'Hellfire' (The Demonslayers Book 2) #PNR by Kate Douglas

HellFire by Kate Douglas

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You can read my review of the first book in the series, DemonFire, here.

Kate Douglas had me hooked the first time I read Wolf Tales, to be honest, and I rarely dislike any of her work. We're friends on Facebook. She seems to be a genuinely nice person who adores her grandkids.

I liked this novel especially because it has a realistically strong heroine who happens to be a gorgeous women of color, specifically an African-American heroine. I love that Douglas, who is a Caucasian U.S. author, doesn't feel the need to restrict her heroes and heroines to one skin color.

These novels in the DemonSlayers series have a lot of fun paranormal elements and a fast pace that makes them exciting, but the main event is still the love story. Ginny and Alton make a great couple. They're both stubborn, he's a little arrogant, and they aggravate each other just enough to build the sexual tension.

If this were a movie, I would cast Lee Pace to play him - we know he looks great as a stately blond because we've seen him in The Hobbit - and True Blood's Rutina Wesley to play Ginny.

I purchased this book with my own funds solely for my enjoyment and was not obligated in any way to review it. I bought my copy from Better World Books. The used paperback appears to have begun its life as a library book, judging by the Winnipeg Public Library sticker on the front. Due to an unfortunate incident involving a cup of coffee, mine copy is, sadly, bound for the recycling bin.

Lost Lemuria

But since we've mentioned the paranormal elements, let's talk about the lost continent of Lemuria. Douglas writes in her prologue:

"Thousands of years ago, the continent of Lemuria disappeared beneath the sea, much in the same manner of the continent of Atlantis. However, unlike the Atlanteans, Lemurians are not considered lost--legend says they relocated their entire society to a sanctuary deep within the dormant volcano known as Mount Shasta in the rugged mountains of North California.

"Much has been written about these tall and graceful beings of their great intelligence and beauty, their advanced technology and supernatural abilities, but no actual proof of their existence has ever been discovered."

Douglas is writing fiction, of course, but she isn't entirely making up the story of the Lemurians. She's incorporating some folklore, as skillful fantasy writers will often do. But Lemuria is also interesting for another reason, because it started out as a scientific theory.

If we look at Wikipedia, it says:

"Lemuria is the name of a hypothetical 'lost land' variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The concept's 19th-century origins lie in attempts to account for discontinuities in biogeography; however, the concept of Lemuria has been rendered obsolete by modern theories of plate tectonics. Although sunken continents do exist – like Zealandia in the Pacific as well as Mauritia and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean – there is no known geological formation under the Indian or Pacific Oceans that corresponds to the hypothetical Lemuria.

"Though Lemuria is no longer considered a valid scientific hypothesis, it has been adopted by writers involved in the occult, as well as some Tamil writers of India. Accounts of Lemuria differ, but all share a common belief that a continent existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of a geological, often cataclysmic, change, such as pole shift."

Lemurs. Public domain image by Adrian Pingstone

The name "Lemuria" came from an 1864 paper by English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater. In attempting to explain why fossils from lemurs and related primate species are found in Madagascar and India but not in Africa or the Middle East, Sclater proposed a lost continent under the sea. He named it Lemuria after the lemur fossils. Sunken continents and lost "land bridges" were often theorized to explain the distribution of land animals separated by bodies of water before the theory of continental drift became widely accepted.

So that's the science part. Then, Wikipedia tells us, the legend of Lemuria fell into the hands of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The first time I ever remember reading her name was in The Magical Worlds of Harry Potter by David Colbert. In the chapter called "Who Really Wrote the Book on Divination?" It reminds us that one of Harry's textbooks at Hogwarts is Unfogging the Future by Cassandra Vablatsky. The Cassandra part, Colbert informs readers, comes from Greek myth. He then writes, "Cassandra Vablatsky's last name is no doubt taken from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), a founder of the Theosophical Society, whose aims include 'investigating unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity' - in other words, magic."

Blavatsky, born in Russia, traveled widely as a young woman, including visits to Tibet and India, where she learned about Buddhism. She founded the Theosophical Society with two others in 1875, and from 1879 to 1888 she was the editor of a magazine called The Theosophist. She also wrote several popular books, including Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, The Key to Philosophy, and The Voice of the Silence.

