Author: Wulf Francu Godgluck
Book: Komainu
Series: Of Gods and Monsters #3
Self Published
Publication Date: August 9, 2017
Length: 259 pages
Reviewed by Meredith
Synopsis
Hades
His innocence was the fire that blighted the deepest dark, but even he can't save the King from a past stained so black, the devil won't even touch it.
Years creep up on you, like a rotting hand: cold and wet, it will drag you down into your grave.
Life will hand you eternity only to rip it away from you.
Love will slaughter you in the most beautiful way and still manage to nail you in the ass, bareback, when you see him choose the heart of another man.
But Death... He is a patient soul. He waits, and he waits, and he waits.
'Cause the bastard knows he will always have the last laugh when he knocks at the door.
Kemono
Memories were all I had, all I had clung to as my heart turned to stone and finally to dust.
Now he is mine and I will hold him, and I will kiss him. We will dance and we will laugh, and we will cry... We will be human together...
I did not know heaven until I knew him.
There is no greater power that can tear and rip your world apart as when their lips finally kiss yours again.
But being human comes at a fatal price.
Sometimes you have to let go of the hand you hold onto so tightly that it brought pain, because that is the only way you can save them from Death.
Rex
Why did she take them away, hand them back, then force me to choose?
Is love really that cruel, that she would enjoy tormenting you as you watch the two men you love with your whole heart, kill each other...?
And then, my worst fear, my deepest darkest nightmare became a living breathing thing.
Death had come to take from us what we could never replace.
Review
Komainu is book three in Wulf Francu Godgluck's Of Gods and Monsters series and there's some important stuff you need to understand before you delve into this kind of darkness. First, these books aren't standalones. They need to be read in order. Second, they are not romances. Third, they are dark, erotic in many places, and at times gory. Lastly, you need to understand the author. He's not one for fluff in any aspect. His scenes are, at times, unforgiving and break many rules you may hold dear to your book beliefs. Understand this and you'll be fairly prepared.
Komainu is a long awaited book. Hades (book two) ended with a gut-wrenching cliffhanger. There wasn't a kindle in the world that didn't meet the wall after that. So, when this one came along we all ran to it like it was water for our parched heart.
The first chapter will test you. Of that I'm certain. If you can get through it then you're almost golden. It's a very rough read. It's super dark, descriptive, and there's physical torture. Be ready.
Now, as this story moves along. Hades and Kemono spend like a year looking for Rex. In this time, these two behemoths learn to sort of live with each other. Both men searching for the other piece of their heart (Rex) only to discover their needs are deeper than just with him. That's pretty much as romantic as this will get.
We see what Rex has been through all this time. I'm grateful to all the people who have protected him and tried to fill the emptiness that threatens to claim him. Why? Because Rex is the everything to everyone and I do mean everyone. There's secondaries that find themselves changing just in his presence. He's a gift and so much more. It's no wonder wars would rage over him.
Wulf writes heartbreak like not many dare to do. I won't lie and say this book was everything I hoped for because it wasn't. It was incredibly hard to read and the ending left me feeling hopeless and empty. It took me almost a week to write a review for this book because I had to separate the "how it made me feel" from the "What I would have done differently" It's not my book it's Wulf's. He's made no secret that he doesn't focus on happily ever after. He concentrates on how his character's fate's entwine, shatter, or bloom. He's at the mercy of the way things have to be. In that aspect I get it. There's no rainbows for monsters.
You have to have a strong stomach, an open mind, and an understanding heart, and be able to distance yourself from fairytales to truly appreciate this book.
Good job!
Interview With Rex
Hi, Rex, it’s so wonderful to get a chance to speak with you. In so much darkness you have been a light, honestly. I’d love to ask you some questions if that’s alright.
Avoids eye contact, and grips his biker cut’s sides with bruised and cut scabbed over fingers. Rex shifts in the chair as he pulls the leather vest tight around his body. “Thank you for saying that… It seems not many people believe that these days.” He peers down at the floor, fingers curl angrily into fists as he squeezes the leather between them. “I myself might be on that spectrum of those people who don’t. Sometimes the light can be far more divesting and cruel than the darkness it’s trying to pierce.”
