Surprise IAD fix!

This posted on SciFiGuy over the weekend: A free Kresley Cole Download!!

Am I the last to hear about it? Did nobody else notice it sitting coyly in one of SciFiGuy's action-packed posts? Because I feel like trumpets should be blaring.

It includes the full novella, The Warlord Wants Forever, which is the series premiere that I never read, and actually didn't know about, plus SEVEN IAD excerpts, including one for Deep Kiss of Winter, the duology with the fabulous Gena Showalter. Whew! I am going to start revving up my ereader now.

And of course the next IAD installment, Pleasure of a Dark Prince, comes out February 2010. I think it comes out in hardcover, but I don't care. A pack of wild orangutans couldn't keep me from buying it...though it would make an interesting YouTube video.

Kiss of a Demon King & a meditation on Sabine's evil nature

Imprisoning a handsome, good-hearted demon for wanton purposes. Check.
This was another deliciously set up Immortals After Dark book. Thank you, Kresley Cole. In this one, we have sorceress Sabine keeping demon king Rydstrom in chains in a dungeon, in order to force him to have sex with her to fulfill a prophecy ... and he really wants to have sex with her, but the prophecy must not be filled! So he doesn't. Even though he really really wants to. Then he gets out and drags her across the wasteland as his prisoner. More fun sex stuff. Sacrifices, battles.

Sigh. I guess I am barely objective about this series these days. I have achieved lift off. Out of radio range.

Finding the book, on the whole, wonderfully badass. Check.

You know that game where you randomly open a book and find a line and write it down? Pulling this book out from under my bed, I was thinking, you can open this bad boy to any random line and chances are good that it will totally entertain. Wait! I'm going to play the game now:

Devious vampire. He rose another notch in Sabine's opinion.

Okay again:

"I can make you see your worst nightmares or your most coveted dreams. And I can control them."

Again:

"You still look unsullied," Lanth said when she and Sabine met upstairs. Sabine hated that word.

Loving evil Sabine
I really enjoyed how evil Sabine was. She came from a culture where evil ways were applauded and effective, and she grew up at war, more or less, with the "good" side. In a way, it was sort of like opposite world. What is bad is good where she comes from.

Question for the ages
So does that even make her truly evil? If you grow up in a world where bad is good, where bad is honored and rewarded, and you never know otherwise, are you bad for being bad? Or are you living up to the moral code you've been handed?

I suppose, when I think really hard about that question, at the end of it is the question of whether human beings supposedly have some innate compass of good and evil. But then, hey! Sabine is not even a human.

I love this exchange between her and Rydstrom (and can I just say, what is with these names? I say that in a loving way. Anyhow):

"Why do you have to steal?"

She blinked at him "How else would I get gold? Join the typing pool?"

"Maybe you could do without."

Impossible. You must have gold." Gold is life...

"You're hated by more than can be imagined."

"Do you hate me?" she asked.

"I don't yet, but I believe that it's inevitable."

She laughed softly. "Hating me is like hating a sharp sword that cuts you. It can't help the way it was formed."

"A sword can be refashioned, shaped anew."

"Only after it's broken down. Imagine how painful the forge fire and hammer blows would feel...

I think Rydstrom himself comes to that sense that this is a conflict of cultures rather than a conflict of morality with realizations like these:

The Sorceri worship gold, Sabine had told him. He'd thought it had been an excuse for greed, but she believed it was more.

To be honest, though, I really wouldn't mind an amoral heroine even when it's not cultural. But that's another post.

SLIGHT SPOILER BELOW:
And I was absolutely thrilled and refreshed that, though she ended with Rydstrom, Sabine didn't turn good in the end, but rather she seemed almost to relish a deception of his--one that I thought he'd get in trouble for.

I understand this book hit the NYT best seller list (I think). If so, I'm so very glad. I think this is the most imaginative and vibrant series in the whole paranormal and urban fantasy realm.

How does she get away with it? A review of Dark Desires

I never really expected Dark Desires After Dusk by Kresley Cole to become one of my favorite books of 2008, but it has. (See post below.) Because I loved it!

I alternately devoured it and horded it, a sign of the ultimate crave book. Like the ones before it, Dark Desires is an enthralling tutorial in big plots, big personalities and dizzyingly high stakes.

Miriam over at Rape and Adverbs wrote a pair of posts here and here that I really agree with on this book. This post here echoes and builds on some of her points.

