Hot Mess Sommelière ~ Caro's Reviews > Through a Glass, Darkly

I DID IT I FINALLY WROTE A REVIEW I DESERVE A COOKIE


I read another book with the same title written by Karleen Koen that was set in France sometime before the French revolution. I also read the first letter to the Corinthians from where the title was borrowed.

"Through A Glass, Darkly" has so many pieces of literature to it, it is a daunting title to use. It has a gothic taste and feel. Many expectations rest in such a title. A more apt title for this book, of course, would have been the second part of the New Testament quote; "Now Face to Face", which, incidentally, is the name of the Karleen Koen sequel to her original epic.

I've been following Nenia's reviews for years, but never read one of her books. I often interact with authors whose books I've read, but I've never jumped from reading someone's cheerfully vitriolic reviews to reading their books. Does the fact we both enjoy reading bodice-rippers even matter, when what Nenia mostly writes is at least somewhat paranormal? Does the fact that Nenia hates YA novels that lack braveness or oomph mean her books are brave and full of oomph? Will the dark nasty asshole hero make a fool of himself and forever exile himself from my good graces? I had a lot of doubts so it took me a long time to decide to actually read one work by Nenia. To test the waters.

Reading this book gave me a lot of anxiety, because:

• it's written in an anxious way
• narrated from a run-down, anxious POV
• the heroine has little agency and she's isolated and her life sucks
• the hero is a dangerous emo predator who ought to go to jail forever
• there are two timelines, past and present, that culminate in horror and then more horror
• all the 90s references were painfully reminiscent of the life of an isolated goth nerd
• the past timeline has a painful, harsh and anxious lesbian relationship that isn't going the way everyone hoped it would
• generally everything that happens appears unavoidable and trainwrecky

This book didn't do to me what Philippa Gregory's Wideacre did (that book is something else; if you ever want to know what gutwrenching hate-filled existential angst feels like just try reading that book and you'll see. I'm hardcore and reading Wideacre made me depressed for two full weeks and I never got the courage to read the sequel), so the anxiety was a well-done effect rather than a trigger for my miserable lockdown experience. But anxiety does put me on edge so it made me more aware of what was happening with words and sentences and plot developments, when I am normally a rather inattentive reader.

This book reminded me a lot of a bleak, anxious film I watched on the franco-german ARTE channel over ten years ago. Starring Léa Seydoux and Louis Garrel, the movie is called "The Beautiful Person". Superficially, it's a french movie about a somewhat hot new chick in class who draws all the boys in but then inevitably fucks the teacher instead. Less superficially, the movie is depressive dread captured with a camera and rolled out in blues and blacks and whites so that when you watch it, you just know that the lust the director makes us feel for the beautiful person is just the very last thread of the will to live any of the washed people at that school have left after leading a life that is tainted and bleak and colorless. It's a good move and Louis Garrel looks dangerous in it, so go watch it. I think James probably looks a lot like Louis Garrel in that movie.

It also had similar vibes to my all time favorite movie, Oldboy by Korean maestro Park Chan-Wook. Oldboy is superficially a revenge movie with lots of action. Less superficially, it's a dark retelling of the Oedipus story, with poor people and rich people pitched in a horrible headlock and no winners. If people actually cared for good cinema, Oldboy would have won every single international film prize back in 2003. I still think that Parasyte got the 2020 Oscar nod because the jury felt guilty after ignoring Oldboy. Whatever you do, do not watch the Hollywood remake of Oldboy. It's like heresy but in your TV.

Anyway, back to this book: Nenia does the miserable bleakness of existence well, which is why the first half of the book, as well as the entire past timeline is a solid 5 stars of perfection for me. You could probably make a movie out of it. The French have a thing for bleak erotica in their cinematic oevres. Sadly no one else does.

Let me give you the basic plot and vibes:

In 1997, Bethany is 19 and lives in a shitty apartment with her best friend (who she also has sex with) and works a shitty job and has absolutely no prospects of improving either her situation, her career, or her relationships. She is a friendless, socially awkward young woman who prefers to sit at home and watch Anime and Chinese dramas (100% can relate) while not having much to eat and getting anxious about her best friend maybe fancying someone else. She is clingy and needy and depressed. In short, Bethany is at the lower end of the food chain in all senses of the word and she has no ambition to change that. Some people will find this annoying, because Bethany's passivity means that she has no agency either in her life before James, nor after meeting him.

