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juleworm · 11 months

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hello!! given that it is the first weekend in june, i'd like to go through everything that i read in the month of may and say if i would or would not recommend it and why. lets go !!

in chronological order of reading:

king of pride - ana huang: YES absolutely! god i loved this book. more specifically, yes i would recommend it if you like opposites attract in romance and dating, or if you like income gap relationships ( he's a billionaire, she's a struggling author ), and yes if you like incredibly hot and well written spicy scenes between characters. i honestly can't even think of a no unless you literally just hate spicy romance as a genre; even then i still think this book deserves a chance for your time. i absolutely adore this book.

2. den of vipers - k.a. knight: yes if you miss reading self-insert on wattpad and like pick me fmcs. the vipers themselves do have a lot of good character behind them, but as far as the fmc...i just really didn't like her. i did finish the entire book hoping that it would get better towards the end, but in my opinion the ending was one of the worse parts of the book and throughout it all it felt very predictable. would i generally recommend this? no. but it's definitely a hit or miss book. you'll either really like it, or not like it at all.

3. does it hurt? - h.d. carlton: yes yes yes yes yes. this was my favorite read of the month of may. i'd recommend it even more if you like witty and funny fmcs; it's sort of a dark romance version of grumpy x sunshine. it has a lot of spice and it's very creative if that makes sense? it's not just boring vanilla missionary, that's for sure. the mmcs character is phenomenal and both of them each have very full character arcs. but i wouldn't recommend it if mentions of incest and domestic abuse trigger you, or if body horror and gore triggers you.

4. never lie - freida mcfadden: yes if you're new to thrillers and want something easy to digest. definitely not if you're not new to thrillers and have read some absolutely breathtaking ones that kept you up at night. to me it had a rather predictable storyline, a twist that falls flat, and characters with absolutely zero depth or anywhere near a completed arc. i really did not like this book at all. also yes if you like a quick read; this didn't take me very long to get through.

5 + 6. there are no saints / there is no devil [ sinner's duet ] - sophie lark: yes if you like a "beginner" dark romance that doesn't stray too far into depravity, but still has a very dominant and demanding mmc. no if you've read things by h.d. carlton or other dark romance authors and that's your expectation level. this might come off as boring to you. however as this was a bit tame for me storyline wise, the spicy scenes were amazing and i did like that they were both artists. i feel like usually billionaires are business-oriented but it was cool to see a wealthy and famous artist. also yes if you like mentor romance dynamics.

7. iced out - veronica eden: yes if you like boys who are very clearly written by women ( in a good way! ). the mmc is perfectly balanced; he's as hot and dominant as he is cute and sweet and nice and thoughtful. he's pretty much the picturesque model citizen for what a girl typically would want in a perfectly healthy romantic relationship. there's very little drama between characters, which i personally liked. but no if parental death or familial death or grief/loss are triggers for you. for a more in-depth response, i did a spoiler free book review here!

if you do read any of these let me know! i'd love to see how our opinions differ :))

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chapterbookluvr · 1 year

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“I’ve taken a life, but never shared a life.” - A Comprehensive Review of Sophie Lark’s Serial Killer Romance Novel, There Are No Saints

Content Warning: Abuse, sexual assault, murder, domestic violence, self-harm Spoiler Alert for There Are No Saints by Sophie Lark

“Well. Looks like I’m into serial killer romances now. So that’s brand new information. In my defense, sociopaths should not be this attractive.” writes Larissa, giving Sophie Lark’s romance novel There Are No Saints a five-star review on Goodreads. When typing in “serial killer romance” into Google, you’re greeted with listicles titled “Serial Killer Love Stories” and “5 Horrific Serial Killer Romance Books (Psychopath Love Story)”. Lark’s story is one of hundreds being mass-produced for Amazon’s Netflix-esque book subscription service, Kindle Unlimited.

