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Dream Chaser

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Published 2008           359 pages

Summary (from the book jacket)

Condemned by the gods to live out his existence without emotions, Xypher chose the pursuit of sensations, to feel again in the dreams of humans, only to find himself condemned to death. But he is given one last chance at a reprieve. Made human for a month, he must redeem himself within that time or Hades will return him to Tartarus and his torture.

Simone Dubois is a coroner who isn't scared by much, especially since she's psychic and can see and hear the people she's working on. When they wheel in another victim, she doesn't think much about it, until he gets up from her table and starts to leave.

Xypher doesn't have time to spend with this human woman and her questions. But it's not long before mysterious attempts on Simone's life force Xypher to stand between the woman who is beginning to touch the heart he thought had died a long time ago and the danger that is threatening her life.

The Review

Dream Chaser is the third novel in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dream-Hunter series which is in turn a spin off from her popular Dark-Hunter novels.  Strangely, the events of Dream Chaser are a continuation of a story line that was started in Devil May Cry, the eleventh book in the Dark-Hunter series.  To me, it seems that the author has assumed that readers will have read (and will want to read) books in both series.  If that is the case, why market them as two separate series?

Aside from the propagation of plot lines and characters from the Dark-Hunter series ending up in the Dream-Hunter novels, the Dream-Hunter books have other problems.  They just aren’t as good as long-time fans of Sherrilyn Kenyon have come to expect. 

Oddly, the books have every thing that vampire/fantasy romance fans could ask.  While they don’t have vampires in the traditional sense of the word they have plenty of blood drinking demons which are almost as good.  They have daimons, were-hunters, Greek gods/goddesses, hunky heroes and Acheron - surely a winning recipe for Sherrilyn Kenyon if there ever was one - but somehow these books lack the special spark that raised this author’s earlier works a head and shoulders above her competition.

Dream Chaser seemed particularly difficult to get into.  I picked the book up, I put it down and I repeated that action numerous times – it wasn’t until the last 150 pages that the book actually held my full attention.  The characters were not so much characters as caricatures.  Evil characters were unrelentingly evil and good characters were unrelentingly good.  Even Jaden, a being made of primal power and the only vaguely morally ambiguous character in the whole story, gives the impression that he is probably only hiding his noble goodness under his misunderstood exterior.

For a romance there wasn’t too much relationship development between the lead characters Xypher and Simone either.  They were handcuffed together by chance but because he was attractive and she was nice they fell in love.  I’m sure that there should be more to death defying love and romance than that.

Overall for Dream Chaser I would say that the plot line was a winner but that the author’s rendering of the characters was very poor.  The writing feels rushed and as a result the story has holes in it large enough to drive a bus through.  Lending more weight to my theory that this story was rushed, this book and other recent offerings are getting shorter in their word count too.  My copy of Dream Chaser stretched to 359 pages but stretch is the operative word in this sentence since the print is large and has plenty of line space to spread it out.

For many years now I’ve been a big fan of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s work.  I was won over by some of the earliest books in the Dark-Hunter series.  Night Embrace, Dance With The Devil and Kiss of The Night are all books that I fondly remember for being unable to put them down after turning the first few pages.  Unfortunately Dream Chaser just doesn’t make that grade, its average for paranormal romance in general but below the high standard that this author has achieved in the past.

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