Marva Dale, $2.99, ISBN 978-1370159246
Contemporary Fiction, 2018
I have no idea how to describe or even categorize Marva Dale’s Dead on Course, but I will try to explain as best as I can.
Basically it’s the story of Strayer Boyd Savitt Jr. The whole thing starts out like a sexually explicit version of those “family dynasty” novels that were all the rage back in the 1980s, as I get to read about Boyd’s childhood and then his teenage romps with his girlfriend, from first to third base. As a cultured individual of distinguished age and palette, I can only wonder why the author will think I enjoy reading such things. Given that the girlfriend breaks off with him after they graduate from high school, the whole part of this story feels like an excuse for the author to do a Jackie Collins back when Ms Collins still wrote hot stuff back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, I said “hot stuff”. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but those naughty scenes in this part are kinda hot. Damn it, is someone going to knock my door soon?
Anyway, then the story takes Boyd to college, or sort of, as he isn’t very gifted in the brain department. He’s musically inclined, though, and has much promise in that area. He hooks up with a rich gal and once again, the author is in her erotic family saga author mode, as these two start getting it on. Then, the girlfriend Laurel goes off to attend music school in California, and a lonely Boyd decides to go trek across the country to visit her.
That’s when this story immediately switches mode from horny horns to B-grade sleazy thriller, as Boyd crosses path with the violent and likely deranged Stormy that pretty much kidnaps him. Their relationship soon becomes sexual and violent and all messed-up, and this is actually the part of the story that is the most interesting to me. Boyd goes from a rather sweet and naïve honey magnet (he’s a one-woman guy) into someone out of his depths but trying to use what he has (including his body) to survive the mess he is stuck in. The sex scenes here are also the most interesting, for the want of a better word, as the author manages to combine violent with sex, hate and lust in one heady concoction.
And then, the story abruptly ends.
What is this? You know what I think? I suspect that Dead on Course is actually part of a planned much longer story, maybe one that will chronicle Boyd’s arc from dreamboat Rick Springfield with an actual functional pee-pee to perhaps a more hardened, cynical Mick Jagger-esque sex god, perhaps an epic Gino Santangelo-esque tale of country and western crime and sex and what not. Maybe the author ends up unable to finish the thing beyond what I am reading now, and she then slaps on a rushed ending so that she can push this thing out of her proverbial drawer so that it will never haunt her again.
That’s just my guess, and if I’m correct, then while I completely understand why the author does that, I have to say that it is one dang shame, because even in its mutant what-the-hell-is-this form, Dead on Course is actually a very engaging read. Yes, yes, the sex is hot—now please forget I ever said that, or else some people will really knock down my door soon—but Boyd has a very compelling first person narration going on here, and I feel like he is finally starting to be an interesting character when the curtain just comes crashing down on me. How rude. I don’t mind reading on had the story kept going, because the idea of Boyd surviving prison and worse to become a hot sex god musician by day and crime boss or something by night is certainly something I haven’t read before but won’t mind reading at all. There are sex here, sleaze, violence, and crazy homicidal people here—all the ingredients for a fun wholesome dip into the wild side, and the author just squanders everything in the space of two paragraphs.
This one gets three oogies for what could have been, as well as being unexpectedly enjoyable and intriguing in its current form, which on paper seems like a hot unsatisfying mess. If this didn’t scream “wasted potential”, I don’t know what will.