Something that should be said about this novel before the full review: this book is not intended to be ‘good.’ L. Brown, who gave No Saints 4/5 stars on Amazon, says “Just please read the synopsis and content warnings before jumping in. And don’t take it too seriously while you’re reading it. It’s for the best”. This is the nature of these ‘trashy’ romance novels. They are known to be mediocre but incredibly attractive because they are filled to the brim with sexy characters and fantastical smut. This quality designation does not absolve them of criticism, though. But any ‘negative’ aspects books like these can have tend to fall into the rug-sweeping ‘taboo’ category. Toxic relationship? Taboo. Poorly written characters? Also, apparently, taboo. Any piece of criticism these novels receive fade into the background, as loving readers clamor to say, “If it’s not your cup of tea, don’t read it!”

Smut, as a category, is sexually explicit content. Content that could border on assault (or just plain be assault), consensual sex, passionate moments. The more absurd, the better. Quality falls wayside, predictably, as written porn comes to life. What this does to the culture surrounding these romance novels is conjure an immense aura of shame. Women are sly about reading their ‘smutty’ books. Those who do not want to purchase a Kindle (thus discretion), can get books from smut authors who market their novels as having “innocent covers” compared to the traditionally more lewd ones, ex. half-naked men, buff werewolves, women in the throes of passion, etc. While all being romantic in nature, these books boast strong female characters and caring male love interests. Never mind that she is pregnant, homeless, kidnapped, sick. He is a Mafia boss, a professor, a dragon, her step-brother. The core of all of these stories is love and heart, marketed in a very sharp package. Sometimes, though, the package is opened, and the only thing left inside is blood.

There Are No Saints fits perfectly into this ‘smutty’ romance genre. The book details a serial killer obsessing over an up-and-coming artist. The killer, Cole Blackwell (no relation to Edward Cullen or Jacob Black from the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, though Cole is regularly described as very pale and is compared, multiple times, to Dracula), is a famous artist from an old, rich, San Franciscan family. He has no loved ones, emotions, or redeeming qualities. Mara Eldritch (Lark loves a symbolic last name) is a young starving artist, desperate for studio space and traumatized (in a sexy way) by her abusive past. Any other characters in the books are useless, serving only as placeholders for cheap plot points (abusive parents to explain trauma away, best friends being murdered for sexy thrill, etc.).

Romance author Sophie Lark opens No Saints, confessing, in her dedication, “Writing this book was intense therapy for me, dredging up some deep hurts from a long time ago”. Therapy can look like a lot of things for different people - for Lark it looks like a heartfelt statement followed by a book drenched in dubious consent, assault, murder, and abuse. There is no additional satirical or critical layer. If Lark was trying to make commentary about women having to endure in the face of abusive men, she missed that mark entirely and ended up playing directly into it. It’s an unfortunate result to an interesting concept. Instead of Mara being independent and daring, she has meaningless calls-to-actions that ultimately get snuffed out by the man she apparently is trying to rebel against. It’s a lesson in futility marketed as feminism.

There are No Saints begins in Cole’s point of view (the novel alternates between his and Mara’s), while he is gloomily presiding over an art show, wherein his serial killer rival is also showcasing a piece. His enemy is named Alastor Shaw (possible reference to the chief torturer demon in the hit CW show Supernatural, knowing Lark), an older, uglier man who has been in not only an art battle, but a killing battle, with Cole, for an indeterminate amount of time. The difference between the Good serial killer (Cole) and the Bad serial killer (Shaw) is that Shaw kills women. That’s it. There Are No Saints does not contain a “killer-of-killers” redeemable love interest. Cole kills 14 innocent men, but no women, “I don’t kill women, typically, This is not out of any petty moral constraint. It’s just too fucking easy”.

