robyn reads books

Are you vanilla, or just performing the flavour?

In other words, do you know your dark parts?

Because Heat knows mine.

Jesus fucking Christ.

This book was brutal. Violent. Excessive. Erotic. Psychological. Weird as hell. Torture, rape, fear, forced submission, forced everything really, degradation, pain, pleasure, survival. It pushed in further and further.

And that was the thing.

I wanted all of it.

I wanted the fear. I wanted the power imbalance. I wanted the submission when submission meant attention, favour, protection, survival. I wanted the pain threaded through the frenzied pleasure. I wanted the vulnerability of being completely penetrable, completely exposed, completely at someone else’s mercy.

Oh god. Another book that switched the erotic electricity on in me.

The physical pain alone in this book really got me.

I’ve talked about pain before. I’ve tried to articulate how I feel about it, how I understand it, and how the raw and brutal can be transformed into something intense, charged, almost sublime. There’s alchemy going on in that transformation.

It was a welcome challenge to figure out why a novel like this felt like it had so much more depth than other dark romances I’ve read.

I’ve read Leigh Rivers and thought, yes, finally, something with a little complexity.

But Smith has this particular ability to get past the superficial and plunge straight into the darker depths of desire, fear and human frailty. She carefully and deliberately puts these characters into highly volatile, often forced dynamics and doesn’t let them breathe.

The scenes are violent, and ever so visceral because of the pain inflicted. I felt breathless. Frantic. Reactive.

Most of all, I was reminded how pain is sometimes the only thing sharp enough to make a person feel completely present or alive.

The psychological stuff was fucking intense too.

While the actual plot was fairly light, the graphic writing surrounding all the fuckery was unforgettable. The scenes were very well executed, written not just for shock value, and had some profound psychological undercurrents moving beneath all the depravity.

Perhaps it’s accurate to say this had emotional depth. That could even be an understatement. There were moments of suffocating anticipation. That toxic blend of fear and excitement over what is coming next. The desperate calculations of the characters. Who really has the power? Who is submitting because they want to, because they have to, because they have no other choice?

And Kane.

Kane.

What an astonishing fucking villain.

I didn’t want him redeemed.

I didn’t want him soft.

I didn’t want to discover that in some crevice he is secretly a good man. A better one.

Well, technically, he is alien.

Anyway.

I wanted Kane.

Exactly as he was.

Manipulative as fuck. Total brutality. That intelligence. That sadism. That absolute certainty. He was terrifying and fascinating and completely magnetic to me.

A surprising, softer counterpoint:

There was a parallel, slow burn romance in here to balance the horror. It edged on a desperate tenderness, on the underlying frantic need to be wanted. In reviewing my annotations, it was this part of the story that had my attention the most as far as highlighting goes. Highlights I’ll keep to myself. Some things feel too true to put on the page.

So Heat hit differently.

It didn’t feel like someone had written ‘dark romance’ and simply turned the dial up.

No.

It felt like someone had gone looking for the darkest, kinkiest, most uncomfortable corners of desire and decided to stay there.

For 650 pages.

And somehow it wasn’t even relentlessly repetitive, which is almost ridiculous considering its length and how much happens in it.

R. Lee Smith did not take a breath.

She said:

Here.

Look at this.

You wanted this.

Didn’t you?

And you sit there for a moment and decide whether the answer is yes.

Mine was yes.

Over and over again.

So that’s what I mean by knowing our dark parts.

Some don’t have them. Some of us let them breathe freely, or at least want to. Others may be very good at performing vanilla. 

And then a book comes along and exposes you.

Something that makes you stop pretending and admit:

Yes.

I want that.

Exactly that.