I Am Completely Serious

It also applies in reverse! If you are okay with there being slightly less doom. There's still plenty to go around, especially in the first book, but in general Carey is less likely to kill everyone's true love and ruin their lives. She's a much more humane writer than Renault, in the sense that she sympathizes with all her characters, even the villains and the idiots.

I think Renault always put her sense of the mythic before everything else, which meant more outright cruelty than Carey goes in for. All of which makes sense, given that Carey is in charge of consensual-BDSM-related fantasy. There's also a lot of humor in there, which is not something you see a lot of in Renault.