Eternal Pleasure—Nina Bangs

As he stepped onto the balcony, she silently chanted the rules of the civilized: Thou shalt not make love on a balcony even if it's thirty-something stories up because someone might see you. Thou salt not make love with a dinosaur no matter how sexy he is. Thou shalt not make love on a balcony when a werewolf is in the room, even if said werewolf is asleep. (148)

Part of Vaginal Fantasy Rewind

Do you love Ocean's Eleven? Ever wanted to read a version comprised of godlike men who have the souls of dinosaurs? Then this is the book for you! Eternal Pleasure is the first in the Gods of the Night series by Nina Bangs. (A pseudonym, in case you hadn't realized.) The Eleven have had their original dinosaur souls reinstalled in (all-male) bodies in order to save the human race from certain destruction. Their evil counterparts are trying to convene supernatural beings city by city to come to the dark side, and the leader of the Eleven, Fin, has had visions of "keys" who can defeat them. I'll give you three guesses what, or rather who, those "keys" are. The first of those keys is Kelly Maloy, who is working as a driver for the Eleven and picks Ty up from the airport with his newly minted old soul. (Once again, three guesses as to which dinosaur soul Ty contains.) Kelly happens to catch a glimpse of Ty's soul, which emerges from him as a kind of translucent offensive and defensive shell when he's engaged in a fight, and realizes she's getting more than she bargained for with the whole job. As the gang learns more about their mission, Kelly and Ty get closer. Much closer. Like, the closest two people can be.

The sequel to this, Eternal Craving, is the main for this month of Vaginal Fantasy—in honor of the release of Jurassic World—so it seemed the perfect time to read this one next in my VF Rewind. It was kind of a two-fer.

This book is such a gem. I just don't even know where to start. Maybe with the fact that most of us don't need to remind ourselves not to make love with a dinosaur, as our female protagonist does in the above pullquote.

There was little to no actual character development. Ty is a tyrannosaur, Kelly is a music student who is working as a driver to try and secure some extra dough for when she goes back to school. He is driven by his dinosaur urges, because he's not really used to his human body yet. She gets swept up into the nonsense because all of the Eleven are basically irresistible Adonises. He doesn't have a lot of backstory to learn because his soul has been on ice for 65 million years, and before that he was a dinosaur. She has the minimal backstory, where we find out she in fact has a mom and a dad and even a sister (who becomes the female lead in Eternal Craving, of course). Oh, and she plays music. Certainly all that you could ever need or want to know about either of them.

Here's a list, though certainly not comprehensive, of the absolutely absurd happenings.

• In addition to the reincarnated dinos, there are werewolves, vampires, sorcerers, ghouls, demons, fae, and changelings. The book is 308 pages long. This is an overload.
• The leader of the Eleven has given them all super creative names. Like Ty for a tyrannosaur. Or Al for an allosaurus. Or Utah and Rap and Tor for three brothers who are...shocker, Utahraptors!
• The leader also gave them all a Chuck-like upload once their souls were in the new body models in order to update them on the essentials of the mission and what they missed for the previous eons. Oh, and he picked really hot bodies for them all so that they wouldn't struggle to catch women and could thus be focused on the big picture because their basic needs would be met. Because he's a thoughtful guy like that.
• The cover story for all of these super hot men needing drivers and congregating together is that they're missionaries. Of course.
• One of the other human drivers—because obviously the dinos can't drive themselves, they don't have the knowledge for that, having been nonexistent for millions of years—gets turned into a werewolf.
• Kelly is a key because her brain waves are music. They have to be mapped, and then translated into a music score, which she then has to play on her flute in order to defeat one of the big bads. But she actually doesn't have her flute when the time comes, so she instead just sings it. Like, WHAT?! In a less insanity-laden book, this might have been an interesting idea, but...
• While Kelly is doing her "key" thing, Fin (the leader of the Eleven) is opening a hole in the earth, causing the Astrodome to implode with the big bad inside, and closing the earth back over the rubble.

When Kelly decides that she loves Ty and that she wants to stay with him, Fin reveals to her the birds and the bees of being with one of the Eleven. You see, when a man (er...dinosaur) and a woman love each other very much, the woman can magically penetrate the weird soul projection that the man creates, walking through it to his corporeal human body, simultaneously being shown the entirety of his 200 million year history. And then she becomes immortal. Because obvs.

Surprisingly enough, apparently Nina Bangs' publishers decided that they didn't want to continue with the series after book three, so I will never know more about Fin or Seir (Fin's brother? who is a demon?), who are really the only characters that I found compelling and non-stereotypical at all.

Read my thoughts on the sequel, Eternal Craving. You can also read about my Vaginal Fantasy Rewind.

Even though the book was gloriously awful, the Vag Fan conversation about it was one of my favourites in memory. It's true that the first thing that came into my mind when we learned that Fin's hair was silver (not grey, not white, but actually shiny silver) was tinsel; whether that was because I remembered this Hangout or because that's the first shiny silver thing that popped into my head we'll probably never know.



If you found out you were a reincarnated dino soul, which dinosaur would you want your soul to have been? I think I'd probably go with triceratops, but I'm open to other ideas.