Illusion Queen is
Misunderstood, not evil
(Well, a bit evil.)

Rydstrom shows his horns
Grows a personality
Bondage fetish, yum.

One part of story
Disappoints: we never see
Ryd’s piercings, alas.

I’m a dirty bird
Wanted nasty hot sexxors
This has all & more

Witty, fun romp? Check.
Sex as playful torture? Check.
Gena shout out? CHECK.

Did I mention that
The cover is hotness itself?
Grade A from this girl.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Kiss of A Demon King by Kresley Cole
2. Thursday’s Haiku Review Moment: A Witch’s Beauty by Joey Hill
3. Thursday Haiku Review Moment: The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase

One of my favorite things about the Immortals After Dark series is that all the books are different.   Sure, there are some unifying themes – justice v. retribution, finding one’s place in the world and in love, independence v. autonomy, just to name a few – but the stories and the couples are not carbon copies of each other, making each book a new reading experience.   Kiss of A Demon King may be the most ambitious book of the series to date, in that it features two alpha protagonists, neither of whom wants to be vulnerable to the other.   The power struggle between Rydstrom and Sabine, combined with the complex plotting and increasingly interwoven aspects of the Lore, made Kiss of A Demon King a very powerful, if not perfect, read for me.

Rydstrom Woede may still be King of the Rage Demons, but his kingdom has long been under the control of the usurper Omort, an evil sorcerer who is rumored to be immune from death.   His purported inability to die draws him to his half-sister Sabine, Queen of the Illusions, who has died more than a dozen times, brought back to life by the powers of her sister Melanthe (Lanthe).   Like many rulers, Omort has no problem with incest, and would love nothing more than to possess Sabine, except for the fact that her fate has been foretold as that of the Demon King’s mate.   More importantly, perhaps, Rydstrom and Sabine’s child is destined to unlock the secret power of the Well of Souls, a supernatural vat of untapped power that each faction of the Lore wants to control.

So Omort simply waits and lusts, holding Sabine and Lanthe close with his own form of control (a deadly poison the women must ingest to stay alive), growing less and less stable in the stir of information that Rydstrom and his brother Cadeon may have found a way to end his life, via a magic sword forged by Omort’s similarly evil brother, Groot the Metallurgist.   Unable to find a soothsayer who can unfailingly guarantee Omort’s ultimate triumph over his enemies or a union with Sabine, Omort’s desperation places even more urgency on Sabine’s plan to capture Rydstrom and seduce him into impregnating her so that she can claim the power of the Well and free herself and her sister from Omort’s sadistic control.

Unfortunately for Sabine, Rydstrom’s will is just as strong as hers, and his pride is just a little bit wounded at the fact that Sabine was able to weave her illusions effectively enough to make him prisoner in the dungeon of the very castle from which he used to rule the Kingdom of Rothkalina.   Sabine may possess the power to weave illusions that seem real, but she does not have the supernatural power to force Rydstrom into serving as husband, mate, or stud, despite her numerous earthy (and earthly) gifts.

Anyone who read Dark Desires After Dusk is aware of the illusion Sabine uses to entrap Rydstrom, and those who haven’t will get a replay in Kiss of A Demon King.   However, there is little overlap beyond that scene, as Kiss of A Demon King has enough to keep the reader occupied, what with the turmoil in Omort’s court, Sabine’s plan to mate with Rydstrom, Lanthe’s own troubles with a vengeful Vrekener (enemy of the sorceresses, one of whom may be Lanthe’s own mate in a future book?), Rydstrom and Sabine’s escape from Tornin and travels through the desert of Grave Realm, and Sabine’s inability to survive for long without her dose of Omort’s poison.   If all of this sounds a bit confusing, that’s probably because it was for me, so I cannot express it more elegantly.   In fact, I’m still not sure I picked up on everything in play, or understood why everything worked the way it did.

Consequently, it was the plotting aspects of Kiss of A Demon King that snagged me up, sometimes disorienting me and sometimes seeming unnecessarily overcomplicated.   For example, I had to read the Prologue twice, once at the beginning of the book and once again after I finished it, not really feeling grounded until that second read.   And then it felt like the only reason it was included was to provide some backstory for Sabine and fill in relevant details from previous books.   Unfortunately, this resulted in something I don’t ever remember encountering in an IAD book:   infodump.   A downside to the complicated plotting and intersected stories framing Kiss of A Demon King was the periodic insertion of chucks of backstory:

So much was at stake in the fight to reclaim his crown-from Omort the Deathless, a foe who could never be killed.

