1 by Rachel Hawkings, Ash Parsons, and Vicky Alvear Schecter is a cooperative novel that is currently available through Serial Box where it is released in weekly installments. I received the full novel version from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The story revolves around Beatrix Green, a fake spiritualist, who makes her living providing closure to people who have lost loved ones. As per the book’s description: “In Victorian England a savvy spiritual medium must outsmart the most important client of her career: a scientist determined to expose frauds like her,” and then something about wits and fatal consequences blah blah blah. That just covers the first 10% of the book, we learn pretty early on that the scientist, James Walker, is only exposing frauds because he is in need of a real spiritualist and is under the belief that Beatrix is it.

James Walker needs someone to help exorcise spirits from his family home so he can let go of the past before he makes a new future for himself in America. And this is where the bulk of the story takes place, Ashbury Manor. An ancient residence with a tragic past and evil within. James, Beatrix, Harry, Beatrix’s friend and sidekick, Amanda Reynolds, an American photographer, and Stanhope all gather in the manor to try and communicate with the dead in order to rid the house of what haunts it.

It is during the first night in the house and the seance that is performed we learn, and Beatrix too apparently, that Ms. Green is not actually a fraud. She seems to have a connection to the otherworld that made it possible for spirits to communicate through her. It is at this point that the book becomes more of a haunted house story with a smattering of romance thrown in, for no real good reason, than anything else. It was also at this point and later toward the climax of the story that all I could think about was the movie “Monster House.” Although I love the movie, I’m not saying that as a compliment. Some descriptions of the going ons in the house were laughable at best.

It might just be my imagination but the slight shifts in tone between one chapter to the next when there was a switch in writers was kinda obvious. This probably works really well as a serial when you have a week between episodes and don’t have two competing voices in your head. It was an enjoyable read, but not one I felt the need to finish, I started this back before Halloween, so yeah, or to see what was going to happen. It was predictable and at the end of the day couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a horror or romance, so it ended not being either.

Den of Vipers by K.A. Knight

Pairing: MMMMF
Orientation: Straight
Identity: Cisgender

Warning: blood, violence, dubious consent, S&M, scenes of abuse and assault

Den of Vipers by K.A. Knight is a reverse harem dark romance revolving around four leaders of the Vipers, the most feared organization in town (no, I don’t know what town, I’m not sure it’s ever mentioned, but some town in either the U.S. or the U.K but definitely not in Asia or Russian), and the feisty, but they don’t know it yet, female that was given to them to pay off a debt. Yes, the plot does sound familiar, it’s a plot that I’ve read in any number of books since the 90’s. But I’m not mad at the premise of the book, I’m mad at the execution and the fact that the plot is virtually nonexistent seeming only to be there as a page filler between either sex scenes or one of the characters thinking about sex and/or how horny they are.

So, Roxanne, who goes by Roxy cuz she’s so feisty, is given to the Vipers by her father to pay off his gambling debt. Her father is a grade A douchebag. There’s four Vipers and they are a walking cliche. All four of them. Ryder, the face of the organization whose cold because he was forced to grow up too fast. Kenzo, Ryder’s brother, a consummate gambler and lover of the group. Garrett the fighter with trust and anger issues who doesn’t trust women. And Diesel, the crazy, funny one. The four of them kidnap Roxy and they all fall in love in the middle of trying to keep the Triad from taking over the city.

And that took 646 pages.

There was a lot of sex in this book. Violent sex. Bloody sex. Rough sex. Sex on tables. Sex in the shower. Sex against windows. It was basically 500 pages of sex. The other 146 is where the plot and character development was supposed to be. Because contrary to popular belief sex, does not develop your character.

Here’s the thing: I love romance novels; I love dark romance novels; I love smut and violence and blood, but it needs to be held together by a plot and characters that make sense and are not just caricatures of what bad mobster are supposed to be all the way down to tattooed bodies and pierced dicks.

And as much as I love smutty dark romances, I could forgive this book for all those things except when it asks me to suspend my disbelief completely and be okay without any sort of character growth.

