…that I noticed on a reread. No, they probably won’t shock you guys, careful readers that you are. But I must have read this one in a rush back in 2007, because when I reread it — and re-enjoyed it –  three years later, I was shocked! Shocked I tell you! By the following:

1. The Black Dagger Brotherhood aren’t undead. They drink blood, but they also eat and digest food. They are warm, with beating hearts and lungs that pump air in and out. They normally do not feed on, and are no threat to, humans. The traits they share with more traditional vampires are their need of blood for sustenance, their immortality, and their vulnerability to sunlight.

The contrast between the BDB and what I would call “real” vampires is heightened in the text whenever possible: the BDB refer to the Lessers as “the undead”, and refer to their 50 degree F body temps, for example.

In terms of the literary vampire tradition, and also in terms of the folkloric one, being undead — having once been a human with a mortal life — is the sine qua non of vampirism. So I think the Lessers are truer vampires than the BDB.

2. The worldbuilding is thin. We are told so little about the vampires outside the BDB that they may as well not exist. These non-BDB vamps are referred to — unhelpfully — as “the aristocracy” pretty much every time they are mentioned, as in:

He hated the aristocracy he was stuck in, he really did.

A couple of females from the aristocracy used to run the Winter Solstice party.

You know how the aristocracy is.

Here’s an example of how the home of a member of the aristocracy is described:

The manse was formal and wealthy befitting the aristocracy.

Really evocative, huh?

Another example of thin worldbuilding is the adding of “h” to regular words as if that alone makes them unique. There is no special lore or history or tradition that distinguishes “ahvenge” from the way the average reader would understand “avenge”. So why bother?

Finally, and this may be a better example of “inconsistency” than “thin worldbuilding”, but here goes: Bonding. With reference to every other bonded couple in the BDB, bonding is powerful and inescapable. Z and Bella bond — his pores emit the Oldh Shpice and everything — yet even at the end of the book, he is still telling himself, and anyone who will listen, that Bella can have a happy life with some other guy … even if she is pregnant with her and Z’s baby. Ok, either “bonding” is an ironclad, unbreakable combination of instinct and tradition, or it isn’t. Which?

3. Nice boys. The BDB are supposed to be alpha, and edgy. Bad boys. And they are indeed really big and strong. They have to be, as warriors who fight the Lessers to protect their species. They are avid lovers, possessive of “their females”, etc. The text reinforces this constantly, as when we are told Zsadist smells of “distilled male power.”

But, on a second read, I noticed that they are, deep down, the kind of boys any momma would be proud of. Here are a couple of examples:

a. Butch is at the club, and is approached by a random prostitute:

He knew where this was headed. He’d end up doing her in one of the private bathrooms over there. Would take maybe ten minutes, if that. He’d get her off, do his business, then beat feet to get away from her.

Did you see that? “He’d get her off” is the first order of business.

b. Bella is in her “needing”, which means every unmated guy in the house wants to have sex with her. Add a bunch of warriors, “massive straining erections” and free flowing Grey Goose, and you’ve got trouble. At one point, Z physically attacks another brother. Afterwards, this:

Z swung his leg up and dismounted, letting himself roll onto the floor. … he wondered idly what had happened to the blunt he’d been smoking. Glancing over at the window, he found he’d had the decency to balance it on the sill before he’s launched at Vishous like a rocket.

Musn’t burn the carpets!

c. Phury’s use of “Red Smoke.” What is red smoke? It sounds ominous every time it’s mentioned. Have we finally found a true bad boy? Um:

Red smoke was just a mild muscle relaxant, really, nothing like marijuana or any of the dangerous stuff.

He relied on blunts to keep him level, just like other folks used cocktails.

