In brief...

I'm watching Howard the Duck. It's a lot worse than I remembered. It was that or Pee Wee's Big Adventure. It's 80's nostalgia night on cable apparently, because First Blood is on too.

I've been all caught up in the newest kerfuffle, rubbernecking as per usual. The comments are flying fast, I can barely keep up. At least some good has come out of this all. Of course by this I mean Mrs. Giggles' Blog Drama Drinking Game. Excellent! Too bad I don't drink no more.

I've been wanting to review Kiss Me Deadly, a novella by Shannon Stacey. I won a download by her at Sybil's, and she was nice enough to send me two!! KMD takes place at the isolated cabin of Bridget Sawyer. When a raven flies into her bedroom, she doesn't realize that it is a messenger of Death, and a sexy shapeshifter. Khail is stunned when she doesn't die, and intensely drawn to Bridget. The two of them want to explore their attraction to each other, but Bridget was marked to die, and the other ravens want to carry out their duties.

This one was okay. I liked the idea of Death as an unkindness of ravens (love that phrase), and the idea of these two stuck in the cabin while the ravens circle the house and tap on the windows, a la The Birds. But it suffers from the curse of the erotic romance novella: how to get two strangers fizz-nucking quickly and also to have feelings develop between them believably. There was definitely a touch of the bamp-chicka-wow-wow factor. A bird shows up in your house, turns into a naked, hot dude, and you're getting it on with him in a matter of hours? Hmmmm...The heroine had isolated herself in the mountains to escape an abusive ex-husband, and memories of a horrible childhood. This made it even rougher for me to believe she'd hop into bed with random werebird so quickly, no matter how undeniably drawn they were to each other. However, I liked Ms Stacey's style of writing, in particular the dialogue and characterization. There were some moments that did reveal a nice chemistry between the two leads. Although I'm giving this a C because I was not able to buy it completely, I am looking forward to reading her 72 Hours. I would imagine that without the length constraints, she will be able to flesh (heh) out the characters and relationship quite nicely.

Okay, now for a very short review of No Rest for the Wicked, by Kresley Cole. In fact, it is a not one, but two Haiku review. Here goes:

Sebastian, sad vamp,
Kaderin kills vampires dead.
Can she be his Bride?

Fast pace and great sex,
Talisman's Hie was cool,
Bitchy chick, hot guy.

For more on this series, see here. I like the array of creatures included. The Valkyries are still kind of annoying, but Cole does soulmates well. I give it a B. For a fun review, which does a great job of illustrating the book, check out the video review at Dear Author.