SPOILER ALERT

About 500 pages into the book, Roxy is kidnapped. While she is trying to get away, she’s in a car accident where her car rolls and then is either stun or drugged or somehow knocked out, honestly I don’t remember. She is then beat up, strapped to a chair with barb wire, tortured for an undisclosed number of hours but many many, her ribs are broken, shoulder dislocated, nails pulled out and you know TORTURED. She then manages to break her chair, free herself, and make her escape. They men are there to save her, but because she’s so feisty and cool, she manages to mostly save herself. She then fights her way through the building, killing anyone that crosses her path. But she’s not done yet, she also, still wearing the bloody clothes from being tortured, goes to save Garrett who was captured and kills Garrett’s ex with her bare hands. She’s not fucking Batman. She did not train in Ninja Mountain or with the fucking military to be able to survive hours of torture without passing out as soon as the immediate danger to her life was gone. Adrenaline only gets you so far.

And the other thing that really made me have a very keen dislike of this book, is the absolutely nonexistent character development and growth. The five people who meet in the first chapter of this book are exactly the same as the five people in the epilogue. They didn’t learn anything, but how could they with the lack of any substantial plot.

Bane’s Choice by Alyssa Day

Pairing: M/F Orientation: Straight Identity: Cisgender

Bane’s Choice is not the first Alyssa Day book I’ve read. I read the first couple of installments of her Warriors of Poseidon series back when they were first released starting in 2007; I stopped reading them not because I did not like them, I remember enjoying them as I read them, but because I had caught up and honestly just forgot to go back and pick up the rest of the series when it was finished. Having now read Bane’s Choice, I don’t find myself in much of a hurray to read her other books.

When I first saw the cover of the book I was excited, a vampire motorcycle club sign me up. I was hoping for exactly what that cover promised a vampire motorcycle club, but I didn’t really get that in this book. The motorcycle club was pretty much nonexistent. They made an appearance in the first chapter and then are not heard of again until the end. What I wanted, what I was led to believe I would get, was a novel about the love lives of a motorcycle club that just happened to have vampire members, but what this book really was … wasn’t that.

About 80% of this book happens in one location, the house where Bane lives with his sister Meara and two other vampires, Luke and Edge. I’m sure we will get their stories in upcoming books so I wasn’t really mad that we learned very little of any of them. Except we learn very little of any of the characters including our two main’s, Bane and Ryan. We don’t really learn much about Bane’s past, and what we learned is basically just told to us. We don’t even know why they migrated to Savannah. And we learn even less about Ryan. Basically, Ryan is a doctor, her father was an asshole, although we don’t really know why or in which way, she lived with her grandmother, but we don’t know when or why, and she whines a whole lot about not being as pretty as or as thin as or as glamorous as Meara or her friend or some random person walking down the street.

The book itself was about Bane and Ryan falling in love after one day, and the vampires battling an evil organization called the Chamber and the evil necromancer they sent to take over Savannah. I know this because we are told this. There’s very little action in this book and what there is seems rushed and honestly boring. I really didn’t care about the action; not even a werewolf motorcycle club made me care about how they were battling against the evil, scary necromancer.

I think the biggest issue is that in my head this was supposed to be a different book than what it ended up being. It wasn’t a bad book, Ms. Day’s writing made sure of that, but it wasn’t the book the cover promised. I’m going to read the next one because I really liked the secondary characters more than I liked the mains, and hopefully the next will be more motorcycle club and less angsty vampire.

An eARC of this book was provided free of charge by NetGalley and the publishers for an honest review.

There are Things I Can’t Tell You

Pairing: M/M
Orientation: gay, bisexual
Identity: cisgender

There are Things I Can’t Tell You by Edako Mofumofu is such a well told story about friendship and how there are certain things that you keep even from your closest friend. The manga revolves around two young men who meet in junior high, and how their relationship evolves from simple childhood friendship to something that becomes more difficult to describe as they grow older and their feelings for each other deepen. It is a book about facing personal biases while navigating the often difficult course of young adulthood.

Kasumi and Kyousuke are complete opposites. While Kasumi is shy, reserved and keeps mostly to himself, Kyousuke is often the center of attention, always around friends and not afraid to go after what he wants. Growing up, they are often each other’s pillar of strength. Kasumi sees Kyousuke as a hero, saving him from bullies, and Kyousuke sees Kasumi as the calmness in the middle of the tsunami that is his life.

