Customer Reviews

Phantasmagoria (Black Lace)

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Phantasmagoria is the sequel to a Gentlemen's Wager and takes place three years after Bella ran off with her two lovers. Bella Rushdale lives a decadent lifestyle with her two lovers, the Viscount Lucerne Marlinscar and Vaughan, the Marquis of Pennerley. Lucerne is the more considerate of the two men whereas Vaughan is the brooding type who likes things rough and his way. Everything is about to change when Vaughan simply walks away from them both without any reason.
The trio's scandalous relationship has long since gone past the point of everything that is considered to be normal in the eyes of society. Lucerne wants Bella to be his wife but lusts after Vaughan with a passion. Vaughan is obsessed with Lucerne, the only person he truly loves; even so, he can't let go of Bella. Bella's soul belongs to Vaughan and is willing to do whatever she can to keep him even if that means sacrificing her relationship with Lucerne in the process.
Phantasmagoria pushes the envelope in so many ways. Madelynne Ellis has written a dark gothic tale where sexual perversions are out in the open. This may sound like an uncomfortable read, but I was enthralled and lost in this tale of three people who live for vice but truly do not know what they want or even if they can love one another.
Vaughan may seem to be the villain of the piece, but he is so tortured because his love for Lucerne will never be reciprocated. He knows he can have Bella eating out of the palm of his hand, but he wants what he can't have, and because of that, he almost ruins himself in the process. Bella is the one woman who understands Vaughan and sacrifices herself. She is willing to do whatever she can to make Vaughan happy just so he will give her a piece of his heart. Seems cruel right? But when you figure out what Vaughan is trying to accomplish, his so-called revenge comes together like pieces in a puzzle. Almost every page is filled with talks of sex and the actual sex acts seem a bit depraved in a way.
Phantasmagoria is erotic, tantalizing and one of the best ménage a trois stories I have read in a long time. This story had me hooked from the very first page. Ellis and her skill at writing about taboo topics are really amazing. She really does deserve kudos for writing an erotic gothic that I won't soon forget.

Katiebabs
A Gentleman's Wager (Black Lace)

[...]
Chosen to kick off the 15th Anniversary celebration of Virgin Black Lace, this surprising sequel to A Gentleman's Wager (also 5 stars) is an emotionally wrenching, dark journey through the death of a relationship.

Phantasmagoria isn't a book that one could say they "liked" or "loved" because those words just would never apply to this haunting story. It's raw, cruel, complex, often crude, and Madelynne Ellis doesn't spare us by allowing us to flinch away from all the manifestations of the characters' pain.

Set in Georgian period London three years after Vaughan, Lucerne and Bella left North Yorkshire, we find the threesome stagnating under the constant rounds of socializing and debauchery in the city. Hoping to reinvigorate the relationship, Vaughan secretly makes plans to manipulate them all away from town and devises a gothic All Hallow's Eve celebration, a Phantasmagoria, at his family seat in Pennerly, near the Welsh borders (imagine creating a Haunted House when your house happens to be a castle). He then clandestinely flees London fully expecting the mystery of his disappearance to lure Lucerne and Bella to follow him.

Not only do Vaughan's house party plans go awry, but they are not the only phantasmagoria [noun: an illusion of perceiving something that does not really exist] in the book. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, each of the main characters perceives their relationship in a completely different, but incomplete and/or erroneous way. These and other phantasms haunt the characters throughout the book.

* As we already know from A Gentleman's Wager, Vaughan's usual method of dealing with his emotional pain is to lash out in cruelty towards others, particularly Bella. I wanted to shake him and tell him to stop debasing her, himself, and what they had together. He is haunted by the phantasms of what his life with Lucerne would have been like had Bella not appeared. In a country where homosexuality was an automatic death sentence, would they still have been together? What if he had never fled London? What if Lucerne had followed him? What if he had never let himself care at all?

* The phantasm of "What if" haunts Bella also. What if Vaughan had not been in the picture? Would she and Lucerne have been married, possibly with a child or two? What if they had never left North Yorkshire for a life in London? What if Vaughan had never left? What if she didn't now know what she found out before she fled London, and Lucerne, to find Vaughan?

Throughout most of this book, I wanted Bella to walk away from BOTH of the men. I felt she deserved better and was angry on her behalf. In fact, when she receives another offer, I found myself hoping she would take it and never look back. Then I finally realized that, though it's not the type of relationship I would want for myself, Bella didn't love Lucerne and Vaughan IN SPITE of the way they treated her, she loved them BECAUSE of their treatment. No matter how vile Vaughan was to her, she CRAVED more of it.

* And Lucerne? I spent most the book angry with him. How could he do that? Why was he ruining everything? But then he told us his view of the relationship and immediately garnered my sympathy. Oh, I still didn't approve of what he did, but the "why" of his actions broke my heart for him.

Saying that Phantasmagoria ends with an HEA would be misleading, but Ellis does gives us a bittersweet-tinged hope for the future; a possibility of something new rising out of the ashes of the relationship. She also introduces us to a whole new cast of engaging secondary characters, some of whom will be getting their own stories before Ellis returns to the original threesome to finish their story.

Phantasmagoria could certainly be read as a standalone, but the reader's emotional involvement will be impacted far more if A Gentleman's Wager is read first. And really, if you read my glowing homage to AGW, you'll note that it's one of my most beloved books and reading it would scarcely be a hardship.

Vaughan, the Marquis of Pennerley, is not satisfied with the way his life is going. He is in love with Lucerne, his lover of many years and fascinated by Bella Rushdale, the woman he and Lucerne have been involved with for three years. Not willing to continue their ménage any longer without being able to express his true feelings, Vaughan does what he thinks best. He leaves Bella and Lucerne to their own devices.

Bella Rushdale has been lover to both L ucerne and Vaughan for 36 months. In all that time, she has never been able to be completely alone sexually with Lucerne or Vaughan without the other watching. When she and Lucerne try to escape for a few moments alone, they are caught once again by Vaughan and the results are explosive, albeit extremely satisfying. But it is upon waking up that she realizes that their trio is minus one member. Waiting for Vaughan is hard for Bella to do because she loves him. Therefore, she goes to him with the hopes of making him love her back even though she knows that Lucerne is really the one he wants.

In a time in English history when being a homosexual could mean death, I have to hand it to Vaughan and Lucerne both for their temerity and fortitude to live their lives as they want. When Bella is added into the mix, you have a huge scandal waiting to happen and in reading PHANTASMAGORIA, I was often scandalized to the point of blushing. Each encounter between Lucerne, Vaughan and Bella left me biting my lips and anxiously reading to find out what was going to happen. Then, in an ending surprise that I didn't anticipate, I smiled at the complete turnaround of the plot and smacked my forehead at my inability to foresee what was coming. Madelynne Ellis takes gothic romance to a new height with PHANTASMAGORIA and I was glad to be along for the ride.

What happened? The first book, "A Gentleman's Wager" has went down as my all time favorite erotica book.

I eagerly awaited this book thinking it would be incomparable. When it arrived I devoted my whole day to it. To say I was disappointed is an understatement!

No sparks, no zest just bland story telling with some gratuitous sex thrown it so it could be classified Black Lace.

Defiantly not worth my time!