Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Night Pleasures is the story of Kyrian of Thrace, a Dark-Hunter (and why the hyphen? Is this like the Waldorf=Astoria differentiating itself with an equal sign?) who surrendered his soul to fight Daimons, who prey on humans. Daimons have wonderfully potent assorted powers but a lifespan of only 27 years (paging Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix, please report to Sherrilyn Kenyon’s house for use as inspiration for Daimon characters, STAT) and so they start consuming human souls to extend their lives.

Due to their predilection for soul consumption, and their general evilness, Daimons are the targets of the Dark-Hunters and have been for thousands of years, dating back to the times of the Greek gods and goddesses. Kenyon bases her paranormal world on a great deal of Greek mythology, and gods such as Artemis and Apollo make appearances in the history of the fictional world the characters inhabit. The world itself is fascinating, and presents an epic good vs. evil struggle of which all humans remain blissfully unaware, but the hero and heroine of this particular story do not really live up to the noble and epic backdrop on which they meet.

Amanda Deveraux is the plain-Jane twin sister of a vampire huntress named Tabitha. Amanda is an accountant and is constantly embarrassed by her psychically gifted and beyond-paranormal family, as they are each weird in their own way. One is a sorceress, Tabitha’s a huntress, and their mother sees auras. And one of them is a midwife- nice way to subtly imply the midwife/witch historical rumor, there. They are all magically delicious, and Amanda can’t stand it. She’s looking for as plain a vanilla life as she can get.

Kyrian of Thrace is chasing an uber-Daimon who has unheard-of powers and has bested several Dark-Hunters. Betrayed by his wife back when he was a royal Greek mortal two thousand years prior, Kyrian was given the chance for vengeance and immortality by becoming a Dark-Hunter. Thus, Kyrian is strong, handsome, immortal, noble, brave, loyal, and utterly, fabulously wealthy, and therefore, annoyingly perfect. His only flaw, and it’s not even much of one, is that he doesn’t trust women and is tormented by his memories of his mortal life, in which he was a bit of a bastard to his family. A little sex ought to take care of that, don’t you think?

Amanda is equally perfect, and though she cannot stand anything paranormal, the minute she and Kyrian meet, it is hot lusty looks and endlessly expressed wishes for physical intimacy. It’s always great when the hero and heroine are humpingly hot for one another, but when that’s the only thing drawing them together, it’s not satisfying, it’s not romantic, and it’s certainly not memorable.

The duration of their epic battle against evil is fraught with much peril, and the endless cycle of “his and hers” drama: Will we be able to Be Together? Can I Trust Her? Does he Want Me? The author constantly reassures the reader of their undying lust and they are constantly gazing at each other with the hunger one might see in my eyes at sundown on Yom Kippur after a 24 hour fast. I look at a bagel with plenty of lust, let me tell you.

But there is little development of their emotional attachment, so their relationship seems simple, flat, and transparent. They have lust, therefore they are drawn together. He is perfect and noble. She is brave and feisty, and appropriately gifted with clever skills and powers at the perfect moment. Perfection in all regards: except there is very little emotional development on either side once that lust is acknowledged and acted upon. The personal issues they overcome to be worthy of one another, which are usually a key element in an epic struggle and romance, are pithy at best and seem too easily remedied, usually by some hot bumpy humpin’.

For example after Kyrian and Amanda get it on, he loses his power. Seriously. He came and it went. He enjoys the afterglow and realizes he’s a helpless weakling with a bad, bad headache. His squire and another Dark-Hunter correctly assume that this is only temporary, and indeed it is, though it comes at a time when Kyrian can ill afford to be vulnerable. A few pages later, he’s got his mojo back, but there’s little revealed about how his recovery came about. Was it a gradual recharge or did he wake up a day later able to kick ass and take names again? And of course, let me just continue to spread the giggles: for the rest of their sexual encounters, he refrains from orgasm because he cannot be powerless, so he implores her to “come for both of them.” Yeah. I know. I’m right there with you. AS IF.