Quick plot rundown:
Basically, Demon Cade has finally hooked up with Holly, his fated mate, the one woman in all the world and all eternity he can find true happiness with. Unfortunately, it’s his job to deliver her to an evil metallurgist in order to win his and his brother’s kingdom back, something he’s quested after for eight centuries (and it was his fault they lost the kingdom in the first place!) See Miriam’s fine rundown of more ways that the stakes are pushed high, and that everything is extreme and huge.

The characters:
Like Miriam, I love how opposite the hero and heroine are. He’s a big slob, and she’s a total OCD clean freak/arrange-things-in-threes gal. He’s a sex maniac and she’s a virgin…make that extra virgin: she doesn’t even watch or think about sexy things.  This extreme balance of personalities makes their interactions crackle. It's just plain old fun.

Also, Cade is wonderfully unheroic in that he tries to get out of making the hard decisions. He wants his kingdom AND he wants his true mate. So he tries to find ways to have both, instead of making a hard choice. For example, he teaches Holly how to fight, vaguely hoping that if he does end up delivering her into the clutches of the metallurgist bent on raping her, maybe she can fight him off. Not a standup guy!

Meriam was slightly annoyed by Cade. I can see it. I’ve had that with Cole heroines—I’m thinking Emmaline in A Hunger Like No Other, where I sort of suspended my annoyance because I was enjoying the book so much. These extreme character pairings make the interaction sizzle, but the flip side is that people can get fed up. I really admire how Cole works this balancing act.

Sometimes I marvel at Kresley Cole books.
So okay, Cade and Holly are on this road trip and, as a non-sexpot girl, Holly has nonsexpot underwear. But not for long, because Nix, who is delivering a few things from Holly’s home, replaces Holly’s normal underwear with thongs and black lace stuff. Because Nix says Valkyries like that sort of thing. And Holly HAS to wear them because they’re her only underwear. I wouldn’t let many books/authors get away with that. On numerous levels.

And hello, the hero Cade is delivering the heroine to freak in a castle who intends to rape her and forcibly impregnate her, and Cade is gleefully happy her comfy underwear has been replaced by racy things and thong stuff. These are just two sort of random examples of the crazy outrages of this book.

I mean, really!
How does Kresley Cole get away with this stuff? I think, for one, she allows the heroines, especially this one, to call attention to the insanity of it all, to sort of inhabit the point of view that many readers probably have deep inside their alpha-hero addled minds:

“I’m going to react,” he said. “Even if you’re not my usual type.”

“Usual type? Oh, let me guess. Swimbos with more breasts than brains?”

He hiked his broad shoulders. “My kind prefers tarts with a little more meat on their bones so they can take a demon’s lusts.”

“Tarts?” Her jaw slackened. “My God, you’re the most misogynistic man I’ve ever met. I bet you also like your tarts barefoot and pregnant.”

”Nah, I like them barefoot, on birth control, and always available in my bed.”

She sputtered.

I would also refer you to Meriam’s choice of excerpt, where Holly rants about another aspect of the setup.

I think there’s another reason Cole gets away with these extremes, and that’s because she does it in a playful way. I always get the sense that this is an author who throws caution to the wind in the name of fun and play, and it reduces the seriousness of everything the way a cartoon can make, say, smashing a guy over the head with a mallet merely wacky (though these books are not cartoon-like at all, and they don't seem like they're trying to be funny, another thing I LOVE about them.) Though at the same time, few romances I read directly call attention to feminist issues of any sort.

It also seems like Cole herself is having a great deal of fun, and that lightens the reader experience, too. Though that authorial fun thing might be deceptive. This writing seems easy and breezy, but I’m guessing it’s the result of careful plotting and hard work. Or not!

Anyway, I can’t wait to read Kiss of the Demon King !!! The whole Immortals After Dark series is an instant auto-buy for me. There's a contest, too! See my sidebar or here.

My laboratory-proven book ranking process & 2008 faves

I was working on a post on how I didn’t expect Dark Desires After Dusk to be one of my top five favorite books released in or around 2008, and then I realized I never listed my top five here on my blog, and then I realized I never say how I even judge a book.

Needless to say, Cade will be waiting another day for his post.

