Sourcebooks Landmark, $14.99, ISBN 978-1-4022-5077-4
Paranormal Romance, 2011
Now, writing fanfiction as a tribute to one’s frantic desire to be penetrated and impregnated by Colin Firthwilliam Darcy is great, and a big woo-hoo to the ladies who enjoy writing and reading this stuff. A big woo-hoo-hoo to those who manage to get these stories published as trade paperbacks, of course, but reading Mr. Darcy’s Bite is like gorging desperately on sugar buns in an attempt to get diabetes.
Don’t laugh, but Colin Firthwilliam Darcy here is a werewolf. Elizabeth Sue Bennett learns of this when she finally gets to stay at Pemberley and discovers that Darcy baby howls at the moon and grows a tail now and then. She tearfully calls off the relationship, but is soon persuaded to keep courting the canine. Darcy is, of course, the boss of the neighborhood werewolves, but the entire plot of this story boils down to the “he loves her, but he doesn’t want to make her a werewolf, so she feels that they may never be together, and this makes him sad too because he really loves her and wants them to be together” kind of rigmarole normally found in love-struck teenage doodles.
Now, I always believe that authors who want to do tributes like fanfiction to the sainted genteel peen of Colin Firthwilliam Darcy can do whatever they want to accessorize the peen in question, but they should make things interesting. Here, the author doesn’t want to tarnish the sainted Darcy and his Mary Magdalene girlfriend even a little, so I get two perfect and utterly flat cardboard characters walking around being adored and loved to a ridiculous degree by the good guys around them.
“Mr. Darcy really is the best master, and he is very kind to his servants. Before Christmas, we get gifts and some coins so that we can buy gifts for others. And the cottages for his tenants are always in good repair, and I can tell you that that is not true on a lot of the other estates. Some of them stay frightful – little more than caves, and he does other things as well. People around here have lots of kids, and they need to work. So he helped to pay for the building of the potteries and a flannel manufactory.” Ellie put the brush down. “I think that will do for your hair, Miss Bennet. Is there anything else you want?”
Imagine an entire book of such devoted gushing. If you are already feeling nauseated, clearly you are a heathen unable to appreciate the glorious glory-be that is Colin Firthwilliam Darcy, so go choke on a Mountain Dew, you corset-less strumpet!
Lizzie and Darcy are meant to be, so much so that his family members are moved to tears just seeing the two of them in the same room. They are so beautiful together, the rightness of it all radiates from his peen and her hoochie to form a heart-shaped constellation in the night sky. And when she decides to call it off, she cries, he cries, and they all cry. I’m not joking about the crying part. The characters here all shed tears for reasons big and small, to the point that they all come off like people in need of either sedatives or some kind of medication for the nerves. She cries when he becomes a wolf, he cries and begs for forgiveness when he believes that he has shagged her too forcefully, and they also cry with equal lack of restraint during their happy moments. I guess when our main characters are so awesome and perfect, there’s nothing to do but to just cry.
I don’t know the point of making Darcy a werewolf here, other than for the sake of having a gimmick to sell this book to the unwary masses. There’s nothing intriguing about the werewolf thing. Pack politics are kept to a bare minimum, mostly as an excuse to deport the annoying trouble-making female out of the picture. Darcy has no problems dealing with wayward werewolves – he acts like a schoolteacher here, admonishing others like they are misbehaving kids, and these kids naturally obey because Colin Firthwilliam Darcy is the most awesome of all God’s creations ever. Naturally, we believers are encouraged to project ourselves onto the weepy blank slate that is the awesome Lizzie and shed tears of joy at religious experience such as the Penetration of His Vessel.
Darcy was sure he was hurting his wife, but instead of whimpers, he heard soft moans and felt her pelvis thrust against his. Her movements sent a charge through his body, and he went from agony to ecstasy in a moment, and as he lifted his chest off of hers, he felt the full force of his release.
Mr. Darcy’s Bite is basically an overlong story designed to put you know who on a pedestal. The emotional conflict is a tedious and played out “Can she love me? Does he love me? I’ll mope until I stumble upon a clue!” nonsense and there is no genuine conflict to interrupt the tedium. Stephenie Meyer is guilty of this too with her Twilight saga, but at least she was smart to put in some villains to give the story an excuse to be. This one is just wants to make Darcy a bit different from the other Darcy-wannabes written by countless members of International Harem Sisterhood of Colin Firthwilliam Darcy out there, but doesn’t want to (or dare to) do anything to threaten the mystique of that dope.
As I’ve mentioned early, loving tributes are meaningless if these tributes are not entertaining or interesting. Here, the author may as well stand on a street corner and recite her love poems to Darcy – this story most likely has very little appeal to anyone who doesn’t believe that having Darcy’s love and bearing his children are the only reasons women are placed on this world. The constant gushing of perfection gets really old fast, and without any compelling conflict or anything at all to improve the tedium, this one is as self-indulgent as can be, in the worst possible manner.
