Darkness Embraced: A Rosso Lussuria Vampire Novel, by Winter Pennington

Posted by Merry in Merry's Blog

May
4

Been cranking through my reading list while I’m working on the PotH manuscript, because I find reading is heavily inspirational to my own creative process. Finished Darkness Embraced: A Rosso Lussuria Vampire Novel a couple days ago. I’m not even sure where to begin in describing this book. For the whole first half of the story I was wriggling in awe over the sheer imaginative power of the Rosso Lussuria world. The Elder trials, the power structure of the vampire clan, the vampires’ special abilities, the lavish use of Italian, even the vivid description of the main character’s losing battle with consumption in the opening pages were all full of AWESOME. I didn’t much care for Renata (though she redeems herself in the end) but I really liked and identified with Epiphany. Then comes the part about the sword, which I won’t describe because I don’t want to spoil it for anybody, but suffice to say the sword is one of the best parts of the whole book and deserves a whole awesome award all to itself.

About halfwayish through the story, however, we are introduced to a new character, a Dracule, who engages in a relationship with the main character that left me with my head tilted farrrrrr to the side. *falls over laughing* Now, I consider myself a relatively open-minded person, and even so, this plot development had my eyebrows in my hairline for a chapter or two. Not necessarily in a bad way, mind you, but certainly in a challenging-to-my-poor-little-mortal-brain kind of way. Nonetheless, the subsequent conflict and development of Epiphany’s relationship with Renata were exciting and satisfying, and the Dracule turned out to be entirely relevant and even necessary to the plot, so it never felt like a contrived excuse for kink, but rather an important element of conflict resolution.

I believe I enjoyed this book even more than Winter Pennington‘s Kassandra Lyall series, in fact, but that’s because I’m a sucker for inventive fantasy. A dark, edgy, fun story that feels almost like a grim fairy tale… Hoping there will be more books in the Rosso Lussuria series (mostly because I want more Cuinn!!)