Santa Please by Jade Falconer

TITLE: Santa Please
AUTHOR: Jade Falconer
PUBLISHER: Phaze
LENGTH: Short story (roughly 9k)
GENRE: Contemporary gay erotic romance
COST: $2.00

Taking a seasonal job as a department store Santa is a little demeaning for college professor Ian, but when he sees the gorgeous young James playing his elf, he decides it might not be as bad as he thought. Especially when James doesn’t hold back on the flirting…

Sometimes I wish I could write a note to authors and say, “You know, there is absolutely nothing wrong with writing an erotic story purely for the erotic factor. Truly. You don’t have to shoehorn in a romance into a short format if it’s going to make it completely unrealistic.” That’s certainly the case with this one. I had hoped that because of its length, this would focus on an erotic encounter, but no, that apparently is not the author’s intent. There’s a great sexual build-up to a rather steamy encounter, but then – in order to satisfy some romantic quota, it would seem – the story jumps forward a month to a sappy, unrealistic, unbelievable HEA. Any attempts to show me the development of the relationship are gone. I don’t even get the characters talking very long about much of anything but their attraction for each other before they’re hopping into bed together. Without those elements, how am I ever supposed to believe that these two love each other at the end? Oh, right, because the author tells me.

Because of the length and the focus on the first two-thirds on the erotic aspect, there isn’t a lot of character development in this. Ian is 50, James 25, but that proves to be only a very minor obstacle to their physical relationship. It doesn’t even really do much to add to the hotness of it, as in bed, it’s not an issue. The guys are likeable enough, but the dialogue never really flows naturally, and I’m left having a vague sense of bodies rather than personality. For an erotic story, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For a romance, it’s the kiss of death. It’s a shame this tried to be the latter. It could have been so much more satisfying if it was just about the sex.

Readability	6/10 – As long as the characters don’t talk or get too romantic, it reads just fine.
Hero	4/10 – A body with some age to it…which would be fine if it didn’t have to veer into unbelievable romance
Hero	4/10 – Not offensive, but not particularly developed, either.
Entertainment value	5/10 – When half the story is sex, how am I supposed to believe any kind of romance?
World building	4/10 – Undeveloped, but not really necessary in this.
TOTAL:	23/50

Survival by Jade Falconer

TITLE: Survival
AUTHOR: Jade Falconer
PUBLISHER: Phaze
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 60k)
GENRE: Gay contemporary erotic romance
COST: $6.00

Successful lawyer Gabriel White has it all – an engagement to the mayor’s daughter, a rising career, money to spare. So why is he looking for a male prostitute to fill all his fantasies? Nicky is a nineteen-year-old whore who’ll do almost anything for a trick. He plays up to every kink Gabriel has and even those he didn’t realize he wanted. But when Gabriel can’t get Nicky out of his head, his entire world is threatened, especially since he can’t stay away…

Every once in a while, I indulge in buying a story purely on kink factor. I’ve never been interested in any other titles by this particular author, and the fact that it was a Phaze release made me leery, but the excerpt teetered on that dirty/wrong line with a glammed up whore and a trick that goes dom and uses dirty talk. I got sucked in and decided what the hell, let’s read this one for the kink.

And that’s all the first third of this story is. It’s scene after scene of Gabriel enacting fantasies, and getting addicted to Nicky and the release of his own suppressed desires. Gabriel is forceful, the dialogue is porny, and it gives in to a lot of different kind of kinks, including dressing Nicky in a schoolgirl outfit. It’s everything most erotic romance isn’t – scorching and very much a guilty pleasure.

But then the story tries to grow out of that kink. When it does, it falls flat on its face. Nicky finds out who Gabriel is and starts to blackmail him, which Gabriel feels he has no choice but to pay. Nicky goes as far as following Gabriel’s fiancée around, posing as a wedding planner in order to learn more about him. It feels like the story is going to devolve into a Fatal Attraction kind of tale, which, honestly, would likely have worked. But that’s not what happens. After making Nicky appear all creepy and unsympathetic, the story twists again to Gabriel realizing he’s in love with him, and everything turns into sappy, heavy-handed melodrama after that. Nicky’s damaged past comes out then, with every stereotypical problem prostitutes have, in order to make him sympathetic to the reader, but it’s too little too late. He’s sobbing every other page and it’s just too, too much. Toss in the fact that Gabriel seems to lose his brain at the same time he falls in love, and the last half of the story is a sheer mess. For instance, Gabriel ends up getting Nicky’s pimp as a client, when the pimp is accused of murder. Nicky is the pimp’s alibi, but Gabriel doesn’t even know that fact until the second Nicky goes up on the stand. Seriously. What lawyer doesn’t depose the primary alibi of a murder suspect? It’s supposed to be all suspenseful and dramatic, but only succeeds in making everybody look like an idiot.

The prose is unsophisticated, with too much passive sentence structuring and mild headhopping. I was willing to overlook it when I played into the kink, but with that attraction gone, the flaws become all too apparent. The end result is a schizophrenic story – fast-paced, dirty, and gritty for the first third, then maudlin melodrama for the rest.

Readability	7/10 – Playing to kink only partially aids prose laden with passive tense and headhopping
Hero #1	4/10 – Mired in his own idiocy after the kink goes away
Hero #2	4/10 – Never breaks through all the sobbing and stalkery behavior to become the tragic hero the story intends
Entertainment value	5/10 – The compulsive kink of the first third sucked me in, but the rest of it falls apart.
World building	5/10 – I never believed Gabriel was a professional, though Nicky’s world was a little more realized.
TOTAL:	25/50