And thus my major beef with this book: throughout the entirety, I couldn’t figure out if I liked it. I like paranormals. I like vampire fiction. I dig romance. I like hot sex in a romance. I like cool weapons, battles with supernatural powers, and characters that rise up to the occasion and kick some serious patoot. Night Pleasures has all of these and still manages to be plain. It’s served up like food from a restaurant that is reported to be fabulous but then makes you yearn for Hamburger Helper and the tv remote. Unmemorable in this respect means terribly disappointing, particularly when one considers that it could have been so very much better. I keep reading back over this review and am surprised at how scathing I am, but one of my major peeves with romance is the amount of dreck that comes out that sounds like it’s going to be a gangbusters novel and is so routine and mass-produced that it pisses me off. This book falls square in the low grade territory because my reaction was “Don’t Waste My Money and Don’t Waste My Time.” And also, “Grrrr!” peppered with “As if!”

The resolution of the battle is just as perfect as the main characters. Having once again been tricked by the evil uber-Daimon, who comes across as a whiny, petulant two-year-old with nuclear strength toys and no friends rather than as a scary evil dude, Kyrian and Amanda must face him down to defeat his evil. In a twist on the drunk-father-made-me-evil bit, uber-Daimon’s father is revealed to have been Bacchus, who gave his son the royal shaft by refusing to intervene when uber-D’s lifespan is almost up. Now he pursues Amanda, because he senses her incredible untapped power and he wants his for his very, very own.

Allow me to ruminate for a moment, here. The balance of power is one of the key elements of a paranormal for me, and how each author handles a pair where only one contains the superpowers is always interesting. One expects the hero to be rich, and some authors of historicals play with the idea of the heroine having the money. One expects one or both to be attractive; again, some play with average looks but eventually fall onto another attribute that makes the plain character unique. Other authors charge the hero with emotional growth such that he gets over his expectation that his girl be a supermodel and learns to appreciate a real-sized, sharp-witted average woman as a sign of his worthiness. So what to do when one person can lift cars and move objects with a thought, and the other can’t?

It’s akin to the idea of an aristocrat marrying a commoner. Some authors arrange for the discovery of an unknown title, thus bringing both characters to the same social level. Others allow the social imbalance to be one of the issues the couple must work through, and refuse to “save” the commoner with the long-lost earldom.

In the case of paranormals and power imbalance, if one character is superhuman and the other is merely human, any number of things can happen, just as in a historical novel. Sometimes the human is revealed to be a secret superhuman, or has the ability to become superhuman. Other times the superhuman must return to human status, a convention I often find disappointing. Either way, a conversion takes place, and now restored to quasi-equal status, they can live happily ever after. This is almost expected when one character is immortal, as the reader cannot believe in happily ever after if the reader knows one character will age and die while the other remains permanently youthful.

But what to do when one character will undoubtedly have powers that the other lacks? In the case of this novel, the power balance shifts dramatically back and forth in the final pages, and the resolution is so unsatisfying I sneered over the ending. In the course of kidnapping and controlling the heroine, the bad guy easily “unlocks” the long denied and despised Whitman’s sampler of powers in the heroine. After years of denying and locking up her considerable paranormal resources, one bad guy with the ability to get inside her head can allow her to flex her considerable psychic muscle. Suddenly she can make shit fly across the room, though of course she allows her now-human but still powerful man to fight the final battle and destroy the evil bad guy while she clutches a Barbie doll with a weapon hidden in her feet. No I’m not making that up. Talk about symbolism!

Once they walk into the sunshine and into their happily ever after, an epilogue informs us of the new balance of powers. She is indeed a sorceress, but is he a mere mortal beside her? Of course not. His powers remain, or some of them, after his mortal soul is restored, even though prior explanations of how a Dark-Hunter gets his soul back imply that once he regained mortality, he would be a normal mortal human. But he can’t be weaker than his now-sorceress girl, now can he? That wouldn’t wash. So his superpowers, in diluted and never-fully-explained form, remain. He is off the hook as far as Dark-Hunting is concerned, but he has enough mojo leftover to “protect them.” Meanwhile, she can likely glance at a building and move it three feet to the left, so what protection does she need, really? At least the reassurance is there, so we won’t remember him walking off into the sunset, emasculated beside his Powerpuff Girl of a wife.

