I've started reading this new series on my Kindle: The Black Dagger Brotherhood. I went searching for fantasy novels with a side of romance, and popped up. It's a vampire series about a group of male vamps who fight against the "Lessening Society" who is bent on destroying the vampire race. They stories also follow the storylines of their love lives.
When I downloaded the first book, I was excited. I wanted to read the storyline of the war between the vamps and the "lessers" as they are called. And that plot is in there, but it takes a very, very small backseat to the love stories. I confess myself disappointed.
I like romance novels, don't get me wrong. I am a girl. I like cheesy, dramatic lines delivered by men unlike anyone you'll ever meet in real life. But these books simultaneously suck me in (to the plot about the lessers and the plot of the romance) and repulse me by the overwhelming amount of, and unbelievable nature of, sex.
It seems like the more fantasy romance novels I read, the more I am convinced that romance writers only use the fantasy backdrop to create obnoxiously unbelievable heroes and borderline pornography. Seriously. There is a group of like, six, of these guys and they're all the studliest, super-hung, amazing physical specimens that break women into drooling piles of quivering nerves. In the second book, the main vamp character is named Rhage (yes, that right, Rhage. With an H.). He has this curse that when he suffers intense pain, or anger, or apparently sexual attraction, he transforms into a scaly, dragon-like beast. Well, of course the romance part of the novel has to allow for the woman he loves to either accept or reject "his beast" as the writer has termed it. Oh, not only does she accept it as part of him, she lets it come out while they're doing it.
I'm sorry, what? This female character has just be re-diagnosed with leukemia and she decides she'd loved to have sex with a dragon? Wow.
I do not defend romance as a genre as being anywhere near a higher class of literature. It's entertaining smut, truthfully. They're formulaic and use very little imagination and don't exactly bring the human condition into sharp perspective. But writers like Nicholas Sparks manage to write beautiful love stories, have a little fade to black when the nooky starts happening, and I devour the books. Fantasy romance, in my opinion ranks even lower that just straight romance novels, and that's saying something.
This "Black Dagger Brotherhood" series, though. I'm on book three and I might just have to stop after this. I like the plot of the war and restoration of the vampire race, but I just don't know if I want to continue to wade through all the crap to get there. And frankly, some of its grossing me out.
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