Tumperkin and Jessica review KOADK to the death.

Whose death? Yours, dear reader: it’s very, very long.

On the plus side, before your mortal coil completely unravels, Tumperkin will reveal KFC’s (the “F” is for “fantastically fungible”) Top Secret Recipe for cooking up another addictive installment of Immortals After Dark, and Jessica talks about Cole as a Master Muffin Tease.

TUMPERKIN’s TAKE:

So Jessica, it might fairly be said that your suggestion that we jointly review Kiss of a Demon King by Kresley Cole is timely for me. I’ve been glomming Cole’s books insanely for the last couple of months. I read No Rest for the Wicked at the recommendation of Meriam and that was it. I glommed the whole Immortals After Dark series (with the exception of the Myst and Nikolai novella) and KOADK was the last of that lot. Then I decided to try one of her historicals and plumped for If You Deceive on the basis of the plot description. After finishing that, I promptly ordered the other two in the If You… trilogy plus The Price of Pleasure, her second novel which predates both the IAD and If You… series.

This is almost embarrassing.

In fact scratch that. It is embarrassing. All the more so because I am hopelessly aware that I am being expertly played when I read a Kresley Cole. (This awareness is perhaps, admittedly, heightened by the fact that I’ve read so bloody many of them over the last couple of months). Ms Cole follows a distinct formula in her books. But perhaps I shouldn’t use the word ‘formula’ given its negative connotations? Perhaps recipe? A successful, brilliant recipe that I admire and that produces a story that appeals to me greatly:

Kresley Cole Book Recipe

Ingredients:

One (1) huge great moody brute of a man, preferably a Highlander

One (1) delicate-appearing but nonetheless tough cookie of a heroine

Large amounts of extreme conflict

Method:

1. Roughly mix the hero and heroine into a situation with lots of the conflict

2. Gradually allow the hero and heroine to work up to a full sex scene. You should aim for at least 4 or 5 sexual scenes of some variety before full consummation is allowed at (nod to Meriam) approximately page 200-250.

3. Post consummation, subject heroine to some unspeakable horror, the object of which is to make her suffer extreme physical pain/ death (e.g. immolation, cholera) and the hero experience inconsolable loss and heartbreak.

4. Allow hero to save heroine whilst endlessly self-acknowledging his ‘need’ to ‘protect’ her.

The thing about a formula (or recipe) is that there’s a certain addiction to getting the fix of it over and over again. I know – I acknowledge freely – that as a romance reader there is something that I am looking to experience repeatedly.

So what is it with Cole for me?

Confession time. I like romance novels in which the heroine really suffers. The worse it gets for them, the better I like it (gosh I sound awful, don’t I?). And (this confession gets worse) I have a particular weakness for books in which the hero is partly culpable for the suffering. I’ve really not got round to thinking about trying to puzzle out the whys of that one. That may be a post for another day.  Or perhaps a course of therapy.

I hasten to add that there is a condition to this particular preference of mine. The heroines must not be made abject by their suffering. They must meet the suffering with -well not with recklessness, I am not a fan of futile gestures – but with strength and a certain courage. They must survive it.

Ms Cole’s books deliver on this for me in a Very Big Way. Her heroines really go through the mill and they survive. And perhaps, in KOADK she gives us in Sabine, the ultimate survivor heroine.

Ok, so the story. Rydstrom is a 1500 year old rage demon. (I’m not actually so big on the demons. I prefer the weres and the vamps *shrugs*) He lost his crown to Omort the Deathless many hundreds of years ago and has been trying to get it back ever since with his brother Cade (who was the hero of the last book in this series).

Omort the Deathless is an evil despot given to acts of spontaneous brutality and general meanness. He is a sorceri and presides over a fairly unpleasant sounding court of other evil personages, including the heroine, Sabine, one of his hundreds of half-siblings. The Sorceri are interesting – they exhibit a vast range of magic powers and have the ability to steal each other’s powers and transfer them to others at will. I imagine that if you were child, it would be fun to play at being Sorceri, since you can pretty much have the power to do anything.

Sabine’s power is casting illusions. Her sister Lanthe’s power is ‘persuasion’. In other words, Lanthe can get anyone to act as she wants them to against their will by mere command. However, it is a power that is easily exhausted and she has all but depleted it ‘persuading’ Sabine to live since Sabine has a habit of getting murdered.