Helena Blavatsky is variously credited and blamed for being one of the forerunners of the New Age movement, and her theories about the "seven root races" are blamed for influencing the so-called Aryan racism that in turn influenced Adolph Hitler/Nazism. She's been accused of being a devil worshiper or, at the very least, a modern Gnostic, because she wrote in The Secret Doctrine that the "serpent of Genesis" or Lucifer was not the representative of evil, but rather of enlightenment. She has also been accused of being a fraudulent medium who deceived people. So, although Colbert's mention of her is neutral, she's rather detested in some schools of thought.

Helena Blavatsky

It's the "seven root races" theory that includes the ancient Lemurians. Wikipedia tells us, "Within Blavatsky's complex cosmology, which includes seven 'Root Races,' the 'Third Root Race' occupied Lemuria. She describes them as about 7 feet (2.1 m) tall, sexually hermaphroditic, egg-laying, mentally undeveloped and spiritually more pure than the following 'Root Races.' Before the coming of the Lemurians, the second 'Root Race' is said to have dwelled in Hyperborea. After the subsequent creation of mammals, Mme Blavatsky revealed to her readers, some Lemurians turned to bestiality. The gods, aghast at the behavior of these 'mindless' men, sank Lemuria into the ocean and created a 'Fourth Root Race' – endowed with intellect – on Atlantis."

Wikipedia also has an entry on Lemuria in popular culture. From it, we learn that the hypothetical continent appears in, among other places:

- H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Haunter of the Dark"
- Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice
- In Marvel Comics, Lemuria is home to Prince Namor's nemesis, Princess Llyra
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which features a ship called the Lemurian Star)
- Dark Horse Comics' Hellboy series

So there you go: from serious scientific theory (subsequently discarded) to the philosophy of Helena Blavatsky and then into popular culture. Frederick Spencer Oliver's 1894 book (alleged to be a true story dictated to Oliver through channeling) A Dweller on Two Planets introduced the idea that white-robed Lemurians dwell in Mount Shasta.

Nine Hells

In HellFire, Alton's favorite curse is "nine hells." Does the Abyss from which Dax originally came have nine different layers? If so, it recalls the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno: Limbo (the virtuous Pagans who lived without knowledge of Jesus Christ), Lust (where the lustful and adulterous are blown around by severe winds), Gluttony (where the gluttonous are forced to lie down in freezing-cold slush), Greed (where the greedy spend their time jousting with enormous weights), Anger (where your punishment might be either constant fighting or endless drowning in the River Styx, depending on whether you were wrathful or sullen), Heresy (where the heretics lie in flaming graves), Violence (where the violent are boiled in a river of blood, torn apart by dogs, picked at by harpies, or wandering in a desert where fire rains from the sky, depending on their crimes), Fraud (where the fraudulent are sunk into stone ditches - that one actually doesn't sound all that bad), and Treachery (where the treacherous are frozen in a lake of ice).

Creative Commons image

Nine is also a favorite number in Norse mythology, which imagines there are nine home-worlds through which the World Tree Yggrasil grows. Sources disagree on the identities of the nine worlds, but they are often said to include Midgard (the world of human beings), Asgard (the world of the As, one class of Norse gods), Vanaheim (the world of the Vanir, another class of Norse gods), Jotunheim or Utgard (the frost giant home world), Alfheim (the elf world), and Hel (the underworld, where the dead go). But that's only six.

Separate from Alfheim is the home of the Dvergar, dwarves or "black elves." (This becomes an important plot point in the second Thor movie, subtitled The Dark World.) Their home-world is sometimes called Svartalfheim. That makes seven home-worlds for seven kinds of beings.

The other worlds are sometimes listed as Niflheimr (primordial ice that existed before creation) and Muspellheimr (primordial fire that existed before creation). In some literary works, however, Niflheim and Hel are used interchangeably. Some separate the land of the dwarves, called Nidavellir, from the land of the dark elves, although "dwarves" and "dark elves" seem to be used interchangeably. See, for example, Encyclopedia Mythica.

But Kate Douglas may not have been thinking of Norse myth, or even Dante, at all. Maybe she just thought "nine hells" sounded like an impressive number of hells.

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What I'm Reading Next

Judging by the cover, Nalini Singh's third book in the Psy-Changeling series of paranormal romances takes place in Jotunheim. 