4. The crying. Talk about leaky faucets! Suzanne Brockmann’s Navy SEALS have nothing on the BDB.

Here’s Butch, thinking about having sex with a prostitute:

And it was really just masturbation disguised as sex. No big deal.
He thought of Marissa … and felt his tear ducts sting.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

And Revhenge, when Marissa is drinking blood from him:

As she sucked at him vein, he had the absurd impulse to cry.

John Matthew, the pre-transition BDB member-in-training, when he finds out a female friend has died:

John burst into tears. He didn’t mean to.

Z’s twin bother Phury:

There was no reply. So Z glanced over again — just as a tear slid down Phury’s cheek.

But the biggest crybaby of all? Is Zsadist. There’ s a lot of crying when he’s enslaved, but we’ll give that a pass. Here are just a few of the instances of weepage in the “present” time of the narrative:

When he thinks Bella has been incinerated:

He scrubbed his face and then stared at his palm. there was wetness on it. Tears?

When — again, late in the book, Z thinks he has lost Bella:

And then he thought of Bella. Tears came to his eyes…

At the end, when Z realizes Bella loves him and all is well:

He reached up and touched her face. He was not going to cry. He was not* –
Oh, to hell with it.
He smiled up at her as the tears started rolling.

And the brothers are not the only boys who cry.

(There’s a lot of distancing language around the tears, as many of these quotes indicate.)

A male lesser thinks his lover is dead:

O wiped desperate tears out of his eyes.

A civilian male vampire awaits his death:

A tear snaked down his bruised cheek.

5. Fear of a giant penis. I pondered the genre phenomenon of the heroine being scared of the hero’s penis in another post. But in Lover Awakened, the hero is also terrified of it! In fairness, it is described as “twitching wildly” and having “punch action”, which sounds ominous indeed.

Zsadist:

he glanced down at the tent between his legs. Christ, that goddamn thing in there was huge; he looked like he had another arm in his pants. And hiding a log like that would require scaffolding.

Bella:

His arousal was enormous. A perfectly beautiful, rock-solid aberration of nature.
Holy … Moses. Would he even fit?

6. The branding. So constant! And, often, inconsistent with who these guys are. Consider this example from Butch:

He figured this session with the shrink was an hour, so his Patek Philippe’s long hand had to take forty-seven more trips around before he could stuff the kid back in the care and bust on out of here.

Now, Butch is a cop with who refers to ZeroSum — the club in town — as “frickin precious”, and whose distinguishing fashion feature has so far been his Red Sox hat, pulled low.

Why are we told that the gym bag issues to new BDB recruits is a Nike bag? Or why say “He was flushed with sweat from his head to his Nikes” instead of “toes”?

Or,

with a curse, Butch leaned onto his knees, put his hand up to his forehead, and looked down at his Ferragamos.

Or,

the diamond eyes were sharp, undimmed even by the Grey Goose

Or consider John Matthew, a young kid who has lived on the streets his whole young life. Is this really how he would describe Butch on first seeing him?

This Butch O’Neal was … well, the man was dressed like a GQ model, for one thing. Under a black cashmere coat he had on a fancy pin striped suit, an awesome red tie, a bright white shirt. His dark hair was brushed off his forehead in a casual, finger-brushed way that totally rocked out. And his shoes … wow. Gucci, really Gucci … black leather, red-and-green band, shiny gold stuff.

To me, this read like the way an adult female romance novelist would describe Butch, not the way a homeless teen would. The addition of slang words like “stuff” and “rocked out” doesn’t help: it only seems more incongruous with the acute observation of the way Butch’s hair is “finger brushed”.

7. If I told you I was reading a PNR, with a heroine who had been abused and enslaved, escaped slavery and became a kick ass fighter, was sexually inexperienced and insecure, felt she was ugly and unworthy of the hero, tried to fix him up with her sister, misinterpreted his desire for her as pity or self-loathing, and had thoughts like this:

…she really would have preferred bringing him something, some [food] that she’d made. Not that she knew how to do that. Christ, she couldn’t read, couldn’t work a damn washing machine, couldn’t cook.