It has been prophesied that Sabine will bear Rydstrom a child who will unlock a powerful magical well. Despite being in love with Sabine (so far as an Evil despot can love) Omort encourages Sabine to use her illusions to capture Rydstrom and try to seduce him.

Sabine is the ultimate Cole survivor heroine. She’s been killed heaps of times and clawed her way back from each death. And it’s not as though all these murders give her a free pass from stage 3 of the recipe. She still has to go through the inevitable unspeakable suffering and be saved by Rydstrom.

One thing I liked about Sabine is that she’s not unaffected by all the suffering she’s undergone in her life. She’s beyond a being a mere tough cookie. She’s cunning and mendacious and self-seeking. But – and this is always the case with Cole heroines – she’s basically lovable. I suppose this is where my main quibble with the book arises. There is a bit of a Gap between how Sabine sees herself and how I the reader saw her. Sabine refers to herself throughout the book as being an evil villainess but I could never have seen her in that light. Evil villainesses don’t worry about their servants or get annoyed when others inflict pain upon their prisoners.

There are various ways you can deal with this Gap as a reader. You might put it down to her culture (the Sorceri see themselves as the baddies) or her self-esteem after hundreds of years of nerve-wracking attendance at Omort’s court.

But for me, it just basically didn’t entirely work. I’d have preferred her to be more in tune with who I felt she really was.

Which is not to say I didn’t like Sabine. I did. (Survivor you see). Rydstrom I was less keen on. I think of all Cole’s heroes, he is the one I have liked least. In the previous books, he has been presented as a logical rage demon who – uncharacteristically – never loses his cool. Yet he spends most of this book in a rage. Perhaps the point of this was that Sabine was the woman to finally make him lose his cool. Unfortunately, I’m not keen on H/H conflicts that have anger at their core. Where there is a core of unadulterated anger, I just worry about how things will work out between the H/H in the longer term. And Rydstrom spent a lot of this book being angry at Sabine.

KOADK delivers on the classic Cole recipe and it’s entertaining.  To be picky, I didn’t find it quite as pacy or quite as much fun as some of the others. Definitely not the best in the series. However, in fairness, I should acknowledge that this was sixth IAD book I’d read in just a couple of months. And in light of that, reading it was bit like eating a sixth slice of chocolate cheesecake.

I wish I could say that I will stop glomming Ms Cole now. That I will put the two If Yous… and The Price of Pleasure that arrived yesterday to one side and ration myself a bit more.

Are you going to make me give a grade, Jessica? If I must, a B-.

JESSICA’S RIPOSTE:

Tumperkin, I love your KFC Recipe, but, like those annoying Epicurious.com commenters who are so sure they can improve a master chef’s recipe by adding a cup of sugar and some Cheez Whiz, I am going to boldly add a couple of steps:

1.5 Hero, after token resistance to the idea (she’s so obviously wrong for him), realizes heroine is his fated soul mate and commences trying to convince her of this fact for the entire book

2.5 Raunchiness and frequency of sex talk inversely proportional to amount of sex actually being had (earning her the appellation, Master Muffin Tease)

2.5.5 Consummation includes recognition by heroine that hero was right all along about this “fated mate” thing.

This is the 4th in Cole’s Immortals After Dark series that I have read (I skipped the ghost one — you can thank JR Ward for my allergic reaction to THAT plotline), and, like Tumperkin, I have enjoyed them all.

Something unique about Cole is the way she mixes very old school elements with a very 21st century take on gender. In all of the IAD installments, you have a sexually inexperienced heroine paired with a hero whose ability to give orgasms is so powerful he fears he may literally break the heroine in two, and this is no less true in KOADK. But Cole overlays that traditional matchup with something very modern that destabilizes the expected balance of bedroom power: the heroine has the hero chained up in her bed and sexually torments him, while the hero, for all his thousands of conquests, had been celibate for centuries and can only have an orgasm with his One True Mate.