When you look at Hades, what do you see?
A sigh spills from his quivering lips, his bottom lip blemished red from being nibbled on far too much, golden eyes ones vibrant and radiant, now hallowed and empty peers at the wall for a long time….
“You really want the honest answer?” Rex meets the woman’s kind gaze. “Regret. Guilt. Anger.”
“He is a terrifying man all by himself, intense and destructive, but there is also pain there. A pain that maybe forever keeps seeping toxic blood, a wound I carved open on an old scar that never truly healed. He is a beautiful man, beneath all the scars and darkness there is a heart… well… what’s left of it … it just lost its light… a light I stole and I don’t know how to give it back again… if he wants it back.”
How do you keep a balance with the life you live?
"I keep busy, my mind likes to run a mile long track of all the shit I fucked up on, so keeping busy, helps me keep off the focus of those things, I give dance classes for the unprivileged and troubled youth here, we even have a dance team we want to enter into some dancing competitions. I also took up kick boxing since my big brother wanted to see if a scrawny little ginger could kick some ass, I enjoy it and yeah…” Rex smirks, “I can kick my brother’s ass now, there’s an advantage of being a short little shit in a fight. But on the inside, I’m a shattered soul, so very fucking shattered and I don’t think those pieces can fit back together anymore or ever again. And I’m afraid no one is coming back to pick up those pieces and make them fit, not even him.”
What is your greatest fear?
Rex's whole body termers. A grating breath leaves his chest as Rex pales a ghostly white.
“Meeting him again. Being confronted by what I created him into, what I have allowed him to become… Losing him forever… That he won’t remember the love we once had, that he will never be able to love again. But that’s my burden, my cross I need to carry, my hell I need to face one day, and that day will come. I don’t think I will live through it, I don’t believe I deserve to.”
You have a tendency to protect the weak whereas “some you associate with” would see the weak as expendable. Do you feel you need to protect them BECAUSE of that?
Rex looks up, his eyes drowning in fat ugly tears as he says, “I wish I could protect everyone, but how can I, when I can’t even protect the one person who owned my very heart? When I was the very thing that destroyed his? Everyone deserves a chance to live… I once believed that, I truly did,” Rex chuckles eerily, “I was a foolish, naïve, little boy that once believed every person had a redeeming quality inside them, that if you looked hard enough you can find the light… Sometimes, no matter how hard you look the light’s just not there anymore.”
If you could make one wish for Hades, and for it to come true, what would you wish for?
Rex stares the woman right in the eyes, not hesitating, not even so much as blinking he says, “For him to have never met me.”
You are loved by pretty much everyone who encounters you. It’s true don’t bother arguing. What do you think it is about you that is so appealing?
“You’re kidding right? After what I did, how I abandoned him, them? I’m not that person anymore, people need to stop trying to seek that naïve little boy who saw the good in everyone, who wanted to believe that everyone could be saved if you just fought hard enough for them. That Rex died years ago. That Rex Killed himself. It’s Algor now. Algor the son of death, the son of Old Devil Eyes.”
What matters most to you in this world?
“My family; Uncle Elvis, his son, Beast and his soon to be old lady, Annabeth, the Brothers of the Fenrir MC. And my two nieces.”
I’ve watched you for a while now. Your future is unpredictable. Where you are in this very moment, is it where you want to be?
“No.” Rex gasp in a sob, breath depleted, pain ablaze in his red rimmed eyes.
“I never foreseen myself being here, but as painful as it is…as it was walking away, having to breathe in hell every single day without him, there’s also a hell of a lot of good I never anticipated I’d ever have.” He wipes at his cheek.
“For the first time I have a family. They might all be a little crazy, me included and I might have never foreseen myself being the type of guy that would take another’s live. But life changes you, she guts you, slices and carves you up and then you put yourself back together and the pieces don’t fit the way they used to. You become a different person, you change for the better or the worse, we all change. We will never be the same person we were yesterday, we were two minutes ago. It’s an endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth. But in the end, we keep changing, and our cord keeps getting shorter. And one day our string will get snipped, sometime because we brought it on ourselves or because we forced it on to others. I’ve made as much enemies as I have made friends, just unfortunately for me the most dangerous of them all, will one day come for what I stole from him.”