Of Men, Nymphs, Satyrs, Incubi, and the God of Shepherds

First, an excerpt from Beltane by Erin O'Riordan:

"Orlando dreamed of the shaded wood, of a forest so lush and thick with springtime foliage, the sunlight came in indistinct and hazy. In this dream, he closed his eyes, his feet firmly planted on a grassy hillock strewn with wildflowers. He breathed in their scent, breathing in too the scent of the still, green lake that lapped at the foot of the hillock. A memory of Slovenia, perhaps. Then, strangely, he heard laughter. Little giggles from the shrubs. Women. He opened his eyes, in this dream, and saw them all around him, surrounding him. They wore gauzy gowns that covered little. Zen was there. Zen, the beautiful stranger, with her pale-blonde hair loose and falling down her back, her bright blue eyes full of mischief. She beckoned him down the hillock, toward the water.

"Orlando shook his head. He looked around at all the faces of the women. They were beautiful, all of them, the blondes and the redheads and the bronze-skinned women with the curling black hair. But something about them saddened him. There was something about them not quite natural, not quite real. Something about them was not to be trusted. They circled around him, dancing, their voices rising to the forest canopy with high, ringing laughter.

"At last he found Catherine’s face among them. Catherine, the most beautiful woman of them all. She wasn’t laughing, only smiling the reassuring smile that told him she loved him and everything was going to be all right. At the lake’s edge, Zen splashed in frustration. Zen stuck out her bottom lip and pouted. Orlando ignored her, holding out his arms toward Catherine. If he could only reach her, he thought, everything would be all right. If he could only reach her—but she seemed to slip further and further from his grasp, until he lost sight of her among the women. He thought he faintly glimpsed her blonde hair disappearing into the darkness of the woods.

"He felt the water lap over his foot, and thought Zen had splashed him. Instead, he looked down and saw his foot—no longer his foot, but a goat’s hoof where his funky red-and-brown suede shoe had been before—was sinking into the lake. Zen had a hold of his arm now. She was dragging him down the hillock and into the lake. He tried to steady himself, tried to grasp at the grasses and flowers as if they would hold him. But Zen’s strength was much greater than he’d ever imagined. He was in the lake up to the waist now, and she was still pulling. A strange song rang through the woods."

The inspiration for Orlando's dream comes from this painting, Nymphs and a Satyr by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. (The image is in the public domain.)

The nymphs in this painting appear to be attacking the satyr rather violently. They seem intent upon dragging him into the water, even though satyrs can't breathe underwater. It's kinda like the W.B. Yeats poem "The Mermaid."

Bouguereau may have had some issues with paranormal women.

Jackie Kessler may have some issues with paranormal men.

You may recall from my review of DemonFire that the paranormal romance I'm currently reading is Hotter Than Hell by Jackie Kessler. It's an appropriate title for a week with temperatures in the mid-90s Fahrenheit.

I've now read Part I, which takes me to approximately the middle of the book. (I haven't read much this week.) When I bring up Kessler's "issues" (and I'm being facetious here), I'm referring to the character Pan.

The hero of the novel is a supporting character from the previous two books, Daun. Daun is short for Daunuan, pronounced "Don Juan." Yep, he's that Don Juan, the one who inspired Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. Daun is an incubus. He seduces evil mortal women, killing them in the process and taking their souls to hell. In this book, he's up for an infernal promotion if he can seduce a woman who isn't evil - usually she'd be completely off-limits to his kind. Her name is Virginia, and as of Part 1, her only direct interaction with Daun has been throwing a drink in his ridiculously handsome false mortal face.

I took this picture of the Don Juan monument in Sevilla, Spain

In Kessler's telling, the demons in hell are grouped by the sins they embody. Incubi and succubi, naturally, belong to the kingdom of Lust, and their king is Pan. Daun's natural form is a satyr, like Pan, although Pan is more goatish, with the characteristic pupils of goat eyes.

Daun is arrogant, smarmy, completely sex-obsessed and crude, but Kessler still portrays him in this series as sympathetic to a certain extent. Pan is the antagonist in that he forces Daun into the "seduce Virginia" challenge, which is the protagonist's obstacle or struggle in this plotline. It's not necessary as a literary device to make the antagonist utterly unsympathetic, but in this case, Pan is utterly unsympathetic. Pan is nothing more than a goat-legged rapist. Thus far, his victims have included a flock of female cherubim and an ancient Greek siren.

To be clear, Daun is a seducer, but he always obtains consent before sex. That the women die is simply the result of their being evil and bound for hell anyway. They're doomed before Daun gets there, although he is the vessel of their destruction.

