Title: Bite me (you know I like it)
Series: Spooky Boys Book 1
Author: Fae Quin
Genre: MM Paranormal (vampire) romance
HEA or HFN: HEA
Blurb:
The spooky boys series invites you to visit a world where things that go bump in the night aren’t just fantasy. These standalone novels feature monsters that are spicy, fun, and sometimes furry.
Blair
I’d been waiting my whole life to run. When I uncovered hidden papers detailing my inheritance, I knew my time had come. I packed my trunk full of plant babies, black nail polish, and determination. With my demons in the rearview mirror and my trauma for company I made my way to Elmwood. The remote Maine mountain town is home to my future, a potential love interest, and a lot of really weird, possibly deadly secrets.
Richard
Until recently, the most interesting thing in my life had been solving a particularly difficult Sunday crossword. Even my vampiric transformation hadn’t disrupted my life much— it was still boring and repetitive, albeit with more blood than I’d previously dealt with. When newcomer Blair —a charming five foot vegan ball of rage— blows into town, it’s all I can do not to follow him like a love-sick puppy…He’s everything I’ve been missing, but there’s a catch: I need to spy on him and convince the Council he’s innocent of his mother’s crimes. Here’s hoping I don’t end up with a corpse instead of a boyfriend.
Follow Blair, a boy who loves the fanged and furry, as he discovers the secrets of the night and also how to be loved by his very own vampire.
Bite Me! Is a standalone slow burn paranormal MM romance with high heat, an HEA, and no cliffhangers. It features a relationship between two adorably prickly men that have everything against them, until they don’t. Together they’re giggly, young, and tooth-achingly sweet. If you like spooky stories with mystery, suspense, hilarious miscommunication, and characters that make you laugh, read on!
I didn’t know how long I’d stood there, just staring at him as I thought. It could’ve been seconds or minutes, but in the end it didn’t matter because like always, Richard noticed. It was like he always hunted for the little pieces of me, looking to understand, to know me in a way no one had ever taken the effort to do before.
Check it out on Amazon now! It’s free to read with Kindle Unlimited.
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What I loved:
So, I absolutely adored the relationship between Richard and Blair. I was rooting for both of them SO MUCH by the end. And the last fifty or so pages of the book were 100% edge-of-the-seat suspense for me.
The romance worked really, really well. I thought Blair and Richard’s relationship ended up being incredibly sweet and it read to me as a very gradual and logical progression between the heroes. We get plenty of time to get to know both of them (this is a HEFTY tome, clocking in at nearly 600 pages).
The thing I really enjoyed is that both of these guys are emotionally wounded in very different ways, but their relationship helps them both to heal, to see themselves in a new light, and to grow together in a way that seems very natural and organic. We get a chance to bond with both of them and really get invested in their journey.
There’s definitely an enemies-to-lovers progression to their relationship (Blair despises Richard at first) and it was a lot of fun to read. I did find myself getting impatient with the characters a bit, since they were both so dang hesitant/reluctant and all I wanted was for them to just kiss already.
The town they live in was super fascinating and Fae Quin does a great job giving us enough of the supernatural world-building to keep the intrigue going without it overwhelming the narrative. I was definitely eager for more of the world she created, but I still felt like I understood everything pretty well.
While this novel certainly has steamy passages, it’s very firmly fixed on the inner emotional world of the characters. But man, when these two do finally go at it, they GO AT IT. They’re both virgins at the beginning of the story, but they definitely aren’t by the end. These scenes read to me as decently spicy, but also as very emotionally intimate and vulnerable.
The only issue I really had with this book is that the POV we get for both Blair and Richard is very, very deep and this does slow down the pacing of the story in a few places, so it occasionally required a bit of patience on my end. I powered through these parts and so I’m glad I did, because once the action really gets going, it’s immensely rewarding.
In hindsight, I’m going to be perfectly honest and say right here that I’m not even sure the pacing was even really a problem. Since I knew both of the heroes so well by the time they found themselves in serious trouble, I had all of the feels for what they were going through – and what they potentially had to lose.
One last thing I want to mention is that the prose in this novel is absolutely gorgeous. Personally, I don’t generally care about pretty prose, but Fae Quin’s writing is just *chef’s kiss.* Her style is quite clear and readable but at the very same time also evocative, emotional, luscious, and frankly, beautiful.
All in all, this was an extremely enjoyable book. It is a time investment, but it’s so worth it. I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone who enjoys vampire romances.
You can get it here.