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A review by s7rangest
Beckoning Blood by Daniel de Lorne
1.0
I’m giving this one star because the author took the effort to write it and because it genuinely had potential to be a great story. But other than potential, it had nothing else to offer.
This read like an outline of a book, not even a first draft. The pacing was shoddy at best and worst of all, the characters were so one dimensional that I couldn’t even root for the protagonist because there was nothing about him I could relate to besides…. Idk… love? There’s so little substance or nuance behind anyone’s motivations that everything came off incredibly campy.
There were countless plot devices that had little to no context whatsoever and I had question marks swirling in my head from start to finish. I feel like this book would have benefited from being split into a trilogy, so that each of the story lines could be explored properly, most especially the bond between the brothers and how it developed because what is supposed to be the driving force behind the entire story fell so frustratingly flat.
Lastly, I picked up this book because it was advertised as a twisted and dark MM romance. It’s far from it. I would equate it to watching an episode from a later season of American Horror Story: gratuitous blood and gore for the sake of shock value because the writers couldn’t think of anything else more creative.
I wish this book had a better editor and was more carefully thought out because like I said, it had potential. But potential definitely wasn’t enough to save this story.
Side note: I absolutely hate that the vampires are not affected by the sun and it’s never explained why. Much like the rest of the book, this just happens, no context or depth and you’re just expected to go with it.
This read like an outline of a book, not even a first draft. The pacing was shoddy at best and worst of all, the characters were so one dimensional that I couldn’t even root for the protagonist because there was nothing about him I could relate to besides…. Idk… love? There’s so little substance or nuance behind anyone’s motivations that everything came off incredibly campy.
There were countless plot devices that had little to no context whatsoever and I had question marks swirling in my head from start to finish. I feel like this book would have benefited from being split into a trilogy, so that each of the story lines could be explored properly, most especially the bond between the brothers and how it developed because what is supposed to be the driving force behind the entire story fell so frustratingly flat.
Lastly, I picked up this book because it was advertised as a twisted and dark MM romance. It’s far from it. I would equate it to watching an episode from a later season of American Horror Story: gratuitous blood and gore for the sake of shock value because the writers couldn’t think of anything else more creative.
I wish this book had a better editor and was more carefully thought out because like I said, it had potential. But potential definitely wasn’t enough to save this story.
Side note: I absolutely hate that the vampires are not affected by the sun and it’s never explained why. Much like the rest of the book, this just happens, no context or depth and you’re just expected to go with it.