Rydstrom had once faced him and knew from bit ¬ter experience that the sorcerer was undestroyable. Though he’d beheaded Omort, it was Rydstrom who’d barely escaped their confrontation nine hundred years before.

Now Rydstrom searched for a way to truly kill Omort forever. Backed by his brother Cadeon and Cadeon’s gang of mercenaries, Rydstrom doggedly tracked down one lead after another.

It is a tough call, I think, to know how much a reader might need to understand all that is going on, especially if she has not gotten through all the previous books in a series.   An author may not want to alienate new readers while at the same time not wanting to bore veteran readers.   Up until this book, I think Kresley Cole handled this difficult dance perfectly, but here it felt a bit clumsy to me.

Another byproduct of the complexity was that certain things didn’t make total sense to me.   For example, there are these covenant tablets in Castle Tornin that signal a promise made.   Sabine has one in which she promises that she will remain sexually pure if she can remain free from being sexually forced.   It is clear the promise has been broken when the tablet falls and breaks. Omort has respected these covenants, essentially relying on others to remain loyal within a court that is hardly harmonious (and placing him in a reactive position should the alliances break).   I know that in holding to the Sanctuary covenant Omort supposedly keeps Sabine’s loyalty and cooperation, but he clearly has other ways of ensuring that.   Is it simply that there are many interwoven promises in those covenants, networks of loyalty that Omort needs to keep his rule?   That may be the case, but since he can steal some the supernatural powers of other beings, why must he depend on such mundane promises of loyalty?   I am still not completely clear about why Omort couldn’t just steal enough powers to disempower others like he did to Cade and Rydstrom, who could no longer trace.   In fact, I’m not completely certain about how these powers are stolen or transferred from one being to another in general.

For me, the problem was that in virtually all the scenes taking place in Tornin I was not fully oriented to everything that was occurring, especially in the latter portions of the book where the scene was being set for the ultimate standoff between Omort and his final destiny.   I am one of those readers who has a difficult time visualizing busy actions scenes to begin with, and in this book there was just so much that needed to be played out and wrapped up that I didn’t feel like I was keeping up very well.   For example, characters travel between planes through the use of portals, and I kept wondering why these portals limited travel to the extent that they did.   Why, for example, was Rydstrom able to facilitate the transportation of many demons through a portal from a desolate plane called Grave Realm to various places in the United States (and why did people remain in less than ideal place to begin with?), but his brother couldn’t follow him through from New Orleans to Tornin?

Lest it seem like I did not like Kiss of A Demon King, though, let me turn to what I loved about the book:   the relationship between Rydstrom and Sabine.   You know how there are movies where an actor will emit such power on screen that you simply can’t look away from them when they are in a scene?   Well, that’s how I felt about Rydstrom and Sabine.   These two are so powerful as characters, so vividly portrayed and potently alive on the page, that I found them riveting.   And fortunately, almost the entire middle section of the novel is taken up with their growing relationship.

I am not sure I have ever met a character like Sabine.   A virgin, she has both incredible sexual awareness and seemingly unflappable self-confidence; Sabine is definitely not Romance’s stock virgin heroine.   Capable of steadfast loyalty, she is unsentimental, ruthless when she needs to be, and unapologetic about her love of gold.   In Rydstrom, she’s not looking for love or even a good time; she’s seeking the means to her preservation and a way for she and Lanthe to rule Rothkalina themselves.

And although we have been acquainted with Rydstrom for several books now, we have not really seen the depth of his pain over losing the crown or his loneliness in not finding his mate yet and not knowing what his future holds.   On the one hand Rydstrom wants to regain the power stolen from him, but his overweening sense of responsibility has also bred some resentment toward the beings he once ruled.   In short, Rydstrom faces the dilemma of the hyper-responsible in that he is driven to do the right thing but frustrated that so much rests on his shoulders.

There is no lack of irony and conflict between Rydstrom and Sabine.   She knows that the Demon King is her mate but seeks no lasting relationship.   Rydstrom wants his mate but refuses to give in to Sabine’s advances, even when his instincts tell him she is his.   She is a nuevo-nihilist who “cares “about nothing very much” as opposed to not caring about anything, while Rydstrom constantly feels the burden of authority.     But all of that just makes for a stronger – and more difficult – attraction:

“Are you falling for him?”