Paranormal authors are free to use mythological figures however they choose, shaping them into their own distinct characters. I don't have a problem with that. In Cara Lockwood's Can't Teach an Old Demon New Tricks, Pan was a low-level demon of sloth, almost too lazy to even be evil.

If you look in Edith Hamilton's Mythology or Bulfinch's Mythology, you won't learn very much about the classical Pan. These sources - standard 20th-century reference materials on the Greco-Roman myths - agree Pan was a fairly minor agricultural god, worshiped by shepherds and the rural people, whose homes were near his sacred outdoor places. The Lupercalia may have been dedicated to Pan.

The most detailed myth about him involves a musical competition between Pan and Apollo, judged by King Midas. Midas declared Pan the winner, and an indignant Apollo cursed Midas with donkey ears. Pan was considered a son of Hermes.

However, Pan has taken on a whole new role in modern NeoPagan and Wiccan practice. To many witches, Wiccans and NeoPagans, Pan is The Horned God, the representation of the Divine Masculine. He's not the only possible representation of the Horned One or the Wild God of the Wood. The Green Man is one of his manifestations, as is Cernunnos, as is Shiva, as is Lugh, and many more.

What is offensive to some practitioners of the Craft is superimposing ideas of the Christian devil onto the non-evil NeoPagan/Wiccan Pan. As we discussed in the review of The Devil on Lammas Night, not all witches, Wiccans, and NeoPagans believe in and/or worship a devil in the Christian sense.

Caroline Tully, in a blog post titled "Calling the Great God Pan: The Horned God in Witchcraft Today," describes the Horned God as "strong but not violent, playful but deep, sexual but not sleazy, loving without being possessive, and emotional without fearing disintegration." The Horned God offers an image of divine masculinity that opposes the masculinity of Western patriarchy, which can be attractive and healing for male and female Craft practitioners alike.

You can read a very detailed paper about Pan, his ancient Egyptian counterpart Min, and the confusion between Pan and the devil at White Dragon.

I'm offering this not as a criticism of Jackie Kessler's writing, but simply as a complementary perspective. I'm just saying this: Pan isn't always the bad guy.

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#ParanormalRomance #BookReview: DemonFire by Kate Douglas

DemonFire is the first book in Kate Douglas's 4-part DemonSlayers series. Based on the series name, you might expect the heroine, Eddy Marks, to be the tattooed, leather-jacketed, tough-as-nails heroine typical of urban fantasy. Actually, she's a reporter in a small northern California town near Mount Shasta. Her life is pretty normal, expect for the fact that her father, Ed, believes in a lost continent of people who live not under the ocean like the Atlantians, but inside the mountain.

In accordance with The Legend of Chekhov*, which states, "When the heroes of a story are told a legend, myth, or fairy tale, you can almost guarantee that the story is true and that the heroes will have to deal with it at some point," the Lemurians who live in Mount Shasta are real. When you think of the Lemurians, think of the elves from the Lord of the Rings books/movies. They're a tall, placid, beautiful people with long, flowing hair and are immortal. 

Although the Lemurian crown prince, Alton, is a major character in this novel, he is not the hero. The hero is Dax, a fallen demon (not a fallen angel, but a born-demon who has rejected The Abyss to become good) who must prevent the escape of the other, much more malevolent demons, which threatens not only the earth but also the paradise dimension, Eden. Dax is able to take on human form for seven days only, and borrows the body of a young American man killed in France in World War II. 

Although they know they can only have one week together, Eddy and Dax are destined to fall in love. 

Note the unflattering haircut on the female cover model. It looks like she had a cute pixie cut, and then someone badly Photoshopped longer hair in behind her head.

I enjoyed the "we only have one week together" twist on the traditional paranormal romance; it helped make this novel more suspenseful. The final chapter is especially suspenseful. It was one of those books that had me flipping to see how many pages were left to see if the story could be wrapped up before the pages ran out. 

Thus far, the DemonSlayer series is not nearly as sexually charged as Kate Douglas's ultra-erotic Wolf Tales series, although this book is an erotic romance.  Eddy and Dax are reluctant to have sex at first because their impending separation will be so painful, but their bodies are drawn to each other. A common theme in many of Kate Douglas's works that I've read is the healing power of love - and, yes, of sex as well - and this book is no exception. It's a nice twist that Dax has never been in a human body before and is really discovering physical pleasure for the first time, which makes for some really hot and emotionally charged sex scenes. I did enjoy those parts of the book. 

