Review: To Summon a Demon by Lisa Alder

Title: To Summon a Demon
Author: Lisa Alder
Genre: Paranormal Romance/Erotica
Heat Index: 4 out of 5
Release Date: August 25th, 2011
Word/Page Count: 81 pages
Format: Copy from The Romance Reviews for review

To gain revenge, she summons a Demon...and loses her heart.

After Lili is viciously attacked by the Fae, she wants revenge. Who better to help her than the sworn enemies of the Fae, Demons. So she uses an ancient sex ritual to summon a Demon lover and offers her body in exchange for his aid.

Prince Gaap, commander of the Water Elemental Demons, is curiously drawn to the mysterious Lili. Though her summons is clearly a trap, an attempt by the Fae to infiltrate and harm the Demons, he cannot resist the seductive lure of her battered soul.

Even forewarned, Lili is helpless against Gaap's sensual attraction and loses her heart to her Demon lover.

How would your life change if Demons were suddenly unleashed on Earth?

For Lili, she loses her life in the city with her boyfriend Brian and slips into an existence of living day to day, haunted by her memories. Ten years pass by since the release of the Demons, years that she has managed to stay under the radar until she’s attacked by the fae. Now she’s out for revenge and seeks Prince Gaap, commander to the Water Element Demons, to deliver her retribution. Things are never easy when working with demons, though.

While there were a few things that worked well for To Summon a Demon, there were a number of things that clicked wrong for me.

The author uses extensive prose to paint a highly descriptive sex scene that, while erotic, feels too soon in the story for me. This is where my personal preference comes into play, though; I would rather have a sex scene later in the novel, once the characters have been sold to me. I know next to nothing about the main character and even less about the male lead so there’s nothing to entice me into the scene, other than blind faceless sex. There’s not a connection, which is something I prefer to have for these scenes but, then again, that comes down to personal preference.

Lili, the purple-eyed heroine, rang a little bit hollow for me in the beginning. She has a deep thirst for revenge, fixated on summoning a demon, no matter what the cost is to her, to retaliate against the fey who attacked her. However, as soon as her plan hits the smallest hiccup, she doesn’t fight back. Instead, she immediately loses her passion, begs for sex one last time, and then asks Gaap repeatedly to kill her.

Before the sex scene, we have Lili trying to get him to put his knife through her chest.

She tried to push her chest into the tip, but he retracted the blade with a quickness that
took her by surprise. She didn‟t even seen him move.

After the sex scene, she asks again for him to stab her.

“Aren‟t you going to do it?” She gestured half-heartedly to the knife he‟d set on the rock out of her reach.

“Perhaps later,” Gaap said lazily. He still needed to discover how the Fae were planning to use her to get to him. And they must have wanted him specifically because she named him during the summons.

“Maybe I want you to.” She held her arms out defiantly as if waiting for the plunge of his blade.

When that doesn’t work, and Gaap tells her he has no interest in killing her, Lili tries another suggestion.

“Are you going to throw me into the ocean?” she asked idly, as if the answer were unimportant.

“What for?”

“Like a sacrifice.”

I can understand the author is trying to paint the picture of a desperate woman, one ten years in the making, but the way the interactions played out didn’t click for me.

Another frustrating aspect for me what that we would have multiple questions raised in Lili’s point of view concerning Gaap, his actions, his motivations, etc. We then switch to Gaaps point of view and immediately get all the answers to the questions Lili just asked with the addition of all the questions Gaap has for Lili. Cue another perspective change with Lili’s unspoken answers and the same questions she had previously still taking the forefront of her mind, at least when sexy thoughts haven’t taken over. It was frustrating to read the same thoughts/questions/answers repetition, leading to a lack of progression in the novel which makes the pacing suffer.

Finally, I think my biggest issue with this book lies with the fact that, even for an erotic novella, there seems to be no situation off-limits to the topic of sex. Each scene, no matter the situation, has the hero and heroine continually thinking about how they want to shove the other person up against the wall and have their wicked way. It was a little too heavy-handed to be sexual tension, especially when the heroine is sewing up a nice big cut to the hero’s stomach with a needle and thread she had laying around the house. There’s no numbing agent, no drugs, no stick to bite down on, just their continuing arousal and erotic thoughts getting them through the scene as she shoves a needle through his skin repeatedly.

The premise of the story with the conflict between the fae and the demons is interesting and the universe has endless possibilities. I just would have loved to see this book after a few of the sex scenes had been scaled back, balancing out the novel a little more. I’d recommend this book if you’re in the mood for a book that features a good amount of romance and a bit of action.