Swallowing Darkness (Meredith Gentry 7)
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The undisputed queen of horror lovin'. DEATHRAY magazine I've never read a writer with a more fertile imagination. DIANA GABALDON Erotic, magical, violent, sensual and thrilling...simply delicious. BOOKSELLER Relentless high-paced trashiness...good fun. SFX magazine
--This text refers to the
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Book Description
Rich, sensual and brimming with dark, dangerous magic, the new Merry Gentry novel from the bestselling storyteller...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Laurell K Hamilton's books have been getting steadily worse for a long long time. I'm still reading in the hopes that she'll start to show some of what used to make her so enjoyable again. The early Anita Blake books were quite entertaining and when the Merry Gentry series started I really enjoyed the first few books too. Sadly things started to slide when the books lost all plot and descended into almost constant sex scenes that spanned the whole entire book. I enjoy sex in books but not to the exclusion of plot. This book can't be tarred with that reason for being bad however as the sex is kept to a minimum - well as minimum as LKH seems to be able to keep it these days anyway and there is a storyline of sorts.
To summarise the plot, the book starts directly after the events of A Lick of Frost (Meredith Gentry 6) with Merry in hospital after being raped by her Uncle Tarranis (Merry shows almost no signs of any trauma - very strange) then a plot to kill Merry's guards begins to unfurl and Merry calls up te wild hunt in revenge to go chassing after the plotters. And that's about it as far as plot goes, Merry reacting to all that the seelie and unseelie and the sluagh and the goblins can throw at her while gaining magical power ups from the Goddess. There is a plot, even if it's mostly the tying up of old threads and dealing with random people that get in her way.
The real problem I found was her repetitive and silly descriptions that read as if they had been lifted directly from one book to the next. On more than one occasion I laughed out loud they were so bad - it sort of spoils the mood of the story when the terrible prose distracts you from the plot. Everything is all sparkly and moonlight lit with detailed pointless descriptions of hair and clothes and rose petals raining from the sky.
I enjoyed the early Merry Gentry novels and I suppose that this book could have seen an end of the series as many of the loose ends from previous books have been tied off. Her father's killer has been unmasked and her enemies defeated for the most part. Unfortunately I don't think that this will be the case and more stories will be spun out with Merry doing more sparkly, magical, and wonderful things with new powers given conveniently by the Goddess just in time and with conversations that start in the middle of the action and just drag on and on to showcase Merry's wonderfullness. I think LKH need to take a break from writing for a while not churn out a Merry and an Anita book every year. She needs to go back and re-read all her books and rediscover her characters for herself and maybe things might improve. I'm still reading in hopes they do but i'm not sure how much longer I will be.
To summarise the plot, the book starts directly after the events of A Lick of Frost (Meredith Gentry 6) with Merry in hospital after being raped by her Uncle Tarranis (Merry shows almost no signs of any trauma - very strange) then a plot to kill Merry's guards begins to unfurl and Merry calls up te wild hunt in revenge to go chassing after the plotters. And that's about it as far as plot goes, Merry reacting to all that the seelie and unseelie and the sluagh and the goblins can throw at her while gaining magical power ups from the Goddess. There is a plot, even if it's mostly the tying up of old threads and dealing with random people that get in her way.
The real problem I found was her repetitive and silly descriptions that read as if they had been lifted directly from one book to the next. On more than one occasion I laughed out loud they were so bad - it sort of spoils the mood of the story when the terrible prose distracts you from the plot. Everything is all sparkly and moonlight lit with detailed pointless descriptions of hair and clothes and rose petals raining from the sky.
I enjoyed the early Merry Gentry novels and I suppose that this book could have seen an end of the series as many of the loose ends from previous books have been tied off. Her father's killer has been unmasked and her enemies defeated for the most part. Unfortunately I don't think that this will be the case and more stories will be spun out with Merry doing more sparkly, magical, and wonderful things with new powers given conveniently by the Goddess just in time and with conversations that start in the middle of the action and just drag on and on to showcase Merry's wonderfullness. I think LKH need to take a break from writing for a while not churn out a Merry and an Anita book every year. She needs to go back and re-read all her books and rediscover her characters for herself and maybe things might improve. I'm still reading in hopes they do but i'm not sure how much longer I will be.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Well I've been a fan of Merry from the start and while Anita Blake seems to have gone haywire Merry got lost in faerie politics. The reviews for this are mixed, and thats fair. There are still the usual confusing plots and alliances and I must admit that as usual I'd forgotten who some characters were! However the main storyline running through this is Merry's escape to LA away from the lands of faerie and the Seelie and Unseelie Courts with their plots and their tricks.
