Clyde Blake, $1.99, ISBN 978-1005108663
Horror Romance, 2021
I see on the cover of Clyde Blake’s At the Lake’s Shore what seems like a naked man and I see tentacles. Sold.
Things that go bump in the night don’t frighten me, but many other things do. The creatures that move silently, slithering within the darkness to stalk the innocent. Or the strange, twisted beasts that don’t value life but instead worship a dark purpose only they understand.
An opening paragraph that defines cosmic horror and has the protagonist declaring that he’s scared of that stuff. I don’t know if this is just the author being meta or something else.
It’s 1839, on the very day when an eclipse is taking place. Master Valentine Yorke is always conflicted over his attraction to men, as it just won’t do when you’re a bloke in that time and in that neighborhood. Unfortunately, the mere sight of his comely neighbor Jonathon Cavendish is driving him insane with desire, so much so that he has all these erotic dreams at night that leave, uh, evidence of his desire on the sheets come morning. His members of the staff now give him that look, except for Mary who believes that he can still be “saved” from the demons that are clearly tempting him into sin.
Then there is this alluring, mysterious voice in his head, beckoning him to step into the dark waters of the lake in his estate, claiming that his every desire will be fulfilled if he would do such a thing.
Okay, let me get this out of the way: in its very core, At the Lake’s Shore is a romance. Yes, there is a happy ending with Masters Yorke and Cavendish happily going ooh-ooh-ooh baby. However, how they get from being neighbors to groin-bumpers, I still have no idea. The story skips many, many important stops along the journey of the romance, and I for one am left feeling like I’m trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle that has half its pieces missing.
As for the horror, it turns out to be another ill-explained creepy thing under the lake wants bad things. That’s a pretty standard trope for cosmic horror stories, and for the most part, I feel that the author is going to take me to some place interesting. I have to give Clyde Blake credit: this is the first story that manages to turn erections, masturbation, and ejaculation into the equivalent of jump scares. When Yorke is rubbing his junk, and when he’s taking to the stars, oh yes, that’s when something bad is going to happen. Well, that or the equivalent of a loud noise that leads to zero pay-off like the miserable state of mainstream horror films these days, but I’d save that rant for another day.
In the end, I finish this story wondering what it is that I have just read. Here’s the thing: this one tries to be both horror and romance. Horror romance, if you will, and yes, I’d dig such a genre so, so hard that I’d be the best shovel-wielder in the land. However, the appearance of the romantic elements later in the story—abruptly too—completely kills the momentum of the horror. Because romance needs a happy ending, the horror elements build to a fever pitch… only to dissipate because I know the two main characters need to live in order to hump their fears away. The author opts for a conventional romance route, and this part of the story is so 180 from the rest of the story that it may as well as be a completely different story altogether.
Horror romance can work, absolutely, but the formulae of both horror and romance need to be tweaked so that they can coexist. This one has kernels of interesting ideas and possibilities, and the horror build-up and occasional erotic moments are all pretty good, hence my giving this one three oogies. However, it is also a conventional horror story and a conventional romance rather clumsily stitched together, leading to a dismal payoff that negates much of the good present in the story up to that point.
