One Good Book Deserves Another

Genre: M/M Urban Fantasy
Series: Gray Zone, Book 2
Rating: 4 Stars
Length: 220 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Dreamspinner Press via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.



There's nothing Liam wouldn't do, nothing he hasn't done to protect and care for his two younger brothers. His stepfather is a drunk, sadistic bastard and Liam is all that stands between him and the tattered remnants of their innocence. His own he traded to insure Chris and Kevin keep theirs as long as they can.

Liam does what he can to assure his brothers don't hear, even as his screams echo in the shadows along the broken streets of the Gray Zone. He's been brutally raped, beaten, cut, burned...his body sold over and over to feed his stepfather's perverse hungers and seed his vices. He's been used and abused by sick, brutal men. And he'll keep taking it, knowingly, for as long and as often as it takes to keep Chris and Kevin safe.

It's not like there are a lot of choices in the Gray Zone, that colorless, hopeless strip that's stuck between the shimmering lies that humanity still tells itself and the gritty darkness of the Dens of the Kin, more honest but infinitely more dangerous. It's not a happy life, it's sure as hell not a good life, but it is life.

The night Liam first sees the Lesser-Bred Jericho is the first time he feels a spark of sexual need and hunger. What he can't fathom, what makes no sense to him whatsoever, is how Jericho looks at him. Not like he's a freak, scarred and ugly, or that he's dirty and over-used, shattered and alone, though Liam knows he's all those things. But with an unearthly beauty, Jericho stares at him as if he's...precious, special, and deeply, deeply desired.

It's a gift Liam doesn't trust but once felt, can't escape, and it hearkens a change that will alter every aspect of the desiccated life Liam is struggling to live. It will change...everything. And in so doing, will threaten the two children Liam has worked so damned hard to protect.


There's something about this series that just levels me. In fact, I hadn't actually planned on reading this book after the first left me feeling so shaken and disturbed. I like dark fiction well enough, but this series goes beyond such tepid terminology. It's a gut-clenching, brutal peregrination through a land stripped of anything recognizable as humanity, desiccated, devastating. Horrifying.

And then there are characters like Liam. His unwavering concern for Chris and Kevin and the conscientious care he provides them in the face of the wretchedness of their home life made for some truly captivating reading. I fell in love with him and his siblings, felt every ache and pain that the trio suffered throughout the book, every bloody, caustic wound inflicted.

Liam's life in the Gray Zone leading up to his becoming is the driving force of the plot, and it is so damn heartrending. The nightmare he endures to protect the brothers he loves is inconceivable, and the layers of betrayal he faces are enough to leave grown men blithering like idiots. How his heart and soul stayed as pure as it did is a mystery, but it made for some damn compelling storytelling as the tension and unrelenting sense of impending doom grew larger and larger.

I love the world that Wilder has created for this series. It's gritty, deadly even, but brilliantly imaginative. The Kin, a dragon race that serves as the impetus behind the existence of the Gray Zone in Atlanta, hasn't had an active role in the series to date, but their Lesser-Bred children have been more than enough to carry the series so far.

Make no mistake, the Kin aren't human in thought or deed, and neither are the Lesser-Bred once they've transitioned. They feed on sex, blood, and flesh. Period. Their needs and their habits are often...uncomfortable when viewed through lenses colored with human sensibilities and morality.

On the other hand, children are valued highly by Kin. They don't smell of sex, so they are not used for sex, and they are never victimized by Kin or Lesser-Bred. Ask Liam how he feels about that particular fact. Holding that up against the life Liam has been forced to lead, and I can't help but feel the monsters of this series aren't the ones with scales. The dichotomy makes for a powerful and intriguing theme that's being threaded through the series.

This isn't a series for the faint of heart, and it's not one I'd recommend for romance-only fans. Though the it's listed as M/M romance, I disagree with that categorization. Dark urban fantasy, yes. Very, very dark. There's a lot of sex (warning: not all of it consensual), but this book has even less "romance" than its predecessor, and neither book ends in anything resembling a Happily Ever After for its main characters. It's just not that sort of world.

Frankly, I'm utterly and completely addicted to it. The writing is strong, the world is complex and the characters reach in and claw out a nest for themselves in my heart. At this point, I can't not read it. I can't wait to see what Wilder comes up with next, even though I'm fairly confident I'll feel nearly gutted and disturbed by parts, if not all of it. Personally, I'd like a closer view of the Kin than we've gotten so far, but whatever story it is, I'm in. I'm absolutely all in.