Now that Merry is pregnant with twins you expect things to get sorted out, and they pretty much do. She becomes Queen of the Slaugh with Sholto, regains the old weapons of power from the Goddess and even faces her ultimate foe; cousin Cel. There is more blood and guts than sex in this latest book, and thats a good thing as the plot seems to move along for a change.
If you haven't lost complete faith in the series then give this a try, my only hope is that this is the final Merry book as this seems to end things quite nicely. I can't imagine what would come after this and its sure to degenerate back into a trashy soft porn series again.
Now that Merry is pregnant with twins you expect things to get sorted out, and they pretty much do. She becomes Queen of the Slaugh with Sholto, regains the old weapons of power from the Goddess and even faces her ultimate foe; cousin Cel. There is more blood and guts than sex in this latest book, and thats a good thing as the plot seems to move along for a change.
If you haven't lost complete faith in the series then give this a try, my only hope is that this is the final Merry book as this seems to end things quite nicely. I can't imagine what would come after this and its sure to degenerate back into a trashy soft porn series again.
49 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
For her last few books, Laurell K. Hamilton has been toning down the sexual content in favor of what can be loosely termed "plot."
Well, turns out there are far worse things than endless sparkly-magical sex scenes. After the shattering cliffhanger ending of the previous book, the seventh Merry Gentry book "Swallowing Darkness" promptly goes on a road tour of Faerie instead of sticking to an actual central plot. It feels like Hamilton has gone as far as she can, and is flailing around instead of getting out of the water.
In the aftermath of being raped by her uncle, Merry is recovering in the hospital... and despite all the moping about how doctors "can't undo the damage," she gets over the rape by cuddling her favorite boytoy.
After ordering her various fey boytoys not to attack Taranis, she receives a visit from her feisty brownie grandma. Unfortunately there's a malign influence warping Gran's thoughts -- with disastrous and fatal results for three people close to Merry. Enraged, she and Sholto summon the Wild Hunt and set out to destroy the conspirators.
But it turns out that the conspiracy goes far further than Merry expected -- and that certain Golden Court sidhe are trying to weed out the stronger boytoys. And of course, divine magical favors just rain down on Merry whenever she sneezes. To keep her entire harem (half of whom I've forgotten) safe, Merry decides to take drastic steps in the human world... but only finds a new conflict with her cousin Cel.
Having knocked up her heroine -- which is supposedly the series' goal -- Laurell K. Hamilton seems to be at a loss for what to do to keep the series going ahead. So we end up with a bunch of vaguely connected crises, punctuated by interludes of Sparkly Magic From Goddess-Merry, magic horsies and lots of sparkly magic roses. It's a little like being alternately choked with flowers and clubbed with a rock.
"Swallowing Darkness" does manage an impressive amount of plot, including the resolution of couple half-forgotten subplots -- and a surprising twist during Merry's stay in the sluagh. Unfortunately most of the plot is just Hamilton slapping in new random problems whenever things get too peaceful. Whoops, somebody's suddenly dying! Eek, a traitor! Yikes, a royal challenge from out of nowhere!
Nor does Hamilton's writing help, since she seems to be bored with her own story when she isn't trying to channel Patricia McKillip's lush prose. Her incredibly stilted, rambling dialogue ("We ride." "To save your Storm Lord." "To save the future of faerie"), repetition (everybody seems to have "moonlight skin") and awkward descriptions ("Gold like the metal of a piece of jewelry") hamper the story even further.
And as with all Hamilton's fairy novels, we get hot pale supernatural men who all worship the heroine, dumb blinkered mortals, lightweight Wiccan theology, Christian-bashing, oral sex worship, and lots of nasty and/or crazy women who simply can't measure up to the heroine. Yes, even a sweet li'l old grandma, who is reviled for daring to hold a grudge against her mother's murderer.
But the book's biggest weakness is Merry Gentry herself. She floats through the book in a cloud of Convenient Magical Powers and occasionally pauses to cold-bloodedly kill people. Everybody is awed by her even if she kills them -- and she declares herself to be a goddess as well. It gets rather nauseating to have a heroine who is such a blatant self-insert.
"Swallowing Darkness" has some shreds of good plot in there, but they're surrounded by jack-in-the-box disasters and a main storyline that is being stretched way too far. And it's not over yet....
Well, turns out there are far worse things than endless sparkly-magical sex scenes. After the shattering cliffhanger ending of the previous book, the seventh Merry Gentry book "Swallowing Darkness" promptly goes on a road tour of Faerie instead of sticking to an actual central plot. It feels like Hamilton has gone as far as she can, and is flailing around instead of getting out of the water.
In the aftermath of being raped by her uncle, Merry is recovering in the hospital... and despite all the moping about how doctors "can't undo the damage," she gets over the rape by cuddling her favorite boytoy.