All About Romance’s review of this book fell between one reviewer who gave it a marginally higher grade, and another who loathed it. The reviewer who enjoyed it said, “Sometimes you just have to go with it, you know?” Usually I have that attitude, but the mediocrity and processed perfection of the book made it rote and boring, so I couldn’t go with it. I felt like reading this book was akin to watching a rerun, or worse, an entirely and frustratingly predictable new episode of a show I usually like. In fact, an Amazon reviewer likened it to “a poorly scripted, poorly acted made-for-TV movie on the Sci-Fi channel.” Amen to that. I’ve read plenty of books that sounded good but ended up average. It’s somewhat more rare for a book to have limitless potential and fall so far short of memorable that it pissed me off.

It actually starts off quite well, with a rather lively writing style. At her father’s deathbed, Sarah Hamilton, our republican heroine (if I had a shot of alcohol every time the word “republican” was used in this book, I’d be dead from anaphylactic shock before page 90) promises to go to England to seek her uncle, the Earl of Westbrooke. Due to a series of unfortunate events, however, she loses her luggage and much of her money. On the eve of her arrival at the Westbrooke estate, she finds herself stuck at an inn and mistaken for a prostitute. She’s promptly hustled into a bedroom that she erroneously assumes is hers, where she undresses (no nightrail because of her lost luggage, so isn’t that terribly convenient?) and promptly falls asleep.

James Runyon, Duke of Alvord, like Galahad of old, is the flower of British manhood: pure and clean and virtuous. Also naked, but unlike the title suggests, he doesn’t spend much of his time in the book in the altogether. However, like many romance novel heroes, he suffers from hypertrophic penile dysfunction once he takes a gander at the beautimous, completely bare republican snoozing in his bed, and the condition persists for much of the book.* (Hey, have I mentioned how often Sarah is called a republican in this book? I have? The repetition is tiresome, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve made my point, why belabor it, right? Don’t you want me to shut up about this already? GOOD. This gives you an idea of how annoying this book becomes as it progresses.)

So where was I before the Spring Snark Attack dragged the last paragraph under? Oh yes, James. He sees a naked, pretty lady in his bed and tries to rouse her because really, he’s not into prostitutes, though he appreciates his best friend Robbie’s efforts to help him get laid. However, Sarah is so exhausted she doesn’t even so much as twitch, the poor lambie. So our Duke of Much Bareassedness, being pretty tired himself, hops into bed next to her, but like a true gentleman, doesn’t ravish her in her sleep despite his manfully turgid state.

Oh, the massive brouhaha when they wake up in the morning with the nekkidness and the virginal trembling and the outrage and the pillow tossing and the misunderstandings and mm-hey the glavin. (By the way, unlike tossing a salad, I don’t think there’s a prurient definition attached to tossing pillows—yet. Please feel free to suggest definitions in the comments. I’d love to come home tonight and huskily tell my husband to “toss my pillows, bitch.")

Once everything is sorted out and everyone and his (clothed) uncle come to check what the ruckus is about, James finds out the woman is not a dirrrty hoooor. She is, in fact, his best friend Robbie’s American (no, wait, republican) cousin. And Sarah is horrified to find out that her uncle died a year before. The man responsible for mistaking her for a prostitute and getting her in this mess in the first place is now her closest relative.

James, personally, is delighted at the turn of events because he has this BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE cousin who’s been trying to kill him, and he wants to get married and pop out sons as fast as possible. Sarah is beautiful, she’s his best friend’s cousin, she smells real purty, and he has very publicly ruined her, so hey, why not?

Sarah isn’t so thrilled and flatly refuses to marry James. She doesn’t want to marry a rake. But specifically, Sarah equates bad marriages and profligacy with the English ton and loving, happy marriages with being American. This borderline xenophobic fear of the English and her veneration of Americans as the models for all marital virtues makes me wonder what version of America she lived in. I mean, wasn’t there an extremely public scandal involving a certain Founding Father boinking someone else’s wife, then being forced into confessing it publicly? And I also seem to remember reading about another Founding Father facing widespread allegations of having a taste for the badonka-donk when he was serving his first term as president.

