A hunter in a small village, he has been trying to become an adventurer for years now. He goes out, sees the world, fights the monsters, gets the gold, and...always ends up back home. Something's missing, but he has never been able to determine what.
Until one day he stumbles across a wounded demoness, fleeing her realm of blood and fire, and a life of pain and endless conflict. Agreeing to help her, John gets to know Yelena the Demoness, and sparks quickly fly.
But can a human and a demoness have a relationship in a world that hates demons?
I am Misty Vixen (not my real name obviously), and I imagine that if you’re reading this, you want to know a bit more about me.
In the beginning (late 2014), I was an erotica author. I wrote about sex, specifically about human men banging hot inhuman women. Monster girls, alien ladies, paranormal babes. It was a lot of fun, but as the years went on, I realized that I was actually striving to be a harem author. This didn’t truly occur to me until late 2019-early 2020. Once the realization fully hit, I began doing research on what it meant to be a harem author. I’m kind of a slow learner, so it’s taken me a bit to figure it all out.
That being said, I’m now a harem author!
Just about everything I write nowadays is harem fiction: one man in loving, romantic, highly sexual relationships with several women. Nowadays, I tend to write more human on human stuff, but I still have a lot of non-human ladies in mind for the future, so if that’s your thing then stick around.
I’d say beyond writing harems, I tend to have themes that I always explore in my fiction, and they encompass things like trust, communication, respect, honesty, dealing with emotional problems in a mature way…basically I like writing about functional and healthy relationships. Not every relationship is perfect, but I don’t really do drama unless the story actually calls for it. In total honesty, I hate drama. I hate people lying to each other and I hate needless rom-com BS plots that could have been solved by two characters having a two minute conversation.
There is a lot to dive into here. This is an omnibus of five mainline stories, with a scattering of short stories interspersed between entries.
First things first, I don’t think I’m really the target audience for this collection. I’ll explain why. The overarching narrative revolves around John and Yelena. John is a human, and Yelena is a female demon, or “Demoness.” They meet and fall in love in the opening chapters of book 1, and from then on embark on a mixture of escapades and sexcapades throughout the rest of the omnibus.
On paper, this would appeal to me. However, there are a few caveats worth noting. Rather than doing a strict “pro” and “con” comparison, I think it’s better to take a slightly more scattergun approach, since many of my gripes with this book are highly subjective.
Each story is more or less self-contained. I didn’t mind this approach, as it makes it easy to take a break and dive back in.
The balance of plot to smut is around 50/50, which is wayyy too much smut for me. Personally, I like at most 2–3% of the total word count to be devoted to it. To be fair, the book is listed as smut/erotica rather than fantasy, but I didn’t check that before buying so that’s on me, and I haven’t factored it into my rating.
The plots themselves are pretty low-stakes at first. The first three books hardly rise above slice-of-life drama, though things ramp up in books 4 and 5. In Demoness 5 especially, the plot makes up perhaps 80% of the word count, which is much closer to what I prefer.
John and Yelena also have an open relationship, which is something I explicitly dislike. To the author’s credit, there’s a clear warning on page 1 about this, so again I don’t think it’s fair to adjust my rating on that basis. Still, it became immediately obvious that I wouldn’t enjoy that aspect of the series... and I never did.
Another problem is the repetitiveness. Mild spoiler warning: This quickly became predictable, and by the end of book 2 I could more or less guess how any new character interaction would play out.
The writing itself, in terms of grammar, spelling, prose, and dialogue, is strong. No issues there.
There is, however, a lot of social commentary that I didn’t particularly care for. It often came across as heavy-handed, and leaned almost entirely on telling rather than showing. That said, this element eased off as the series progressed, and by book 5 it was basically absent. I suspect the author recognised that fantasy interspecies erotica isn’t the best vehicle for political signalling, which was a welcome shift.
Ultimately, on a pure enjoyment level, I’d give this maybe a 2.5 out of 5. But I also think that’s unfair, since I’m clearly not the intended audience. I would definitely give some of the author’s other series a try, as her writing is strong and I understand not all of her work revolves around open relationships. My rating here is therefore based on how well I think the book delivers what it sets out to promise.