Tag Archives: incubi

Book Review of Captive (Beautiful Monsters, #1), by Jex Lane

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CaptiveI received a free ARC of Captive, by Jex Lane, in exchange for an honest review.

Description from Goodreads:
Matthew Callahan has spent seven years struggling against the insatiable hunger for blood consuming him. Unable to stop the vampire inside from preying on humans, he keeps himself confined to a lonely existence.

Everything changes the night he is lured into a trap and taken prisoner by High Lord General Tarrick—a seductive incubus who feeds off sexual energy. Forced into the middle of a war between vampires and incubi, Matthew is used as a weapon against his own kind. Although he’s desperate for freedom, he is unable to deny the burning desire drawing him to the incubus general he now calls Master.

Review:
Man, I hate being the first person to give a book a poor review, but I just can’t agree with the majority here. I did not enjoy this book. The writing and editing are fine, but I had some major problems. The first of which was a preference thing. I’m not into the master/slave thing. It’s not my kink. Watching a man be broken and then come to love his enslavement is just not something I enjoy. I personally find it abhorrent. Not morally or anything, I wouldn’t bring that into a review. But I don’t find anything about it sexy. I consider it torture porn and, again, not my kink. I wouldn’t have picked the book up at all if I’d really believed this was the plot.

But outside of just not liking the type of book this turned out to be, I also basically thought this was 200+ pages of Matthew being too perfect and that just got old really, really fast. He started out clueless and I liked him as a character. But as soon as he got a little information he excelled at everything. He was faster, stronger, smarter, sexier, wittier, etc than everyone else. And not just a little bit better, but four times stronger than any other vampire. Plus, he had additional skills that I won’t mention so as not to include a spoiler, but he shouldn’t be impossible. He could charge into a room head-on, outnumbered and over-powered and win every time. Well, knowing that it’s hard to feel any real tension in any of the numerous fight sequences.

I did not feel the supposed affection between him and Tarrick (even when keeping a mind open for lies of protection). Please, don’t mistake this for a romance just because there is sex in it. You will be disappointed. I did appreciate that Matthew and other characters had both M/M and M/F sex, but I was shocked to find incubi and succubi with such HUMAN sentiments toward sex and relationships.

Humans were shockingly disposable. The narrative frequently fell into long tell heavy passages, as time passed. Matthew accepted his situation with shocking ease. The answer to the ‘what am I’ mystery was painfully obvious. The book felt overly long and, worst of all, never really accomplished anything significant before concluding with an open ending.

All in all, while it might be a matter of matching a book to a reader, I was disappointed with Captive. I could see what the author was trying to create with it, but I don’t feel it ever really accomplished it.

Enslaved

Book Review of R.C. Murphy’s Enslaved

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Enslaved

I grabbed R.C. Murphy‘s book Enslaved and it’s sexy cover (yum) off of the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
The gods are flawed . . . and they make awful parents.

Deryck knows first-hand the cruelty of the gods. Three thousand years after his birth, he is still trapped, forced to service humans as an Incubus—unable to choose whom he sleeps with, and living a life completely devoid of love. There is no out for him. No hope. Or so he thought.

Shayla McIntire spent five years getting her life back on track after the accident claiming her husband’s life. She is content to a nice, boring, subdued life free of the abuse she suffered before. Her friends are worried. They want her to find the man of her dreams and move on.

Little do they know, the Powers That Be have decided the man of Shayla’s dreams for her. There’s just one hitch, he’s enslaved to the gods and it will take power she doesn’t know she has to free him. Deryck isn’t the only one hoping Shayla will free him, though.

Review:
Well, this wasn’t anything like I expected. I really thought it was going to be hot erotica. Let me just clear that misconception right up, in case anyone else thinks a book about incubi would involve sex…apparently not. It wasn’t what I expected but it was still a decent read. Deryck was very sweet. Shayla was witty and her friends were fabulously supportive. If I had to reduce my review of Enslaved to one word it would be Sweet…maybe awkward, but sweet. I don’t mean the writing or anything. The characters were shy and sweetly awkward with one another.

I liked that Shayla was said to be beautiful, but was shown to be something other than a stick. I don’t think her dress size was actually ever given, but she had size D breasts and it was at least suggested that she’s in the double digits size-wise, maybe a ten or twelve. I do wish she hadn’t been so concerned about it, always calling herself a cow and such. But at least it was often countered by her friends. I also liked that she was a woman who ate. There didn’t appear to be anything that a jelly donut and coffee wouldn’t fix. That is a woman I can relate to!

I did think Deryck seemed a little clueless for a 3,000 year old incubus. Surely in a few of those calls to service women in their dreams at least one had wished for the perfect date before all that sex he was having but the reader didn’t see. In fact, it’s apparent Deryck had at least been in restaurants with the women he serviced. So how had he remained so innocent?

The book was a little slow, dragging in the middle a bit and I really would have like a little more back story to flesh the characters and their histories out. But it read well and wrapped up with a syrupy sweet ending. All in all, not what I was expecting but not bad either.