#ThrowbackThursday - Fearless

 

This was the lethal cocktail of Mercy Lécuyer: his baffling good humor, and his veiled fury. A wolf who chose to domesticate himself amongst Labradors, who pretended to be one, most of the time.

At its heart, Fearless is a gothic romance. I think that it's easy in today's book climate to assume that it's the vibe that makes a romance gothic. The crumbling mansion, the lace and velvet and flocked wallpaper all done in shades of black and deepest green. Ravens and cobwebs and rain-streaked windows. Remote locations, manors perched on hilltops, where the clouds sit low along the horizon and the trees are all gnarled and stunted from the altitude. Thia is certainly a vibe I love, and one that contributes to any good gothic tale...but a gothic romance is about the romance itself: specifically, about the "problematic" nature of it. It by definition can't be a normal and healthy one dressed in Halloween rags. No. A gothic romance is one in which the lovers are absolutely insane for one another; lovers who are doomed, but fight tragedy anyway. A girl with a heart as black and twisted as his; a boy with a wife, or a dead body, or a half-choked club girl in his attic. 

Since its publication in 2015, Fearless has been branded as having been enjoyed despite its violence and taboo romance. Dear reader, those things are the draw. That's what makes it gothic. Fearless is what if Wuthering Heights was set in the American South, and what if, impossibly, it had a happy ending? Because this Heathcliff and Cathy don't live in polite society, but in a society that embraces all the ways they're wrong and gives them right back tenfold. 

Fearless is the beginning of the Dartmoor Series, and eight years later, I'm writing book ten. I don't intend for it to be the end of Dartmoor, but I do want to it be a bookend for Fearless. A big, sprawling Southern epic; a chance to revisit all the gothic twists and wrongs of that first adventure. 

If you've not started the series, now's the time! If you've already read it, and the Legacy spinoffs, I'd reccomend a little brush-up of Fearless before Dartmoor X drops. The reading order is:

Fearless

Price of Angels

Half My Blood

The Skeleton King

Secondhand Smoke

Snow In Texas

Tastes Like Candy

Loverboy

American Hellhound 

Shaman 

Prodigal Son 

Lone Star 

Homecoming 

The Wild Charge 

Long Way Down 

Nothing More

The cypress trunks had crowded in around him, towering overhead, blotting out the sun, so that their trunks, dripping moss, had seemed the vaulted walls of some vast, echoing cathedral somewhere, the water over which he glided a sacrificial altar; he himself, of course, the offering. All his size irrelevant here. No man, no matter how big, or how bad, was but a speck upon this water. No more significant than the scurrying nutria shrieking beneath the ferns.

Get out. A silent, malevolent urging that had pressed at him, turning the humid air to something poisoned and choking. Because this hallowed, vaulted place was not his; this church of tree trunks belonged to Remy. To the man who’d avenged Remy’s death, but it was not for Alex. Only wild things walked here, monstrous and amorphous; anything lesser would have been rolled to bits by the gators, bones picked clean by the birds and the insects. 

From Dartmoor X, copyright © 2023