Enter Mara into the gallery. Described by Cole as “a nobody” wearing “a loose white shift dress” with “battered Docs [that] look older than she is”, she is immediately identified by Cole as an anonymous girl that is dirty and small. Someone bumps into Mara, spilling wine all over her dress. She runs to the bathroom, Cole thinking she’s trying to wash the stains out of her dress, but this “nobody” returns, doing “quite the opposite: she’s tie-dyed the entire thing”. This quick Project-Runaway-style turnaround is what Lark attempted to do with Mara’s character for the entire novel: be quirky in the face of destruction.

Throughout No Saints, Mara is repeatedly described to be unique. She wears overalls with nothing underneath, she reads Dracula (highlighting only topical quotes for Cole to read when he breaks into her house later), she listens to EDM. She has an abusive mother, no money, and shit luck. These novels, with their unfortunate protagonists, all possess negative traits that are never accompanied by negative qualities. They want a romance with all of the edge but none of the grit. Mara has “never known what it would be like to swipe a card without wondering if the balance would clear” but has “never starved yet”. She’s down on her luck, but God, not starving-down, that would be unbecoming.

Female protagonists in dark romance novels tend to be either 1) demure, quiet, and inexperienced, or 2) snarky, haughty, and whorish. Either way, their character arc always peaks at becoming as ‘dark’ or ‘twisted’ as their male love interest. Their subsidiary personality traits, like being kind or witty, act as seasoning to their congealment into their boyfriend.

As far as how Mara is interpreted by readers as a character, some, like Ayman’s five-star review of No Saints on Goodreads, regard Mara as: “…so admirable, strong, and will put this psycho in his place when needed. she isn’t the “i can change him” type or the super submissive type that would make me say “stand up girl”. cole does that all on his own. she literally makes him feel regret for the first time for some shit he pulled. and if there’s one thing i’m gonna eat up, is a woman bringing wreaking chaos on a very organized man UNAPOLOGETICALLY!!! the shear revenge she pulls…she’s the puppeteer and he’s the puppet!”

While other people, like Lori, with their one-star rating, disagree, “A sexually aggressive heroine does not a strong heroine make”.

The collision of these characters, Cole, Shaw, and Mara, happens after the gallery showing. After smoking some weed in the alley with one of her friends, Mara is struck on the back of the head and wakes in the trunk of a moving vehicle. Lark then spends a lengthy paragraph detailing the duct tape, bag, zip-ties, and rope used to gag and bind Mara. She gives the readers all the gory details of the kidnapping, details you’d hear on Forensic Files, TikTok compilations, all the warnings women are given about strange men. How to break out of zip-ties, how to find the emergency pull-tab in the trunk (“WHERE’S THE FUCKING LATCH!” wonders Mara), what cuts duct tape. Mara inventories her trauma exactly how someone who likes true crime would want to hear about it.

After drafting this Criminal Minds script in her head, the trunk Mara is in, flings open, “It’s only when the cold air hits my flesh that I realize I’m naked – or at least, partly naked”. How, in this detailed description of her current state, did she not realize she’s naked? The answer is obvious: it wouldn’t be sexy. Mara is dumped in an alley way by a mysterious man. He dressed her in a skimpy BDSM outfit and ‘stripper heels’. Every trauma Mara goes through in No Saints either makes her even more resilient or, just hotter. Before leaving her to die, the man pierces her nipples and slits her wrists. The chapter ends.

Back to Cole, walking home from the gallery and wondering if he’s going to be caught for his most recent kill (he isn’t, the whole situation is forgotten immediately because there has to be room for sexy moments). He stumbles upon Mara, gagged, and bound, and immediately understands her presence in ‘his territory’ as a message from Shaw, “I don’t kill on impulse. I prepare my location. And I never lose control. He hopes I’ll break all three rules”. Ignoring the fact that those three rules are all fundamentally the same, character-wise, Mara becomes a question mark for Cole, “I’ve never killed a woman. I assumed I would at some point, but not some skinny girl, and not in some frenzy of fucking and stabbing like that ghoul Shaw”.

