Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole

Someone with talent spent money on the cover of this novel. For a paranormal it looks classy.

In the prologue the hero mutilates himself (he bites his leg off) and so spends the whole of the rest of the novel hobbling about with one leg shorter than the other. This wouldn’t matter if he had an intellectual role but seeing how one of his main life’s ambitions is to kill his mortal enemy this gimp places him at a big disadvantage.

Well, I found the prologue bloodcurlingly gory and dreaded the rest of the novel carrying on in the same vein. (I do not read horror novels nor do I watch horror films) No worries about that. Essentially this story is about the hero’s efforts to bed an easy-going golden-haired (virginal)bimbo.

If I were a 16-year old I probably would have loved this novel. But I am not and in the end I hated the story for exactly the same reasons that I would have liked it all those years ago.

The werewolf hero is being held in chains in the catacombs under Paris where he’s been seriously tortured for over a hundred years. He senses the approach of his ‘mate, who is the woman he is destined to spend the rest of his life with, frees himself and goes to meet her. The half-vampire heroine is that ‘mate.’ At no time during the course of this story does the heroine express any feelings of love towards the hero. In fact she spends a lot of her time trying to justify to herself the fact that she’s allows a complete stranger to violently woo her. Let’s put it like this. She does not not like him. And that’s the strongest she feels for him as far as I could tell.

The hero’s home is in Scotland so he decides to take his beloved there…by car. So most of the first half of the novel is essentially a travelogue from Paris to Scotland via Shrewsbury of all places. Well you’d think the journey would be an opportunity for some character development or the couple getting to know each other better. Not a bit of it. The heroine spends most of the journey with her MP3 phones attached firmly to her ears.

And we get the same graphically hot romance scene replayed over and over again. He jumps on her for sex. She tolerates it for a while then says a big ‘NO.’ He stops. We travel a little and the same thing happens again. By page 100 I felt like I had been the victim of that notorious Nigerian scam. I am telling you. Nothing happens. They get to Scotland, she meets his extended werewolf family, she does internet shopping because she’s homesick and he takes every opportunity to jump her bones. I was B.O.R.E.D.

And what’s more it looked like the heroine was never going to say yes mainly because the author had given her no reason to do so. It’s not that the heroine hated the hero because she didn’t. In true bimbo style she just couldn’t be bothered.

Well thank god for editors. Around page 250 at last the couple get it together. The hero becomes a little more assertive because it’s a full moon and for the same reason the heroine takes on the characteristics of a werewolf and turns into a bitch in heat. (It made no sense because she wasn’t even vaguely a werewolf) Admittedly it’s a very hot chapter. But after that THERE IS HARDLY ANY MORE ROMANTIC SCENES BETWEEN THE MAIN COUPLE. As far as I am concerned that shows up the author as totally useless. That’s what romance writers used to do in the 70s.

What happens next is a load of unbelievable tosh. The heroine was in Paris because she was looking for her vampire father who she had never known. The father turns out to be the same vampire that originally imprisoned and tortured the hero and who the hero has sworn to kill. This father is supposed to be ‘the most evil and strongest’ vampire on the earth. After having mated with the hero, the heroine decides the hero is too much of a weak pussy to come out alive from any encounter with her vampire father. So she goes off to kill the vampire father in his stead. That’s right. For no reason other than she’s had sex with the hero our bimbo decides to kill the ‘strongest and most evil’ vampire around. And the most ridiculous thing of all is that the vampire dad, after a token wounding of the heroine, essentially gives up the fight and allows himself to be killed.

There are some good bits to the novel. For instance, both the hero and the heroine have claws. I liked that. And the hero does what vampires in other novels do…he bites off the heroine’s clothes. There’s this quite funny scene where the hero tries to get the heroine drunk so he can have sex with her. But he does it very sneakily. HE drinks alcohol so that when she drinks his blood she gets drunk. It doesn’t work and in revenge when she (the virgin) is giving him some oral, she bites his dick so that he passes out while she tries to escape. I’ve never come across that before. And tbh both the hero and heroine are very likeable people.

The bad bits. Sorry. His Scottish burr made him sound like a hick. Accents and dialects are perfectly acceptable when you can hear them but to see them written on the page is painful. The hero does a lot of talk. About how he’s protected his castle with strong magic spells and then both the heroine’s foster aunts and evil vampires break in successfully. About how his big vengeance mission in life is to kill the evil vampire King and then he lets his bimbo gf do it. But even the vampire King turned out to be not a king but a clan leader.Terrible consistency error. Swords are used in this novel…not guns. I found that pussy. A total waste of time. And basically it was a mistake to make the hero into a werewolf because as the author clearly demonstrates, in the paranormal world the werewolves are near the bottom of the social and magical skills scale.

A lot of the novel is used to set up characters for sequels but tbh that’s par for the course for the genre. I read this book once only and basically regretted spending my money on it.

Genre; paranormal romance; movie rating 18; explicit sex, violence, use of knives, profanities, murder.