Such is the case with the protagonist of Ink Exchange, Leslie, a young woman scarred by a horrific gang-rape who is unknowingly thrust into the mysterious and dangerous world of fairies. With no small measure of irony, it is the novel’s villain-apparent Irial, King of the Dark Court, who exhibits an honesty lacked by the Summer Court. Of course, honesty can be just as much a weapon as deception, which points to Marr’s blurring of absolute moral categories. Irial, who repeatedly insists he is not strictly evil, fails to realize that evil, like good, is defined by actions rather than dramatic rationalizations. But of course, Ink Exchange is written in the mold of the Bronte sisters, full of gothic melodrama and tortured romance. Though Irial resorts to horrific methods to feed himself and the faeries of the Dark Court – Marr’s dark fey are unquestionably vampiric, although it is emotions rather than blood that provide sustenance – his relative honesty and capacity for love makes him the epitome of the tortured romantic anti-hero instead of the outright evil menace he probably should be.

To compensate for that ambiguity, we get more traditional heroism with amped-up mental anguish through Niall, a fairy whose very nature creates a destructive addiction in mortals. Assigned by the Summer Court to protect Leslie, Marr casts him from a very Byronic mold in his struggle to deal with a tempest of emotions. With the guilt and scars of his past bubbling into the torment of forbidden love, Niall offers the second point of the requisite, salacious triangle formed with Irial and Leslie. What, exactly, makes Leslie so deserving of all the fawning adoration isn’t clear.

By contrast, on the lighter side of fairy-land, Leslie’s high school friend Aislinn is, unbeknownst to her, the new Queen of the Summer Court. Along with her consort, the manipulative Summer King Keenan, she is determined to protect Leslie from the fey world. But the Incomplete Goodness Theorem applies in full force, and the Summer Court’s attempt to keep Leslie away from Irial invariably sabotage themselves.

Ink Exchange, then, presents a fantasy world of politics, seduction, and violence laced by a strong sexuality that, had the book been written by Linda Hamilton, would have gone far over the top instead of settling into something restrained for younger readers. The metaphysics of horror, in which the world is presented as an unremittingly hostile place, are in play with the fairy world presented as yet another invisible realm that can destroy unsuspecting humans, but the typical genre bleakness is tempered by Marr’s injection of moral complexity and the presence of countervailing forces for good, however dubious.

Unfortunately, much of the story consists of familiar plots and subplots. Leslie, through a tattoo that binds her to Irial in an intimate violation, is the seduced innocent traumatized and exploited by the rivalry of fairy courts while struggling with the emotional slaughterhouse of her life. Niall, smitten as he is, suffers from allegiance issues while Irial broods over the survival of his court. Marr isn’t afraid to take these characters in unsettling directions, but is to beholden to vampire fiction. Most damaging, the world she creates lack a certain depth of the kind achieved by other authors whose fictional universes also consist of magical worlds superimposed on our own. From J.K. Rowling’s you-know-who books to Sergei Lukyanenko’s innovative Night Watch series, there is a mountain of fiction that creates vivid parallel worlds of magic, wonder, and terror that Marr’s fairy world doesn’t achieve. In Marr’s defense, and also explaining why some characters are given short shrift, Ink Exchange is, after all, the second book in the Wicked Lovely series. A case of contextualitis excuses some of the book’s shortcomings. But in the end, what recommends the book despite the deja vu is Marr’s tightly drawn characterizations of her leads. Niall and Irial, for all their stereotypes, have a compelling inner life, and Leslie is an engaging protagonist whose humanity is wound, unwound, and rewound with great sympathy and attention. If the fairy world itself doesn’t beckon, concern for Leslie’s fate carries readers through to the end.