Indeed,
all the familiar elements of the typical genre story are here; the smart,
plucky, headstrong heroine, the attractive, gentlemanly, ever-attentive sweet
guy—“Mr. Maybe”—and the hero, the handsome, brooding, dangerous,
perpetually-exciting bad-boy with the deep dark past who sets the heroine’s
heart (among other parts) aquiver in ways the sweet guy never could. Except
this bad boy is really bad—we’re
talking bad on a cosmic scale here. It turns out the “hero” of this romance is
nothing less than a fallen angel:
Loki, Prometheus, Azazel, Amirani
in Georgia, as I found out later when I started searching on the internet. All
demiurges involved in the creation and nurture of mankind. All rebels, fettered
for eternity by a God or gods who would not tolerate insurrection.
Ashbless’
young heroine, Milja, takes on the role of Pandora in this mythic morality
play; drawn to the handsome captive imprisoned beneath her family’s small
Orthodox shrine in the mountains of modern Montenegro, her natural curiosity
about the creature is at first colored by pity, and later tinged with lust. Sensing
trouble, her father, a priest of the Serbian Orthodox rite, sends her away to
the US, but the young woman cannot get the image of the bound man out of her
mind, even in bed with her new American boyfriend:
But it didn’t work out well in the
end: on our third night of actually having sex together I begged leave to tie
him up, spread-eagled on the bead. Then I straddled him, slipping him into my
hungry embrace. Below me, in the warm, dim light of the candles we’d lit, his
body lay stretched out like a sacrifice: narrow hips, long pale hair, elbows
raised as he braced against the scarves knotted at his wrists.
A stray thought grazed my mind: a
wish that he had darker hair, and more of it on his torso. But it was only
momentary, a twist in the rising surge of my appetite. I clenched my muscles
and moved to make him gasp. Every time I ground against him a wave of heat
seemed to billow up from the point where we were joined, filling me to
bursting. My vision grew blurred. I tugged at my nipples, grinding them between
my fingers. Ben bucked beneath me, thrusting upward, trying to fill the need he
saw in me—but without the slightest idea of how great and hollow and ancient
was the void in my soul.
Inevitably,
all hell (or, at least, a substantial part of it) breaks loose when Milja returns
home and frees the angel from his ancient bonds. The story takes fascinating
turns into paranormal action-adventure, ancient Christian myth, and
contemporary ecclesiastical-political intrigue, from medieval Balkan
monasteries and mountain fortresses to the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada
and the New-Age communion of Burning Man.
I
hesitate to draw the obvious comparison here. Ashbless’ tale of ancient texts
and ruthless churchmen at first seems of a piece with some Dan Brown thriller,
though Ashbless is a much better writer—certainly far more intelligent and
imaginative than the purveyor of The Da
Vinci Code. A more apt comparison might be early Anne Rice; in scale and
pacing this novel is pleasingly reminiscent of books like Queen of the Damned, without the tiresome existential inner
monologues or cloying narrative excess that overtook Rice after the first blush
of literary and financial success.
Apparently
the first volume in a projected trilogy, Cover
Him with Darkness ends with a cliffhanger worthy of Lord of the Rings, and leaves us breathless for more! Recommended.
Fierce Enchantments Ten Erotic Tales of Myth, Magic, and Desire
These
ten deliciously diverse stories reveal a vivid, wide-ranging imagination—one is
struck by the sheer breadth of Ashbless’ inventiveness, her natural gift for
story-telling honed to acute sharpness with rigorous intellectual focus and well-practiced
craftswomanship. Covering all the archetypal bases from folk ballads, myth,
legend, and fairytale to futuristic sci-fi, well-researched historical fiction,
contemporary horror, paranormal thriller, and post-apocalyptic
action-adventure, there’s something for everyone in this wondrously abundant, cerebrally
and erotically stimulating, perpetually entertaining collection.
My
personal favorites from this outstanding field include The King in the Wood, a marvelous glimpse into the life of ancient
Rome, where the erotic and the sacred were often one in the same; Sycorax, a delectably sexy re-imagining
of The Tempest, re-casting sweet
Miranda as a rather adventurous wild-child; At
Usher’s Well, based on an old folk ballad (familiar to many from the
version recorded by the folk-rock group Steeleye Span in the 1970s) in which
the tale of three-doomed brothers’ homecoming is related from the point of view
of the serving girl who loved them all in life; and A Man’s Best Friend, the story of a wandering bard, seeking out the
young widow of his fallen comrade, a gorgeously detailed story, told with such
familiar ease and poignant beauty that it seems to come alive within and all
around us.
Ashbless’
tales are full of lively spins and twists that almost always surprise, yet
never fail in retrospect to seem exactly right, as with Bolt Hole her steamy, claustrophobic take on the zombie apocalypse;
or the portrayal of BDSM-as-PTSD-therapy for emotionally scarred vampire
hunters in The Last Thing She Needs,
or the pleasingly Heinlein-esque The
Military Mind, in which a squad of futuristic Marines bonds with the aid of
a sexy telepath. Turnabout is more than fair play (or foreplay) in Knight Takes Queen, in which the
familiar legend of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot is transformed into something
that neither Mallory, T.H. White, or Lerner and Lowe would ever have thought of,
a twist so ineluctably sexily perfect that readers will be nodding their heads
even as they sit gape-mouthed, trying to get their minds around what they have
just imagined.
Enthusiastically
recommended!
Sounds right up my alley. I can't wait to read it!
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