This is where our love birds get introduced. Cole, standing stoically above bleeding Mara, while she whimpers for help, and he thinks of killing her. This is where character development happens, right? This is the moment where we see Cole start his redemption towards Mara? –“I take one last glance at the girl’s beautifully tortured body. Then I step over her and carry on my way”. No. Cole leaves Mara to die. Thus is their meet-cute.

Mara, through sheer power of will (“I’m not dying here. I’m not fucking doing it.”), gets up and survives this murder attempt by Shaw. The rest of No Saints is Cole and Mara orbiting each other, him growing more possessive over someone he thought he watched die, and Mara just needing money and a place to make art. They are, not subtlety, given the Hades and Persephone motif, though Cole expresses his distaste for such obvious reference in the first chapter, insulting a sculpture that has “all the symbolism hitting you over the head”.

As the plot continues, Cole inevitably does something murder-y, like threaten to kill someone Mara has sex with. She does this as revenge, Cole knows, because he puts a camera in her art studio and Mara purposefully has sex with someone else on a giant canvas (that she later hangs in Cole’s office) while making direct eye contact with the security camera the whole time. Cole threatens to kill someone who slapped Mara’s ass (bar is on the ground, as he is already a serial killer), and Mara, throughout, all but gasps and stares.

Lark attempts, again and again, to define Mara’s character. Unfortunately, those definitions tended to be mutually exclusive. For instance, at an art show that Cole demanded Mara wear something specific at (which she rebelled from, saying “Well fuck him, I pick out my own clothes.”), they have an intimate moment after Cole manages to get Mara’s painting sold. She finds herself suddenly attracted to the man that left her for dead, saying “I wanted death. I wanted HIM” (Lark loves using capital letters in place of description). Mara offers a sexual favor to Cole, internally thinking “This is the deal with the devil. He owns me. He controls me”. Then, a mere four sentences later, tells him “I wanted to fuck you. But you don’t own me, Cole. And you never will”. Lark makes it hard to ignore inconsistency in character, especially when it happens on the same page.

Mara and Cole’s relationship can be crudely defined by a phrase Mara tells herself while in one of her many painful contemplations of Cole: “Rage isn’t the same thing as ‘caring’”. Cole is violent, disrespectful, and cruel. He compares having sex with her as being “strapp[ed] into an electric chair”. His redemption comes from the misery he spares Mara from, though it was him putting her in it in the first place. Cole dares to admire the strength Mara has to overcome her trauma, like a predator playing with his meal. Even outside of their interactions with each other, Cole is disrespectful - Mara tells him about when her dad died, saying “I loved my father, the day I lost him was the worst day of my life”. Cole, ever the loving partner, responds with a smile, “The worst day so far”.

Cole, like Mara, is a very contradictory character. Not in a anti-hero, grey-morality-type way. Cole doesn’t make sense in a poorly-written way. His violent profession is emphasized in the beginning of No Saints and used only as a spunky character trait for the rest of the novel. His serial killing distills down into him just being a violent and broken man. Something attractive and fixable. He later starts developing feelings for Mara, “Mara warps who I am. But in the moment, when I’m with her…I like it. I see things I never saw before. I see things, Hell, I even taste things differently”. Mara, just being her, poor, inconsistent self, is curing this man’s murderous instincts. Cole, as someone who didn’t ever kill women, doesn’t make sense to have this redemption arc. Mara is not hard for him, she’s just new. If Shaw fell in love with her and resisted killing her, that would be character development. Cole has not grown, nor has his serial killing done anything for the plot but be shock value. In fact, the mention of the 14 people he killed is rare, and he doesn’t kill again after he meets Mara. He’s never caught, either: “Getting away with murder is pretty fucking easy. Only 63 percent of homicides are solved under the best of circumstances—and that includes the cases where the idiot criminal is literally holding the smoking gun. There are precious few genius detectives, despite what network television would have you believe. I’ve killed fourteen people and I’ve yet to receive a single knock on my door.”

