[Things are about to get very spoilery; you've been warned]
[The king] reached for the girl, and she snapped at him. He let her bite—did not move his hand, even as he teeth, tiny as they were, sank deep into his bony index finger.
She looked him straight in the eye, unblinking, and he returned that stare with mounting interest.
This was not the stare of a panicked child who didn't know what she was doing.
That was the stare of a creature who understood she was confronting death itself, and still chose to spit in its face.
"A little serpent," he murmured.
Okay, let me set the scene:
You’re the adopted human daughter of an all powerful vampire king, entirely surrounded by bloodsuckers who are one missed snack time away from savaging your carotid, and you can do nothing but make yourself as unappetising as humanly possible. To say the least, you’re done with their slavering shit, so you enter a Hunger Games-esque tournament to the death to have your one wish granted to become a vampire and seek out your long lost family. Sounds easy, no sweat, you're scrappy and stabby, should be a cakewalk, but the minute you enter you meet the love of your life, which you don’t know yet, so obviously you stab him in the thigh and book it towards the clamouring chaos of human screams where you immediately lose your only friend, decide taking bloody revenge on the suckjob who offed your buddy is the best use of your time, which results in an uneasy alliance with your future hubby, sparring montages, heated eye fucking, fucking fucking, a bushel of trauma-laced interactions, and finally the ultimate betrayal: you win the tourney, kill your boyfriend/soulmate, discover daddy is a lying dick, bf’s also a lying dick - but with, like, integrity or whatever, and now you’re trapped once again in your moon glow tower, the head of a rebellion you never wanted because you just liked stabbing vampires in the chest meat as a mental health release before you eventually got the fuck out of dodge to hook up with the fam, and worst of all, the new queen of the nighty night vampires for some reason that kinda doesn’t make sense but meh, chosen one shit rarely does.
What’s a knife wife to do, huh?
Marry the guy who killed your pops, aka. your reanimated future hubs, of course.
Sounds fun, right?
Well, that's because it was fun. SO MUCH FUN.
I haven't read a vampire book in years, decades, because after a certain strain of emo, sparkly forest dwellers seized the crown and took all the bloody fun out of being undead (sorry to the fans, not yucking your yum, but the Cullens gave me chronic eye roll-itis), I tapped out of the pointy sub-genre and focused my attention elsewhere, and haven't been back since. But everyone just kept talking and talking and talking about this new series with winged vampire courts and a short serpent girl who kept spoiling their revelry by sticking them with the pointy end, and, sorry, but there is no universe where I say no to reading tiny, violent women fuck shit up with knives and sarcasm. I can't do it, it's my ultimate weakness, and so I ended my vampire hiatus, cracked The Serpent and the Wings of Night open, and instantly felt the buzz.
You know the one, the new favourite series one, the oh shit, this is gonna be gooooood one, the buzz that feels like getting shot in the ass with dopamine and not knowing what to do with your limbs, aka. the best goddamn feeling a reader can experience when starting a new book. And it just kept going. For chapters, and chapters, and five hundred plus pages later it was over and I experienced that well versed moment of: well what the fuck do I do now?!
But seriously, what the fuck do I do now?
And it's not that the book in itself is perfect or anything particularly new in the world of Romantasy, in fact it's the kind of story and writing that feels like it could be an offshoot of any of the big hitters stories within the genre (Maas, Draven, Jensen, Yarros, etc.). It didn't blow my mind with new concepts or fresh characterisation; the protagonist, Oraya, was more introspective and softer than the vicious bitch I was hoping she'd be; Raihn, her love interest was an amalgam of the Illyrian babies - attractive, amusing, but ultimately a little forgettable; and the world-building was lustrous and decadent, though perhaps lacked the grit needed to ramp up the terror. This story is inarguably flawed, there's no denying it, but in its predicability, in its familiarity, it sparked this wonderful thing where it reminded me acutely of how I felt when I first started reading fantasy, when I'd gotten over my need to devour literary fiction and wanted to get back to my one true love: speculative narratives, and how welcome and cushy that experience was. It's a singular affair to find the genre that captures your entire heart, that no matter what will always feel like home, and since I was little, before I was a reader, I was always hardcore into the impossible. My childhood bedroom walls were adorned with unicorns and fairy tale castles, I watched Labyrinth on repeat and hid under the covers when the Skesis crumbled in The Dark Crystal, tumbled head first into the walls of Gormenghast castle with a headiness particular to the delightfully inebriated, and when Buffy landed on UK screens I pledged my unwavering allegiance to tiny, acerbic women skewering the undead like it was their greatest pleasure. I love this genre, I love everything about it, the ridiculousness of it, the impossibilities it repeatedly flips the bird to, the humour and brutality it wields with equal fervour, and this book reminded me, like a slap to the head and punch to the heart, just how potent a new story within the genre can be. No matter its level of ingenuity or competency, when a story appears and something clicks inside of you, something that points true fucking north towards, it's only ever to be treasured and every moment of enjoyed.
And I did, I enjoyed it so much.
The trials, the banter, the tension, the gore, the betrayal, and the moments of joy; I enjoyed it voraciously and with absolutely no abandon. None whatsoever. Hedonism, thy name is I.
And there's more, five books more, with two novellas in between; a veritable feast in an already cornucopian genre, my blood filled cup runneth over, splashing on the obsidian tiles of the Nightborn Palace, beckoning these petty little fuckers in to try and take a bite.
And I'll let them, just open my throat and let the lifeblood flow, as long as I get to stay a while longer, just until the lights finally go out.
"Are you going to kill me, Oraya?"
[Raihn] said it just as he had a lifetime ago, as dawn encroached on an alleyway in the human slums. And just like that night, I didn't pull away from his touch.
Instead, I pressed my palm flat to his chest. Behind him, my kingdom burned.
I thought, Maybe.
"Not tonight," I said.
SO good.
So fucking GOOD.
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