Throne of the Fallen by Kerri Maniscalco
(Hodderscape, 2023)
Reviewed by Steven French
This is the first adult offering from YA author Kerri Maniscalco and by ‘adult’, I mean ‘ADULT XXX’ with episodes that are definitely NSFW! The story is constructed around two core protagonists: Miss Camilla Antonius, a talented painter who is petite and buxom, with ‘deep silver’ eyes; and Lord Synton, whose eyes are a ‘unique, lovely shade of emerald’ and who is lean but hard, in all the right places (if you know what I mean…and trust me, you will after just a few pages!), and is actually Prince Envy, one of the seven demon Princes of Hell. He is caught up in The Game, set by the chaos-loving King of the Unseelie fae. As well as some anagrams and a pretty obvious riddle, this involves successfully completing certain magical tasks, the first of which is to persuade Camilla to paint the Hexed Throne.
Doing so takes up the first couple of hundred pages and as soon as the painting is finished, the Throne manifests itself and sends Camilla and Envy off on a journey through the ‘underworld’. Along the way they encounter two of the other Princes, Sloth and Wrath—the former of whom seems quite a nice, bookish type—confront the Goddess of Death and escape from ‘Malice Isle’, home of the vampires, before finally ending up in the Unseelie Court. Here things take a very dark turn as the Game concludes and Camilla’s true identity is revealed.
Pushing things along is Envy’s concern over his own court which has succumbed to some kind of progressive memory related madness causing his people to tear each other apart. However, despite the pressure to finish The Game and have his power restored, thereby saving his court, Envy evidently feels he can take the time to engage in extended and about-as-explicit-as-it-gets foreplay with Camilla. Obviously, it is these sessions which are supposed to put the erotic charge into the story, although they do tend to blur into one another, insofar as they pretty much all involve a fair amount of bodice/shirt ripping, followed by various degrees of thrusting and moaning and whatever.
As for the fantasy side of things, this is standard fare, albeit rather thinly constructed. For all that Envy and his brothers are supposed to be Princes of Hell, they’re not actually that demonic and Envy himself, of course, is presented as deeply and darkly attractive. The vampires are more Ricean than kin to Nosferatu and the Unseelie are your typical nasty fae, whereas their nicer Seelie brethren are kept out of the picture. As for Camilla’s circle of friends and acquaintances in the quaint town of Waverly Green, these folk all seem to be cast in the mould of Regency noblemen and women, with barely a glimpse of the servants and working folk who presumably keep the whole shebang going.
What is a bit odd, however, is that although Waverly Green itself, with its ‘Briarwood Hall’ and ‘Wisteria Way’, is also clearly based on some saccharine image of Englishness, the book’s obligatory map situates it on an island that is shaped just like Sicily! And the Seven Circles, where the demon Princes reside, occupy half of another nearby island, which looks an awful lot like Italy, whereas the Unseelie and Seelie courts are clearly set on the Iberian Peninsula. It is as if the author or her editor instructed some hapless minion to produce a fantasy map and the best they could come up with were the geographical shapes of the Western Mediterranean. Sadly, this sets the tone for the story that follows which has an air of being cobbled together from cookie-cutter components that act primarily as brief periods of respite between the sex scenes.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.