Juliet Dark: FAIRWICK CHRONICLES

Author: Juliet Dark (pseudonym for Carol Goodman)
Series: FAIRWICK CHRONICLES
Plot Type: Romantic Fantasy
Ratings: V3; S4; H2-3
Publisher and Titles: Ballantine
        The Demon Lover (12/2011)
        The Water Witch (2/2013)
        The Hallow Door (TBA)

          WORLD-BUILDING         
    The heroine, Cailleach (Callie) McFay, is an literary scholar specializing in Gothic novels and folklore. She wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled "The Demon Lover in Gothic Literature: Vampires, Beasts, and Incubi" and then achieved minor fame when a major publishing house retitled it The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers and marketed it as popular nonfiction. All her life, Callie has listened to and loved folk and fairy tales. In her younger years, she heard them from her parents (both archaeologists), and after her parents died (when she was quite young), she heard them from a handsome man who came to her in her dreams. Now, with college behind her, she takes a position at Fairwick College, a small school in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York that is renowned for its folklore department. Callie's long-time boyfriend, Paul, is currently in California finishing his doctoral thesis. They agreed early on in their relationship that their careers were more important than their relationship, and, consequently, they have spent much of their time apart. 

          BOOK 1: The Demon Lover            
     The series opener begins with a steamy three-page excerpt from the unpublished manuscript of a novel written by Dahlia LaMotte, one of Fairwick's most famous citizens, and that excerpt introduces us to the titular character. Dahlia was a prolific writer of Gothic novels, and she was a former owner of the Victorian house that Callie falls in love with and purchases early on in the story. I must warn you that the first third of this book moves at a glacial pace. Although the reader quickly understands that Fairwick is teeming with supernatural entities, Callie is extremely slow on the uptake—to the point of obtuseness. Callie keeps having lurid, lustful dreams about a dream man who makes passionate love to her in a flood of moonlight. Even though she keeps waking up with the graphic physical evidence of his reality, she keeps playing ostrich, telling herself that these are just dreams. This goes on and on until you want to take Callie aside and explain the facts of life to her. If you can make it past the first 14 chapters, I promise you that the pace begins to accelerate. 

     As chapter 15 begins, Callie learns that Fairwick and, especially, the woods behind her house, are hives of supernatural activity. Oddly enough, Callie doesn't question this at all. Wouldn't you think that she'd show some surprise, shock, or even disbelief when her new Fairwick friends tell her that they are not human and that she's being drained dry by an incubus? Nope! She accepts this as if it were an everyday thing. Here, Callie muses about the group who gathers at her house for Thanksgiving dinner: "I looked at the gathering in my kitchen: a witch, a demon, a fairy, a...what was Casper? He looked, I suddenly realized, a lot like the ceramic gnomes people put in their gardens. The most normal person in the kitchen was an alcoholic, bipolar memoir writer. How much stranger could it get?" (p. 160) 

     As the story progresses, three of Callie's new friends insist that she must forcefully send her lusty incubus back to Fairyland. With some misgivings, Callie goes along with the program. During the banishing ceremony, though, Callie has second thoughts and begins thinking about some "if onlies": if only he were more decent and caring, if only he "would know that talking was at least as important as lovemaking." (p. 147) In essence, she thinks to herself that if the incubus were more like the dream man from her childhood (who has become her ideal man), maybe things would be different between them. The rest of the story unwinds from that point, dealing with the consequences of Callie's wishful thoughts during the banishment. The ultimate villain of the book is easy to spot—for the reader, that is, but not by Callie and her friends. That, for me, is a severe weakness in the book.

     This is a difficult book to categorize. Much of the plot centers on romance: between Callie and Ben and between Callie and her dream lover. But without an HEA, I can't really call it a romance, so my final label is romantic fantasy. The sensuality level is 4, but the scenes don't have quite enough graphic details to be called erotic fiction. I'm hoping that book 2 will move along at a faster pace than book 1, and that Callie will become smarter. The book is crammed with popular cultural references (Charlaine Harris and Sookie Stackhouse are mentioned more than once), and it's fun to see how Callie gives Gothic and paranormal fiction some credibility. For me, the most interesting and arresting character in the book is Liam, who becomes Callie's boyfriend in the final third of the book. His character is fully developed and extremely complex; he is likable and yet disturbing. Callie's supernatural women friends are not as fully developed and tend to be more stereotypical (e.g., the wholesome Diana Hart, who bakes a lot of muffins and runs the tchotchke-filled bed and breakfast across the street.) By the end of the story, the multiplicity of sub-plots (all of which develop in the final 2/3 of the book) become somewhat overwhelming. Some of them are resolved by the end, but others are left loose, to be tied up, perhaps, in the next book(s).