Recommending Kiss the Villain

I need to recommend Kiss the Villain by Nina Kent. It gets a lot of hate on Goodreads because it leans so very heavily into dubcon territory, and tbh the very first sex scene kinda crosses into noncon, but if that's acceptable (or your kink when it comes to fiction)...

- Kinda obvious, but if you have a NC/DC/CNC spectrum spectrum kink... This book will very likely scratch that itch quite nicely for you.

- As someone who really isn't into pain kink (I have a low pain tolerance), I really like that it doesn't have much focus at all on your usually BDSM pain stuff (flogging, intense intense and ongoing spanking, etc.). It was mostly just some shorter spanking sessions for a specific purpose, biting, pinching, that sort of shit. And, ya know, the pain that happens when someone insists on trying to fucking murder you.

- It's a MM romance where both characters are dark. The s (Gareth) is a masked (in the neurodivergence sense) undiagnosed narcissistic psychopath, and the D (Kayden) is his morally grey professor.

- The above means that not only is Gareth not your standard rag doll or even "feisty captive", but sort of like... A straight-up violent "brat" right from their first scene? Like, Kayden's motives change throughout the book, as is standard for this stuff, but on some fundamental level a big part of it is always to tame his violent brat.

- The spice dives right in at chapter 2. Like, HARD. And it's hella spicy, and the scenes are more than long enough to, um, enjoy yourself to. I've actually kind of been ruined by writers like Nina Kent, Sierra Simone, and even Annabeth Albert, and now when I'm hunting down spicy books and the scenes are all of a paragraph long I'm like "well, shit, that wasn't helpful".

- The emotional development of the relationship is complex, painful, and recognized as toxic. There's no sense that Kayden will "fix" Gareth - only calm him, and if need must be, find the least bad outlet for him (a "waste of space"). Again, Kayden is quite grey himself, so that aids in this dynamic being realistic.

- The plot is genuinely riveting. I honestly found myself dropping what I was doing at many points in the story and just... sitting on the floor, listening. The internal monologs were meaningful and minimally redundant *CoughSierraSimoneCough*, there were lots of subtle Chekov's gun revelations that I appreciated, and while it was a HEA, I was on the border of ugly crying at one part. (The narration was wonderfully done here too, although there's maybe one line I would have wanted done differently.)

- I sort of alluded to this earlier, but I kind of liked how the brat taking dynamic was actually plot relevant and for Gareth's own good, and not just in the "Oh, he's not eating enough vegetables or getting enough sleep or drinking enough water" kind of way. More like the "he's going to get himself fucking killed or thrown in prison for life" sort of way.

- A surprising amount of dialogue bits that had me snorting with laughter for a book so dark and so smutty.

Some of the cons:

- Not uncommon for MM books, but definitely a number of painfully written Very Special Episode lines. Why can no-one seem to write this sort of dialog in a way that sounds at all natural?

- The epilogues especially were painfully stuffed with all too obvious pairing placement for the other books in the Nina Kent universe. I think this may have partly been an actual replacement for a preview chapter of another book? But the HEA moment in the second epilogue, was, I must admit, incredibly cute, especially in the narration. Like, the way the reaction was acted? Fine job, Mr. Actor.

- Apparently Kent is fucking addicted to the phrase "literally and figuratively". Having also just listened to Hunt the Villain (which wasn't as good), I swear she uses this phrase like four times per book. She also seems to like "Just kidding."

BTW, if anyone has recommendations for other books I might like that are similar to this one, please let me know. I've already read New Camelot, Lyonesse #1 (dropped #2 because Isolde is boring AF) but am planning to read #3, a number of Annabeth Albert books, and have ACOTAR waiting for me for the plot (since I know it's very light on the spice).