LoveSpell, $5.99, ISBN 0-505-52480-5
Fantasy Romance, 2002
Nina Bangs’s Night Games is icky. Sorry, but I go “Eeeeeuuwww!” when I read this story, it really makes me feel squicky and dirty inside. Maybe it’s because of the author’s depiction of the future, 2502, which makes me feel like checking my hair for lice. Or the hero, who makes me want to go get a STD check-up. Either way, I need a long hot shower after finishing Night Games.
In the future, they have no disease, no obesity (since they start selling those slimming pills, everyone now pigs out and eats whole buffet tables of food for snack), and get this – men’s libido is now at near zero point. Only a few select studs who can get it up are now national heroes that appear on TV shows like Monday Night Sex. Yes, they have sex shows on TV to sate the women of the world.
Uhm… what happened to vibrators?
Our hero, Brian Byrne, is the TV Sex God. He is the star player, being able to pleasure four women at once on prime time TV. Okay, so they don’t have STDs at those time, but seriously, I’m grossed out. I keep seeing nasty images of greasy-haired steroidal beefcakes mud wrestling each other in a tub of seminal fluids, and yes, I need a psychiatric check-up, I know. If that is the future, I don’t want to live to the age of 600, no thanks.
Brian, tired of plunging his virtuoso penis in the eager orifices of his TV participants no doubt, decide to go back to 2002 for a vacation. He owns an Irish castle, and maybe he can get some R&R there. Yo dude, why not just go to Prison Block A and service all the losers there? Just a thought.
Meanwhile, someone has alerted our American tourist Ally O’Neill and her aunt get news that a vampire of legend will be appearing at that castle, and they actually rush there – alone, unarmed – to witness said vampire’s coming. And we wonder why so many silly American tourists meet nasty accidents when they are abroad. Instead, they find Brian. Ally isn’t a virgin, but she has only slept with a sex-fiend ex who inexplicably enough is a boring lover. Yet Ally now has a book contract: she will write a book about a single woman’s sexual adventures in 2002. (Would you want someone like Ally to write that book? I don’t – it’s like asking Ally McBeal to write about the rules of dating.) So she asks Brian, a virtual stranger, to teach her and show her stuff. Hey, her aunt, who gets my finger for saying “horse pooky” in a bad attempt to be precious, has told this stranger all about her niece just moments after she finds him lying on top of her niece and she struggling under him.
If you can’t tell by now, logical character behavior is nonexistent in Night Games and intelligence is substituted with precious behavior.
Seriously, this will only be an insulting romance of a frigid dumb woman (who can’t buy a vibrator to save her sexually frustrated life) rescued by a man from drying up if the hero and the future aren’t so repulsive to me. The moment the hero eats like a pig is the moment I actually feel grossed out. Everything about Brian, from his steroid-beefed up physique to his overexposed access-all-area for-TV-sex-show body, squicks me out. He has “sloppy millionth helpings” all over him, and the thought of all those STD germs proliferating in every nook and cranny of his body make me really nauseous.
Nah, Night Games are not for me, although I can easily think of a few Rob Ashton groupies who will love this book. I like to think of myself as not a prude, but the idea of someone like Brian even touching me is enough to give me permanent goosebumps. Something about him seems unhygienic, man, I really want to take a nice long bath.