After ordering her various fey boytoys not to attack Taranis, she receives a visit from her feisty brownie grandma. Unfortunately there's a malign influence warping Gran's thoughts -- with disastrous and fatal results for three people close to Merry. Enraged, she and Sholto summon the Wild Hunt and set out to destroy the conspirators.
But it turns out that the conspiracy goes far further than Merry expected -- and that certain Golden Court sidhe are trying to weed out the stronger boytoys. And of course, divine magical favors just rain down on Merry whenever she sneezes. To keep her entire harem (half of whom I've forgotten) safe, Merry decides to take drastic steps in the human world... but only finds a new conflict with her cousin Cel.
Having knocked up her heroine -- which is supposedly the series' goal -- Laurell K. Hamilton seems to be at a loss for what to do to keep the series going ahead. So we end up with a bunch of vaguely connected crises, punctuated by interludes of Sparkly Magic From Goddess-Merry, magic horsies and lots of sparkly magic roses. It's a little like being alternately choked with flowers and clubbed with a rock.
"Swallowing Darkness" does manage an impressive amount of plot, including the resolution of couple half-forgotten subplots -- and a surprising twist during Merry's stay in the sluagh. Unfortunately most of the plot is just Hamilton slapping in new random problems whenever things get too peaceful. Whoops, somebody's suddenly dying! Eek, a traitor! Yikes, a royal challenge from out of nowhere!
Nor does Hamilton's writing help, since she seems to be bored with her own story when she isn't trying to channel Patricia McKillip's lush prose. Her incredibly stilted, rambling dialogue ("We ride." "To save your Storm Lord." "To save the future of faerie"), repetition (everybody seems to have "moonlight skin") and awkward descriptions ("Gold like the metal of a piece of jewelry") hamper the story even further.
And as with all Hamilton's fairy novels, we get hot pale supernatural men who all worship the heroine, dumb blinkered mortals, lightweight Wiccan theology, Christian-bashing, oral sex worship, and lots of nasty and/or crazy women who simply can't measure up to the heroine. Yes, even a sweet li'l old grandma, who is reviled for daring to hold a grudge against her mother's murderer.
But the book's biggest weakness is Merry Gentry herself. She floats through the book in a cloud of Convenient Magical Powers and occasionally pauses to cold-bloodedly kill people. Everybody is awed by her even if she kills them -- and she declares herself to be a goddess as well. It gets rather nauseating to have a heroine who is such a blatant self-insert.
"Swallowing Darkness" has some shreds of good plot in there, but they're surrounded by jack-in-the-box disasters and a main storyline that is being stretched way too far. And it's not over yet....
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Swallowing Darkness has Merry stepping up
At the end of A Lick of Frost, Princess Meredith NicEssus finally learned that she was pregnant; she was raped by her uncle, the King of Light and Illusion; and she lost one of the... Read more
Published 18 months ago by Rebecca
Lamentable - don't pay this lazy author's rent by buying it
Woeful exploitative rubbish from a lazy, arrogant writer with zero respect for her readers or her own characters. Read more
Published on 15 Jan 2010 by KalteStern
Oh dear, oh dear
Why do I keep reading these books?? I remember the glory days of the early Anita Blake books, good strong female character, exciting story lines, just brilliant. Read more
Published on 23 Nov 2009 by Netty
The straw that broke my back
Simply appalling. Dreadful stilted purple prose, a contrived plot and general Mary Sue saves the world with convenient plot devices. Read more
Published on 18 Nov 2009 by G. Baker
Disaticfaction
I found the pace of the book to be frustrating - on one side LKH writes about going from a place to another in a hurry, but then she keeps writing and writing inner dialog, dialog,... Read more
Published on 18 Nov 2009 by Lotus
Bought as a Gift
I bought this book as a present for my sister's birthday, she has the complete collection of Laurel K Hamilton books. Read more
Published on 7 April 2009 by M. Bagwandeen
Brilliant
Brilliant!!
Last in the Merry Gentry series, so it seems. Boo-hoo!!
Well written, as always, with some nice twists and turns. Read more
Last in the Merry Gentry series, so it seems. Boo-hoo!!
Well written, as always, with some nice twists and turns. Read more
Published on 25 Feb 2009 by M. Farrell
Another book I cannot put down
Finally Meredith has gained some backbone when dealing with other seelie and is prepared to use her hands of power to devastating effect. Read more
Published on 24 Feb 2009 by J. Walter
Better than previous books but not quite there
Having read all the books in the Merry series and all but the last book in the Anita book (which I had to stop reading after about ten chapters, less end up hurling it at the wall... Read more
Published on 27 Jan 2009 by Gem - the bookworm
Shows true followers of the Gentry Series
To all those previous reviewers just to clarify the whole situation on the supposed 'rape' which took place in the last book. Read more
Published on 12 Jan 2009 by L. Lawrence
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