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Dream Warrior

Sherrilyn Kenyon

Published 2009         314 pages

Summary (from the book jacket)

They are the servants of the Furies – diligent, vigilant, fierce and inescapable. They are the right hand of justice – and no one stands before them. They are the Dolophoni…

Cratus, the son of Warcraft and Hate, spent eternity battling for the ancient gods who birthed him. He was death to any who crossed him. Until the day he laid down his arms and walked into self-imposed exile. Now an ancient enemy has been unleashed and our dreams are his chosen battlefield. And the only hope we have is that the one god who swears he will never fight.

As a Dream-Hunter, Delphine has spent eternity protecting mankind from the predators who prey on our unconscious state. But now that her allies have been turned, she knows in order to survive, the Dream-Hunters need a new leader. Someone who can train them to fight their new enemies. Cratus is her only hope. But she is a bitter reminder of why he chose to lay down his arms. Time is running out and if she can’t win him to her cause, mankind will be slaughtered and the world we know will soon cease to exist.

The Review

Dream Warrior is the third or fourth novel in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dream-Hunter series. The Dream Hunter books are a spin off from her popular Dark Hunter paranormal romance series, although with the surfeit of Dark Hunter characters and old daimon villains it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.

Dream Warrior is the story of Cratus (known as Jericho since Zeus stripped him of his godhood.) Not content with just stripping Jericho’s powers, Zeus has also spent the last 6,000 years making Jericho’s life a misery. The abuse the he has suffered over those years has left him bitter and a bit mad, and don’t forget his trust issues because obviously he’s been betrayed once and no one will ever be able to love him anyway…

Sound familiar? Any reader who has already read just a handful of the previous Dark Hunter or Dream Hunter books will recognise the formula. Fans of this series, and I include myself in their number, enjoy this formula so the repetition isn’t necessarily the problem – it’s the lack of fleshing out of the protagonists that causes Dream Warrior to fall flat.

The lack of character development meant that Delphine and Jericho’s romance failed to engage me on all but the most superficial level. I knew that the couple would get their HEA (that’s a given) but I wasn’t engaged with the characters enough to bother wanting it for them.

Another major problem with Dream Warrior is the amount of supporting characters that were just thrown into the story. Their presence didn’t seem to be an integral part of the plot they just seemed to be included when ever the author felt like it. Most of these characters were from previous novels, which may please existing fans since it gives then the chance to catch up with old favourite characters. BUT if you haven’t read all of the previous books most of the characters are going to be meaningless as the author only spends a minimum amount of time and effort fleshing them out. It’s assumed that readers will know their back-stories.

The story was confusing in places too - a glossary might have helped my understanding of Dream Warrior because important plot developments (vital to the understanding of this book) obviously happened somewhere in previous novels or novellas and are not explained in any meaningful way in this story.

Sherrilyn Kenyon’s trademark fast-paced action, pop culture references and snappy one-liners carry the story forward to its inevitable conclusion. The journey to the finish of book is a quick one due in part to the novel’s scant 314 pages, filled out with large type. It’s not a novella but it isn’t a normal full length book either…

Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dream-Hunter and Dark–Hunter novels have been of variable quality of late. With Acheron, she seemed to have regained the magic spark that makes her books so readable, yet with Dream Warrior that spark is noticeably absent – leaving it somewhat lacklustre in comparison to her earlier works.

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