So, my top 5, alphabetical, not faves order:

• Dark Desires after Dusk by Kresley Cole
• Death of a Pirate King by Josh Lanyon
• Demon Moon by Meljean Brook
• The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne
• Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas

**Little CJ and I discussed most of these at Book Smugglers last week, so I won't do it here.

How did I determine these? Pure readerly experience.
By my system, a poorly written book can fare better than a well written one, just if I take a fancy to it. And if a book has something I personally hate, it can be the best book in the world and it will nevertheless get multiple vicious stab wounds which, as anybody who watches real crime TV knows, is not at all random, but a sign of strong feelings. I don't often assign the "ranks" below as grades when I discuss a book, but it's how I arrange them in my mind.

Book experience ranking levels:

Love affair: I crave it, it takes hold of my mind, it has me in its thrall. Very rare. The Spymaster’s Lady is the only one above that was a full Love Affair, even though it didn’t have the character interplay that makes a book perfect for me, described below in my last post. I didn't care. I loved it.

Passionate crave read: Almost a love affair, but not quite. A passionate crave read is full of excitement and magic, and when I’m not reading it I wish I was. Paradoxically, though, I often try to read slow to make the goodness last. I totally did this with Dark Desires.

Damn fine read: This is a rollicking good read that I look forward to. This might be a B+ for me. Most books I talk about here fall into the damn fine read range.

Serviceable: The book generally works, nothing special. Good enough to finish. Some serviceable books take me forever to finish, others are page turners but still, merely serviceable.

Hostage situation: I want to leave but it won’t let me go because I have to find out what happens goddammit! Extreme measures during a hostage situation may include skipping chunks, reading only dialogue or the first sentence of every paragraph.

ROI situation: (return on investment) This is where I force myself to finish a book because I invested a lot of time in the reading of it before I realized I wish I wasn’t reading it. Typically, a serviceable book will convert to an ROI situation when I'm pretty far along.

The cautionary tale: A DNF (did not finish) I still read a bunch of and get a lot out of, because it’s like a warning or lesson for me as a writer: don’t let this happen to your hero. Pay attention to the build up or you'll have this problem. This sex scene leaves me cold because of that problem. I read such a book with the sort of attention I give to scenes of car crashes or fires. A primal instinct forces me to look for a while, and then it’s like, enough.

The mercy kill DNF: This is a DNF due to boredom. Set gently on floor with a sigh.

The multiple vicious stab wound DNF: This is a DNF due to an intense negative reaction. If it’s a book I actually own, it usually involves some physical abuse, like hurling it across the room.

Speaking of top books of 2008, I still have my running list going here. Let me know if you have a list for me to post. I just added an interesting one last night: the best selling fantasy, which includes a lot of urban fantasy, from Best Fantasy Stories.

The two lower images from Wikipedia commons.

Real & perceived hugeness

The Immortals After Dark by Kresley Cole
Book #2: No Rest For the Wicked

What’s funny is that when I was writing about A Hunger Like No Other below and thinking about all the different scenes, I decided then and there that was my favorite book of this series. But now that I’m thinking about No Rest For the Wicked, gosh, this one was so good, too! Maybe this one is my favorite! Maybe I have two favorites. What the heck, it’s my blog.

This is the first book in the series that revolves around the Hie, a kind of road race/scavenger hunt for the immortals.

The hero is one Sebastian Wroth, who was turned into a vampire against his will… “Burdened with hatred and alone for ages, he sees little reason to live. Until an exquisite fey creature comes to kill him, inadvertently saving him instead.”


The creature is Kaderin the Cold Hearted, a Valkyrie assassin sent to kill him. Their super lusty encounter shocks them both, but Kaderin takes off - she can’t think about Sebastian; she’s in the Hie, and the prize is the ability to go back and change history (save her dead sisters!) Sebastian decides to enter the Hie, too, though he just wants to seduce Kaderin and win the prize for her, or help her. This is a very fun and sexy book, which in fact spawned a certain infamous question of the day.

Real hugeness
Here’s what I want to talk about—one of the things I most love about this whole series: Kresley Cole doesn’t do anything halfway. Everything is HUGE!

In book #1, Lachlain didn’t just hate vampires, they burnt him to death repeatedly for 150 years. Kaderin’s not just cold-hearted, she hasn’t felt emotions for centuries, ever since her sisters were killed by a vampire she spared on the battlefield. It is her fault!

And Kaderin is sent to destroy Sebastian, but when she encounters him, she doesn’t just change her mind or fall for him—nothing so minor as that. Rather, her feelings come back, and his heart starts beating again (and they have a fabulously lusty encounter in his castle where he has hitherto suffered, tormented and alone for ages). And yeah, people here live in castles. Not condos. Not houses.

