I Am the Dark That Answers When You Call by Jamison Shea
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I Am the Dark That Answers When You Call is good. I did like it and also feel it’s a solid follow-up to I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, but for me, unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as compelling.
While this still had the same gloriously-dark, often gory imagery, toe-curling body horror and rage-filled good for her moments, it nevertheless lacked a bit of the drama and the easily-understandable motivations of the 1st-book.
Additionally, part of the draw for me to that 1st-book was the backdrop of the high stakes, cut-throat world of a professional ballet troupe. There’s really not much of that left by the time the story progresses to this point.
This novel is set about two months after the events of the previous book, and Laure has pretty much left the ballet in her wake. She is spiraling a bit, drinking, partying and basically being a monster, menacing the streets of Paris.
It’s on one of these nights though, that she discovers the dead body of a woman she had been associating with. It’s this event that spurs Laure into seeing that something isn’t right within the city.
As it turns out, she’s not the only monster in town…
This focused a lot on Acheron and Elysium, as well as Laure’s family and potential reasons why she may have actually found herself in her current circumstances.
I did like learning more about her background, but as mentioned above, I did miss the ballet and Laure’s original ambitions. My mind wandered and at the end of the day, I’m sure there’s some substance that I sort of glossed over.
Nevertheless, I can appreciate what the author did here and I know so many Readers are going to love this. For me, it just didn’t quite live up to the first book.
Thank you to the publisher, Henry Hold and Co (BYR) and Macmillan Audio, for providing me with copies to read and review. I will be picking up more from this author!