I gave The Never King, book one in this series a very ambivalent B- because 1) I was entertained and 2) I was compelled to read the next title to see what happened next. Alas, I am 1) no longer entertained and 2) so appalled by the rampant misogyny in The Dark One that I feel disgusted and just so gross after reading it that I need to shower in bleach and burn my Kindle. 

Warning: in order to do this review justice, I’m using language and quotes from the book that are very graphic in nature. If this offends you, you may not want to read on.

We pick up immediately after the ending of The Never King. Winnie “Whore” Darling has returned to Neverland with Peter Pan, the fae prince twins Kas and Bash, and The Dark One, aka Vane, because she is so darned horny that having four hot dudes use her body in every vile way is simply impossible to resist.

“It’s hard to believe that this is my new reality. That I have four insanely hot men all to myself…Could this be my life from now on? Just lazing on the beach and fucking any one of them whenever I want? Letting Bash cook me food while Kas tells me a story and Vane broods beside me while Peter Pan smokes a cigarette and looks sexier than any man has a right to look.” 

Meanwhile, Peter Pan has finally found his lost shadow, but when he attempts to reclaim it, not only does the little bugger escape, but another shadow – Neverland’s Shadow of Death – also escapes and is running loose. 

You see, the islands of this magical world all contain two shadows, a Shadow of Life and a Shadow of Death. When he became king, Pan chose the Shadow of Life, while Vane, who came from a different island, accepted the Shadow of Death, for Reasons. Unfortunately, this Dark Shadow has grown uncontrollable, and when it’s unleashed it wants to hurt people. Badly. Not only must Pan hunt down his own shadow, he and Vane need to figure out how to deal with the growing threat of Vane’s Darkness. Oh, and fight Captain Hook and the Fae Queen Tilly who are plotting together to kill Pan and take over Neverland.

I honestly can’t say what I found most offensive about The Dark One. The fact that women exist only to service Pan and his Lost Boys in whatever depraved, abusive way they want, or the obscene character of Winnie, who could be replaced, no joke, by an inflatable pink plastic sex doll and no one would notice.

Seriously, Winnie is nothing but a collection of holes. She has no personality other than loving sex. And she likes that Pan and Vane read The Books. 

What I find so infuriating is that Winnie’s situation is a perfectly delightful fantasy I could totally buy into, as far as the story goes. While I am not into degrading group sex, I do appreciate the dream of having a handful of hot men, each with different, appealing qualities, who desire you above all others, and being allowed to engage in those desires without guilt. Go girl!! Get you some.

But Winnie has done nothing to earn that fantasy. She’s worse than a Mary Sue. A Mary Sue does so many things and is perfect at everything she does. Winnie has a magical vagina. That’s all she offers the four hottest men on Neverland. Even Pan doesn’t understand where the attraction comes from:

“Darling has us all worshipping her. I still don’t know how she managed it. She is a magician pulling tricks and I have yet to see the reveal. Perhaps her wet pussy is the trick and the flourish because fuck if I don’t feel awed by her every single time she’s wrapped around my cock.”

Winnie’s super-special magical hoo-hah is so bedazzling that Pan, Kas, Bash and Vane actually commit to sexually abusing having sex with her exclusively when she stamps her tiny foot and insists, now that she’s a permanent resident of Neverland, she Will Not Share Her Men! Not with anyone.

Pan won’t share Winnie with anyone else, either, except, of course, Kas, Bash and Vane. Not only will he share her with them, he gets off on watching them abuse her. 

“God, I love watching her get used.”

It’s most definitely a mixed-message, with each of the dudes thinking, at some point, “she is mine and I am hers”. Except Winnie is not any single one of theirs. She is, at best, a co-op.

Whenever the group gets freaky and Winnie heads Vane’s way to give him his fair share of her whorishness and rightful chance to abuse her as he wishes, his Shadow threatens to turn him into a mindless, murderous beast, so he runs away to keep from hurting her precious self. As the single holdout against the Allure of The Vagina of Winnie, Vane is the most intriguing of her men, and Winnie determines to have him even if it means heinous bodily injury.

“This is what I wanted. Every single part of it. I don’t care how dangerous he is or how painful it might be…”

We are told these boys men are willing to sacrifice everything for Winnie and her magic va-jay-jay because they think rubbish thoughts like:

“I (Kas) will pick Darling over my own wings because with her I am already flying.”

And:

“If I (Pan) get my shadow back, I can return to the daylight, but perhaps Darling has been all the light I’ve needed.”

However, they never show this affection in actual words or loving physical acts. Every sexual encounter is violent and misogynistic. Orgasm is actually used as a torture device.

“She wants to throw her body at us,” Kas says, watching the Darling’s face turn redder by the second. “So let’s make her come so much it hurts.”

Lost Boys groupie Cherry who has the hots for Vane, sums up the entire book’s treatment of female sexuality:

“I’m okay with getting the worst of Vane if I can have any of him at all. My body still aches from the…Pounding is the only word. Even if it is inadequate. I’m still sore between my legs and bruises still pepper my skin. I wear them proudly, of course. I have the marks of his hands on my skin. Winnie Darling just has the bruise around her throat from where she made him mad.”

Because Winnie is thoroughly turned on by the degradation, we are supposed to be okay with it. But Winnie being a non-entity with no defining personality whatsoever, the message isn’t ‘positive ownership of her personal kink’ so much as ‘she’s a whore in the most negative sense of the word and has zero self-respect.’

Then there is the sloppy writing. The twins are so indistinguishable that author St. Crowe herself mixes them up multiple times. Bash, a master at tying knots, spends a healthy word count tying Winnie to a tree (which has sex with her, don’t ask), only to have Winnie muse “Kas knows what he’s doing when it comes to tying ropes”. And don’t even get me started on the clusterfuck that is Wendy Darling’s story. Suffice it to say, the plot hole is so large, you could drive an entire planet through it.

The only reason I didn’t give The Dark One a double, triple F is because if you take Winnie completely out of the story – like kill her dead – and remove every single word of the sex scenes, Pan, Kas, Bash and Vane are quintessential Bad Boy anti-heroes and the worldbuilding has potential. If this were a much, much better book, we’d actually follow the intriguing premise of Neverland’s shadow magic. Instead, we get far too much Winnie Whore and the Gang Bang Crew exchanging bodily fluids.

I have learned something about myself as a reader. While the Why Choose trope is perfectly viable fantasy fodder, I don’t find a group of men sexually abusing sharing a single woman in front of each other the least bit sexy or romantic. This book is basically gang bang porn full stop. If that’s your thing… yeah, no judgment. I’ll take a hard pass.

Please note that this book contains many potential triggers that I will not list here but which can be found on the author’s website: https://www.nikkistcrowe.com/content-warnings