The next book in the series promises to introduce a potential romance for Alton, with Eddy's friend who's a 9-1-1 dispatcher. 

I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. 

The Folklore: Dax's true, demon form is sometimes a six-limbed, dragon-like creature, sometimes a snake-like creature, and sometimes a black mist. His human body has a living tattoo of a snake in which his demon powers are stored. The tattoo seems to be alive independent of Dax, and sometimes it tries to attack him. Eddy has the power to calm and soothe it. 

Dax has as his earthly companion Willow, a name that stands for Will O' The Wisp. Also called a sprite, she takes the form of a small blonde woman with blue wings who sparkles with blue energy. Her job is to pull energy out of her surroundings to funnel to Dax. With the energy Willow provides, Dax is able to shoot fire and ice from his human hands, an ability he'd normally have in his demon form. 

The will o' the wisp is a fascinating feature of Northern European and other world folklore. (Rural Argentinians have a strong folkloric tradition of them - they're called Luz Mala in Spanish - as do aboriginal Australians.) You can read quite a bit about it on Wikipedia. That encyclopedia entry associates the will o' the wisp with the hinkypunk of English legend, which of course we all know from the Harry Potter series. Professor Lupin taught Harry and his classmates to battle hinkypunks - which Rowling describes as having the appearance of smoke - in their third-year Defense Against the Dark Arts class. 

The appearance of "ghost lights" or will o' the wisps in graveyards and marshlands is explained scientifically by photon emissions produced from the oxidation of methane and other gases produced by decaying organic materials. The Enlightenment-era physicist Alessandro Volta, for whom electrical volts are named, was among the first scientists to study the phenomenon. 


Literary Aside: Volta is credited with discovering methane. As an interesting literary aside, Volta was a vocal opponent of anatomist Luigi Galvani's theory that electricity was what made living things alive. Galvani could show experimentally, using a rudimentary battery cell, that electricity could cause muscular contractions in dead frogs. His experiments are some of what inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein - sometimes considered the first science fiction novel. But I digress. If you want to know more, you could read An Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Age of Enlightenment by Patricia Fara.

What I'm Reading Next: The third book in Jackie Kessler's Hell on Earth series, Hotter Than Hell. 

Disclosure: I purchased DemonFire with my own funds - I believe I bought it several years ago while Borders was still in business. I was not compensated for this review in any way, shape or form. It represents my own honest opinion. 

*You can thank, or blame, Jinni for introducing me to TVTropes.org. 

What I'm Reading and Watching ~ Mini Update

Construction-related phone company issues in my neighborhood have temporarily taken down my wifi, but while I'm able to connect I thought I'd check in with a short post about what I'm reading and a movie I saw over the weekend.

At book spot #1 (the comfy spot on the couch), I just finished:

Review here. 

Taking its place on the couch will be:

That's my fun paranormal romance. (I hope it's fun. It should be - I've never read a bad Kate Douglas.) In reading spot #2, I have my Serious Literature:

I'm about 100 pages into the sequel to Shanghai Girls, a book that my grandmother, mother and I all read. When I finish it, I plan to read the last book I purchased at Barnes and Noble, which was Divergent by Veronica Roth. (Emma at Bubblymuppet recently read Divergent. And so did A Country Girl's World.)

For review, I'm reading this e-book on my laptop:

This is a new(ish - it took me about a year to get around to reading it) series from the author of Ivan and Marya. When I finish that, I'll read Miss Underworld by Racquel Kechagias, an Australian author, for review. 

The movie I saw on Saturday was Silver Linings Playbook. I liked it. I liked Tiffani; when she said, "There will always be a part of me that is dirty and sloppy, but I like that, just like all the other parts of myself," I knew she was a character I could identify with. The whole things was very well-acted, and Jennifer Lawrence is especially talented. It's nice to see her in roles other than Katniss Everdeen (although of course I love Katniss). 

But I am getting a little embarrassed at the number of book-based movies I'm seeing without having read the book first. I think I would like this as a book, though. I might read it some day. I read The Prestige after seeing the movie, and if anything I was glad I'd seen the movie first. 

I don't think I'm going to read the Castor Chronicles series, but I do plan to see the Beautiful Creatures movie in the near future.