I really enjoyed this book and it’s exploration of friendship and how that can deepen into love. I really liked the fact that the relationship wasn’t manipulative or one sided. There was no unnecessary miscommunication or misunderstanding. Everything these two boys did, even those things that hurt each other, they did because they believed that it would make the other happy. As misguided as that was, the thing they could not tell each other was that the other’s happiness was more important than their own.

***I was provided a digital copy of this title by NetGalley for an honest review.

August Wrap Up & September Plans

August has always been a weird month for me, even before the whole fucking pandemic. Every working adult in my household works for the school district, except for me. So, August was usually the end of summer break for them, and they would be all bemoaning about having to go back to work, while I, who have jumped from job to job since I quit teaching almost 15 years ago, haven’t had a summer off in 15 years. And without fail, I become so unmotivated during August. I don’t want to do anything. Hell, even my work suffers.

But, this is 2020 and I wasn’t going to let myself fall into that same August trap. But I did. I started a book on August 1 and DNF’d it on August 17 when I was about 65% through the book. It took me 17 days to read about 250 pages and that is all I read for those 17 days. I would open a book, read a sentence or two, once even a whole paragraph and then just close it. I just wasn’t feeling any of it this month. I was thinking of doing the SummerWeen readathon that was hosted over on YouTube by a couple of creators that I kinda follow, GabbyReads and Oliviareadsalatte. I created a TBR, downloaded a couple of books, and well it didn’t go so well. So, in the month of August I read one book, The Assistant by John Tristan.

I did watch 3.5 seasons of Lucifer on Netflix and 2 seasons of my Supernatural re-watch, I’m on season 7 as of the end of August. I also watched the Old Guard with Charlize Theron which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would. It wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was mindless fun and I would not mind at all if Netflix went ahead and finished of the trilogy.

In the month of September, I’m going to ease my way back into daily reading. I have a couple of e-arcs that I want to read for review over at NetGalley, I’m going to read the books I downloaded for SummerWeen, and maybe a couple of books from my massive TBR.

E-Arcs for September

There Are Things I Can’t Tell You by Edako Mofumofu an M/M manga about two childhood friends that need to navigate facing the world and their feelings for each other as adults.

Ten Things I Hate About the Duke by Loretta Chase a spin on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. As someone with an English degree and an unhealthy obsession with all things Shakespeare I’m looking forward to this one.

Adulting by Liz Talley a book about friendship and second chances. It doesn’t sound like a book that I would usually pick up, but I need something different to jolt me out of this funk.

SummerWeen in September

I’m going completely blind into these reads but the books I was going to read during SummerWeen and will now read in September are Within These Walls by Ania Ahlborn, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix, and Lock Every Door by Riley Sager. I used to devour thrillers and horror books when I was younger; I’m hoping that picking up books that younger me would like will make me more likely to actually start and finish them.

The Assistant by John Tristan

Pairing: MM
Orientation: Gay
Identity: Cisgender, Trans.

Warning: discussion of depression, dealing with a chronic illness/disability, depiction of a D/s relationship between boss and employee, and a heavy caning scene.

The Assistant is Nick Kurosawa who is a former soldier battling with depression as he drifts from job to job and from one meaningless back alley encounter after another. Nick has found himself in a place where he doesn’t know how to move forward, but understands that he can’t stay stagnant. His one and only friend, Alex, gets him an interview for a position as a personal assistant to the secretive Jacob Umber.

The book is about the relationship that develops between the two men. The way they move from boss and employee to a more emotional and at times physical relationship. If the book had been longer, I would call it a slow burn, but since it isn’t I felt a bit stilted. We get almost fifty percent into the book before the relationship between the men begins to develop, during which time we get to know our main character Nick, but not much else. The book is almost three quarters done before the”mystery” of Jacob Umber begins to unravel and honestly it didn’t add much to the book or the relationship.

I felt the “romance” in this book was very one sided and forced. I’m not a newbie to D/s books and I felt that even though the very few mature scenes we got were very well done they weren’t anything that couldn’t have been in a scene between two strangers playing for the night.

I really enjoyed John Tristan’s writing. I just wish he would have written more. I think this book could have been a five star read if it were longer. If we had more time to explore the relationship between Nick and Jacob. If we had more time to figure out who Jacob was. After the the first half of the book, the rest of it felt rushed.

*The eARC of the book was provided by NetGalley and the publisher in exchange of an honest review.