Review: The Serpent's Kiss by Cyrano Johnson

There's a promise in the summary for this book of "White women being dominated by multiple Black men," and it made me nervous on multiple levels. Domination's very hit-or-miss for me, and something about the capitalization of "White" and "Black" felt vulgar. But a friend had highly recommended the story, so I decided to at least make a stab at it and try to reserve judgment.

By the end of the introduction, that reservation had fled: I knew I'd be finishing the book, and probably in just a couple of sittings.

It didn't take half a page to recognize Cyrano Johnson as a tremendously skilled author -- his use of language is simultaneously accessible and archaic, whimsical and high-minded, breezy and intricately layered. He juggles description, implication, foreshadowing, and tone with an effortless, sometimes coy grace. In the space of the introduction, preface, and first chapter, he presents three distinct narrators, bound together by the diction and mannerly prose of the Victorian setting yet each unique in style and character. Plot hooks and the allure of promised mysteries abound.

Given the intensity of engagement that the book's opening brought on, I kept expecting it to falter or subside into something more pedestrian. It's a work of erotica, so at the very least I figured that the sex scenes would lower things to a blunter, less ambitious level.

But no.

Unlike most erotica, this book is not a story in which sex is simply a natural part of the plot -- it's a story in which the sex is integral to the author's larger purpose. Don't let the word "purpose" scare you off; "The Serpent's Kiss" first and foremost delivers ripping good entertainment. But Johnson is always picking and picking at a deeper meaning, one that couldn't be brought out through any other means than the steamy, sometimes nefarious perversions that enfold Evie Stone as she ventures deeper and deeper into the shadows of Verderosa.

Hugely fun, impeccably crafted, literate without being stuffy, and devilishly, devilishly sensual, "The Serpent's Kiss" delivered on all levels for me, and at the end left me paging back and forth to more fully appreciate the passages that had washed over me in a rush on my initial reading. The book is a delight on the surface and even better as one pierces its underlying strata.

I expect to snatch up whatever Johnson writes next like a hawk.