Hello all! I’m going to start posting my cuts for books I DNFed, but I want to stress that everyone’s taste is different. If we had 10 different blogs than the ones we have this year, there’s a decent chance that we’d end up with a very different finalist show down for phase 2. What doesn’t suit me may be your cup of tea, so please pick this up if it sounds good to you!
Lurid Lantern by Victoria Clapton
I really loved this cover so I picked this one up early on. I also liked how it started with a fairly standard opening to the world describing Lighters as a kind of paladin of this world. The Lighters are trained to cleanse the world of filth, to be pure, serve the people, etc. I’m cool with black/white good vs evil books every once in a while, and I thought this was heading in that sort of direction. There’s kings, knights, old school magic etc., and things were going fine. I did notice on a personal level that I was struggling with the visualizations of the scenes but that’s because I really struggle with creating novel imagery in my head from straight descriptions. I greatly benefit from simile and metaphor or writing that relies on senses other than vision — like the feel of the floor, or smell of the room, or what sounds are going on around the character.
There’s mention of other worlds and how all beings are connected to each other, so there’s a sense of vastness, a large scale universe made of three different realms, and there’s also chakras and whatnot that I really wish had more page time. There were a lot of really neat world building aspects that kind of got set aside to make room for the plotline.
Our main character is Cahya, she’s a member of the Refulgent, which is like a warrior monk kind of class who protect the Realm of the LIght. Her actual king is King Leor, ruler of the Lighters/Refulgents. Being a Lighter/Refulgent sounds like the worst, though. They aren’t allowed to enjoy anything, including food, because it’s considered sinful or something like that to have a little fun. She and her band of Refulgent go to fuck up some Smiters, the bad guys, but along the way they encounter King Kage, the King of the Dark Realm. Instead of killing everyone in her party, the King of the Dark Realm just says some cryptic shit and dips back to his realm. Cahya was left without a choice but to tell her own King, King Leor about the weird encounter. King Leor is creepy as shit. When he learns that she’s met the other king his response is super not unhinged, “You are mine! Mine alone! Not his!” He then forces his tongue down her throat as some kind of dominance thing. King Kage is creepier. It’s just a creep party. And both creeps wants the MC “for their own” and they both assault her. Except Kage literally chains her up and basically tells her he has the power to take her to the brink of death, strip the flesh off her bones, and then heal her back to normal only to do it over again. This was prospect was sexually exciting for the MC and it was at that point I was I was like, mmmmmmmm I don’t think I’m the target audience here.
I can do okay with romance books, I can even do okay with some erotica overtones. Together with Kristen we have put forward a romance or romance-ish books as finalists (Stephanie Burgis has a delightful book we chose as a finalist). However, sex scenes tend to either bore me or make me laugh — but here I found a new reaction, “ew, what??” I was unaware that pain-pleasure/torture-love was a subsection of the literotica world. This is definitely one of those books and there are a large amount of those scenes in this book that I just didn’t connect with. I knew I wasn’t going to choose it as a semifinalist and my partner, Kristen, who is a romance reader and erotica reader passed on taking it into her pile. This book is marked as cut, but if this is your favored subgenre of romantasy I’ve seen others give high praise on Goodreads.