Welcome Guest Blogger Eve Silver!
A huge thank you to Carly and the rest of the Plotmonkeys for having me visit.
I've had crazy deadlines the past few years, and that means I have to guard my time like a mama bear with her cub. But I'll let you in on a secret. I'm a Plotmonkeys lurker. I'll pop by and take a peek at the posts when I break from writing because there's always something interesting going on here. So, I dropped by a few weeks ago and started to read Carly's post about paranormals. I nodded when she mentioned Michele Bardsley and Larissa Ione and Meagan Hatfield. Then I got to the end of the paragraph and realized that Carly was now talking about me…well, not me. My book. Sins of the Heart.
And what she had to say made my day because she was talking about the very thing that had made me delve into the world of the soul reapers in the first place.
Carly wrote:
"So I naively go into her world of SOUL REAPERS and I am shocked to my toes when the HERO reaches into someone's chest, rips out his heart, places it in a bag, and then goes back into the body for his soul. Yep. I'm floored. In a, am I really reading about this kind of way. But I'm determined to keep going. How can I like this hero or fall in love with him? I have to find out. And sure enough, once I hit halfway, I'm IN THIS WORLD and I'm OK with it, LOL. This dark twisty hero (I think I'm missing my Grey's Anatomy fix … where else would dark and twisty come from?) would invoke his powerful father's name to keep her safe. Yeah, I'm hooked. And in love."
The first time he introduced himself to me, Dagan Krayl—the hero of Sins of the Heart— was standing in the shadows wearing faded, low-slung jeans, a well-worn leather jacket, and a splatter of blood. At first I thought the blood was Roxy Tam's. After all, Dae was the villain, so it made sense that it would be the heroine's blood on his hands. Then he stepped up to stand beside Roxy, and from the way he looked at her, it was obvious he had no intention of harming her.
Because the villain, Dagan Krayl, was the hero.
Then I met his brothers: Alastor the suit-clad, über-controlled, incredibly sexy hero of Sins of the Soul, and Malthus, the bad boy, adrenaline junkie hero of Sins of the Flesh, and I realized that the heroes of the Otherkin books had evolved from a question that kept nagging at me. What if the villains were the heroes? What if I took three guys who aren't good or noble or heroic and made them the heroes of the stories…could I make them likeable? Could I make them laudable somehow? Could I make the villains heroes?
Could readers fall in love with these heroes? Or should I say antiheroes?
It's happened to me. I'll watch a movie or read a book and the villain of a previous story is the hero of the new one, or a man who is anything but likeable ends up being loveable. Some examples that jump to mind are Dexter Morgan from Showtime's Dexter, Terrible from Stacia Kane's Downside/Chess Putnam books, Jericho Barrons from Karen Marie Moning's Fever series, Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent from Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas.
So what about you? Can you think of some favorite morally ambiguous heroes to add to the list? I'll send a copy of Sins of the Heart, Sins of the Soul or Sins of the Flesh (your choice) to one random commenter. Thanks for dropping by!
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