If you were stranded on a desert island with only 3 possessions (not people) what 3 things would you want with you?
Rex smirks, glances at the lady and blushes fiercely. “My dildo, a bottom bitch gotta do what a bottom bitch gotta do. And my Bacon, you said no people, and Bacon is not a people, he is supreme god of everything. And last, my My Little Pony Rainbow Dash plush, my brother Beast gave me, the dudes all mean and big muscles, but he’s an even bigger, hard core Brony.”
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?
Painful shame and guilt flashes darkly over Rex’s face. “That the darkest monster, with the sharpest of claws who exudes the purest essence of wrath and death can invoke the blackest of fear within a single look aren’t the ones we should be looking out for.
"It’s the ones that hold the key to the monster’s heart you need to be weary of, they can create far more fighting monsters within those men, drive them to do unspeakable things in the name of revenge and love.
"The real villains are the sweet innocent ones who foolishly believes they can fix the demon, fight off the darkness, only to be the culprits who rips out their hearts and crumble them to dust.”
If you had this life to live over again would you change anything? If so what?
“There are so many things I would change. But at the cost of what, him never meeting me? Would it be worth it?
Loving him was and is worth everything to me, it still is and it will always be, despite the fact that I know I killed a part of him, that I ripped his heart to splinters, that I caused so much pain to a man that was already bleeding inside. I guess I’m selfish. And I know, for that, I will pay dearly with my own life. And when that time comes and his hands wrap tightly around my little neck, squeezing the life out of me, I will still love him, because even in death I will hold and own a part of him that no one has ever touched, felt or seen. That no one will ever love him as fiercely as me.”
Thanks, Rex, for hanging out and I wish you all the luck in the world!
Excerpt: REX
“I could fuck you over this counter,” Haywood brought his face inches from Rex’s own, a glare spitting embers of heat, “right now for this evidence.” Haywood’s hands slammed down on the counter, pinned on either side of Rex’s thighs, the muscles in those arms balled tight with frustration. “One kiss, kid…” Haywood’s hot breath danced against Rex’s skin, making it break out in icy pebbles. “That’s all I ask, all we ever fucking wanted from you since the first time we saw you dancing in Diablo.”
Rex swallowed hard. He could play the game, set the teasing to scorching, but he couldn’t betray his bruised heart.
Instead he turned his head when Haywood came in for the kill.
“Fuck!” the man groaned, heated air flaring along Rex’s neck as he sniffed him instead. Nose and scruff tingled Rex’s skin when Haywood skimmed his lips to Rex’s ear. “Who hurt you, baby?”
“A very, very bad man,” Rex said coldly.
About Wulf Francú Godgluck
They come to me in the night, creeping into my head. Their voices are all different, their stories all dissimilar, but they keep saying the same thing…
“Show us, tell us, bring us into your world, and make us known.”
Then I sit and they take over. They tell their tales of love, loss and sinister misfortune. Not all of them get a happy ending, but they are pleased when their part is written.
I sometimes find myself lost in my own mind; a world very similar to our own yet so different. Things don’t go bump in the night— they squeal and crawl under your skin, making you grind your teeth, and making your stomach turn over and putting your nerves on edge. Then there’s the drama. Oh, the drama!
Wulf Francú Godgluck hails from South Africa. His work is not for the faint-hearted! In his books you'll find... all the beasties with their nasty claws and teeth, and some you didn't even know existed.
But the monsters aren't all real.
Some live inside us. Who knows what he will make you discover about yourself, lurking in your heart, behind the closed walls in the deep, black recesses where no light penetrates?
Wulf will steal your heart and never give it back. More than likely, he’ll pin it to the wall with a bobbypin and sit there sipping his tea while you writhe and squeal on the floor...
STILL sure you want to read a Wulf Godgluck book?
Proceed at your own peril.
Contact & Media Info
Giveaway
Wulf will be gifting one person the bundle of, Of Gods and Mosnters
Book One: Menoetuin
Book Two: Hades
Book Three: Komainu
and
Neon White (not part of this series)
Please enter the rafflecopter below.
Contest will end August 21st
thank you
a Rafflecopter giveaway