If Cole’s violent crimes are the equivalent to a day job in how they impact his life and intimidate Mara (both meaning, not at all). It brings up the very important question of: why is Cole a serial killer in the first place?

Back in the beginning of No Saints, we see Alastor Shaw make a pass at some young girls at the gallery showing. Cole, watching, thinks to himself, “Alastor’s need disgusts me. He’s such a cliché of himself. College co-eds, for fucks sake.” Cole goes out of his way to snidely mock Shaw, whispering under his breath, “You and Bundy”. This reference to a real-life killer makes the true-crime loving audience that will inevitably devour No Saints feel included – as seen in RenegadeWoman’s five-star review of No Saints on Amazon, “I have never read a book so psychologically dark – except about Ted Bundy”. But what true, narcissistic, sociopath cares about other killers? Especially long dead ones? Lark makes her characters just culturally literate enough for the readers to sit up and go “OMG! I know that reference!”

There Are No Saints is a part of the growing “violent criminal romance” subgenre, something consequential to the recent hyper-popularization of true crime content. Especially on the social media platform TikTok, where it is hard to parse out the difference between fake crime and true crime, and the fans of both tend to be one in the same. So, lines between crime and romance, fact, and fiction, are destined to blur.

Mikayla Raquel, reviewing There Are No Saints on Amazon, says: “what is it about serial unaliver smut that is just sending me into a tizzy lately!! Cole is yummy yummy yummm…now i want a psycho artist unaliver control freak to rent the house across from me and watch my every move and become obsessed with me…and be really rich and sexy LMAO.”

The phrase “unalive” comes from users trying to circumvent TikTok’s rigorous yet unpredictable explicit content tagging system, so “murder/killing/suicide” has transformed into “unalive”. The presence of the word here, in an Amazon review that does not scan for such verbiage, indicates the origin of this person’s exposure to There Are No Saints: BookTok.

“Dark romance”, as a genre, is very popular on ‘BookTok’ (the term coined for the reading community on TikTok), hijacking recommendation lists and Goodreads charts. Most dark romance stories bank on the fact that these readers will be so caught up in the subversion of classic romance tropes that they will not notice the decreasing quality of the writing. It’s a lot of “look at how bad this man is treating this woman, BUT he is also nice to her a few times”. The disparity between these two concepts: abuse, and subsequent love, is what drives the popularity of these novels. They bank on the idea of “he’s an asshole to everyone but me” , while the audience don’t realize the relationship they’re reading about is going far deeper than domestic violence.

Redemption arcs in dark romance novels seem to have no limits. When talking of heterosexual romance, the man can keep the woman locked in a cage (Birdie’s Biker, Misty Walker) or even stalk and sexually assault her (Haunting Adeline, H.D. Carlton). It does not matter, as the man is redeemable, even when he says he’s not. His irredeemability is a character flaw, not an actual plot point. These men are regularly painted as satanic creatures with one soft spot: their woman they abuse. This broadcasts a dangerous message: if a man protects you, he is allowed to hurt you.

Cole does just this, regularly hurting and seducing Mara. The climax of the novel is a sexually explicit scene where Mara, during intercourse, reveals to Cole that she was sexually abused as a child. Cole uses this experience to re-train Mara, even as she says “No, wait!” Her abuse becomes sexual fodder for Cole to manipulate. Though, it works, as afterwards, she “sob[s] again, this time from pleasure and relief”. Thus, Mara and Cole come to a close.

There Are No Saints is, at its core, an unconventional love story. It’s certainly not the best thing ever written, but it sure is entertaining. Mara summarizes the reading experience best, “I’d rather be dead than bored. And heaven sounds pretty fucking boring”. ■

★★☆☆☆

#we'll see how this fucking goes #book review #sophie lark #there are no saints #dark romance #booktok #review

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