Ezra Dawn, $2.99, ISBN 978-1544631059
Fantasy Romance, 2017
Sometimes I do wonder about shifter romances. We have lions mating with tigers or bears or dragons… what kind of Lovecraftian monstrosity that will result from such breeding? Perhaps it is a good thing that the two leads in The Mortician are both blokes and hence won’t spawn brats, as one is a Komodo dragon and the other one is a lion. The very idea of a kid coming out from this mating—I imagine Dagon will surely approve. Then again, Komodo dragons are capable of parthenogenesis in the absence of a mate of the opposite sex to reproduce, so who knows, maybe one day Dmitri Sullivan will lay eggs all the same and we will all run away screaming in terror once they hatch.
Yes, the Komodo dragon’s name is Dmitri. Why isn’t his name more Indonesian? Well, don’t ask me. Maybe he is actually a were-gerbil that identifies as a Komodo dragon. His destined mate is Mufasa Deidrick, and I’m sure we can all guess what he turns into every other day. Mufasa goes by Miles, though, and his sister thoughtfully dies so that Miles and Mitry can meet and have sex and what not. Apparently destiny or biology wants them to shag, and I have no idea which. Biological impulses tend to be driven by the need of a species to propagate, so I can only guess it has to be fate at work here, maybe because destiny is an equal opportunity matchmaker that robs people of all agency when it comes to what they want to do with their private parts.
Alright, these two blokes are generally nice, jovial guys, although the author ends up making both of them sound like the same person. Alternating first person points of view is never a good idea when the author can’t give both the lead characters distinctive voices, let’s just say.
However, I don’t know why the main characters have to be shifter woo-woo types. Their shifter nature doesn’t add anything to the plot, aside from giving the author a short cut into forcing her main characters to start humping one another. These two blokes could have been simple, ordinary people that happen to meet and fall in love. Despite being a Komodo dragon, Mitry never uses his venom or blood in any remarkable manner, so he may as well be a Teddy Ruxpin shifter for all the good that aspect of him does to the overall story. It’s the same with Miles – there is nothing lion-like about his personality or biology, so he could very well be a Cabbage Patch Kid shifter and nothing about this story will really change much.
In fact, given how the setting is a mortuary, I wish the author had done something different here. How about making one of them an undead hottie? Heck, I’d even take a romance between a bloke and a hot corpse at this rate. With this story being what it is, the woo-woo aspects of it are just unnecessary cosmetic trappings, trappings that don’t even fit contextually with the premise or with one another, come to think of it.
In the end, The Mortician is a painless and readable story, but it is also a singularly pointless one. Why write a paranormal romance that could have easily been turned into a mundane contemporary romance with just a few tweaks? Did someone press a gun against the author’s head and insist that the story had to feature shifters? I can only wonder.
