Teddy Pig, who does a great line in - well, great lines, described this book as ‘Regency Gayness in Space’. And I couldn’t put it better myself. And before I go any further - I can’t hold it back - I liked this book.

Ok …. rewind.

The Cover

I don’t generally like mantitty covers, but…. this is a mantitty cover with hair. And I’m already officially on record as liking moustaches [Bam: Grody!]. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m partial to a hairy chest. Yes, I likes me the hirsute fellows.

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Grade: C+

So here’s my second foray into manlove fiction. Previously, my only other experience with this came from author L.E. Bryce. In Here Be Dragons, T.A. Chase has written an urban fantasy wrapped around a love story.

Kael is a herpetologist hiding out from an abusive ex-lover in Ireland. In any event, he’s working slightly out of his field in a research lab for a total hottie named Hugh. Kael is a thin, gangly science geek and Hugh is just two hundred pounds of pure stud, so Kael figures Hugh would never give him a second look. Plus Kael has all kinds of emotional baggage from his former partner, Will, and he doesn’t think it would be good idea to get involved with his boss, even if Hugh wanted him. Which he doesn’t. Because who could ever love a loser like Kael?

Little does he know, Hugh pops wood anytime Kael walks into the room. Hugh is a pretty normal guy without any excess angst, although his brother is going through a messy divorce because his wife is a cheating whore. that leads me to my next point — I’m a little nonplussed by this book in some ways, however. There isn’t much in the way of healthy straight relationships found in the book. Kael’s coworker, Irene, appears to be in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend as well. Apart from Hugh, there’s a dearth of … normal people to balance out Kael’s emotional fragility. When too many supporting characters suffer from some crisis or other, it lessens some of the impact of what goes on with the protagonist. Hugh was the best part of the book, but I’m afraid he couldn’t carry it alone, and the story never captured my interest altogether.

Anyway, once you get past all that, it’s quite a sweet love story between Kael and Hugh, joined with an interesting retelling of a dragon myth. I won’t give too many details because I don’t want to ruin the story for anyone who might want to pick this up. If m/m erotic romance floats your boat, you’ll find Here Be Dragons scorching hot with its plentiful, well-written sex scenes.

Grade: B-
I was not supposed to like this book. As I was reading it, I found myself getting annoyed by a bunch of little things: the overly martyred heroine who just also happens to be an empath, the overly alpha male who wouldn’t know reason if it took up a shovel and bashed his face in, the seemingly obligatory anal and threesome scene (seriously, what’s with that?), and a bunch of meddling secondary characters who are basically nothing more than advertisement for the previous books in the series. Yes, it’s a series and it’s about a bunch of overly alpha males who are Cyborgs from the planet… *deep breath*… Karn’al. *crickets* Ahem. Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah… I liked it. Heh. That’s funny. As soon as I typed that, Crazy by Gnarls Barkley started playing in the background. Does that make me crazy? Does that make me craaaaazy? Probably! No, seriously, I did. It’s immensely readable. Sure, I wanted to strangle the heroine with her long, silky, black hair… but I liked her too. And Logan, the hero? He deserved to have a catheter stuck up his peehole with no anesthesia only to have it yanked out without warning seconds later, but… I actually got him. Sure, these two dummies could have sat down and resolved the whole thing in five minutes, but hey… did I mention the threesome scene seemingly tacked on at the end to please the smut gods?
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Grade: B+

Well, once again L.E. Bryce has done it. I started this book with an overwhelming sense of disgust and loathing, despite the gorgeous, evocative writing. By the end, I have yielded to the pervasive wonder of her imagination.

You see, Erred is a taleve to the Lady of the Waters. This is something like being a priest, except he’s a shapeshifter who can turn into a sea creature that I imagine as a cross between a dolphin and a seal. He’s sacred and Goddess-touched, entitled to a life of privilege and reverence. The Goddess exacts high payment for her favor, though, as Erred is unable to marry, father children, and he suffers from a reduced lifespan. The oldest taleve at the temple is thirty-nine.

The reason for my hate and horror — at the start of the book, Erred is kidnapped and enslaved. Make no mistake, this isn’t a sweet Stockholm syndrome story where he falls in love with his captor because the man treats him tenderly. No, Erred has everything stolen from him: his honor, his dignity, his purity and even his name. I nearly threw up over the way they torture and degrade him. In some regards Dead to the World strikes me as akin to an adaptation of the story of Job, an elegy that explores the nature of faith and the resilience of the human spirit.

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Grade: A
As we all know, old skool fairy tales aren’t the sanitized happy-happy-joy-joy Disney version that we tell our children (or cats). In one version of Cinderella, the wicked stepsisters cut off their toes so their feet would fit into the slipper and when it is Cinderella’s turn to try it on, the slipper is squishy with blood. In another version, when the evil stepmother and sisters attend Cinderella’s wedding to the prince, a bunch of pigeons come along and poke their eyes out. In The Goose Girl, the villain is placed naked in a barrel lined with nails and dragged from street to street by horses until she is dead. In Hansel and Gretel, the titular siblings make it home and the father hugs them to this chest, then decapitates his wife for suggesting the plan for losing H&G in the forest. But none of these stories could ever be as grisly and macabre as Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin. In Donkeyskin, a king is made to promise by his dying wife that he will only marry a woman as beautiful and graceful as she is. Over the years, the king is unable to find any woman who could even come close to being as beautiful as his dead wife and as each day passes, it becomes more apparent to him that his daughter, nearly identical in appearance to his wife, is the only one who fits the bill. The king decrees he will marry his own daughter and the daughter, in an effort to stall her father, demands three gowns made of impossible-to-acquire materials and the hide of her father’s precious donkey. When her father fulfills each and every one of them, the girl runs away with the help of a fairy-godmother and eventually finds a prince who falls in love with her and marries her. And they live happily ever after. Yeah, that’s not how it happens in Mckinley’s version of the tale.

Warning: This is NOT an Young Adult book. Seriously. No, I’m not joking. There are some seriously violent and disturbing images in this book. Robin McKinley does not hold back.
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