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Seize the Night is another Comic Con freebie novel. When someone offers me a free book, I don't stop to read the back and see if it's something I'd normally read, I say "Sweet! Free reading/review material!" and toss it in my swag bag. Not until I got back home and put all of my review material on my desk did I take the time to learn that this novel was a Paranormal Romance about vampire hunters. Oh goodie.
I'm not entirely opposed to the paranormal romance genre. Rachel Caine's Weather Wardens series is a guilty pleasure that I indulge in on occasion, because the hot love scenes are wrapped in an enjoyable plot and decent writing. However, a bad run-in with a Laurel K. Hamilton novel, not to mention my intense hatred of the fantasy-romance Morrigan's Cross by Nora Roberts has kept me from delving too far into this genre, and really, the only way to get me to try a romance novel is to give it to me for free.
So, Seize the Night languished unloved on my desk, until the right moment arrived. I was going to spend Christmas Eve dog-sitting for a friend, and I needed reading material, plus my Collector Times deadline was looming, so I had to start coming up with stuff to write. Perfect! I grabbed the book and flipped it open to a random page as I walked to my suitcase. As luck would have it, I found myself at the start of the novel's first big love scene, which included this gem: "His groin burned in need of her." I read this aloud to my husband, and he agreed with me; if his groin is burning, he should probably get it looked at by a doctor.
But hey, maybe the laughable love scene was in the middle of an awesome story. Maybe the rest of the writing was good. And besides, I wasn't about to go to Barnes and Noble two days before Christmas to look for something else to read. So into the suitcase it went.
Unfortunately, I found nothing in this book to really impress me. I would have to say that in my (admittedly limited) experience, the big flaw that paranormal romances have is they put too much emphasis on the romance and not enough on the paranormal. Oh sure, the characters have supernatural powers, but instead of putting them to good use, they're making moony eyes at each other.
Seize the Night is a good example of this. At one point in the story, our two heroes are in a Goth club, supposedly looking for daimons (some sort of vampire, except they suck souls instead of blood), and suddenly the female hero is trying to get the male hero to join her on the dance floor. The worst part in this is that they're looking for the daimons because they're threatening the heroine's twin sister and toddler niece. Oh, don't worry about your family, chickie, just keep seducing the unrealistically sexy man.
That's my other problem with paranormal romances: the overabundance of unrealistic men. Sure, I want the hero to be sexy, and in the series I've been writing, the male lead is rather attractive. But paranormal romances take it to new heights, populating each book with multiple incredibly attractive men, with long, flowing hair and impeccable fashion sense. And instead of getting turned on, I find myself rolling my eyes. I'm not sure what it is. I can buy into the idea of immortals and mystical powers and all manner of other impossible things, but a bevy of long-haired, firm-assed, perfectly-chiseled men with unusual colored eyes and dark pasts is just too much for me to accept.
At its heart, Seize the Night is an opposites-attract love story. Our female lead is Tabitha Devereaux (Tabby to her friends), a quirky human vampire hunter. Tabby runs a fetish shop by day, hunts vampires by night, and sleeps somewhere in between. She has empathy, supposed other minor psychic powers that never come into play (including my favorite, psychometry), and an intense personality that drives people around her crazy. Our male lead is Valerius Magnus, a former Roman general who is now an immortal Dark-Hunter. He's incredibly uptight, has no friends, and has a dark and tragic past. A dark and tragic past that is tied with the past of Tabby's brother-in-law (a former immortal Dark-Hunter), which adds an element of forbidden romance to the mix.
Surrounding this love story is a plot about daimons who, as I said before, want to kill Tabitha's sister and steal her magical baby. This plot is ignored for chapters at a time as we explore Tabitha and Valerius's growing relationship, his past, the intricacies of her family, and the drag queen scene in New Orleans. After one promising fight scene near the beginning of the book (which introduces our two lovers), we're treated to very little action, which seems a shame in a book that's supposedly about people who hunt and kill vampires.