In 1997, James is a depressed vampire trapped in an abusive, co-dependant relationship with his creator. He has no life goals or ambitions toward happiness. When James meets Bethany in a music shop, it's not love at first sight, but rather a slight ripple of interest in a sea of bland inertia. Since James is so bored and so anhedonic, you'd nearly think he might just be devoid of any real drive or passion, yet he isn't. Though sluggish in his response to bait, he does react to Bethany like a shark to fish slush. Maybe possessiveness is his unique drive in life, who knows.

It's a very strange dynamic of two passive, miserable people coming together through their active, driven partners. The entire time, Bethany and James are always offset by Dory (Bethany's lover) and Nick (James' lover), who act like hot and cold air meeting and clashing. It's an incredibly well-done dynamic, even more so when all the cards are played in the end and we see more than just one point of view of the situation at hand. It was fascinating, gorgeous characterization. Everything played neatly into the crafted people: the locations, food, interactions, and even the pop culture references did not seem arbitrary.

I was flying on a high reading it. So of course I had to come crashing down at some point.


SLIGHT SPOILER (you can still read and enjoy after knowing this)

If there is one trope in fiction that I would like to set on fire, it's the Captivity Romance trope. Once a heroine gets kidnapped by the hero and put in a locked room, most books are pretty much over for me. Not because I think kidnapping and captivity are tropes that can't work for me. It's the opposite. I'm the Antoine Ego of Captivity Romance.

Remember that gourmet guy from Ratattouille who said "I LOVE food. What I don't love, I don't swallow."

That's me.

Captivity is a trope that is challenging to pull off, even from just the technical perspective:

• prison life is repetitive and boring
• the prisoner is robbed of agency, putting the focus on monologues and descriptive prose
• captivity is inevitably a lonely state of existence, so the interaction with the captor who is also the romantic interest has to be all the more poignant
• if themes like self-harm and suicide remain unmentioned, it feels weird
• there is usually a tipping point after which it just gets tedious
• the prisoner generally has to be realistically and visibly depressed and not optimistic. If the prisoner was that way before, reflecting the changes without overwriting gets hard
• cold bare rooms with nothing to do aren't sexy unless you have a fetish for humiliation that goes way beyond a simple rape fantasy
• the captor has to be opaque enough to be fascinating but transparent enough for the reader to wrap their head around: the opaqueness is were most writers just fail

My personal opinion about books that dive deep into mid- or longterm captivity as a trope in rape fantasy romance novels is that authors should decide whether they can make up for the pitfalls of the trope or not. Most writers cannot. They write this trope unthinkingly; as if captivity that goes on for longer than a day really were an extension of the popular kidnapping trope. It is not. Prolonged captivity of the main character is either a vehicle for character development or the complete dismemberment of your cool, sexy idea. Readers have to put up with a mopey, desperate person locked into one position which they have no hope of changing. Giving the mopey desperate person horny feelings does not change the main problem of the trope, which is its rigidness. If you hold your main character prisoner, you also hold the audience prisoner, so the pay-off has to be greater than if the reader can expect the main character's next day to be more interesting or at least different than the last.

As a rule of thumb, I avoid captivity romances for that reason. I do not trust any writer to hold my interest for a hundred pages while the main character whose thoughts I am reading about is physically and emotionally hogtied into a pretzel of doom. It's like watching the great show you like for 16 episodes, but three full episodes are just Girl A waiting in a room, monologuing and moping and the only highlights of the episodes are Boy B coming in and saying things of no consequence to her. It's miserable.

Since the book was great overall, the appearance and resolution of the trope did not ruin things beyond repair; but it did soften the heavy blows dealt by the intertwining timelines to a disappointing "oh, so that's how it was".

The prose was truly brilliant at times. When Bethany finds out what James has been up to through nonverbal cues by Dory, I nearly wanted to cry because I read so much overwritten trash. As I said, the locations were used with purpose and so where objects and foodstuffs. I was delighted. Positively shocked. The characters weren't bazillionaires either. And even though the female lead was destitute, James did not lead a much better life in terms of material possessions. That was a fucking departure. i loved that. If I have to read one more billionaire kidnaps the hot destitute street rat storyline I will choke on my evening tea.

I would have really liked to give the whole ride 5 stars; but the chapters of dull prisoner life made that impossible (I also didn't care much for the silly fight with Nick and James' attempt at ... was that supposed to be an apology?? Idk but that's a whole different can of worms).

4 stars I really liked it great job, I will be reading that dark step bro romance even though the guy is rich (ugh)

Initial pre-review:

Reading this book made me anxious

Writing this review is making me anxious too

Maybe I'll get back to it.

The dual timeline was very well done. The writing was good. Some other things weren't so much.

CJ Roberts should be punished for inventing this genre by having to sit in a bland cell without a vibrator and having to read every single dark captivity romance that was published after her shite book.