“Could there be a more doomed relationship? It is ridiculous even to contemplate.” His husky voice . . . the way his smooth skin tasted, “He’s just so… so good.”

“I think that intrigues you,” Lanthe said. “He’s a male as strong as you, and one you can’t defeat.”

The truth is, that neither can defeat the other, which both fuels and frustrates their mutual appeal.   Especially because Sabine represents everything Rydstrom disdains – well, at least appears to disdain:

She sat at the foot of the bed. “That’s the difference between me and you. I won’t try to convert you. Do I like that you never lie and esteem things like valor? Of course not. But I don’t try to rid you of those traits. Why does your kind forever seek to change ours?” That was what she hated most about them-not their odd, counterintuitive beliefs per se, but that they would force them on others.

“Because we live more contented lives. We have loy ¬alty, fidelity, honor-”

“All three are overrated. The only chance you have to demonstrate any of them is to deny yourself some ¬thing or someone that you desire.”

What Sabine soon discovers, though, is that Rydstrom is more attracted to her badness than he lets on, which gives her a certain amount of power over him, which is in turn matched by Rydstrom’s unwillingness to cooperate with Sabine’s need to be queen and to carry Rydstrom’s legitimate heir.

How one goes about bringing two characters together who do not have obvious chinks in their emotional armor is no small feat.   There is a fine balance between keeping the sexual tension alive and not surrendering either character’s emotional guard too soon or too cheaply.   Kiss of A Demon King keeps this balance beautifully, by slowly, slowly wearing down Rydstrom and Sabine, allowing them to torment each other, allowing each of them to take the upper hand in turn, forcing them to remain together long enough to be revealed to each other in new, unexpected ways.

Her lids slid closed. Peaceful. Perfect. . . . When she opened her eyes, she found him studying her face. The possessiveness in his gaze made her breath hitch. “My naked body is spread out before you, and you’re looking at my face?”

“I’m trying to figure out how your mind works. If I can do that, then this”-he trailed his fingers between her breasts and lower-”will always be mine to enjoy.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I have to, Sabine.”

This process is facilitated by a road trip, so to speak, with Rydstrom and Sabine getting the chance to escape Tornin for Grave Realm, a barren outpost of Rothkalina that contains portals allowing for transport off plane.   But the portals are remote, requiring days of arduous hiking through desert-like conditions, and it is it through this section of the novel that Rydstrom and Sabine grow closer.   True to their characters, however, neither simply lies down for the other, and both carry numerous secrets.   Rydstrom, for example, has lied to Sabine about the oath he delivered to her in captivity, an oath she believes is a wedding vow (it’s actually a vow for revenge), and Sabine allows Rydstrom to falsely believe that she might be carrying his child.

These lies are enough to bind the two but not enough to seal their relationship.   After all Sabine is still supposedly an “evil sorceress” (“It’s not my fault the truth and 1 are strangers-we were never properly introduced.”) and Rydstrom is still supposedly a straight-laced King.   Watching their personalities fill out within the context of the novel was a true pleasure.   For these two, it’s not enough that they are attracted to each other, and it’s not even enough that they ultimately love each other; for them it’s about trust and the incredible risk they take in trusting the other when all signs show that to be dangerous.

Had the whole of the novel read with the same taughtness, emotional impact, and even pacing as the middle sections of the book, this would have been a straight A for me, as the relationship between Sabine and Rydstrom is among my favorites in the series.   Assigning a grade that adequately expresses my reading experience of Kiss of A Demon King is difficult, but a B seems fair on balance.

~   Janet

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or ebook format from the Sony Store.

Related posts:

1. Dark Desires After Dusk by Kresley Cole
2. REVIEW: Dark Needs at Night’s Edge by Kresley Cole
3. REVIEW: If You Desire by Kresley Cole

Somewhere in the middle of Dark Needs at Night’s Edge I felt that this book occupies a very important moment in the Immortals After Dark series. As Jane said previously, this is a series one can pick up at any point and not be completely confused. But for those of us who have been reading it since the beginning, the world-building is complex and multi-layered, not only with different species of immortals but with different families and other kin relationships to keep track of, and various mythologies, alliances, aversions, grudges, and other intersections among the immortals. It is a challenge to keep the reader engaged with the central story as well as giving ample attention to the world building for both novice and initiated readers. Dark Needs at Night’s Edge reminded me of how difficult that challenge can be, because the book’s main strengths and weaknesses relate to this balancing.

