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Synopsis for NightWhere:

She yearned to go beyond… but some curtains should never be opened.
When Rae broached the idea of visiting an underground sex club, Mark didn’t blink. He should have. Because NightWhere is not your usual swingers club. Where it’s held on a given night…only those who receive the red invitations know. Soon Rae is indulging in her lust for pain. And Mark is warned by a beautiful stranger to take his wife away before it’s too late.

But it’s already too late. Because Rae hasn’t come home. Now Mark is in a race against time — to find NightWhere again and save his wife from the mysterious Watchers who run the club. To stop her from taking that last step through the degradations of The Red into the ultimate BDSM promise of The Black. More than just their marriage and her life are at stake: Rae is in danger of losing her soul…

Synopsis for The Night Mother:

The sequel to the 2012 Bram Stoker Award finalist NightWhere!

Selena, a fallen angel, knew that once exposed, you could never escape the pull of NightWhere, a mysterious underground sex club run by beings called The Watchers.

Cassie, a driven dominatrix, didn’t.

When both are drawn into the club’s secret rooms that promise an ecstasy of forbidden pain and pleasure, they must somehow try to protect the men they love. Because the club’s Midnight Queen, the Night Mother, has a deadly plan that may break the boundaries of our world and destroy everything and everyone they’ve ever desired…

Review:

NightWhere is a place where all of your most deviant fantasies can come to life A BDSM sex club that moves to a new location in the Chicagoland area every month, but the inside of the club looks the same everywhere. With people watching from the ceiling and the walls, watching everything that happens. With walls dripping with blood. With people who have never escaped. John Everson published the first book, NightWhere in 2012, and received high praise, even a finalist for a Bram Stoker award. Now he has returned to NightWhere for a sequel, The Night Mother, the woman who is in charge of the entirety of NightWhere, a character who does not factor much into the original novel. 

If you have read NightWhere and loved it: You will love The Night Mother even more. This is a direct sequel to NightWhere. The first novel is Mark trying to save Rae from the club. This novel is about Mark trying to save the club from Rae. (Isn’t there a song, “Heaven Doesn’t Want Me and Hell is Afraid I’ll Take Over”?) This sequel has all of the characters that we connected with from the first novel, with a few new ones to help with the readers journey through NightWhere. 

If you have read NightWhere and did not like it: This is a better story, and to be brutally honest, John Everson is a much better writer now than he was a decade ago. The years between the two novels have been spent publishing great books like The House by the Cemetery, Voodoo Heart, and Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds. He has really honed his skills, and The Night Mother is a well crafted and well-written story. NightWhere is also a much more interesting place a decade later. There are rooms that have any sort of fetish that you can imagine, and as we walk through the club again, we are exposed to a much more varied and interesting experience. And The Night Mother. She has a small scene in the first book, but her character in this second book, along with the Rae and how she has changed, really makes for a sequel that is better than the original.

If you have not read NightWhere: This is a direct sequel, but Everson has written it in a way that you can enjoy it without confusion. He introduces Cassie, a dominatrix, and Paul, her slave, to NightWhere, and they do the job of explaining the club and what is going on with each room. I read NightWhere and The Night Mother back to back, and I did enjoy it this way, but I also tried to think of reading The Night Mother without the context of the first. If I was lost. I do think that Everson does a good job of explaining the situation and even expanding on the club, but I also feel like I get more depth from the sequel having read the first because every character from the first returns for the second. 

Someone blurbed NightWhere as “Hellraiser meets Fifty Shades of Grey.” This is not terribly far from the truth. NightWhere is a special place where the deeper a person travels into the depths of the club, the closer they are to the depths of Hell. I always liked Hellraiser because the main purpose of the story was for the characters to find the ultimate pleasure, unfortunately the Cenobites idea of pleasure is through tortuous pain. This is NightWhere. Many of the acts in the club cross the line between pain and pleasure, and this is the line that NightWhere tries to straddle. There is gore and torture, and some of the horrors that are described here are some of the most brutal I have ever read.

Beneath all of the surface horrors, there is a great deal of heart in both of these novels. Ultimately, NightWhere and The Night Mother are love stories, where ordinary people get caught in the playground for otherworldly entities. In NightWhere, Mark is trying to save his marriage and the woman that he loves from a club that he thinks has brainwashed her becuase “Love Will Conquer All”. He is kind of an idiot, but he is also not wrong. The “Love Will Conquer All” aspect in these novels is what keeps everyone reading and the hope of a good outcome is what makes them palatable. Like one of the characters mentions in The Night Mother, NightWhere is a place for pain but also for pleasure. When you lose sight of the pleasure, all you have left is pain. Everson’s best job in these novels is balancing the horrors of NightWhere with the humanity that is fighting the entire time to stay alive. 

I received The Night Mother from John Everson in exchange for an honest review.