By Lisabet Sarai
There
aren’t too many authors whose books I’ll buy on release day, but
Aurelia T. Evans is one of them. When I saw the November 6th
announcement in the Totally Bound newsletter, I hesitated only long
enough to start up my special e-commerce computer in order to
purchase a copy of her latest novel Spider.
Spider,
the sixth book in
the fascinating and disturbing
Arcanium series, brings readers back to the alluring,
terrifying circus
created and nurtured by ancient jinni Bell Madoc. For
Bell, Arcanium is simultaneously a plaything, a work of art and a
cosmic mission. The
appeal of his edgy big
top performances and horrible
but fascinating Oddity
Row depends
on his “people”: captive demons, human misfits, and unfortunate
innocents whose unintentional wishes have bound them to the circus.
Although Bell is
capricious and can be cruel, he’s also exquisitely sensitive to the
secrets that haunt visitors to Arcanium. The transformations he works
upon those whom he entangles via their wishes make those secrets
visible.
Elizabeth,
the protagonist of Spider,
lives her life in fear: fear of heights, fear of darkness, fear of
insects, fear of disease. A member of a conservative, Amish-like
religious cult (in fact, the illegitimate daughter of its prophet),
in public she covers her hair and every inch of skin apart from her
hands and her face. Like many unmarried daughters of the Petrosian
Saints, she works as a nanny; Christian
parents view the modest,
sober, serious Petrosian women
as ideal care-takers
for their children.
A
mistake leads Elizabeth to takes
her charges on an afternoon outing to Arcanium—a
mistake that will change her life forever.
Trying to keep track of
a teenager, a ten year old, a toddler and
an infant, she idly
wishes she had extra hands. Bell pounces upon her figurative
statement. He has her
abducted, brings her to Arcanium, and magically bestows another pair
of arms and another pair of legs, turning her into his human spider.
Then he installs her in
his dreadful “fun house”, actually
a prison he has
created to punish evil-doers who have threatened Arcanium. Visitors
assume the bloody horrors of the fun house are fake, but Elizabeth
soon learns that every
terror is real.
However,
Bell has not brought Elizabeth
into the
circus for punishment,
but to help her accept her fundamental
nature. He knows that
her many phobias mask a
deeper fear—that
she’ll be exposed as the elaborately tattooed porn performer her
seductive, abusive
former boyfriend had
made of her. Indeed, as
she adapts despite
herself to eight-legged life in Arcanium, she gradually comes
to understand that her
true self
is something
even darker, wilder and
more forbidden.
Totally
Bound is a romance publisher, yet Ms. Evans’ books break every
romance rule. That’s probably one reason why I love them. Here’s
the publisher’s
Reader
Advisory for
Spider:
This
book contains plot-driven dubcon, monster sex, arachnophobia, public
sex, extreme violence and horror-related gore, accounts of noncon and
sex trafficking, double penetration, sex addiction, alcoholism and
religious guilt.
Definitely
not a book for the faint of heart! At the same time, none of this
content is gratuitous, inserted just for shock value. Like many of
the characters in the earlier Arcanium books, Elizabeth is broken
inside. Strange as it might seem, her ordeals contribute to a sort of
healing.
I
find Arcanium’s mix of terror and eroticism refreshing and deeply
enjoyable. Even after six books, Bell can still inspire my
wonder.
He wields incredible power, but he’s constrained by free will. His
moral ambiguities fascinate me. He
loves his people, yet also tortures them. He leads them to deeper
self-understanding even as he selfishly
uses
them to increase the popularity of his circus. In
this book, one character, with powers of his own, comments that Bell
came into being before good and evil, that he is born of primordial
chaos.
This
book is the first in which Bell’s omnipotence
is
seriously challenged, by a mysterious outsider. I’m assuming that
Ms. Evans is working on another volume that will explore this plot
twist. I only hope it comes out soon!
My
reviews of some of the earlier Arcanium books:
This sounds fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Not at all a bad thing on a book, if you manage to be in the mood.
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