![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: Beyond Hate - Lee McCormick
Jul. 17th, 2025 02:10 pm
London doesn’t want to die. So it’s a good thing that Otto doesn’t plan on killing him— yet.
Thrown from one awful situation into another, London is taken from the frypan into the fire, and then dumped into a bucket of ice for good measure. Along the way he discovers: kinks, Stockholm Syndrome, arterial bleeding, a switchblade knife, what Otto looks like when feral and when tame.
Otto meanwhile discovers: what it feels like to be the big spoon, incandescent and possessive rage, how hot London looks with blood on him, and that sometimes it’s better to let go of the past instead. It just takes several corpses to get there.
We as the readers get to know some of the answers Otto is hunting, so that’s a satisfying bit to munch on. Lee ties the past and the future very nicely together, with no dropped threads or overly large plotholes. This book could also technically be read as a stand-alone, since it only very briefly touches on the events in Beyond Reason and doesn’t need much, if any, knowledge of the rest of the series to make sense.
You know that trope “I can fix him”? Yeah, that’s not this book. “I can make him worse” is much more appropriate; Otto is a live cannon who just needs a direction to shoot, and if he wants London to do the shooting, well, London wants him to break his ribs open and eat him alive, so they work out well together. 10/10.
(Otto is so hot, I want to run my hands through his hair.)
I don’t usually like the Fated Mates trope. Far too often I see it in “these two characters actually hate each other, even if they’ve never met, and also they’re dating Other People! They have Zero charisma or desire for each other but! They’re Fated To Be Together and no matter how hard they Loath one another, They Will Be Together, They Match.”
Kai and Nash match not Despite their feelings for one another, but rather because of it. Nash has been waiting his whole life for his Fated Mate, endured teasing from his siblings for it, even, but has not given up. Kai’s from a world where Fated Mates aren’t a known thing, but he’s Still very much got the hots for Large and Green, and thinks Nash is way attractive right from the get-go. Nash actively keeps the whole Fated thing as lowdown as it can be to not scare his partner! (Nash tries really hard in general not to be scary. Props to him.)
A lot of books in this trope do sexual harassment to push the envelope. Nash actively refuses to do anything any more sexual than crashing in the same bed for a long while, and actively hunts for Kai’s enthusiastic consent to taking it up the next step. He lets Kai set the pace of their relationship despite is own aching need otherwise. The only thing his pretty human mate isn’t allowed to do is wander off on his own; there’s predators in the woods.
But Kai isn’t a wilting flower either. The two of them are fate-designed to be a matched set, and Kai’s allowed to figure out where he fits in Nash’s nomadic band on his own. It’s actually way nice to see; Kai doesn’t have much of a life in his native world (our world), but in Nash’s, he actually fits quite perfectly. Granted, being half-married to a chieftain means he gets to take his time and figure out how and where he fits, but none of Nash’s band is trying to tuck him into a suit, tie, and five-foot cubical like our society would be trying to do.
10/10, I’m going to read it again. Now I have to figure out how to get my hands on the other two books…