Genre: LGBT - M/M Paranormal Romance
Series: Gray Zone, Book 1
Rating: 3 Stars
Length: 230 Pages
Formats: Paperback, Kindle
Disclosure: An ARC of this book was provided to me by Dreamspinner Press via NetGalley. This rating, review, and all included thoughts and comments are my own.




Dark Fiction Too Grim For Me

When there's nothing left in your life and nowhere to go before you become something other than human, you return to the Gray Zone, a broken, hopeless place that forms an uneasy boundary between the humanity in Atlanta and the Dens of the Kin. Adam has returned to the Gray Zone after five years away, his needs such that he has little choice but to face the memories and ghosts of his complicated and traumatic childhood.

As he approaches the change that will transform him into a Kin/human hybrid known as Lesser-Bred, his hungers for sex and blood have sharpened beyond the point of him being safe among humans. Though he's been away a long time, he can't help but hope that the one source of comfort he had as a child is still around, a young boy who had been both his best friend and his first love. The young human raised by Kin to be food was a nearly feral child who didn't know what love was, but he'd claimed Adam as his own so very long ago. Like Adam, that boy would now be on the cusp of manhood. That boy named Ean.

Ean had grieved for his Adam, the Kin Batu having told him that his boy had died five years ago. Now there is a new man in the house Adam had once lived in, and he smells like memories and yearning and a need Ean doesn't understand. Coming face to face with the interloper kindled the sort of joy that Ean hadn't known existed. His Adam hadn't died as he'd been told. His Adam had come home. And Adam needed Ean in ways that Ean was more than familiar with and more than willing to satisfy. There's nothing Ean wouldn't give, wouldn't be, to ease Adam's transformation. Even if the cost is his life.

Ean may not know love, but more than anyone, he understands sacrifice, and for his Adam, no price is too steep.


Every once in awhile I come across a book that confounds me, disturbs me, or just generally makes it difficult to rate. To Adam With Love is one of those books. As much as I appreciate the occasional darker, edgier romance, especially when coupled with paranormal elements, too much of the world and mythos created here by Wilder crossed that hard-to-define line between dark and edgy and grim and hopeless for me to be able to say I liked it, and there were a few too many story-related issues for me to fully embrace it on an artistic level.

It was certainly imaginative and original. It had sultry, sexy moments and reflected a genuine, believable sense of the innocence of youth and the otherness of the Kin in well-written flashbacks of the shared childhood history of Ean and Adam. I found it almost compulsively compelling in that regard, as the ever-present sense of impending doom was too visceral to tear my gaze away for long lest I miss a crucial piece of this complex, complicated story. I can even say with all honesty that I easily understand why this book would be wildly popular among fans of darker fiction.

Yet I can't say I liked it.

As much as I appreciated the Glossary at the beginning, I felt there was a noted overuse of the italicized words from the Glossary in the narrative. Part of my problem with that is simply how my mind works and remembers things. I pick up and understand more when terminology that is created for the world and mythos for a story is explained and defined in contextual situations. Not only does that help flesh out the world and define the parameters of the story for me, but having to flip to the front to refresh my memory as the story progresses interrupts the flow of the narrative and pulls me out of the story.

I also had some problems with some of the plot threads. There were too many questions posed either directly or indirectly that went unanswered, and the romance arc that had been strong from the start ended up going a little awry for me at the end. The world and the characters were a little too dark and foreign for my personal taste, and I thought the mythos was hard to follow - in part because of the problems I had with the terminology. The sexuality included in the book and the descriptions of Kin feeding pushed at my comfort levels a little, and the romance didn't offer enough of an HEA for me to balance out the emotional trauma the characters suffered throughout the book. I also never really felt Adam or Ean had matured into adults or had advanced beyond the development levels seen in the many flashbacks.

That probably sounds like a lot of negatives, but in all fairness I can't help but admit that for all of that, something about this book was genuinely captivating. Both the story and the characters have stuck with me days after I finished reading their tale. I wish a few things had been different, or had shaken out with a less grim existence for Lesser-Born and their food. I couldn't help but feel a bit hopeless about the Gray Zone and its inhabitants, the Kin and the Dens. That's just not a comfortable feeling to have at the end of my romance reads and it definitely affected my overall impression of this dark and edgy book.

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