I was in the middle of reading Dark Secrets before I realized that I'd read another book by this author before, For the Love of a Goblin Warrior. By then, I had already started to recognize a few of the things that bothered me so much about the first--and then some.
Dark Secrets is about a man named Haidyn who is a whore. However, because he has magic powers he uses his mind to give the illusion that he's having sex with them so he doesn't physically have to. Housewives ever would simply love to know his alternative to "no thanks, I have a headache."
Every ten days, the evil leader has super-happy-rape sex with him. Is he an extreme sadist? Of course! And here's where I took some offense: doesn't it seem like in order to show the leader of a fantasy world is Evil with a capital 'e', he has to have disturbing sexual proclivities--including a fetishized homosexuality?
Perhaps it isn't meant this way, but it seems like the villains of fantasy world are often homosexuals, and this is portrayed to be a bad thing. It happened in Wizard's First Rule, it happened in Kushiel's Dart, and it happened here. I don't like it anymore than I like how the villains in horror movies always seem to be mentally ill.
Considering that this book is under 90 pages long, I suppose the author did her best to create a story arc but it was too short to do an adequate job. Most short stories tend to justify themselves with heaping doses of erotica, but Dark Secrets, despite being about brothels and whores, doesn't actually have any sex beyond the fat villain guy masturbating while thinking about hot buttsecks.
Um, ew.
1.5 stars.
Yeah, that sounds ew. I saw this one around and just skipped it because it didn't sound all that good after all. I'm definitely glad that I chose to since it sounds horrific!
ReplyDeleteGreat review, Neina.
Yeah, it was very disturbing.
Delete