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biblio_lore's review
1.0
This is another one that disappoints me to be giving it a low rating because honestly, the problem isn't the prose. Severin writes well enough and the visuals she paints, particularly with the gore, are well done. My problem with this collection is one of lack of characterization and truthfully, to some extent a lack of respect for the subculture it leans on. On the first point, I found that the stories were disjointed and you never really got a sense of why you should like these people or really want them to live or die. About the only story that was interesting to me was the one between Valentine and Vivant but even that wasn't really fleshed out enough. In fact, if it had been its own book and given the proper space to give these characters more room to grow, I think that would be a great book by Severin but as it is, I feel like it's just not enough. The rest of the characters bring me to the second reason I didn't like this one. I don't believe that you have to be a goth to write about the subculture but as a goth, I do feel a little bit of an insult at the way that they are portrayed in this book. The typical things that people are so terrified that we supposedly do is all represented here without any sense of irony. The goths here come off looking slutty, degenerate, vapid and violent. These are stereotypes and it further adds to the shallow treatment of the way these characters act. This was probably most disappointing because there was a wealth of material that this author could have used to craft these characters into something more and could have really developed this into a great work but none of that happened. Finally and maybe more importantly, I have to say that for a book that touts that it is erotica, it's a pretty big problem that there is nothing really erotic about it. This isn't to say that I was expecting porn or that there is no sex in it. There is sex but the problem is that with no build up to it, it's ineffective and that's a big problem if your ideal was to create erotic fiction. Again, this is too bad because honestly, it's not like Severin can't write but I think more focus, less stereotyping and more development of the characters would have given us a better show of her talent.
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