The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark (ARC)

The Demon Lover
Juliet Dark
Published: December 27, 2011

Synopsis: 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.

Surprisingly, I really enjoyed The Demon Lover, and I say surprisingly cause I've noticed lately I seem to enjoy young adult novels more than the adult ones. I am a little hesitant to call a book about an incubus seducing and sucking the life out of a woman an actual romance, but hey, Callie McFay seemed to like it. I also enjoyed the author's creation of Fairwick College, in which the majority of the staff and students enrolled seemed to be a little more than human. I did, however, find it a little odd that Callie didn't realize she was a little more than human herself until she was well into adulthood and working at the college, especially since she had studied and written a book about folklore. In fact, there were times throughout the novel I felt Callie was a little dense to what was going on around her, but maybe being exhausted from her romantic encounters with the incubus dimmed her perception a bit.

Fair warning - there's a lot to keep up with in this novel. There are sooooo many characters with wierd names that are all some type of different supernatural being, a lot of which I've never heard of before. And they've all got their own problems and stories that almost seemed forced onto the character at times - like they don't have anyone but Callie to share their problems with. She might as well  take on the position of Guidance Counseler too. And the problem with having an endless amount of characters circling the MC is that I really didn't care about any of them too much. Except the mouse. I became rather fond of her familiar Ralph the mouse...go figure...and who would've thought one's familiar would be a mouse! And I'm still not sure the purpose of referring to another author's work in this novel. It didn't serve much purpose other than offering sexual stimuli and confirming that another woman that lived in Honeysuckle House had been visited by the incubus...but we already knew that without reading the dead woman's manuscripts.

Even though The Demon Lover seemed almost bombarded with secondary characters and stories, I was still pretty happy with this novel in the end and I look forward to seeing what happens to Callie and her demon lover in the future. Call me crazy, but I really hope the incubus can find a way to merge itself into her life properly.

ARC provided by Random House via Netgalley.