AUTHOR: D.J. Manly
PUBLISHER: Loose Id
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 56k)
GENRE: Gay paranormal erotic romance
COST: $6.99
A bad break-up has completely derailed Russell Thompson’s life. For the past three years, he has mourned the loss of his ex, Gray Wiese, and the band they formed together, watching from the sidelines as the band skyrockets to fame without him. When Eddie, a high school acquaintance, shows up and offers to get him back into the band, Russ jumps at the opportunity. But the contract he signs promises more than his devotion to Eddie. It promises his very soul…
The publisher’s blurb for this story doesn’t do it any credit. At over 300 words, it’s a mishmash of too many names and too much backstory that forces a potential buyer to read more than once in order to get even a rudimentary understanding of who the players might be and what is actually going on. Ultimately, though, the story itself is very simple. Boy loses boy and band. Boy meets powerful demonic creature willing to give at least the band back to him for a price. Boy has to fight not to break the contract that will damn him forever. Much of the detail provided in the publisher’s blurb is extraneous and confusing, better left for readers to find out on their own as the story progresses.
That being said, what starts out as a promising horror erotic romance never quite reaches the potential of either the premise or the opening chapters. The author’s voice is simple and direct, with little challenging or exciting to differentiate it from other stories. Details that would have helped build the horror and suspense of what Russ is going through aren’t shared until far too late, and without those, the constant scene-cutting back and forth between POV – Russ, Gray, and Eddie – makes it harder to connect or respond to any of them. Russ is the easiest to connect with, and for me the most likeable character, while Gray’s emotional arc is all over the place, with melodramatic reactions that don’t endear him to me at all.
Because the thrust of the novel is keeping the two heroes apart, for the first two-thirds of the story, the eroticism is presented in other ways. Eddie has done this for Russ because he’s wanted him since high school, but Eddie’s sexual tastes have changed over the years, in accordance with what he’s become. These are the scenes the reader gets to witness, almost all of them BDSM scenes with bondage and pain. Russ only does it because he has to; saying no is not an option, so the level of consent in this dubious at best. We’re supposed to believe that Russ becomes addicted to the sexual release he gets from these types of scenes, but frankly, I didn’t get it. If they’re so pleasurable, why do his thoughts outside of those scenes never reflect that? They always seem to linger on how much he hates it all, how much he wants out of it, how much he’d rather be with Gray. I can’t buy that he gets much satisfaction at all from Eddie’s games, which ultimately keeps them from ever being arousing.
The most interesting aspect of the story is the last quarter, where the action and tone take a definitive shift away from the more contemporary ambience straight into paranormal. In a lot of ways, it felt like an entirely different book. These were characters far more interesting to me than the ones who had started out the story, with details painting a world that engaged and entertained me. Russ has far more depth, and I could even tolerate Gray’s drama queen tendencies better. I would have much preferred seeing this style of storytelling throughout the novel. It’s engaging and nuanced; unfortunately, it takes three-fourths of the book to get to that point.
| Readability | 7/10 – A crowded cast and odd pacing slow down otherwise simple reading |
| Hero #1 | 7/10 – Sympathetic, though it always felt like there was something I didn’t know about him. |
| Hero #2 | 5/10 – A drama queen, and hard for me to take seriously with all his melodramatic reactions |
| Entertainment value | 6/10 – A lot of potential that never quite follows through |
| World building | 7/10 – The paranormal aspects of the last quarter are hinted at throughout the book, but it’s sudden shift gives the story a schizophrenic feel |
| TOTAL: | 32/50 |
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