Samhain Publishing, $5.50, ISBN 978-1-61922-724-8
Contemporary Erotica, 2015
Now, it is one thing to include lots of flowery names and stuff in a story, but Cat Montmorency loads up so many foo-foo stuff here that Fleur de Nuit is like some teenager’s fanfiction gone wild. Here are the names of the main characters: Moira Elenor D’Arcangelis, Kara Deschamps, Adrian Lacroix. I am feeling left out; maybe you all start calling me Lady Sofifi Felandaris D’sonatalepew from now on. Adrian is French, so he suffers from the Jean-Claude Ma Petite Pepe Le Pew syndrome – every other word from his mouth is French to the point of being overkill. Reading this book is like spending time in the company of someone who has put on way too much perfume – a little less flowery stuff would have gone a long way to make things more easy to read.
Moira prefers to spend her weekends at home watching TV and eating ice cream – don’t worry, she’s still skinny and hot – until her BFF Kara brings her to a BDSM club. Under the tutelage of Adrian, she quickly – almost unbelievably so – transforms into a Domme who just loves to bring bad girls to heel. Moira soon realizes that she has the hots for Kara, who is a sub, and if things aren’t complicated enough, her ex breezes back in town like the raping, murdering no good bastard that he is.
Normally Dommes, sex, and drama go together perfectly, but here, the entire story feels too much like staged camp drama. The names are over the top enough, but the rest of the story are just as whacked. The ex is not just evil, he’s also a rapist and a murderer whose villainy is so ridiculous that he’s actually quite comical. Nothing here feels plausible. Moira goes from an introvert to a confident Domme as if such a transformation is akin to a chair being given a new coat of paint. People all talk like they are auditioning for a campy off-Broadway play, and half the time I am not sure what the author is thinking, but a lot of the comedy here has a whiff of unintentional camp.
Fleur de Nuit is simply too much and too over the top to be taken seriously at the end of the day. Still, the same issues also make this story an absurd kind of a fun read. I suspect it’d be even more entertaining when the reader isn’t completely sober… not that I’m going to test this theory myself, of course. No amount of alcohol can stop me from wincing each time Adrian speaks.
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