"I only take what's owed me, and you, my little swan, owe me blood."
A single kiss from a masked vampire has left Shane with an obsession and a mission: uncover the secrets of the black-market blood trade and find his mystery vampire in the process. But one knock at the wrong door and he could have fangs at his throat instead of lips.
Andres is trying to forget his kiss with Shane Crowley by drowning himself in his work as a thief for the blood trade. When his boss seizes an overcurious Shane to drain his blood, though, Andres's only option is to buy him for every drop he'll ever produce. This new ownership awakens thoughts of glittering collars-thoughts Andres knows are the desires of a monster.
But Andres needs blood to live, and he's going to have it from Shane, even if that means donning a mask once more and demanding Shane bare his neck during nightly excursions.
Soon, Shane feels pulled in all directions, between the strange desires his role as Andres's part-time blood slave is stirring in him, his investigations into the cycle of injustice that so many fanged citizens face, and a new friend whose mouth seems strangely familiar. Little does he know, every path leads back to the same vampire...
How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck is the third book in a series of gay paranormal romances with vampires. This book features a hidden identity, cat-and-mouse T4T relationship between a transmasc human and a he/they vampire who engage in light power dynamics, as they learn to express their desires for gilded collars and sensual obedience through healthy role play. While it can be enjoyed as a standalone, this book will contain minor spoilers for prior books in the series.
PUBLISHER: Kraken Collective
YEAR: 2024
LENGTH: 454 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Romance
RECOMMENDED: Highly
Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Main Character(s), Genderqueer/Nonbinary Main Character(s), Trans Main Character(s).
HOW TO BARE YOUR NECK AND SAVE A WRECK is what happens when an author with a great flair for characters decides to take several hidden identity/coincidence tropes to excellent extremes.
This book pulls together a bunch of pieces which were set up in the first two books, connecting characters in new ways. It reveals hidden or less obvious ties between them which have secretly been present since the start of the series or close to it. This is one of those where I don't quite know what to say about it because I just love the whole thing, I don't want to spoil anything and I had a great time reading it. If you like the first two books and made it this far you'll probably love this third one, if you decided to jump in here for some reason and you like it then go back for the first two, because the whole series is great. Some things get to pay off here that I didn't even realize we're setups for later, in addition to a couple I did notice at the time. It's actually connected enough that I don't know what a fourth book would be able to pull for setup, in terms of who could be the main characters, though it is pretty clear what the mission would be with how things ended at the end of this book.
One of the things that's emphasized so much in this series is solidarity and community and the importance of bonds between people who are marginalized for different reasons, pulling together to help each other. At the end of the last book (referenced again here) is that there's a blood bank for vampires which queer men specifically choose to donate to because mainstream blood donation services won't let them donate because of homophobic bullshit. While that restriction was dropped in the USA in between when the second and third books were published, it lasted for so long that having it appear here doesn't force the stories into the past.
If you like this you may like:
- Swordcrossed by Freya Marske
- The Reanimator's Heart by Kara Jorgensen
Graphic/Explicit CW for sexual content.
Moderate CW for confinement, blood, violence, torture, medical content, medical trauma, death.
Minor CW for drug use.
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