The Hie is also huge. You have minefields and shark infested waters and all-consuming immortal hell fires.

This hugeness of plot just makes everything more fun somehow. I really think this series is even more clever than it appears.

Perceived hugeness

Okay, here is another observation on hugeness: did you ever notice that in this series, as well as many many others, the heroes will frequently worry that they will hurt the women with their huge cocks?

It happens over and over—I would say the majority of paranormal reads in this very blog feature this idea on the part of the hero. Yet never once has a heroine felt upset or complained or been like, Yow!

I find this somewhat humorous, and I don’t think it’s exactly intentional on the authors’ parts. Taken case by case, I believe it’s supposed to suggest, well, yes he has a huge cock, but these two are perfectly suited so…

But when you look at it as an overall trend, it can only suggest that heroes have unrealistic assessments of their own sizes. Because they always seem to think it.

More opinions

Many of my esteemed colleagues have reviewed this series, including Sula, and Lisabea whose book this is, LesleyW, whose reviews on this series are way more thoughtful than mine, Taja who just finished them, too, and probably about 10 other people on my sidebar.  And you'll find MaryKate's fab reviews of #4 and #5 here!

A Hunger Like No Other

Oh wait, hold the presses, this is a blog about BOOKS? Not DVDs? Not Kitties? Yes. And believe it or not, I have been reading and finishing books. Maybe not as fast as some of you high performance readers, but I have. And three of them are the first three installments of Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark. Does it seem strangely like I only read books that everybody else has already read? It does to me.

In a lot of ways I was predisposed not to like this series. I’d read a few tepid reviews, then heard the only good one was the first, then it was the third. Though some people like these quite a bit. Then I ordered #3 by mistake and I was like, shit, now I have to read the first two or I’ve wasted my money. I bought the first and lovely soon-to-be MBA Sula lent me #2.

So anyway, that is the pall under which I started #1, A Hunger Like No Other. Add to that I sort of sensed the hapless, gadget obsessed, slightly shallow-seeming heroine, and I don’t tend to like that sort of heroine.

But wow, this series totally grew on me. You know when you look back on books, and you have a kind of image or feeling about them? Maybe with one book it’s a nice feeling, or another it’s just blandness, like, what the hell was that even about? Or for me, Lara Adrian and BDB is dark broody sexorin. 

I look back on these Immortals and it's brightness and newness. To me, they’re these bright, clever reads that don’t take themselves seriously, but are quite fun and smart—in a way that sneaks up on you.

This is the story of werewolf Lachlain MacRieve of the Lykae Clan. This guy was chained under the catacombs of Paris for decades by vampires, where he was repeatedly burned to death, though being that he’s an immortal, he always revived for it to happen again. So it’s this terrible torture, and then he finally gets this new energy to be free when he sense his predestined mate walking the streets above him. And it’s Emma, a half vampire.

So he's mad, since all that kept him alive was visions of retribution against vampires. And she’s not into him either, as he seems like a big, backwards monster freak to her - okay, here, from the back: “…her fear of the Lykae—and their notorious dark desires—ebbs as he begins a slow, wicked seduction to sate her own dark cravings.”

Can I just say that’s some fine back cover copy? Also, I must say there were a lot of scenes where I was like, OMG, I can’t even believe this author is doing this. Various shower scenes come to mind. Yet I found them enormously fun and dirty! 

I really liked this book. I think of the three, it was my favorite, and Emma is my favorite of the heroines, and Lachlain MacRieve is my favorite of the heroes, too. I know people are partial to Bowen (Ana). In fact, bring back DIK and Lachlain would have been in my hero mix. Who got him anyway?

But Emma had such a strong character arc; she grows out of her timidity in a way that is very satisfying. I also like the writing in her sections. Like this, from very early on:

Starving in Paris. And friendless. Was there ever such a predicament?

Couples strolling hand in hand along the gravel walk seemed to mock her loneliness. Was it just her, or did lovers look more adoringly at each other in this city? Especially in springtime. Die, bastards.

She sighed. It wasn’t their fault that they were bastards who should die.

There is just a kind of coy darkness to the sections on her that I really like. Also, I enjoyed the Valkyrie…after a while. More on that later. With this book, there were moments when I wearied of their standoffishness, but on the whole, wow, grand and unexpected fun!