Conrad Wroth is a Fallen vampire, turned by his desperate brother against his will into the creature he had made a sacred vow in life to destroy. And now, in his Fallen state, eyes blood red and the memories of thousands of victims in his mind, he has succumbed to a kind of madness induced by bloodlust. With a demon’s curse hanging over him – that when he gets his most cherished dream he will also get his most horrid nightmare – and various other immortals seeking his death, Conrad is brought against his will – once again by his brothers – to an old estate where they seek to rehabilitate him with the help of a magical elixir. Chained and crazed beyond reason, Conrad soon becomes aware of another presence in the house, a beautiful young woman ghost only he can see.

Néomi Laress, burlesque dancer turned prima ballerina, has not been able to leave her estate since her violent murder 80-some years earlier. Every month her ghostly self relives her violent stabbing, and the rest of the time she tries to entertain herself by observing the intermittent tenants at Elancourt, the latest of which is the mad vampire chained to a bed and watched over carefully by his two vampire brothers, Sebastian and Nikolai, who know that if they cannot bring their brother back from his bloodlust they will have to destroy him for good. Néomi is used to being invisible to her home’s residents, to entertaining herself by stealing things with her telekinetic abilities and haunting any tenant she deems unfit for residence. But it has been a while since anyone moved in, and Néomi is starved for something to break the monotony of her lonely netherworld existence.

So when Conrad moves in, Néomi isn’t fazed by the violence he does to her home in his frenzied attempts at escape because she is too caught up in this frightening, imposing, but clearly tortured male. At first she simply watches Conrad, who, amazingly, can see Néomi but believes her to be a figment of his shattered imagination. Over the days, though, she begins to reach out to him, curious and feeling no small amount of pity for his suffering. And even though Conrad does not trust in Néomi’s existence, he cannot help but respond to her, to count on her steady presence in the house and her interest in who and what he is.

When Conrad’s brothers go missing, he is left to fend for himself, restrained by chains that are magically treated to keep him within the boundaries of the estate, and in the company of the ghostly Néomi, upon whom more and more of his rational mind focuses. Because he has not yet been blooded by his Bride (the process in which his heart pumps once against and he breathes), he cannot physically respond to Neomi’s unashamed sensuality, and Néomi cannot deliver on the promise of her blatant teasing, either, but they develop a strange camaraderie nonetheless (or perhaps because of those physical limitations):

And as he improved, they talked more and more – two people who desperately needed to. Often they hit a rhythm, a bandying back and forth, as if their thoughts were interlocking pieces. She’d told him, "When we talk, I like how our words ebb and flow. There doesn’t seem to be a need to remark on every comment, no need to clarify – it’s like we both understand that we understand each other. It’s like dancing."

"Or sex?"

She’d smiled. "Only if it’s great."

He’d given her a confident nod. "Then we would have great sex."

Lord, we would. . .

They seemed to fit in every way. Yes, he was half-mad, but as a Prohibition-era ghost with a penchant for stealing condoms, moon pies, and bras, she wasn’t exactly in touch with reality herself.

Initially it is great loneliness that brings these two together, the mutual understanding that neither really has a place in the world, at least no place they feel they have affirmatively chosen. And the fact that they cannot physically touch ironically creates more sexual tension between them, because they are forced to express so much verbally and through their emotional reactions to one another. In terms of their characters it makes their growing attraction that much sweeter, and narratively, it is a very smart way to build tension into each level of their relationship and the seeming impossibility of their ever being together on an equal plane.

Part of the tension in Conrad’s characters comes from his increasing sanity. During the times Conrad is not crazed with the nightmares that come from the memories he has ingested from his victims (along with their blood), he is becoming more and more reflective, more conscious of all he gave up for his vow to the vampire killing Kapsliga. Néomi becomes his comfort, calming him when no one else would be able to:

"You’re getting so much better," she murmured. "Soon you won’t have these nightmares."

He narrowed his gaze at her, as if just noticing she was there. "You were murdered – you remind me of the things I’ve done, of consequences," he choked out the words. "And you show me what I could have had . . . if I’d been . . . different." He grasped his head again and muttered, "You’re what’s wrong with my past. What must be missing from my future."

