Faint
dnf @ pg 68
I wanted to like this one because I liked her haunted house one and the premise is fucking wild but also like. I understand what Gailey is doing and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of where the two ways the MC might be heading but I just do not care about the characters so that's a no from me.
dnf @ pg 166
IDK why I gave Emily McIntire another chance man. after crossed i should have just tossed this one onto the sell pile and left it there but ughhhh I wanted to at least try.
anyways, it's bad. jafar is white but like Italian white so he can still have a cringe nickname for Yasmine and be ✨spicy✨ and Aladdin is now... Aiden. I... I got all the way to the marriage of convenience and was like I just can't keep going like this there are so many other books to read.
dnf @ pg 105
okay I picked it up at the library because it was pink and it looked interesting, but the minute I read "piercing the imaginary line between literary and genre fiction" in the introduction I was like mmmmmmmmmaybe not. some of the stories were great (I went out of my way to make sure I read Stephen Graham Jones' contribution and was NOT disappointed) but most of them were just... meh.
the collection was meant to (according to the intro) blend traditional terrors with more real life or modern ones and that's fine. horror is often a metaphor for our fears of something else. but that only works if you're subtle about it and these authors.... mmm. no. very heavy handed. and this might be a side effect of each story being less than 2k words, but the overwhelming feeling of pretention slapping me in the face every time I started a new story was more than I could handle.
anyways. this was pretentious and most of the 19 stories I read were mid at best and talking down to you at worst.
dnf @ pg 127
normally I don't rate books I didn't finish but this is the second Sav R Miller book I've dnf'd because it's so fucking boring I'd rather be eating the book and then maybe I'd get something out of it. you can just be like teehee haha he's a bad man but he gives her a cute little nickname and tells her he wants to fuck her teehee haha romance~✨ and give the reader Nothing Else and expect results
dnf @ pg 133
I bought this sometime this spring and read like 100 pages and gave up for a while. I thought I was going to go back to it but.... it's just so fucking boring. it's billed as a serial killing priest who falls in love with an exotic dancer so you can imagine why I'd pick it up but again. boring. it's written in split POV so there's so sense of mystery, the priest has no conviction behind his killing or his faith so he's just kinda a wishy washy asshole instead of something scary. AND there's someone in the town worse than he is so what's the point of making him out to be this villain of all villains if you're not even going to make him the worst person living somewhere where there are like sub 1000 people?? he's supposed to be frollo but he doesnt have even a third of frollos energy. also instead of finding a way to deal with Esmeralda's Romany heritage, the author just made her racially ambiguous and "Quinton" has autism. anyways. boring, unoriginal, I read better Frollo/Esmeralda on fanfiction.net in 2006. save your money and check AO3.
smut: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️1/2
this one is for the girlies who said they wanted enthusiastic consent in their romantasies. we were on round three by page 65 and then spend the next four hundred ish pages working through every self confidence issues the fmc had it was a wild ass ride and I WILL be getting the sequel when it comes out next year.
This was... okay? I guess? I really liked some of the stories, but most of them were kinda meh.
I Speak For The Trees by Donna J W Munro - ⭐⭐⭐
The Thousand-Eyed Stag by Syd Richardson - ⭐⭐1/2
A Debt Owed by Kimberly Rei - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
The Bog Feeders by Eryn Hiscock - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
Those Things We Cannot See by Lex Vranick - ⭐⭐⭐
Dating in Murderville by VZ Vazquez - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
King of the Forest by Amber M Simpson - ⭐⭐1/2
That View From the M62 by CE Hunter - ⭐⭐
The Warning Color by Galina Trefil - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
Atchafalaya by AS MacKenzie - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Spots by Ariana Ferrante - ⭐⭐⭐
Survival in the Woods by McKenzie Richardson - ⭐⭐⭐
Between the Trees by Dustin Walker - ⭐⭐1/2
Hallowed Ground by AG Hilton - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
The Valley of the Shadows by Chris Hewitt - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Best in the Black Isle by Daniel Purcell - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Nattmara by Rachel Oseida - ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2
The Calm by James Dorr - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Moonshadow Monster by Gina Easton - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Propagate by Cameron Ulam - ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2
Spirit of the Forest by Ville Merilainen - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
When Called by David Kenney - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Heralding by Ian Abelson - ⭐⭐⭐
Moths to a Flame by O Sander - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
A Pillywiggins for Beau Hensel by Stuart Croskell - ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Contains spoilers
rating: 🌟🌟🌟
spice levels: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
review:
having a template for something always helps me write better so welcome to the new beta template for me to review books! this one was a pretty basic monster romance novella. if you checked this one out on KU you know what you were doing and what you were in for. it was good, but the characters were so un-memorable that i read this less than a month ago and i don't even remember their names lmao. the plot was decent for a smut novel, though. the fmc awakes the gargoyle mmc with her blood and it's revealed this his purpose on earth is to act as a foil to a specific demon. the descriptions were also pretty good--especially when the author was describing the demon's true form with all the wiggly worms and grossness. this could have very easily been a full length novel with the concept the author went with to structure her monster smut, but alas. only a novella.