Oh yes, and then there's the whole issue of the Dark-Hunters. They're apparently an organization of people who, upon their death, sell their souls to the Greek goddess Artemis and become slayers of demons. They have fangs, they can't go out during the day, and they don't cast reflections in mirrors. They also have various psychic powers. Although they died and have no souls, they appear to be alive, eating and having sex with the same gusto that us normal mortals do. And they're led by some uber-mysterious Atlantean Goth guy who has a pet demon chick with annoying speech mannerisms.
The problem here is that Seize the Night is in the middle of the Dark-Hunters series. While I would guess (based on the resolution of this book, and the references to the pasts and romances of other characters in the story) that each novel is something of a stand-alone with fresh protagonists, it seems like the world and its rules were established early on, and not really repeated in this novel. Why does Artemis have a pack of demon-hunting immortals? Well, as a hunter goddess, I guess that part does make sense. Given her traditional portrayal as a man-hater, her penchant for sexy, sexy men in her hunting squad doesn't make sense (I have more to say on this in a minute). Why do the Dark-Hunters have fangs if they apparently don't drink blood? Why can't they go out in the sun?
There are other questions, but I don't really want to go into spoiler territory, so I guess I'll get back to the sexy, sexy man hunting squad. This is the second paranormal romance I've read where a powerful woman has a squad of sexy, sexy men who she has forbidden from having lovers. What is up with that? Is it to up the ante on the forbidden romance thing? It doesn't even really become an issue in this book, it's brushed aside so easily. I guess maybe it was established in a previous Dark-Hunter novel and was a bigger issue for the characters in that one.
I will say that the characters were decently interesting and well-rounded, although I found Valerius entirely un-sexy with his constant "Nobody likes me, I'm better off alone, every time I try to help someone I hurt them." I knew that the Goths sacked Rome, I didn't know that the Emos followed in their wake. I'm sure that the intent was to provide a wounded hero that the heroine could heal with her love, but it was all too much for me. He does win some points for being a closet genre fiction fan, which is one of the things that brings him and Tabby together. The book loses points for never explaining how this tight-laced Roman general found and fell in love with sci-fi novels, so it does end up feeling like a forced attempt to give the lovers some common ground.
As for the writing, it keeps up a brisk pace and was a little too simple for me, but also thankfully bereft of stupid plot holes or embarrassing typos. If I were feeling under the weather, I might have enjoyed it more, as I like something really light when I'm sick. I did find that the character descriptions were too over the top. Authors are often instructed to show, not tell. That means, don't tell me that a character is "exotically erotic." Describe him to me and let me decide if he fits my description of erotic. I suppose the narrator who was looking at him was thinking of him in that way, but eh, I'd still like to form my own opinion. I also found the shifting point of view very annoying. Perhaps there's a term for it already, but I'd like to call it "Third person, indecisive" as it switches from the limited point of view of several characters within a single scene. Including love scenes. Ick.
Of course, the major thing in a paranormal romance is the sex scenes. If you didn't want those, you'd read a normal paranormal book. Aside from the above-mentioned POV shifts, and the earlier complaint of some laughable wording (he he, burning groin), I'd say they're sufficiently hot. There's about two or three major love scenes and a couple "Oh, they're totally gonna do it, no wait, the phone rang and it's important" hot-and-heavy scenes. They're relatively kink-free, I guess to appeal to the widest audience.
Although Seize the Night was not really my thing, Sherrilyn Kenyon is apparently a best-selling author and the front of this book was full of rave reviews for other Dark-Hunter novels. So maybe this is as good as the genre gets. As such, if paranormal romance is your thing, you may want to check it out... although I'd advise starting with the first book, which is called Fantasy Lover. Well, I guess that title doesn't leave much question as to what sort of book it is.
As for myself, I think it's time to admit that the paranormal romance genre is not for me, and I'll settle for sticking with regular fantasy novels, where the sex is usually less hot and gratuitous, but the stories are more developed.
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