Anyway, this “no rakes for me” nonsense started to grate on me. He’s nice to her, he’s handsome, he kisses well, he smells good, he’s beyond patient with her, he treats her like a queen, and she keeps on assuming he’s a master cockmongerer without actually telling him her actual fears. And that’s another problem with the book: I have no freaking clue how or why these two fall in love since they don’t spend a lot of time alone with each other, and when they do, they don’t talk very much. James usually latches onto her ta-tas, which of course causes her knees to weaken, and hey presto, they’re making out like horny little weasels. When they do talk, the book is almost schizophrenic in tone. For instance, James can’t bear to say the word “whore” in front of Sarah, yet earlier in the book they engage in an excruciatingly detailed conversation about prostitution without so much as twitching an eyebrow. And of course clamping onto her nipples like a drowning man grabbing at a straw is perfectly acceptable. Seeing the two of them interact more often than not made me go “What the fuck?”

There’s a suspense side-plot of sorts involving Richard Runyon, James’s cousin and next in line to inherit the title. Richard wants to be the duke, and he’ll stoop at nothing to get it. And make no mistake, he could not be more villainous short of planting a giant red neon sign on his head that says “PSYCHOTIC VILLAIN HERE” with a blinky arrow that points down, and maybe cueing Darth Vader’s theme every time he walks onto a scene. Allow me to bust out a little bulleted list.

• He’s bisexual, and as y’all know, all you need to do to make a romance novel villain Super Evil++ is to have him be a Connoisseur of Cock.
• He rapes women.
• He kills with little to no provocation.
• He’s sadistic.
• This one is actually pretty funny: When Richard is enraged, he starts breaking shit. Throughout the book, he tosses and flings aside glasses, dishes, cream pots and teapots with great zest and abandon. No wonder he wants to succeed to the title and fortune so badly; replacing all the china and breakable tchotchkes he’s thrown about in a blind rage—and he’s in a blind rage A LOT—has to cost a mint.

Worst of all, the author never really bothers explaining why Richard is so insane. No, wait, actually she kind of does. It’s spoiler-ish, though, so you know what to do. Brace yourself, it’s a really, really stupid reason. Apparently Richard’s this way because his dad spanked him when he was four years old for being mean to James. No, I’m not kidding. I wish I was. That’s all the motivation the reader is provided for Richard’s batshittiness. GAAAH.

The book also contains a very amateurish mistake near the end of the book, but this isn’t just the author’s fault because the editors should’ve caught it, too. One moment James and Sarah are engaged and the announcement is in the papers (causing Richard fly into a passion and fling yet another piece of china at his hapless lover’s head), the next moment they’re getting married and nobody in the book has any idea they were engaged in the first place. Not only that, but an event that took place over 100 pages before and several weeks ago is also referenced as having taken place just the previous night. Whoever the copy editor is for this book, she needs to be deprived of cookies until she learns to do her job properly. Bad copy editor, no sweeties for you! *slaps wrist*

Despite the multitude of problems—a plot that doesn’t make much sense, the silliest villain I’ve ever encountered, a heroine who’s an annoying prig, a hero who’s nice enough but is pretty much unremarkable, and for the bonus round, a big honkin’ continuity mistake—the book was surprisingly readable. The tone swings wildly from Regency England ("making micefeet of things") to twentieth-century American (”Okay, sweetheart"), but given the other problems, this actually didn’t bother me too much. There were spots though, such as the very beginning of the book, that had a pleasant liveliness to it, and those few spots were what saved this book from the Dreaded F.

*A side note: Romance novel heroes really need to learn to masturbate instead of walking around with a persistent hard-on all through the book. Really, it’s not that hard. *pause, snicker* OK, it IS hard, but if you take matters in your own hands and give the matters a little rub-a-dub-dub, it takes care of things quite nicely and the hardness subsides. See? Congratulations, you’re now a 28-year-old who has finally learned to master his domain, something most males figure out by the time they’re 13.