Midnight Tide Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 978-1393626268
Paranormal Fiction, 2021

Elle Beaumont’s The Spirit of You features kids in high school, but don’t worry, we all know that in stories such as this one, kids in high school don’t have sex so this one is safe to read without the cops breaking down our door and arresting everybody. 

Koryn fell in love with the gangly guitarist with a voice as smooth as silk and fingers as quick as lightning.

It’s funny how one simple sentence like this has me sort of falling in love with the premise. I know, it’s probably my own residual high school issues, but I never met any gangly guitarist actually. Just a curly-haired guitarist with beautiful eyes and a voice that I could listen to for hours… ahem. Where was I?

Koryn and Dustin are in love, and everyone that knows them approves of this relationship. It’s all so perfect and sickly sweet that it’s inevitable that something will happen to destroy this private utopia of theirs. 

So yes, he dies. Hey, I’m not spoiling anything that isn’t in the official synopsis, so don’t look at me like that.

Now, I can be cynical and say that she remembers the best of him, and in a way, it’s a good thing, because had they been together, who knows what growing up would do to their infatuation for one another—especially had they pursued and succeeded in their dreams to become music stars.

Then, I remember that boy from school that played the guitar and sang Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love to me and you know what? Sometimes the silliest, most frivolous memories can also be the sweetest. It was a different time back then, but a part of me will always wonder what could have been had I been less afraid of the social consequences of going out with a boy of a different race and religion… oh well, water under the bridge, really.

Ahem, so okay, I’m not that cynical when it comes to this story.

I also have my reservations when the author jettisons Dustin out the airlock of this story only at about the midpoint of this story. Oh dear, will there be enough space for the author to develop Koryn’s grieving process properly?

Actually, yes. Oh my, yes, to the point that I feel like a voyeur intruding into something that is intimate and raw that should have been kept inside Koryn’s head.

Now, this is not a long story, but I feel that the author has paced the poor darling’s grieving process just right considering the length of the story. The author tugs my heart so well here, breaking it into tiny pieces and then gently glue the pieces back together again by the time the story ends as Koryn experiences her bittersweet epiphany about her life without Dustin. 

I can’t resist a story that evokes the feels like this, especially when I come across so many other stories that make me just read on with indifference, and I believe I shed a tear by the time I finish reading the last sentence.

The only thing that makes me wince a bit are the lyrics of that song performed by Koryn at the penultimate moment of the story. It comes off like some eeuw mutant hybrid of the lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s sublime A Case of You and some James Blunt song.

Also, sigh, the author could have ended this story with the most perfect sentence ever, but no, she has to add eight more paragraphs after that—yes, I actually count the number, with a grimace on my face—and completely ruin the glorious high that comes with reading that beautiful, heartrending sentence.

Still, this is a short story that stomps on my heart and makes me feel the glorious highs and lows of loving and losing that love. The fact that a short story does this only underscores how impressive the whole thing is!