Genre: Paranormal
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
So what’s a young gay boy from suburbs of Dayton, Ohio to do, when he comes out to his family, only to finds out his family has been keeping their own secrets. Jason Wynwood just turned 18 finding out he is in a long bloodline of witches.
As Jason searches for love, he falls for a mysterious black haired gentleman named Damien. Jason is thrown into a dangerous world of magic with witches, vampires and werewolves, and a glittery nightlife sexual pleasures. He also discovers Young gay men have been turning up dead at rest stops all over surrounding areas.
Police suspect that it’s the work of a serial killer. But when a friend ends up dead it becomes personal. Can Jason find the killer before anyone else turns up dead?
The Review
This has to be categorized as an enthusiastic 3 rating, because I found myself charmed both by the story and by Jason Wynwood’s character—despite the insistently unpolished and badly-edited writing. This is Harry Potter set in middle-America, presented to the reader through the eyes of R.D. Noland who, after reading his biography, could himself be Jason Wynwood. The tale is told in a matter-of-fact way, filled with unadorned yearning and a kind of awkward young-adult sex that I found weirdly endearing.
Jason Wynwood is the teenaged protagonist in this kitchen-sink paranormal romance set in the early 1980s. At first it just seems like the simple story of a high-school graduate who lives in suburban Dayton, Ohio, being angsty about coming out to his family. Jason works his way toward independent adulthood by means of sharing an apartment with his cousin and working as a waiter in a local Chinese restaurant.
Weirdly, the book actually starts with a dark prologue about a college student picking up a trick at a rest stop and apparently coming to a bad end. So, right away we know that something’s up, and it seems to be paranormal. It takes quite a while before the story ties back into the macabre opening scene.
Jason’s personal journey in southern Ohio becomes a three-pronged story: coming out, discovering his own magic powers, and helping his newly-found paranormal community track down a serial killer. Eventually, Jason meets Damien, a beautiful dark-haired boy who seems to be Jason’s dream date, but turns out to have his own interesting complications. It’s a bittersweet story, this one, opening the way for the second book in the series, “In The Light of The Moon.”
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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