Review: A great new spin on the m/m supernatural genre...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 8, 2012
D. River's new "Love Bites" seems to be the first in what promises to be a new series called "Feral Hearts." If the next books are as much fun as the first, we're in for a real treat. Ryder and Tucker are characters that I fell for very quickly, and by the end of the book I was hungry for more.The werewolf romance has produced some interesting books, but River's spin on this youthful genre makes it both intensely individual and personal as a story; as well as more vividly romantic than many m/m romances I've read.  He does this by setting up a trope I particularly dislike--the "gay for you" mode where straight guys suddenly find themselves hankering after a guy--and turning it on its head. He won me over in a big way.Tucker and Ryder are lifelong friends, straight guys who have always been close, through thick and through thin.  They live in a world where occult folks--from vampires to witches--are part of society, even if they tend to live on the fringes, marginalized as tourist attractions and tolerated as local color. When the two buddies are attacked one night after a game of one-on-one basketball in a NYC playground, they are forced to take a closer look at the magical ghetto they have always avoided; and they're forced to look more closely at their own relationship and deal with some  increasingly uncomfortable realities.The book becomes something of a road trip--imagine "Lord of the Rings" as a gay buddy movie. (Well, that's not too difficult, actually.) But it is not an epic journey: it is a personal journey into the nature of good and evil, the relativity of cultural perceptions, and the boundaries between friendship and love.Somewhere in the midst of all this, D. River has managed to create what I felt was the most romantic scene I've ever read in a m/m novel. I was captivated from the first pages, and I look forward to the next installment in this series, which is sure to become a classic of the genre.