Fantasy Lover by Sherrilyn Kenyon

 

Dear Reader,

Being trapped in a bedroom with a woman is a grand thing. Being trapped in hundreds of bedrooms over 2,000 years isn’t. And being cursed into a book as a love slave for eternity can ruin even a Spartan warrior’s day.

As a love slave, I know everything about women. How to touch them, how to savor them, and most of all, how to pleasure them. But when I was summoned to fulfill Grace Alexander’s sexual fantasies, I found the first woman in history who saw me as a man with a tormented past. She alone bothered to take me out of the bedroom and into the world. She taught me to love again.

But I was not born to know love. I was cursed to walk eternity alone. As a general, I had long ago accepted my sentence. Yet now I have found Grace—the one thing my wounded heart cannot survive without. Sure, love can heal all wounds, but can it break a 2,000-year-old curse?

                                                                                                          Julian of Macedon

Fantasy Lover (Dark-Hunter, book one) by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Start date: August 4, 2021

End date: August 6, 2021

Rating: 4 out of 5 starts

Content warning: child abuse, filicide, suicide, sexual slavery

            Dr. Grace Alexander is a sex therapist who desperately needs to get laid, according to her best friend, Selena. She’s a fortuneteller who believes her latest spell will end Grace’s self-imposed celibacy. It’s Grace’s birthday and a full moon to boot, so after some pizza and a little too much wine, Selena convinces Grace to summon Julian of Macedon, the sexy-as-hell man pictured in a supposedly magical book Selena got from a thrift shop. After chanting his name three times under the moonlight and nothing happening, Grace gives Selena some good-natured ribbing that has her going home demoralized. But soon it becomes clear to Grace that Julian is no longer in Selena’s book but within the confines of Grace’s home, and he has one mission on his mind: have earth-shattering sex with Grace.

            I was surprised by how much I liked this book. It broke the monotony of paranormal romances involving the standards of vampires, shapeshifters, and zombies. While I love those books, it’s nice to change things up occasionally. This story is steeped in so much Greek mythology that I frequently googled character names to find out who they were. (I took a couple classes on mythology in college but the adage of “if you don’t use it, you lose it” is unfortunately true.) If you want to familiarize yourself with the auxiliary characters and bonus context to the events in the book, prepare yourself for some additional reading. It’s not necessary, but I promise the extra research adds to the story. Buckle up for lots of back story.

Julian is the son of a Spartan military general known as Diokles the Butcher and Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty. Cast out of Mount Olympus at birth by his grandfather Zeus, the Greek god of the sky and thunder, Julian is raised in the way all male Spartans are. From a tender age, he’s separated from his family, tortured daily, under clothed, underfed, and forced to steal to survive. The other boys in training despise Julian for being the son of a general (sort of like being the teacher’s pet) and later, because of his enthralling nature to the opposite sex (thanks to his divine mother’s genes). After taking the beating meant for a boy named Iason, Julian gains a friend who ultimately leads to his downfall.

Julian longs for the love that surrounds Iason. His parents watch his fights from afar to support him, they leave him gifts that ensure he doesn’t always have to steal to survive, and he has a beautiful woman named Penelope who’s in love with him. Meanwhile, Julian’s family don’t visit him, and his brothers on either side torment him. He stews in his jealousy of Iason for years until he overhears him making ugly comments about Julian to Penelope. He becomes enraged and does what only a Greek demigod would do. He enlists the help of his half-brother Eros, the Greek god of love and sex, to make Penelope fall in love with him and Iason to forget his love for Penelope. Years later after Penelope and Julian are married and have children, Julian defeats Livius in battle, enraging his half-brother Priapus, the Greek god of fertility who was Livius’s patron. Priapus feeds Iason water from the Pool of Memory, undoing the spell Eros performed for Julian. Iason then attempts to kill Julian and dies, and Penelope, having remembered her love for Iason, despises Julian for forcing her into loving him. She kills their children and then herself in retaliation.

When Julian realizes who was behind his family’s undoing, he marches into Priapus’s temple to kill him but becomes distracted by having sex with Alexandria, one of Priapus’s virgin priestesses. (Again, something only an angry Greek demigod would think to do.) Priapus lashes out at Julian for defiling one of his virgins and imprisons him within a book. While inside the book, Julian lives in a claustrophobic darkness, feeling an unquenchable thirst and insatiable hunger. He doesn’t age and he can’t be killed. He can hear everything that happens near the book, but he can’t interact. His only reprieve (if you can even call it that) from his prison cell is when someone summons him from the book as a “love-slave.” Per his curse, he’s forced to service the sexual desires of his summoner for the duration of a lunar month. The curse compels him to always be ready to have sex and prevents his release—talk about adding insult to injury. At the next full moon, he is driven back into the book for the process to be repeated.

“Love-slave,” which is a term used frequently in this book to refer to Julian’s sexual slavery, is inappropriate. It romanticizes the idea of sexual exploitation and slavery. Julian is portrayed as a willing participant in his sexual summons but a closer look at his behavior and mindset reveals a man who has had two thousand years to accept his fate as a slave. He is confused and angered by Grace’s refusal to have sex with him.

