Celia McKinley, $2.99, ISBN 978-1005851903
Horror Erotica, 2021
Come face your fears at Garrity Hotel! Officially founded in 1877 by William Garrity, the hotel originally housed a brothel where the infamous serial killer Sebastian “Smiling” Calhoun was said to have killed thirteen people. Garrity Hotel only remained open for a week before disturbing stories of strange noises and sinister apparitions forced its closure. The building remained abandoned and untouched for more than a hundred years until its grand reopening this Halloween weekend! Test your courage and see what horrors await you in one of 48 refurbished rooms! Just fifteen minutes from Santa Fe, online check-in available.
Naturally, our heroine Isabel Martinez allows her boyfriend Mason Carter to drag here to stay at the place. What do you think will happen to them there?
Season of Owls is a reference to some key figures in Apache folklore that Isabel grew up with, but to be honest, I have no idea what is happening here. That is my one and only issue with this one, and that issue is everything that sinks the story where I am concerned.
Let me try to explain. Okay, I will say that sometimes, if the author were very good at it, erotica works even without context or cohesion—that is, if the sex scenes were so hot that who cares about everything else. Here, though, the main attraction, sex with something that isn’t even human, is short and singular, and the author isn’t that good with sexy prose to get me to overlook everything else about the story. Hence, I am very aware that things happen in this story just because.
Why would Isabel suddenly try to get naked in front of a window? What’s her motivation? She can’t make out anyone clearly outside the window, so for her to suddenly decide to put on a show is bizarre.
Why would that thing that suddenly show up to shag Isabel? I’m told that it shows up to kidnap and eat children, so why is it shagging Isabel instead? What is its link to the other thing that shows up to get at Mason? What is happening?
Oh yes, these things happen to lead to the monster sex thing, but I am distracted by why these things would happen. They just happen, and as I’ve said, that one sex scene is not novel or sexy enough to get me to forget these questions in my head.
I like the premise, and who knows, maybe with 10,000 more words to go into fleshing out the Apache folklore and the back story of Garrity Hotel, this one could have been a grand horror-tinged erotica. As it is, though, this one just has me wondering what I have just read, with an unsightly, perplexed scowl on my face to boot. This is definitely a wasted potential. Someone please tell the author to expand this thing into something that would do its premise greater justice!
