Sealed with a kiss
“Lord of the Deep” by Dawn Thompson
I will never look at a seal the same way again.
The hero of “Lord of the Deep” is a selkie, which is basically a creature of the ocean, who can take the form of either a seal or a human. When it takes human form, it will go ashore and mate with mortals. Being blessed with incredible physical beauty (when the selkie is in human form I guess, coz I’d like to think that people aren’t turned on by seals and if they are, I really don’t want to know about it), mortal lovers are often enamoured of their selkie lovers and will do anything to keep them by their side. You can keep a selkie with you by possessing his sealskin so that he remains in human form, but once you return his skin to him, he will never look back and return to the sea.
In all the books I’ve read, the heroes are always associated with tigers or wolves or lions or hawks. A seal? Neh. I did like “A Well Favoured Gentleman” by Christina Dodd, which featured a selkie hero as well, but he spent all his time on land and the mythical part of him wasn’t fully explored. And when I say parts of the Lord of the Deep are explored, take that however you wish. In “Lord of the Deep,” you dive right into a world that is really quite interesting, although it has more than a few scenes which made me gurgle (and not in a particularly good way).
Simeon is the Lord of the Deep, which means he is the ruler of the ocean. I find that quite hot, because think a good looking and young Triton, and not the white-bearded father of Ariel the Little Mermaid, with nipples the size of quarters (Triton, not Ariel) There are also lords of the Forest and Air (more on that later). Megaleen is to become a priestess of the shamans, but she’s really quite a frisky little thing, and one night she spies on Simeon as he shakes his bon bon with his consort on the beach. Cooling off in the sea after that, Simeon suddenly appears and drags her under the waves with him, breathing air into her so that she can breathe underwater.
Simeon and Meg get up to lots of aquarobics. Lots of it. They swim from one coral to another, have sex, swim to another coral, have sex. All would be peachy for them, except for the fact that Meg being human, cannot stay underwater indefinitely. Especially since Simeon’s harem (who he refers to as the “sea cows”) try to drown Meg, jealous of Simeon’s feelings for her. Simeon returns Meg to land, promising to return for her the next night and bring her to place where they can be happy and alone and frisky like sea rabbits forever. But before the lovers can be reunited, Meg is sold to the shamans.
This is when it starts to get weird. Because you know, it was pretty strange to begin with, what with a selkie lover and all, but the shamans have rather odd practices. Whilst escaping from the shamans, Meg stumbles into the forest and at her wits’ end, pleads for the help of the tree spirit, which then proceeds to, ahem, make her acquaintance. In the form of a tree. Being readers of this blog, you are all highly intelligent beings, and hence don’t need me to draw a picture for you (because I coud, but then you’d have to make sure you didn’t leave it around for kiddies to find). Suffice to say, I have discovered many things about the uses of roots that I never knew, and could have gone through my life happily not knowing. No more ginseng for La Lola. But the shaman is on Meg’s trail, and just as she’s about to fall into his nefarious clutches, she’s rescued by Gideon, Lord of the Air, who has huge angel wings, and gets pretty frisky when said wings are touched.
Well then.
Simeon and Meg are reunited briefly, and they celebrate their union by having lots and lots of heated sex underwater. As if the ocean isn’t polluted enough! I am going to be so careful not to drink any seawater the next time I go snorkeling.
There’s also a sea witch who has the hots for both Simeon and his bastard half-brother, Vega. Add in a scene where she disguises herself and tries to come on to Vega and he rejects her? She then puts a sea anemone onto his trident. Uh huh. Trident. And yet, he doesn’t get stung, and on the contrary, is a happy, happy selkie. And the sea anemone is happy too, because it gets nourished with, ahem, sea salt. A truly astonishing book, this.
There’s also this little question of immortality, because Meg is mortal. She decides to leave Simeon but before she can tell him this, she gets abducted by the shaman. While in captivity, the shaman shows Meg a phallus, which he says is an exact replica of Simeon’s, because Simeon posed for it eons ago. And just before she escapes, Meg grabs the phallus because she figures that if she can’t have the man she loves, she’ll have the next best thing. Err… quite. Simeon and Meg finally reunite and when he finds out that Meg’s been using his mini me, he gets jealous, as he puts it, of his own effigy. Oookay then.
And check out the cover of the book! Not something you can read in public, unless you hang out in some dodgy areas. This book is not for the faint of heart. Luckily for me, I am made of sterner stuff. Except I’m going to be a bit leery of getting close to an aquarium for a while. And not to mention keeping my distance from trees.
Wendy said,
October 22, 2007 @ 3:03 pm
I don’t think my stuff will ever be that stern.
cutepolishgirl68 said,
October 22, 2007 @ 7:49 pm
You know this all started with the wonderful vampires, then the w-wolves, now they have fairies, seals, gargoyles (Okay gargoyles I can get into), but come on, what’s next fungus plants??? And how come the old fashioned well endowed manroot is no longer enough to satisfy, that we now need 2 or more appendages (not to mention of the studded variety)….is it just me that some of these authors are just too far out of reality. I never really got into sci-fi/fantasy books, and I do not like my romance books heading in that direction!!!! When I watched Star Trek as a kid, I liked Captain Kirk, not the tribbles that multiplied in the cupboards.
Digigirl said,
October 22, 2007 @ 10:24 pm
Sounds like a true adventure in, um…. well, a true adventure!
As always, regardless of the book itself, your review is highly entertaining!
La Lola said,
October 24, 2007 @ 11:30 am
I’ve always been a bit on the experimental side I must admit (file this under stuff you’d rather not know about me) but some of this is intergalactic weird. And I’ve found myself giving sidelong suspicious glances at the shrubbery, lest it has designs on me that I’m not willing to entertain.