"Enjoy what? Enjoy getting to know people whose faces will haunt me for eternity? Do you think I enjoy looking around here knowing that in a few days I'll be pulled back into a blank, empty hole where I can hear, but I can't see, can't taste, feel, or smell, where my stomach churns constantly from hunger and my throat burns with an unquenchable thirst? You are the only thing I'm permitted to enjoy. And you would deny me that." (Kenyon 88)

She even vows to find a way to break his curse, which is an impossible task according to Julian. Cue a run-in with Eros. After speaking with their mother privately, Eros informs Julian that there is a way to break his curse but it’s nearly impossible to accomplish.

“When the woman of Alexander summons you, you can’t put your spoon in her jelly jar until the last day of your incarnation. Then, the two of you must unite carnally before midnight and you must keep your bodies joined until the sun rises. If you withdraw from her at any point, for any reason, you will immediately return to the book, and the curse continues.” (Kenyon 109)

            I thought the way to break Julian’s curse made internal logical sense. Julian is served his just deserts by being forced to have sex with a limitless number of women for his crime of having sex with the wrong woman, Alexandria—like Trunchbull forcing Bruce to eat that entire chocolate cake in Matilda. To break the curse, it would make sense that he would have to abstain from sex until the end of his summons (with the curse actively working against him in that regard) and then attempt to reverse the process that started the whole thing by having sex with another woman like the priestess.

It’s revealed that since Grace has “Alexander” somewhere in her name—remember, it’s her last name—she qualifies as “the woman of Alexander” called for in breaking the curse. Surnames can denote places where families originated, so I support why Grace would qualify because it’s possible her family can trace their lineage back to the city of Alexandria where the priestess was likely from. I took issue with the qualifier that she could have had Alexander anywhere in her name since first and middle names are largely randomized, meaning she would have nothing in common with the original priestess except that they had similar names. Anyway, all Grace must do is not have sex with Julian until the end of the month, something she’s been succeeding at already.

While there’s no denying the sexual attraction between them, Grace has no desire to race off to bed with Julian. Her opposition to sex stems from a traumatizing sexual encounter from her youth in which a man named Paul consoled her after her parents died unexpectedly and then coerced her into having sex with him even though it was painful for her. Afterwards, Grace found out that he was participating in a childish bet with his roommate to see which one of them could deflower the most virgins in a year. (Don’t get me started on male fascination with virginity.) Understandably, this left Grace feeling used, and she shut herself off to physical intimacy with men. She promised herself that the next time she had sex it would be with a man who loved her. The irony that Julian must use Grace’s body to break his curse isn’t lost on either of them. Julian doesn’t want to ask Grace to do that after learning about what happened to her, but Grace feels a sense of obligation to break Julian free.

Julian was a military commander in his era and has been a sex slave for two thousand years. Grace decides he needs to be “modernized” to assimilate to her time when the curse is broken, which is something he initially doesn’t want to do.

He didn’t belong here. He belonged in ancient Macedonia. Alone. (Kenyon 172)

She buys him modern clothes, teaches him skills he’ll need in the modern world like driving, and reads classic novels like Peter Pan and the Iliad to him since he can’t read English. In the end, Aphrodite gifts Julian with items he’ll need to live in Grace’s time: a birth certificate, a doctorate, and modern currency. It’s a version of the “taming the beast” trope where one character is “civilized” by another character, though it’s usually a man doing it to a woman.

There’s a subplot about Grace being stalked by a patient of hers that results in a home break-in and then a potentially deadly confrontation at her job that seemed tacked on. It was a little cliché, and its only purpose was to strengthen the bond between Julian and Grace when he saves her from the crazy patient in the elevator scene.

            There are some strange conditions to a month without sex for Grace and Julian. Sex in this case must refer only to penile-in-vaginal penetrative sex and not grinding, oral sex, or digital stimulation because there’s a lot of that. As part of his curse, the longer the two go without having sex, the crazier Julian becomes, but he’s also able to slow the encroachment of his madness down by not kissing Grace. Suffice to say, it’s bizarre, but I imagine it’s hard to write a steamy romance in which your characters aren’t allowed to have sex at all. It’s convenient that Aphrodite shows up when Julian is completely suffering from madness and relieves him right before Grace and Julian must have sex. On top of having sex, the two must stay conjoined from midnight until dawn, a particularly great feat spanning over than a handful of hours. At a certain point, Grace falls asleep (I’m not surprised), and Julian must ensure she doesn’t dislodge a certain body part to separate them.

            I feel like the author had a bunch of ideas for how the story would end and decided to write them all. Julian decides not to have sex with Grace to spare her from his family and goes back to his book. Aphrodite turns back time for a do-over. This time, Julian and Grace have sex until dawn. Priapus shows up after the curse is broken, kidnaps Grace to be his sex slave, fights Julian (who is suffering from newfound mortality), and then kills him. Aphrodite brings Julian back to life, and the two fight again with Julian being the victor. Priapus is sent into the book he previously cursed Julian into. I felt like I was being jerked around with all the turning back time and dying/being brought back to life, so that when the true ending came, I felt like everything would change in the next sentence because it had previously. It didn’t but it was exasperating to me as the reader who gives the author a certain amount of faith that they won’t do that. 

            In the end, I liked the book even with some of the problems I had, and I will certainly be reading the next in the series.

Works Cited

Kenyon, Sherrilyn. Fantasy Lover. St. Martin's Press, 2002.