Dark Lover

Dark Lover is gloriously excessive, and its vampire king is both the attraction and the obstacle.

Some books ask you to accept their mythology. Dark Lover asks you to move in, learn everybody's alarming name and overlook the fact that the furniture appears to be made of black leather. I had a very good time. I also rolled my eyes often enough to qualify as exercise.

J.R. Ward's 2005 opening to the Black Dagger Brotherhood is a landmark flavour of paranormal romance: big feelings, bigger men, danger thick on every page. It is not a delicate introduction. It is more like being shown through the door by someone who has decided you are already late to the war. I admire that confidence even when the book spends it too freely.

The premise (no spoilers past Wrath's first duty to Beth)

In Caldwell, New York, vampires are fighting their slayers. Six warrior vampires form the Black Dagger Brotherhood, led by Wrath, the last purebred vampire. He has a personal score to settle with the slayers who killed his parents. When a trusted fighter dies, Wrath must help the man's half-vampire daughter, Beth Randall, understand the world and fate she has never known. That duty brings two people with very different information and very different power into close contact.

Ward does not hide the terms of this world: violence sits beside desire, and the brotherhood comes with its own loyalties and rules. The useful early question is how Beth can make an informed choice when Wrath knows so much more than she does. The book is most interesting when it remembers that question.

What works

Wrath enters as an almost ridiculous concentration of authority, grief and appetite. Ward commits so completely to him that the excess becomes the point. He is leader, weapon, reluctant guide and man apparently incapable of entering a room at a normal emotional volume. There is a pleasure in watching the prose make space for that much menace. My private test for this kind of hero is whether he remains interesting after the first entrance. Wrath does, largely because his power does not relieve him of obligation. It compounds it.

Beth gives the romance its necessary resistance. She is not simply a prize awaiting revelation; she has a life before Wrath arrives and reasons to distrust the sudden collapse of its boundaries. Their exchanges work best when she asks practical questions and he discovers that commanding an answer is not the same as earning belief. Ward can make the imbalance between them crackle. I wanted more time in that uncomfortable space before the attraction took over.

The brotherhood itself is an efficient series engine. Each warrior arrives with enough outline to suggest a history, but the immediate story stays tied to Wrath's responsibilities. I finished with the sense that Caldwell had further rooms I had not entered. That is precisely what a first volume should do: deliver a couple, establish a war and leave me curious about the people waiting just outside the light.

Ward also understands that paranormal romance can put bodily danger and emotional risk in the same sentence without pretending they are identical. The combat gives the love story urgency; the love story makes the combat cost something. When that balance holds, the book is tremendously easy to keep reading. I reached the point where I was bargaining with my bedtime, a negotiation I rarely win.

What's polarising

The slang and swagger have aged more conspicuously than the central idea. At times the dialogue sounds as though every warrior has been issued a dramatic entrance and a compulsory threat. The invented names are an acquired taste. I acquired it, mostly, but there were moments when the cast list felt like a dare. If you prefer elegance over bombast, the first chapters may make you flee.

More seriously, the romance moves quickly across an information gap that deserves scrutiny. Wrath's desire to protect Beth can become a way of deciding for her. The book likes his dominance more than I always do. I can enjoy a powerful, difficult hero and still want the woman opposite him to have more room to say no, ask again and set the pace. Those are not ornamental questions; they are what make the relationship convincing.

The slayer conflict can also feel blunt beside the more textured push and pull between Wrath and Beth. Whenever the external threat takes over for too long, I miss the quieter, more revealing negotiations between them. I came for vampire politics. I stayed for the much harder problem of a man learning that being feared does not make him understood.

The Wrath of it

Wrath's appeal is not that he is secretly gentle. It is that he is burdened, and the burden has left him bad at every ordinary human scale of interaction. Ward makes his ferocity attractive, then lets it embarrass him. I like a formidable character who cannot simply issue an order and end the conversation. Beth is good for him precisely when she refuses to behave like one of his soldiers.

Still, a reader should not have to call control romantic merely because the controller is handsome and miserable. The book is at its best when Beth's uncertainty has real weight and at its weakest when destiny seems to stand in for consent. That tension is part of my verdict, not a footnote to it. I can be thoroughly entertained while wanting the hero to take several long walks and reconsider his methods.

Spice and heat

Heat: 4 of 5, explicit open door. This is adult paranormal romance with on-page intimacy and a strong current of desire from early on. Romance.io gives it the same four out of five rating. The chemistry is fast, physical and central to the story, so readers wanting a slow courtship should adjust expectations before opening it.

Content notes: the premise includes a parent's murder, a violent war with slayers and Beth's discovery of a heritage kept from her. The book contains threats and killing. Its relationship also has a pronounced power imbalance and possessive behaviour. I would not hand it to someone seeking a gentle vampire romance on the strength of the word love in the title.

Who it's for

Read Dark Lover if you can forgive operatic dialogue in exchange for a fierce central couple and a world built to keep feeding you stories. Read it if your tolerance for alpha behaviour is high but your interest in the heroine's choices remains intact. You will have more fun treating the excess as the house style than waiting for it to calm down. It will not.

I would send it to the friend who wants vampires with teeth, loyalty and emotional incompetence in roughly equal measure. I would add a practical note: keep the next book nearby, because the brotherhood is already advertising its future problems.

Books like Dark Lover

• Halfway to the Grave by Jeaniene Frost, for a sharper-tongued vampire romance with danger and wit.
• Kiss of Midnight by Lara Adrian, for another warrior-vampire world with a central romance at full volume.
• A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole, for fated attraction and an even more unruly alpha hero.

Ward's particular skill is making the enormous feel personal. The book may ask me to forgive too much, too quickly, but it never left me bored. Sometimes that is enough to keep me awake until the birds begin their own dramatic dialogue.

Finished the book and not ready to leave? Wrath is waiting on Fictora.

Talk to Wrath