I recently read the “Vicious Lost Boys” series by Nikki St. Crowe. I have… thoughts. It’s very much a retelling of Peter Pan, and the writing was fine. Nothing really jumped out at me (except that I don’t once remember her using the dialogue tag “stated“). The sex scenes weren’t bad, the action scenes weren’t bad, the general plot was okay. I wasn’t reading these books to learn or grow; I was reading them for enjoyment, and I would say I enjoyed them.

Some minor spoilers for the series and its follow-up book are coming.

The follow-up book is called Devourer of Men, and it follows Captain Hook, the Crocodile (who, in this series, is some sort of vampire/flesh-eating creature in human form), and Wendy Darling. In the original VLB series, when we meet the Crocodile, there really isn’t much made of his sexual orientation. Captain Hook is shown to be at the very least bisexual — he loved Wendy, but he also appreciates and thinks about sex with men. It’s a throwaway few paragraphs in one of the VLB books, but it’s there.

However, the fourth VLB book ends with the Crocodile’s POV, and in it he’s thinking explicitly about sex with Hook. And that’s quite a tonal shift for me. Throughout the VLB books, the Crocodile focuses more on violence, consumption, and being a master of snark. Once Devourer starts, though, it seems like all he can think about is sex with Hook. Which is fine, but it’s a very different characterization of the Crocodile than I was expecting. Of course these books are very sexual in nature, and it says right in the first pages that this book is a MMF retelling which indicates that sex is very much on the menu. So far I’ve read one sex scene between Hook and the Crocodile, and it was written just as well as all the others in VLB.

I think if I was going to be more on-board with the Crocodile’s interest in Hook, I would’ve needed some sort of signposts in the VLB books. There are plenty of interactions between Hook and the Crocodile in VLB, but other than some mild fantasizing by Hook I don’t recall anything that suggested the two of them would someday be interested in seriously getting together for some sexytimes. The fact that this wasn’t laid in in the previous books makes me notice it, and takes me out of the story a little bit. As a writer, I never want to take the readers out of the story and make them think about what’s happening; I want them to experience it with as few bumps in the road as possible. This tonal shift… little bit of a bump. Just saying.