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Diary of a Succubus (eBook)
| Diary of a Succubus | |
|---|---|
 Diary of a Succubus eBook Cover, written by James Patterson | |
| Author(s) | James Patterson |
| Publisher | BookShots |
| Publication date | April 4, 2017 |
| Media type | eBook |
| Length | 160 Pages |
| ASIN | B01BU1IUVS |
For other uses of the word Succubus, see Succubus (disambiguation).
Diary of a Succubus is an eBook written by James Patterson. In this work the character Lily is a Succubus as are several other characters.
Overview
- Title: Diary of a Succubus
- Author: James Patterson
- Published By: BookShots
- Length: 160 Pages
- Format: eBook
- ASIN: B01BU1IUVS
- Publishing Date: April 4, 2017
Plot Summary
I can kill a man with a kiss.
Book Review
The following review was originally published by Tera on her Blog, A Succubi's Tale on July 21, 2017
The book summary is less than useful, in that it doesn’t tell anything really about what happened in the story. A better summary might be something like: “There is evil in the world. It seeps into the light, tearing away at soul, lives, hopes and dreams. A terrible force with seemingly no equal. But nature abhors a vacuum, light presses against the dark, no matter the cost. For Lily, the last of her kind, the cost has been high, but it will be higher still.
The work is an action-adventure overall, there isn’t any erotica or romance to speak of and even when there are moments that come close to being so, they really aren’t for all of the violence, pain and loss which surrounds them. The darkness that presses upon Lily, the main character, is overwhelming and never gives up for an instant. Even in the moments of self-reflection, there’s always that darkness pressing upon her and it becomes weary after a time.
Being there is so much darkness, there’s a great deal of violence, fighting, blood and killing which rampages throughout the work. That’s a shame, as a whole, because being that the work focuses upon Lily, a succubus, there really needed to be more shown of her aspects of being a seductress than there is.
The work is told from Lily’s perspective, which means there’s a lot of internal monologue and reaction to what happens around her and what she faces. The problem is that there’s not that much told about Lily herself, it’s all about her thoughts of how to prepare for the next fight, the next mark and even when there’s the barest hint of a connection with another character, that gets tossed from the story far too soon, then is forgotten.
While there’s some time spent telling some slivers of her story, there are many of her sisters, and others mentioned, appearing for an instant, thought of. But there’s so dearly little time spent in giving them life. For one character in particular, seen at the beginning of the story, she’s but a ghost, a means to drive an emotional dagger into Lily and then she’s forgotten. This is all a shame because there’s so many connections to Lily which are teased, but not used or explained. There’s a huge history about Lily, but we never get to know that, or her, save for those fleeting moments of self-loathing and brash commentary. There really should have been more.
The force that Lily faces in this work, what drives her quest, is revealed in levels of detail that I could only wish to see for Lily and the succubi in this universe. It’s a very uneven comparison and it disappointed me. Not just in that the story of succubi wasn’t told better, not that those Lily faced didn’t have their world laid out in detail, but that at so many points things were skimmed over, characters appear and then things move on.
The work is almost all action in tone, not having many points at which Lily reflects on the past, her choices and what she’s facing. There’s never really a moment where the reader can pause, reflect on what’s going on before the next encounter, issue or tribulation comes crashing in. I thought that didn’t do a lot for the story, certainly it didn’t give the character development I wanted, or the story I needed here.
I wanted to know more about the succubi, about who they are, how they come to be. There’s gaps in how things work as a whole which distracted me from the story. Hints of their physical forms, more precisely their true forms, needed to be fleshed out more. Their powers weren’t delved into, simply glossed over. When it came to weapons, fashion or cars, there was more than enough information by far, it’s a shame that the same cannot be said about the succubi themselves and Lily in particular.
This is, however, a story about succubi and that theme was present in the work. It wasn’t erotica, it wasn’t a hot flash either. There wasn’t enough of Lily being a seductress, a succubi, it was more about her being an avenging angel in a world of darkness. That worked, that story came tougher well at the climax and the closing of the story. It just could have been so much more.
Three out of five pitchforks.
The action and mystery parts work well, but there’s so little told about the succubi, about their past that I found myself sighing when the story came to a close. The focus wasn’t, overall, in telling about the characters so much as it was to drive them into conflict after conflict with no seeming end to things.
Lily held the work together, she is the narrator after all, but we never really get to know her, to see beneath her singular focus and when the work closed I had a feeling of loss. A hint of her, of what she’s done and seen is a start, but it doesn’t really give her character the breathing room to grow and be fulfilled.
I’d like to see something more to follow this, not so much as constant rollercoaster as this work is but rather to focus on Lily, on her sisters, on their world as much as their opposition was. Only half of the story was told here, tell the other part to make the tale complete.