Swoony Sunday Book Review: "Phantasma"

Kaylie Smith's sultry romantasy is evocative of Anne Rice in its New Orleans setting and its skillful blending of Southern Gothic and paranormal romance.

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Welcome to another edition of “Swoony Sunday,” where I’ll be reviewing romance in all of its forms: film, TV, books. As a Pisces, I love to love, and what better way to express that than through writing about romance, the genre that’s all about finding your heart’s desire?

Warning: Spoilers for the novel follow.

Phantasma is another of those books that I started reading because it was the monthly read for my romantasy book club. As soon as I read the description I knew it was going to be a hit with me. I mean, come on. The book has New Orleans, sexy supernatural beings, and a formidable heroine who gets sucked into a contest in a manor house that has some connection to Hell itself. There’s just so much to love here that it’s hard to know where to start. As soon as I started to read it, I fell more and more in love with both Kaylie Smith’s writing style as well as the main character.

When the novel begins Ophelia Grimm and her sister Genevieve have to immediately contend with both their mother’s death and with the fact that their beloved home will soon be put up for sale to pay for their mother’s debts. When Genevieve, always the type to leap before she looks, signs up for a sinister contest in the otherworldly place known as Phantasma, Ophelia quickly realizes that she has no choice but to follow her. Upon meeting the Phantom Blackwell, however, she soon finds that things are far more complicated, and dangerous, than she could have ever imagined. She must not only pass through the many trials in Phantasma but must also guard her heart against being broken.

Ophelia is just the kind of heroine that I love to see in romantasy. She’s a real badass, but she also has her own vulnerabilities, particularly when it comes to her family. After all, the whole reason that she goes into Phantasma in the first place is because she wants to rescue her sister. Once there, though, she finds out that there’s much more to herself than she ever imagined, and one of the major strengths of the book is its ability to convincingly demonstrate her growth as a character, as she contends with both her family’s strange history and her own burgeoning powers.

And, perhaps just as importantly, she has instantaneous chemistry with Blackwell, the Phantom with whom she comes into contact soon after entering Phantasma. You can tell from the moment they meet one another that they’re end-game material, for all that they each have their secrets and their fair share of struggles that they have to overcome in order to find some way to be with one another. Believe me, Blackwell has more than a few skeletons lurking in his closet, the kind of secrets that can really destroy a person, including Blackwell himself, if they come out before he has a way of preparing for them. Needless to say, when you’re enmeshed in a sinister mansion that is populated by various Devils and other sinister beings, one can’t always control how these secrets make their way into the world.

It’s a good thing that Ophelia and Blackwell strike up an unusual sort of alliance, because there’s no question that the games within Phantasma are deadly serious. There are several moments in the book where characters that we’ve actually come to know fairly well end up biting the dust, whether because they fail to understand the rules of the contest in which they are engaged or because of Ophelia’s actions (though it’s important to point out that she does at least feel some measure of guilt for at least one of these). These deaths help to give this book some pretty hefty stakes, since it’s very clever that either Ophelia or her sister could perish before they have the chance to make it out of Phantasma alive.

The sex scenes are, of course, scorchingly hot, and I say that as someone who can generally take or leave straight sex on the page. Smith just has a knack for writing sex scenes that manages to be both arousing and also helpful for fleshing out these two characters and their relationship to one another. For Ophelia, having sex with Blackwell is not just a means of connecting with this otherworldly being who is, to be fair, sex on legs, but also a way in which she can finally escape from some of the demons that are constantly in residence in her own mind. For a person who is often tormented by the voice in her head, this is nothing short of a revelation. Her bond with Blackwell reminds her that she is worth loving and that she is more than just the darkness that resides in the cracks and crevices of her psyche.

On a more somber note, I also appreciated the way that Smith gave what is, by all accounts, a fairly accurate representation of what it’s like to live with OCD. Though Ophelia never calls it that, she does have a dark and sinister voice in the back of her head that is always telling her to do terrible things or asserting that terrible things will happen if she doesn’t, say, knock on the wall three times. Anyone who has ever had to live with OCD in any of its forms will see a lot of themselves in Ophelia, and I applaud Smith for being willing to be so open in depicting mental illness within the context of romantasy. At the same time, it can also be a bit of a slog to read through these bits, since it’s bound to be uncomfortable and more than a little disorienting to spend so much time in such a troubled headspace.

I’ve been doing well recently of choosing romantasies that are adept at balancing the romantic and fantastic elements of their stories. Though paranormal romances like this aren’t my usual go-to when it comes to this genre, I nevertheless appreciated what Smith brought to the table. I see quite a bit of Anne Rice in her writing, not just in her decision to set the story in ghost-ridden New Orleans (Rice’s favorite setting) but also in the way that she perfectly captures the way that family secrets and sexual desire can lead us down some very strange sometimes perilous paths.

I do think that the book is a tad long, particularly since the trials themselves tend to feel a bit repetitive after a while. However, Smith has such a captivating writing style, and Ophelia is just such a fascinating and fun heroine, you don’t always notice just how long the book is.

Then there’s the question of politics. By the time the novel comes to an end Ophelia has essentially chosen to be bound to Blackwell for eternity. That is to say, she now has eternal life of her own thanks to her little dalliance with him within the walls of Phantasma. I know that some reviewers have taken exception to this plot development, seeing it as an iteration of a sort of tradwife ideology. I’m not sure that I completely disagree, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple, either. People are complicated beings, and that’s particularly true when, like Ophelia, they have remarkable powers and haunting family histories. Moreover, it’s pretty clear that she stands on equal footing with Blackwell, so he’s not going to get everything his own way..

The only question that I have, having finished the book, is just what comes next for Ophelia, Genevieve, and Blackwell. Sure, they’ve managed to survive the trials of Phantasma, and sure, they all seem to be mostly happy with how things have turned out, but you get the sense that there’s something waiting in the wings, something that’s going to disrupt the little bit of peace that they’ve all somehow managed to find.

I know one thing for sure. I’ll be getting the sequel just as soon as I can!