I picked up a copy of H.B. Jack‘s Stone Cold as an Amazon freebie.

Three massive stone gargoyles. Monsters all. And now I belong to them.

I didn’t ask to be rescued. I was doing fine on my own, even if I had just lost my job, dumped my ex and taken a wrong turn down a dark alley.

So when Cararr thinks I need saving and sweeps me up in his huge claws, what am I supposed to do? Say no to this damaged, vicious and sweet as candy gargoyle who only wants to prove to his mates he’s worthy of their love?

Mates who include Viriroz, one growly grump of a gargoyle, all dominant and possessive, and the sinful Garaz who looks at me like he wants to eat me. Whole.

These are powerful monsters with a dangerous job to do, protecting the human world from the things that slither in the dark, but they need a final female mate to complete their roost and produce their heirs.

All of which means I have to decide whether to stay with these delicious, feral males who love to share a bed and each other, or whether to condemn the rest of the world the world to the darkness.

But I have to make the choice, because the war is coming and it might just rip us apart before we even begin.

Think Gargoyles, the TV show, but spicy.

I dislike the cover, but I decided to overlook it and give this book a try. It started out really well with three male gargoyles in a very affectionate, committed relationship. I liked each individually and had high hopes for when the why choose element was brought in. But the book deteriorated fairly quickly into weird sex-based power dynamics and a sloppy, predictable plot full of far too many coincidences.

Let me start with my biggest disappointment. The three males were in a pre-established relationship, and they needed a female to join them in order to have children. But this left Lara feeling like a fourth wheel, the three of them in a relationship that had a female instead of the four of them in any sort of equal partnership. I really like that the three men were involved and continued to engage with one another even after she arrived, but she was never integrated enough into the dynamic to feel like a true part of it. This was very much reinforced by the weird power relations of sex.

Penetrative sex is referred to as being bred, even between men, and penetrative sex is used as a punishment. Don’t get me wrong, everyone who was penetrated seemed to enjoy it. But it is referred to repeatedly as punishment and used as such. These two facts infer, upfront, that penetration is tied to procreation, and there is something shameful about being penetrated. It is shameful to be the receiving partner in the sexual act. Sound familiar?

Plus, there seems to be rigid penetration politics involved. Alpha Viriroz can penetrate everyone. Garaz can penetrate Carrarr and Lara. Carrarr can only penetrate Lara, and Lara penetrates no one. (This isn’t just an observation, Garaz says at one point how glad he is to never let Carrarr breed him. It’s explicit.) It’s of note here that Carrarr is the most female-coded of the three gargoyles.

This ranking of who penetrates and who is penetrated seems to correlate almost exactly with authority in the relationship as a whole. The end result is that one’s place in the hierarchy reduces with proximity to femaleness, with being the receiving sexual partner as the proxy signal and being deserving of punishment (shameful) as the reason for one’s social position.

Taken together, all of this starts to look a whole lot like familiar patriarchal, misogynistic bullshit that reduces women to sexual toys and broodmares and then deems them of less worth because of it. I want none of this anywhere near my romance books, but especially in a why-choose romance that one reads largely to subvert such puritanical standards. (As a side note, I wonder if the author even knows they did this or if it is so internalized as the norm that they didn’t even notice.)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect every book to be a feminist masterpiece. A lot of what makes dark romances fun is that they play with the very cultural norms feminism fights. As women, these are our reality, and it can be satisfying to engage them from a position of control. (I can shut a book at any moment, and there is a compact between the author and reader, then the heroine is really safe, no matter the current plot point.) But I adamantly dislike books that do so uncritically, that feed the reader raw patriarchal, puritanical mythos as romance. There is nothing subversive here, and I find nothing in female oppression erotic without it.

Plus, a lot of the sex scenes were repetitive (both in the acts and the language used) and defied the limits of human capacity. I know it’s fantasy. One always has to suspend their disbelief. ButJacks so threw out any limits to what the female body can accommodate to pull me, the reader, right out of the scenes, the last one especially.

Add all of this to the convenient and often unexplained coincidences and Dues ex Machina solutions to problems, and by the end of the book, much of my hope had simply evaporated, and I was glad to be shot of it.

Other Reviews:

Review: Stone Cold (Monster Prey Mates, #1). ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️