I agree with you completely, Tumperkin, about the way Cole builds sexual tension and only allows her hero and heroine to consummate their relationship once they are in love. This is very Old School. But having them tie each other up and spank each other on the way to the Big O is not in your grandma’s romance novel.  Cole’s heroes in particular, can be very graphic, even crude, from page one, about their desires for the heroine, but like gentlemen of yore, they withhold themselves until everything is safe and everyone is emotionally ready (hence, the book’s status for its female readers as a Muffin Tease).

Further, you have the traditional sexy, tiny heroine, and big strapping hero. She’s talky and he’s taciturn. He’s all about honor and principle and she’s Freud’s view of women sprung to life: narcissistic, manipulative, and deceitful. All very Old School. But now reverse it: deep down, he’s lonely and wants a spouse more than anything, he is insecure at not having found his mate, while all his friends are paired up, he’s incapable of orgasm, he’s embarrassed by sexual fantasies that do not become him, and he’s a powerful career person who secretly wants to be dominated in the bedroom. Sounds like a common species of the contemporary heroine, doesn’t it? For her part, Sabine is ruthless and gets what she wants, only wants Rydstrom to advance her career, she pries into his mind to discover his sexual fantasies and uses them to gain power over him, etc. Sounds like a billionaire CEO doesn’t it?

Cole plays around with gender expectations not just in the H/H. relationships but all over the book. One of my favorite examples is the scene when Rydstrom comes home to his mansion in Louisiana and finds the place trashed.  Empty kegs, underwear hanging from the chandelier, pornographic magazines laying around. Except instead of beer-soaked Hustler’s, it’s beer-soaked Playgirl magazines: yes, folks, it’s the witches and Valkyries, not the men, who have been partying in the King’s absence.

And this juxtaposition of Playgirl and Lordly Lore reminds me of something else, which is not unique to Cole, but is such a strong feature of the series I wanted to mention it: the mix of 21st century (middle class) American life with ancient/fantasy cultures. Sherrilyn Kenyon, Laurell K. Hamilton, JR Ward also do this sort of thing, of course. I enjoy entering the world of the IAD, mainly because I like the people in it. However, I find that the quick switches in tone and setting (from a bloody death battle to pop culture laced girl gossip between Sabine and her sister Lanthe, for example) detract from my ability to tale any of the “Lore” seriously.

SPOILERS

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When I think about KOADK, the moment in the book when Sabine runs away into the Lousiana night and Rydstrom runs after her, and then, back in the mansion, slumps down and realizes he can’t live like this, was much more memorable and powerful than the moment when he decides to give up his kingdom for her.

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END SPOILERS

To me, the paranormal and fantasy elements add to the fun, but not as much to the drama.

Tumperkin, you mention that Sabine’s self image doesn’t match what we know of her, and I agree. I note that this type of low self-image is very common among heroes, so I view this as another example of Cole’s gender bending. But, following along with your observation, there is a vast difference between a bitch and a badass, a selfish woman and an evil sorceress, a snarky person and a cruel person.  Sabine never really crosses that line, in my opinion.  I, too, enjoyed Sabine, unlike some other reviewers who felt she “wasn’t good enough” for the hero: she certainly made me laugh out loud more than once (I loved the scene when she argued that “fighting solves everything”).  It was enough of a conflict for me to have morally upstanding hero and a selfish deceitful heroine, so while the Sabine’s self image as “Eeeeeeeebil” didn’t work for me, it’s working also wasn’t necessary for me to get wrapped up in the relationship.

I do wish more time had been spent on their divergent moral views. Did Sabine have a point when she defended cunning, deceit, self-interestedness, and violence as a first resort? To take just one example, it was a very powerful moment in the text when Rydstrom lied to Sabine, but the ramifications of that lie on his character and on their relationship were not given their due.

Like you, Tumperkin, I will absolutely continue reading the IAD, and you may also have convinced me to give a Cole hisoptrical a try.

I leave you with two totally unsupported subjective opinions:

1. I respectfully request that the phrase “feed me into you” when spoken in reference to the hero’s penis be banned from all of romance for ever more. The connotations are ALL WRONG. Shudder.

2. Enough with the horned heroes. There’s a reason none of the heroes on demon romance novel covers are shown with their horns. And that reason is this: horns are gross. (I don’t find rhinos or goats sexy, either, by the way.)

In conclusion, who wins this duel? Clearly, it’s a TKO for Kresley Cole.