House of Stone by Vaughn R. Demont

Title: House of Stone
Author: Vaughn R. Demont
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Length: Novel (183 pages)
Buy the book: Samhain Publishing

Blurb:

A modern knight, a noble quest, and a magical sword. What could go wrong?

Welcome to the City, where gods run nightclubs, goblins hire out as mercs, sorcerers work their magic, the Fae hold court over every neighborhood…and humanity is blissfully ignorant of it all.

For minor Fae noble Richard Stone, life is going well. He has a decent fiefdom (okay, it’s a slum), a budding acting career (okay, so it’s porn), and one of only five magical swords in the City. An arranged marriage is barely a blip on his worry meter—until his family blade loses its magic. The shame of it puts his noble standing in jeopardy.

To regain his status, Richard needs help. Fortunately, his new bride is a sidhe knight and his servant Simaron has, er, his back. Together they embark on a quest to find the demon who slew his father, investigate a conspiracy that goes to the highest echelons of Fae nobility, and discover a secret family legacy that could ruin his House.

All while keeping up appearances to a society that demands perfection. And they say a noble’s life is easy…

Publishers warning: Warning: This book contains explicit gay sex, not-so-explicit gay sex, explicitly implied gay sex, routine breaking of the fourth wall, occasional bouts of Pearl Jam fanboy-ism, and plot. Side effects include confusion and headaches, and are best avoided by reading the pages therein in numerical order.

Review:

I found it hard to get into this story. The pace of the first half of it feels off. As if things haven’t quite started getting going yet. Stuff is happening and yet somehow it all still feels preliminary. The pace does improve after about the halfway mark, but by that point it had lost me really. I’d have skimmed the rest if I hadn’t been reading it for a review.

One reason could be the way the narrator gives us explanations of the world throughout the story. It’s probably not fair to call these “info dumps” as they are usually kept short and being in first person they don’t feel as dull as such things do in third person. But still, they do feel like interruptions and damage the forward momentum of the story. I started to glaze over at some of them, even when they were quite short. It’s tough to feel the proper reaction to an event in the story if we’re only given an explanation about what it means after we first see it happening.

The first person present tense narration is okay, but never really sparks into life. Richard’s voice isn’t distinctive enough. I didn’t find I warmed to him and never felt very engaged with him, which might be another reason I struggled to get through this story. He often didn’t appear that engaged himself. Even at moments of supposed high emotion he comes across a bit too cool and detached.

The other characters are either rather cliché – Jen, Richard’s wife, a kickass warrior chick without much depth – or rather inconsistent – like Sim, Richard’s valet and lover. Rather than making a gradual change from servant to equal I thought he jumped back and forth too much. Of course it’s natural he’d have some wobbles on the road, drop back to old behaviour patterns, but there’s too much jumping around for it to feel like a progression.

The ending is a bit too neat. I feel unsatisfied when a character does something brave and noble, makes a sacrifice, but then has what they’ve lost given back to them, along with more. To me that cheapens what they did. I like to see a sacrifice that sticks!

I’m not sure about the aspect of Richard being a porn star. It doesn’t serve much purpose in the story aside from supposedly being edgy or shocking. It doesn’t have much effect on the plot.

There are irritants too, like Sim having a twelve-and-a-half inch cock. I know he’s not fully human, but for goodness sake! And who counts half inches once you’ve got a foot-long anyway? Richard’s Pearl Jam fannishness just makes him appear immature. Having quite as many t-shirts for a band as he seems to have is kind of teenager-like. He has magical accelerated healing powers, so recovers more quickly from a car crash he’s in than a human would. The trouble is with that power is it means scenes where the character is in physical danger lose some of their sense of jeopardy.

It’s not a bad story as such, and the writing it clear and readable, the copy-editing good, but it just never quite caught on with me. Some things in it are tiresome and in general I didn’t feel emotionally connected enough to it. It took me nearly a week to finish it, and it should really have only taken a couple of days at that length. It’s okay, but for me no more than that.

Oh and in case the mention of a wife worries those of you who prefer m/m only and no surprise m/f or whatever sneaked in, rest assured the marriage is just an arranged political thing. The only sex scenes in the book are m/m.