Review: Dark Prince by Christine Feehan

Title: Dark Prince
Author: Christine Feehan
What follows is a rant about this book in which a year’s worth of frustration with my inability to finish this stupid book gets vented. There may be spoilers, and there is definitely snark.

Summary from her official website: He came to her in the night, a predator — strength and power chiseled his features.
The seduction was deep and elemental; he affected her soul. His need. His darkness.
His terrible haunting loneliness. Her senses aroused, she craved the dangerous force
of his body. Burned for him. And he had only touched her with his mind.
She came to him at dawn, his bleakest hour. As the beast raged inside him, threatening
to consume him, he vented his centuries-old despair in an anguished cry that filled
the waning night. And she answered, a ray of light, piercing his darkness. A beautiful
angel. Her compassion, courage, and innocence awakened in him an exquisite longing
and tenderness. He knew he must possess her, for only she could tame his savage side
and lift the dark shadow from his soul. Apart they were desolate, bereft. Intertwined
physically and spiritually, they could heal one another and experience an eternity
of nights filled with love.

And since that summary sucked, even if it does give you a sense of Feehan’s style, let’s go with my own version, shall we?

Mikhail Dubrinsky is a bad-ass Carpathian. A Carpathian is basically a lot like a stereotypical vampire, except that in this universe, actual vampires are soulless and savage and completely corrupt. Carpathians, it turns out, live huge, long lives and gradually lose all but their violent emotions. Once this happens, Carpathians have three choices: (1) endure the lack of emotions for as long as possible, (2) find their lifemate, and (3) set up a one-way date with the sun.

Mikhail, who is the biggest, baddest Carpathian evah, until the next book, needless to say, has not known love, or any other emotion at all, in centuries. Apparently, he has not once in all this time considered having a little tension-relieving gay sex with his fellow Carpathians. If he had, I would have hated this book less. As it is, he’s considering saying goodbye to the cruel world and watching the sunrise, when suddenly, he makes mental contact with Raven Whitney, and, inexplicably, he can feel emotions, see colors, and resist the urge to have haut gay sex with his right-hand man, Gregory. Yes, kids, raven is Mikhail’s lifemate.

The rest of what follows is distinctly hard to summarize, because, man, this plot is a mess. Basically, Raven and Mikhail have sex, someone threatens Raven, who keeps putting herself in danger, because Raven is not the brightest crayon in the box, Mikhail kills them, he and Raven have sex, ad nauseum. We are also introduced to other male Carpathians, who all lack distinctive personalities, with the exception of Gregory, who manages to be even more of an arrogant alpha jerk than Mikhail and who manages to make me hate him from his first appearance in the book.

OK, a lot of things bothered me about this book, but I’m going to be nice and only give it a C- for a grade, because I believe the book was Christine Feehan’s first, and I’ve been told that this isn’t her best book by fans of this series. In fact, Feehan’s prose, though distinctly purple, is evocative, and I quite liked the gothic campiness of the setting. I also found the sex hot, and there are glimmerings of good writing amidst all the purple that kept me paying attention for as long as five minutes at a stretch.

But, oh, the bad… Where to start…

First, the characters. None of them have any depth, particularly Mikhail and Raven. The only thing that sticks out in my head after finishing this book was that Raven has silky, blue-black hair that is extremely long and luxuriant. All I can remember about Mikhail is the fact that Christine Feehan regularly refers to “the heavy muscles of his chest.” The secondary characters are barely perceptible, and the one character I did think could have developed into someone sort of interesting turns into a stock villain that Mikhail and Gregory have to deal with.

It is clear that there are no moral ambiguities in the Feehan-verse. You’re either one of the good guys, by which I mean the Carpathians, or you want to kill said Carpathians. Just once I would have loved for one of the villains to show more intelligence and a better motivation for his actions than “Bwahahaha! I am evil! Ph34r me and my mad evilness!!!11!!”

In conclusion: This book is brain candy. That’s pretty much its only redeeming factor in my opinion. But there are way better vampire romances out there. A C-, like I said, because she did have her moments, and there is a tiny part of me that wants to read the next book just to see if someone stabs Gregory repeatedly with a dull spoon.