V.J. Chambers's Blog, page 2
December 25, 2024
The Infallible Gaze, Out There, Book One
No one wants to believe
for fans of The X-Files
When PI Slade Russo visits astrobiologist Claire Ingles, he’s there for one reason. He wants her to tell him that the idea of aliens making contact is ridiculous.
For her part, Claire agrees. It’s likely that there’s alien life out there somewhere, she says, but given the difficulty of faster-than-light-travel and communication, it’s very unlikely we’ll ever find them or them us.
Russo’s employed by a billionaire who’s been in contact with something—is it aliens or a huge hoax? The last guy to try to find the truth ended up dead in a hotel room with his brains decorating the wall behind, gun in his hand. A suicide? Or engineered to look that way by The Way of the Seven Signs, the creepy alien cult?
Russo can handle the cult part, the suicide part, the human angle. But when it comes to verifying aliens, real, honest-to-God aliens, well… he needs Claire for that.
Together, they’ll delve into the twists and turns of a conspiracy that reaches across the country and deep into the past.
Are the aliens out there? Or is someone faking it all?
October 9, 2024
Feral Werewolves
Thrown to the wolves.
When the moon is bright and full, the werewolves wait for their tithes.
If a woman is meant to be a tithe, there are signs. A hunger within her, a need for what the wolves will take from her, a body that changes to be receptive to the sheer force of their savage desire. For her, it will be an overwhelming pleasure, so intense that she will be nearly as mad with it as the beasts are who take her.
When the morning comes, the tithes go home, some with werewolf babies sown in their bellies, some not.
It’s a rare woman who bonds, who goes cross-eyed with the frantic want for reuniting with some wolf that had his way with her under that wild and gleaming moon. It’s an even rarer woman who bonds to more than one wolf.
When Clementine feels it, she knows she should fight the urge. She knows she should cling harder to her life here, inside the walls of the city, safe from the beasts outside. But maybe she’s always known she belonged out there, out in the wilderness with her wolfmen.
September 26, 2024
Lagoon: a creature feature horrormance
Nothing cinnamon-roll about this tale of monster lovin’. Welcome to the lagoon. It won’t hurt… much.
“Riley,” he said in that rich voice of his. “You can take a few more of my eggs.”
She gasped. “Not too many.”
“Not too many,” he agreed. “But more.”
Dr. Riley Stine arrives at a remote spot in a lush, tropical forest to study a newly discovered amphibious creature. But when the creature turns murderous, she is trapped in a nightmarish new reality with no escape.
The situation grows more chaotic when she and everyone working at the site are dosed with a soup of insect-amphibian-fish DNA.
Now, they have all been altered in strange, horrid, and darkly pleasurable ways.
This horrormance is a B-movie creature feature with all the body horror and so much my-body-is-betraying-me kink. Contains: non-con, dub-con, ovipositors, death-by-eggs, sensual egg laying, and a somewhat disturbing HEA. Not for the faint of heart.
September 2, 2024
No Bones About It
Release date: 8/26/24
Fifer Ione is an asexual selkie. She likes sexual fantasy, and she wants to fall in love. Only, erm, without the touching parts. Without the fluids parts. Without the gross, real parts. Just the good stuff.
When Hollis Mac appears at open mic night at the Meck and reveals that his skeletal face means he lacks skin, so he lacks, you know, anything gross, she can’t help but feel as if he’s what she’s been waiting for her whole life.
Except Hollis is some ancient fae thing, exiled and odd, very wealthy, very aloof. He doesn’t think he’s quite capable of love, only desire, endless and aching and exploitive. His kind, he says, only want to devour things, especially pretty young things like her.
But she trusts him.
Or anyway, she’s curious enough to risk it.
Some things are worth the risk.
This book doesn’t depict a lot of actual, physical intercourse. But it does depict a lot of shared fantasy about intercourse, and since it’s a book, are we splitting hairs here? Content includes: vampire blood play and biting, breeding, capture, spanking, and soothing during noncon.
July 12, 2024
Promised to the Alpha Prince
Release date 7/24/24
The marriage was arranged when Aurelie Le Blanc was a child. On the several occasions she’s met Prince Dmitri Klein of the country of Valhn, he’s been cold, distant, dismissive.
Of course, she’s never expected love, not as a royal omega. She’s marrying him for duty and appearances, nothing more.
He doesn’t even come to fetch her himself. He sends Prince Johannes Fischer, next in line to the throne of Valhn, and some commoner companion, Nikolai Wolff, who looks her over with a lethal leer. At least Prince Johannes is charming and easy to be around. He assures her that after her consummation with Prince Dmitri, she’ll be allowed other alphas to ease her omega needs, and Prince Johannes is enthusiastic, eager to be there for her. It’s nice to be wanted by someone.
But she can’t be with Prince Johannes yet (or Nikolai—apparently, they’re a matched set, not that she minds), not until she is officially married and mated to Prince Dmitri, who never seems to want to spend time in her presence.
It’s shocking, then, when she goes into heat, and he’s all she needs. It’s molten, possibly the most erotic experience of her life, a passionate pinnacle that undoes her. His knot, his bite, his body…
She’s fallen for him.
Which is exactly when her childhood friend and adolescent sweetheart, Corentin Sejour, reappears. Now, somehow, he’s an alpha. She swore to him once, when they were very young, that she’d never love anyone the way she loved him.
But she can’t run away with him now, no matter what she promised then…
RH contemporary omegaverse with drama galore, and very jealous, possessive alphas.
April 11, 2024
The Omega Princess
Release date: 4/13/24
The Crown… with knotting.
In Eleri Cardiff’s world, only titled royalty have alpha and omega bloodlines, so she’s never considered the possibility she could be an omega. Of course, she’s always been different.
