Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K Hamilton

Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K Hamilton
Buy Swallowing Darkness by Laurell K Hamilton at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Fantasy
Reviewer: Magda Healey
Summary: Seventh in its series, but readable as a stand-alone, it has sinister plots, faerie court politics, blood and guts aplenty, some (but much less than the previous volumes) sparkly sex and masses of magic. Marred by shoddy writing and lack of editing, it's still a reasonably enjoyable, lively, trashy fantasy adventure romp.
Buy? No	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 384	Date: Novemeber 2008
Publisher: Bantam Press
ISBN: 978-0593059548
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Swallowing Darkness is the seventh Meredith Gentry novel and the first one I read. Despite that I had no problems at all in following the plot - even though there isn't that much obvious exposition in the novel.

Meredith NicEssus is a faerie princess in a slightly alternative world (i.e. US) where faeries are known by the humans - a treaty allowed them to settle in the US three hundred years on the condition that they don't engage in war or make humans worship them.

The faerie courts are obsessed by purity of blood and even more so by purity of looks and Meredith, who is mortal, curvy and has not just human but also lesser fey ancestors, flees the Faerie and starts working as a private investigator in the human world. But her disguise ends when Meredith investigates a man using magic against humans. Her aunt, the Queen of Unseelie Court sets a competition between her son and Merry. The Sidhe are dying out, the old magic is disappearing, and some revival - and a heir - is desperately needed. The previous six books, apparently, chronicle Merry's adventures as a private eye, evading death and trying to get pregnant.

Swallowing Darkness starts with Merry in a human hospital, pregnant with twins genetically fathered by all of her harem of at least five guards, having just been raped by her uncle and the King of the Seelie court. A visit from her brownie grandmother proves rather disastrous and starts Merry on a bit of rampage tour of the whole Faerie, during which she unleashes more and more amazing magic, dispatches quite a few major enemies and gets crowned (twice).

From what I gathered from my brief survey of the previous volumes of the series, the other Merry Gentry novels had plentiful descriptions of magical, shimmering sex executed in lush prose worthy of Diana Gabaldon and other writers of bodice-rippers, bonk-busters and female-aimed erotica, sometimes being not much more than a vehicle for the prolonged sex scenes.

Swallowing Darkness is not like that: it reads as a lively fantasy adventure romp, with sinister plots, court politics, blood and guts aplenty, lots of flowery magic, lots of nightmarish magic and some, but mercifully not that much, shimmering sex abundant with cuppings and the most intimate places and, of course, hardness.

And it would all be great fun, if it wasn't marred by the way it's written. The amount of detailed description is overwhelming and amounts to pure padding. While grand Dali-esque visuals of writhing wild magic may occasionally impress, providing a detailed description of face, body and clothing of every character that turns up (especially the fey males) is simply boring.

The language doesn't exactly soar either, with awful, wooden dialogue, frequent repetitions that should have been edited out, a surfeit of unnecessary adjectives and and an occasionally very grating clash of modes (my mother's emotional ambivalence towards me doesn't fit with the high epic style of the sequence in which it's included). My personal worst was repetitive mention of Sholto's (one of the lovers) extra bits (a set of tentacles of various sizes round his body): this colloquial and light-hearted expression was used in all contexts, with a complete disregard for the tone of the scene in which it figured. Totally inexplicably in the context of the above, extra bit was also used to describe Doyle's (another lover) foreskin.

Still, Swallowing Darkness, while by no means among the best in its sub-genre, is not entirely dreadful either. I wasn't tempted to seek out previous books from the series nor other novels by Laurell K Hamilton (she also authored a long series about Anita Blake, the vampire hunter, but I read this one in two days while recovering from a 'flu and it was kind of fun. It could easily provide an evening or a plane journey of trashy entertainment, especially if urban fantasy with sexy, arrogant fairies and an omnipotent heroine worshipped by everybody is Your Kind of Thing.

I would only recommend it to hard-core fans, though, and I feel compelled to remove half a star from my private rating for the awful, awful pun of the title.

Thanks to the publisher for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

If this type of book appeals to you then we think that you might also enjoy books by Melissa Marr and Holly Black both of whom write enjoyable urban faerie fantasies aimed at the Young Adult demographic which are better written if sexually more tame. If you like this kind of thing, Otherworld novels by Kelley Armstrong may be also worth a look.

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