Acheron by Sherrilyn Kenyon is the nth book in her Dark Hunter series. Ash has always been the leader of the Dark Hunters, who are vampire-like, but kill other vampires who are evil because they’re Apollo’s offspring instead of Artemis’s. Or something. It’s always been kind of vague and ridiculous to me and I ignored that part to concentrate on the individual Dark Hunter’s past/background.
This series, despite the vampire angle, is mostly romance-based. The point of the stories is to match the Dark Hunter up with his One True Mate who then has to kill him to redeem his soul. In later books, we see that the Dark Hunters’ souls are not freely given by Artemis, Asheron pays for them with his body and flesh and blood.
Acheron’s story is a tome. The hardcover version outweighs the most recent Erikson hardcover. But it has thick paper and pleasantly sized type. 65% or so of the book is very ancient times, like 11,000 years ago. We see Ash as a child. We see him eternally living in the absolute worst torturous environment possible, with hope lasting just long enough to make the fall past rock-bottom even harsher. A lot of it was nauseating to read. If this was fanfiction, it would have carried a plastering of warning labels rivalling Indy cars. I loathe that published fiction has zero respect for readers and does not even bother to mention this level of violence and graphic torture. Normally I would not read anything with this much blood and gore and unfounded hatred because it makes me less of a person to immerse myself in other people’s pain like a sadistic voyeur.
What absolutely ruined the book for me was the modern story.
We see Ash going to an archaeology lecture and heckling the speaker. We see the speaker asking a colleague for help, the colleague is a Dark Hunter from a previous book (of course beholden to Ash) who says he can’t help her, but knows someone who can. The woman speaker throws a hammer at Ash and stomps off. (He deserved it, admittedly, but only if you hadn’t just read the previous half of the book.)
Ash decides she’s the woman for him and instantly falls in love with her, so despite ELEVEN THOUSAND YEARS OF EXPERIENCE, he trusts her and opens his heart to her. She falls for him because he’s freaking gorgeous (and this is actually described much better than the Kitty Does DC author’s “Brazilian”) and he can teach her to speak Atlantean (the language of Atlantis.)
It’s bizarre and completely unrealistic. There’s no reason these people should fall in love. And if there is, then Ash should have been able to fall in love before, because this woman is nothing special. Ash is thrilled that she seems to accept him, but lots of women accept men with shadowed pasts and don’t hold it against them. Ash is thrilled that she seems to have honor and loyalty and he’s never see that in another woman. I don’t know where he’s been looking, but I know a LOT of smart women who don’t lie and don’t cheat and who generously aid their friends even when it’s hard. The book is set in New Orleans, which is part of the South, where they claim to have Southern Hospitality and women are all kind and Christian, but most of them in my experience are vicious snakes in the grass out for any and all advantages they don’t deserve, as long as they can pull a kind face on it and say “Bless your heart!” afterward. So maybe Ash really does think all women around him are worthless whores, but I did not see ANYTHING special about this woman. There was no real rationale given either.
I had to read hundreds of pages of filth and torture scenes where a young boy is chained up and raped repeatedly and starved and beaten and raped and castrated and thrown out of his family home just for having been abused— and I get, Ash meets his perfect woman who is the only woman he’s ever met who doesn’t think badly of him for having been tortured. ? What? Really? That’s it?
No quibble with the very thin love story, not really. All the Dark Hunter books have been like that, where the big strong man just knows when he’s met the right woman. Then they go through some conflict and plot and drama and in the end there’s a happy ending. I was really expecting that. This was absolutely not a happy book even though there is lip service to that. We spent pages and pages watching Acheron be raped and bled almost to death and gutted and having his eyes gouged out… but the only sex scene in the modern half of the book was less than 2 pages, most of which described the woman as wearing sexy lingerie instead of a pleasant instance between them.
I am angry that there was 10 times as much effort to convey the pain and fear and gut-wrenching aspects of Ash’s early life and no effort what-so-ever to convey why he would fall in love with this particular woman. She didn’t seem special. That would have been fine if it had stood alone. With all the gore though, I feel like I am OWED hundreds of pages of “this is what it’s like to be in love with the right woman and be immortal.”
I would like the other 400 pages of happy ending. Or for someone to have warned me to start 2/3 of the way in the book. Even just typing this out, my stomach is trying to escape through the back of my neck and my skin is crawling fit to move to Canada without me.
There is no question that this was supposed to be a “romance” story, that’s who the whole series has been marketed toward. But at the same time, there is no question where this book belongs. It was full-on horror in my opinion.
-1089123 in meeting my expectations.
Heartily non-recommended due to causing of repeated vomiting.
If you’re one of those sadistic people who likes scary stories and violence and characters hurting beyond the point of human frailty, well, this book is definitely for you. It was well researched and catchy enough that I read it all. But it still gives me nightmares.
0/10 because it made me want to throw up just thinking about it to write about it here. ANGRY ANGRY ANGRY at the author for the zero warning.