When she sees Prince Devlin Byrne at an event while she’s circulating trays of canapes amongst the people of the upper crust, something happens. She feels it, and then the prince corners her and put his nose to her neck and runs his thick, strong fingers all over her jaw and shoulders.
The prince is insistent. He has to have her, she’s his mate, and she belongs at his side as his omega princess.
She’s dazzled. For the first time ever, she feels as though she’s not weird and wrong, that she actually fits somewhere, that she belongs. She and the prince have an unfathomable connection, like nothing she’s ever experienced.
Until she does experience it again. With her bodyguard. With the prince’s best friend. With the prince’s worst enemy.
Her life is just finally getting good. She can’t ruin it now, but this attraction she feels to these other men… it’s impossible to ignore.
February 20, 2024
Handcuffed to the Gargoyle
Release date: 3/3/2024
Amazon
Last night, Essence Quill had the worst, the most awkward sex with her friend and co-worker Decker Naggs, who happens to be a gargoyle.
So, naturally, what happens tonight is that they end up handcuffed together with magical handcuffs that won’t come off. Naturally, the guy who goes to find a spell to get them off disappears, and they can’t find him. Naturally, she and Decker have to talk.
Decker wants a do-over. He thinks if they try again, the sex could be better. He thinks they’d make a great couple.
Essence is definitely attracted to him, but she can’t help but feel like they don’t really mesh.
And besides, the stakes are too high. If this doesn’t work out, their friendship, their workplace environment, their entire lives are ruined.
This friends-to-lovers contemporary monster romance is Before Sunrise with gargoyle spice. Conversations about love, life, porn, sports, men and women, and everything in between—interrupted by bouts of monstery steam. Contains: choking, dominance play, marking, and spanking. Plot: sorta, kinda? Define “plot.” Spoiler alert: HEA.
February 7, 2024
Little Bits of Badness
Publication date: 2/21/24
Amazon
Rebecca meets Gone Girl
Novelist Heather Wyatt used to be successful, but her career isn’t going so well these days. She’s at a writer’s conference to get drunk, er, network. Over cocktails, she meets another writer. He’s blond and broad and beautiful, with a private jet and an honest-to-God British title.
“Come away with me, Heather,” he says, the second day she knows him.
Crazy, right? But she wants to say yes.
She probably shouldn’t. This rich and handsome man is Jacob Lloyd. She doesn’t recognize him right away, but then she remembers. It was all over the news, five years ago. He was wrongly imprisoned for murder, because he gave a false confession. It turned out his then-girlfriend had actually killed her parents, not him. The girlfriend felt so guilty, she killed herself and divulged the truth in her suicide note.
So, Jacob has a dark past, but he’s innocent.
Besides, maybe it’s romantic for a man to have rescued the woman he loved by going to prison for her crime. Maybe it makes him more alluring in some way. And anyway, with her writing career on the skids, Heather’s got nothing else going for her.
So, Heather lets Jacob whisk her off to Rome, where they have leisurely meals and sleep late in each other’s arms. Everything is idyllic and charming. Until she finds a set of letters written by Jacob’s dead girlfriend.
And the more Heather reads, the more she begins to think that when Jacob confessed to stabbing that couple to death in their dining room, he was telling the truth.
This domestic thriller does not fade to black, nor does it censor its characters’ language. Reader discretion advised.
February 1, 2024
AmazonShe’s a girl imprisoned in a tower. But the man who...
She’s a girl imprisoned in a tower. But the man who finds her is no prince.
If a good man discovered a nineteen-year-old woman in a tower, imprisoned there, lied to by her captor, cut off from the realities of the modern world, a good man would rescue her.
I’m not a good man.
I can’t help myself. I’m too enticed by this untouched, innocent girl, this girl who’s never seen a man before, never seen any part of a man. I have too many ideas of things I’d like to do to her, things I’d like to teach her, ways I’d like to exploit her natural curiosity.
So, I continue to deceive her, and I keep her there, my captive plaything.
I don’t even think about taking her out of that tower.
Not until I realize she’s pregnant with my child.
Verge notes: This contemporary dark romance takes its cues from Rapunzel (with a little Jane Eyre homage nestled into the middle). It’s for mature readers. Discretion is advised.
How dark, you ask? Dark enough to make you squirm, but with at least a vestige of redemption.
January 7, 2024
Claimed by the Minotaur Duke
A dark tale of imprisonment, force, bonding, escape, and healing…
Agnes Babbington, the Duchess of Evonshire, has no idea there’s a labyrinth built in the depths of the wood behind her estate until her husband locks her in there.
She’s not alone. There’s a bull-headed man with her.
Her husband Cyril has been trying to get an heir on her for over a year with no luck. Cyril says she can’t leave until she’s with child—the monster’s child, which he will claim as his own.
And it’s worse, because she knows the minotaur. He’s her husband’s brother Dorian, the man who would have been duke if it hadn’t been purported he was dead. She’s never liked Dorian, a rich rake of a man who takes delight in ridiculing her. Dorian’s not dead, though. Dorian is cursed with a bull’s head and bull’s hooves, and now she is locked up with him here in this labyrinth with no escape.
She won’t couple with that thing, of course.
And Dorian—for his part—claims he’s not interested in forcing her.
But then Cyril comes with a revolver and demands their participation.
Now, she and Dorian are bound in shared anguish. They will have revenge on Cyril. They will fight their way free. And they will travel together towards whatever happiness is left to broken things like them.
This forced-breeding monster romance is a dark journey to a destination of unshakable, everlasting love. It’s unflinching and intense, but it’s also lava-level hot. Non-consensual activity is depicted. There are also explorations of fantasies of bondage, power plays, and voyeurism. It’s ultimately a story about affirming and integrating the darkest aspects of ourselves and about healing the harm others do to us. HEA guaranteed.
