Liquid Silver Books, $5.50, ISBN 978-1-59578-485-8
Contemporary Romance, 2008
I waded into DJ Manly’s Amusing Amanda series when the series was well underway, so perhaps the author and I can start all over again on a fresh slate with this brand new standalone effort. Love Most Inconvenient is actually a collection of three short stories where men fall in love under, well, the most inconvenient circumstances. No threesomes, foursomes, or a strange fag-hag who pays a lot of money to see male escorts put on a live sex show in front of her, instead we have more conventional stories of falling in love.
No Vacancy sees Manuel and John having a problem. John rented an apartment from Sam, not realizing that Manuel pays half the rent and therefore he sleeps in the bedroom that John has moved into. Yes, they eventually get naked and get happy, but I find this story pretty contrived. The two characters are such drama queens because instead of talking, they escalate the initial confusion into a situation where the cops are called in. Well, at least they are compatible in that aspect, I suppose. This is a very short story so everything takes place at high speed. Hello – drama – sex – happy ending, that’s it.
In Right before My Eyes, we have Paul who is attracted to the hottest DJ at the radio station he works for, Marco Delino. Hey, it could be worse – Paul could be infatuated with Ryan Seacrest. This is a much better story than the previous one because the author has taken the trouble to show that Paul and Marco have bonded in an emotional level before doing the wazoo. This is a pleasant story and the characters are likable.
In My Name Is Dane, Mark Merchant has a family crisis. His sister is pregnant as a result of a, er, “thing” with the manager of the restaurant where she works and the man in question is refusing to accept any responsibility for the act. Against his better judgment, he accompanies his impulsive and hot-headed brother Frankie to kidnap the man in question to force him to see the light. They end up with the wrong man. Dane is cute, but given the situation, it will take some effort to rectify the situation into something less farcical. This is a farce. There are times when I fear that Mark will lose his head and start running around while making chicken sounds because he’s that high-strung at times. The author often relies on Mark being a big drama queen to keep the story going for as long as it does, which ends up causing poor Mark to come off like a twit.
On the whole, the three stories are too short to make much of an impact. I suppose Love Most Inconvenient will make an easy bite-sized read for readers looking for gay romances, but for me, I find the first and third stories too reliant on hammy high-strung antics for “comedy”. Since drama queens tend to make me cringe rather than laugh, I have a most unfortunate reaction to those stories. The second story is pleasant, and that’s about it, I’m afraid.