"Conrad, your future’s not settled. You can still have good things in your life again."

"You’re the perfect punishment for me."

"Oh." Stunned, she rose to leave.

He reached out to stay her. When he closed his big fist around air, he turned and struck the headboard with frustration. Eyes vacant, burning red, he rasped, "Did any man ever want his penance so much?"

For anyone who has read other books in this series, they will recognize this dynamic immediately: two powerful characters who are struggling to protect their vulnerabilities from each other, all the while becoming increasingly vulnerable to their mutual feelings of attachment. Although Neomi is a ghost, we never underestimate her strength; we know that this woman’s spectral endurance is a reflection of an extremely strong spirit. And Conrad, poor Conrad, has unbelievable strength and equally potent fears. These two are a natural fit, indeed, except for the small problems of his bloodlust, the demon’s curse, another demon’s pledge to kill Conrad, and Néomi’s lack of physical embodiment. Many paranormals would centralize this last conflict, making it the primary obstacle in the relationship, but not here. Thanks to Mariketa and Nix, Néomi is able to return to the physical world, an event that sets off a long chain of consequences, from Conrad’s blooding and the consummation of their relationship to hastening the crisis point in Conrad’s hunt for Tarut, the demon who cursed him.

I must confess that one of the reasons I love this series is precisely the interaction of different characters and species of immortals, and their appearance never feels gratuitous. Mariketa, Bowen, and Nix have important roles to play, as do Sebastian and Nikolai Wroth. Cade and Rydstrom have key contributions to the narrative, as well, and so their presence allows for us to become more acquainted with the brothers before Cade’s story comes out imminently, and in a way that doesn’t seem plunked into the novel. In other words, the strength of the world building and the characterization is more and more apparent with each novel. Of course, it is also more difficult to maintain with clarity, a challenge I also see in Meljean Brook’s Guardian series.

The flip side, of course, is that there needs to be ample time for the main couple’s bond to develop, something I felt was sacrificed a bit in the last book, Wicked Deeds on A Wicked Night. Here, however, Néomi and Conrad spend so much time alone that they cannot help but grow close, and so we get a lot of uninterrupted time with them. However, the very isolation also creates challenges of its own, namely that these two characters have A LOT of inner angst, and they have no one in which to confide these anxieties. Thus there is A LOT of thinking that goes on during this part of the book, and we seem privy to it all. Which made my reading experience slow for a chunk of the middle, during which I waited impatiently for something to come along and break the narrative monotony. This was by far the weakest part of the novel for me, and had the pace not shifted well before the end, my overall grade for Dark Needs At Night’s Edge would have suffered considerably, because the balance I mentioned at the beginning of my review would have been significantly askew.

Instead, the shifting pace, back and forth between the isolated drama within Néomi and Conrad’s relationship and the rest of the Lore’s complicated dynamics kept me interested. I loved, for example, how even the details are given heightened attention. When, for example, Conrad is blooded, he does not, understandably, recognize the sensations. Instead he feels like he is running over land mines, the beat of his heart a virtual explosion in his body and mind. And Neomi, when she becomes embodied, experiences a physical "hypersensitivity" that would be expected, but not necessarily illustrated for the reader. I appreciate these details because they naturalize the world of the novel and aid that necessary suspension of disbelief.

Finally, there are the women of these books, especially the pugnacious and avaricious Valkyrie and the vain and opportunistic witches, and now Néomi, whose fate I will not reveal but will say it was a satisfying and believable outcome for me. I know this has become somewhat of a refrain, but I don’t care: I love these women, because those characteristics that would be seen as flaws, weaknesses, and even unacceptable taboos in other areas of the genre are represented in these books without judgment and with significant humor. They’re bawdy and raucous and strong, not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally, too. As intensely sexy and appealing as the heroes can be, with all their sometimes clueless, brooding angst (and their tendency to the "mantrum" as Nix calls it), it is the females that really hold these books together for me, and keep me reading them. Dark Needs At Night’s Edge is an entertaining and adeptly imagined addition to a great series, and it gets a B from me.

~ Janet

This book can be purchased in mass market from Amazon or Powells or ebook format.

Related posts:

1. Kresley Cole and Her Innocent Men
2. REVIEW: If You Desire by Kresley Cole
3. REVIEW: No Rest for the Wicked by Kresley Cole