Harlequin--chapter 27

Book stuff first, my lovelies. Weekends are when I usually sell the most books, so I want to remind ya'll that The Perilous Choice is out in the wild and ready to go home with you.  Click on the Gray Prince tab to go to that list of books. 

If nothing else, the ego boost will help make the pain go away. This book, people. This fucking book.

Anita starts discussing the ardeur. She manages one whole sentence before moving on to the world breaking stupidity.

My control of it had grown to the point where I had to give it permission to feed.

Anita cannot make it through ONE DAY without feeding the ardeur. She has NO CONTROL of it whatsoever and never has. She has just used to to RAPE hundreds of people and is about to use it to rape hundreds more. The solution to control, as has been mentioned time and time again IN THE TEXT is to eat real food and not abuse her body over much. She has proven incapable of doing either.

And then this happens.

I had to unleash it. Maybe if the beasts inside me hadn’t risen at nearly the same time, I wouldn’t have thought of the ardeur as something on a leash. Something on a chain, yeah, a chain with a leather collar at the end of it. Yeah, something leather and metal studded, and tight.

It's kind of the yeahs that do it. Without them, it's kind of normal LKH writing. With it, all I can see is some dude masturbating during a peep show. Which is probably the effect LKH wanted so...uh...go team?

LKH then manages something actively beautiful, but there's another rather sad problem with it:

 He lay against the front of his body like something carved of ivory and blushed with the first pink of sunrise. He was as pale as a vampire, but he was dawn, he was sunlight on water, he was moonlight on wings.

Laurell's desire to avoid naming genitals at all costs is now warring with her ability to use correct grammar. Penis, Laurell. It's called a penis. There are several pages of kissing and, once again, Anita calls her vagina her "opening". Also, her vagina is now a giant bag of holding. Not kidding.

“My version of the ardeur gives you what you want most, sometimes.”

Million dollars and a pony. Come on. You can do it.

And then, right at the moment before Anita and Donovan decide to have sex, Anita decides not to do it and Jean Claude's power sweeps her off into the world of magic sex because OF COURSE she can't decide to have sex on her own. He's managed to recover from the brink of death just in time to save Anita from having to own her own sex drive. What a pal.

Anita gets too rough with poor little weakling Donovan, and her peanut gallery gives him advice in how to keep her from eating him alive. LITERALLY.

This would be funny if it weren't going to end in the nation wide rape of hundreds of innocent people who trust Donovan to protect them. Good Christ, most of these people don't know Anita, will never know Anita, and will never give two shits wheither she lives or dies and she is raping all of them to keep her lovers alive.

 Anita shreds Donovan's lower lip. He's the weakling for not being able to take the pain.

but his eyes filled with that look that a man gets . That look that says, Mine, sex, more, less than that.

The bolded part is italicised in the book. Because somehow a look manages to approximate its own meaning. I think LKH has confused eyes with semaphore flags.

Finally she breaks through Donovan's sheilds and:

The three women I knew in St . Louis were in a small bedroom . They stared up at me as if I were something they could see, something that had come to get them.

Yep. Because we must be reminded: Anita KNOWS these women. She PROTECTS these women. They come to her house for safety when Donovan's away, and she's just raped them and everyone else like them in the entire country. East coast, west coast people.

It gets worse. Jean Claude wakes up and:

We ate them down while they stumbled in mid -step, while they slid down walls, and none of them fought us. They just gave it up.

And the justification? None of them fought.They just gave it up.

Guys, I have been pretty open about the fact that I was sexually assaulted about five years ago. It was non violent and I did not fight. It would have been very difficult to fight in that situation. Hard as it is for me to believe this, the fact that I did not fight does not make it any less of a rape. A manipulative aggressor will absolutely make it difficult for you to fight back. A lack of a violent response--or any response--does not negate the damage that unwanted sexual invasion does to you. It doesn't matter what gender you are or what gender they were. Not fighting doesn't negate that rape happened. Having an orgasm does not negate that you were raped. What matters is that it did happen, and there will never be ANY justification for it. Ever.

I'm not even going to dignify this by arguing logistics, though I could. Because it doesn't matter how they could or could not have fought Anita off. It wasn't their fucking responsibility to fight Anita off. It was ANITA'S job to fight Anita off. It was Anita's job to say "This is a real shitty idea and we need to find a better one". It was Anita's job to ask Donovan if he had gotten permission from all of his swans so that she could go forward knowing that she wouldn't be damaging the people she was about to suck dry. Anita made the wrong move, and now hundreds, possibly thousands of people just paid for it. Also, Anita's rape victims now number in the THOUSANDS.

Anita continues to fuck Donovan while he turns into a swan.

The fact that LKH did not make a Leda/Zeus comparison ONCE tells me that her classical education was sadly lacking.

Jean Claude and Richard are magically healed, and then JC and all the other vampires die for the day, giving Anita a few precious hours to find and kill the Harlequin with all her fresh new rape magic.

Everybody connected to this book should go die in a fire.