And what if I told you, in the end, despite all her kick-assedness, her weapons, and her tough talk, the hero is the one who kills the bad guys and saves the day?

You wouldn’t bat an eye, right? Been there, read that. But I’ve just described (and quoted) Zsadist! I think Ward did something pretty interesting here with this subgenre. She took all the tropes of the PNR kick ass heroine … and made her a man.

Which leads me to …

8. Bella rocks. I had a memory of Ward heroines as wishy washy. Not this one. She is the one who is sexually experienced. She is the one who is sexually assertive and confident in the relationship. She exhausts him sexually, to the point where he can’t even move. She is the one who breaks it off when her needs aren’t being met. And she is the one who avenges herself. Here’s a bit of representative dialogue:

[Bella:] Do us both a favor and don’t try to think for me, okay? Because you’re going to get it wrong every damn time.

Z follows her unto the bathroom, where she is starting to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “If I …uh, hurt your feelings or something.”
She glared at him. “I’m not hurt. I’m pissed off and sexually frustrated.”

She is not remotely afraid of Z, as this passage shows:

Zsadist didn’t speak a word. Just stared at her, all power and male strength.
“Did you come to loom at me?” she snapped. “Or is there a point to this?”

And at the climax, not only does Bella save herself, but she saves two Brothers and a fellow kidnapped female. She kills the Lesser at close range, with a knife. When she turns to the nearly dead Zsadist to offer him her blood, and he refuses, she has had it:

“Shut up,” she told him, and bit into her own wrist. “Drink this or die, your choice. But make up your mind quick, because I need to check on Phury and then I’ve got to get the two of you out of here.”

9. The homosociality, by which I mean the most important and charged emotional connections are really between the men, not just the Brothers, but between the Lessers, the Brothers and the Lessers, etc. And also, the … I want to say “latent homosexuality“, but that term so often goes hand in hand with homophobia, which is not really present at all, I don’t think, in the text, that I hesitate to use it (although there is a lot of explicit distancing from homosexual orientation, so I’m not sure). There are way too many examples to even begin to cite them between the brothers, not least of which is that the only sexual release the very horny Butch has in the text is due to interacting with Vishous, or, more humorously, that when Z arranges a meeting with the Lesser who has kidnapped Bella, they decide to meet in the back row of a theater playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But here I will just point out that even the moments which you might think of as the most masculine, and therefore the most hetero (because in our culture, masculinity and heterosexuality are still strongly linked), i.e. the fight scenes or scenes of conflict, are seething with male-male erotic tension. Here are two examples:

“You picking a fight with me?
You going to kiss me before the sex? the Reverend murmured, still playing,
...
Phury laid a hard one on the male’s mouth, the kiss a punch between faces, not anything remotely sexual.

At one point, Z thinks:

he wanted to fight his enemy with a desperation that was downright sexual.

Looking back on this series, and on the growth of m/m romance written for women romance readers in the past few years, I have to wonder (and I am certainly not the first to do so) if the popularity of the BDB reflected, in part, that its mostly female het audience was ready, even if it didn’t know it yet, for more explicit m/m couplings.

10. The BDB was always urban fantasy. I stopped reading the BDB at book 5. At the time, I told myself it was because Ward had moved from a traditional romance novel to UF. I remember feeling vindicated when the books started being labeled UF. But you know what? She never wrote a traditional romance novel with the BDB. In LA, you have whole chapters devoted to people other than the h/h, even to the enemies of the BDB. I honestly cannot recall another romance novel which spends so many pages on other characters, not just a secondary romance, but equally important characters and plots. I think it’s a sign of how skilled Ward is at writing romance that many people –ok, I — didn’t notice this at first.

I know some of these points are critical, but the BDB got me reading romance, something for which I will be forever grateful, and it’s the only romance series I reread periodically. I still have a very soft spot in my reader heart for them, especially this one.