Review: The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark

Title: The Demon Lover (Fairwick Chronicles #1)
Author: Juliet Dark
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Heat Index: 3 out of 5
Release Date: December 27th, 2011
Word/Page Count: 416 pages
Format: Purchased

I gasped . . . or tried to. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t draw breath. . . . His lips, pearly wet, parted and he blew into my mouth. My lungs expanded beneath his weight. When I exhaled he sucked in my breath and his weight turned from cold marble into warm living flesh.

Since accepting a teaching position at remote Fairwick College in upstate New York, Callie McFay has experienced the same disturbingly erotic dream every night: A mist enters her bedroom, then takes the shape of a virile, seductive stranger who proceeds to ravish her in the most toe-curling, wholly satisfying ways possible. Perhaps these dreams are the result of writing her bestselling book, The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers. After all, Callie’s lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature—which is why she finds herself at Fairwick’s renowned folklore department, living in a once-stately Victorian house that, at first sight, seemed to call her name.

But Callie soon realizes that her dreams are alarmingly real. She has a demon lover—an incubus—and he will seduce her, pleasure her, and eventually suck the very life from her. Then Callie makes another startling discovery: He’s not the only mythical creature in Fairwick. As the tenured witches of the college and the resident fairies in the surrounding woods prepare to cast out the incubus, Callie must accomplish something infinitely more difficult—banishing this demon lover from her heart.

The Demon Lover is the first installment of a promising series by Juliet Dark, the penname of Carol Goodman, an author with a number of titles to her credit. Dark manages to spin a story that stays with you after you’ve finished the last page.

Cailleach (Callie) McFay is a newly minted PhD, author of a dissertation turned into best-selling book, and on the look for a job. Though her desire is to have a placement at her undergraduate alma mater, NYU, Callie ends up teaching at Fairwick, a college in north New York state, after feeling a strong pull to a grand Victorian home within the economically depressed town.

Callie quickly buys the Victorian home and settles into the small town routine but it isn’t long before she discovers that Fairwick is far from what it seems. In addition to working with demons, fairies, and witches disguised as human, Callie soon discovers that she is haunted by an incubus, a demon lover that may be more familiar than she initially believes. As he begins to dominate her dreams, Callie starts to wonder, is it possible to fall in love with a demon?

I went into reading this book with the perception that it was a paranormal romance (as it had been labeled on several book sites) and I think that’s part of what initially threw me. This book doesn’t adhere to your typical PNR story structure of immediate action followed by world-building while your character regroups, then more action.

Instead, I’d say it follows more of a typical and traditional story structure, one similar to books such as Pride and Prejudice. As a result, I felt that I had to be continually shifting my perceptions to accommodate not only the events of the book, but the way the events were approached. What would normally be cut and culled down to a single sentence in a PNR was given three paragraphs of description in this text. This isn’t necessarily an issue, once you get used to the story structure, that is.

The introduction of Honeysuckle House, the Victorian that Callie buys, lends a very gothic presence to the story. One room in particular, the bedroom that was built on the back of the house as a sick room, stood out for me especially when Callie was exploring the house.

“Matilda had this addition built on and spent most of her time back here,” Dory said, opening a door onto a mudroom with a washer and dryer and then another door to a rather drab bedroom papered in yellowed, peeling wallpaper with an old iron bed frame painted a matching peeling yellow. “Her arthritis made going up and down the stairs difficult and it was cheaper just to heat the downstairs. She closed off the library …”

“The library?” I asked. I was glad to leave Matilda’s little apartment behind. It had the atmosphere of a retirement home and, curiously, felt older than the rest of the house even though it was a newer addition.

Though brief, the description of yellow wallpaper and an iron bed immediately reminded me of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the story, a woman is confined to the bedroom of their summer home by her physician husband on the thought that this will help her recover from her “temporary nervous depression.” She is forbidden from working with her access to the rest of the house controlled by her husband who keeps the door continually locked. Slowly, the woman becomes obsessed with the pattern and color of the wallpaper.

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw--not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

But there is something else about that paper-- the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here.

It creeps all over the house.

I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.

I recommend reading The Yellow Wallpaper before exploring The Demon Lover, if only to see the interesting connotations between the two stories. Dark makes use of Gilman’s imagery throughout the story. Throughout The Yellow Wallpaper, the main character sees shadows creeping all around her, a vivid imagery that is replicated in Dark’s novel with the use of the incubus invading not only the dark corners of the gothic house, but the private thoughts and memories of Callie’s dreams. There is also a bit of foreshadowing for the character Phoenix, who rents the room from Callie, if you’re familiar with Gillman’s story.

While I appreciated the references to outside literary works displayed not only in the text itself, but also in Callie’s thought, I do feel that there was a certain sense of detachment displayed by Callie at all times. This is despite the amount of emotional distress typically accompanied by the events we see play out in the novel. While I usually like a strong-willed heroine, Callie’s distance made her a little harder to sympathize with. As a result, I was somewhat disconnected with Callie’s story and found myself more interested in the world she inhabited. A world that we will hopefully see expanded further in the series.

The idea of an incubus was an interesting one to see and I liked how Dark had his personality play out. Callie herself draws the parallel between the incubus and Bronte’s Mr. Rochester from the novel Jane Eyre with his shifting personality and the hope of redemption through an understanding of his circumstances. The personality of the incubus continued to evolve throughout the novel, leading not only Callie but also the reader to question the amount of humanity that might be left in the demon.

Overall, I enjoyed The Demon Lover and will check into the next book when it’s released. As for recommending it, I’d advise checking a few of your preconceptions at the door. This is definitely a book where you will need to suspend your judgment and bring your patience to the forefront as Dark sets up the plot lines for this series to be a long run.