Liquid Silver Books, $5.95, ISBN 978-1-59578-547-3
Paranormal Erotica, 2009
Poor Dessa Blackwell. She can speak to dead people – yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that movie too – and at the time the story opens, she is haunted by the ghost of her bereaved husband. She misses him, but she doesn’t acknowledge him because she believes that she needs to push him to move on to the afterlife. If that isn’t tough enough, she is also not eating well and her husband has left her with a pile of debts to deal with. Needless to say, she doesn’t have the money to clear those debts.
You’d think that sleeping with the hottest name in rock music is a great way to get over the blues, especially if she gets to get the said rock star, Nick Hijuela, to use his money to clear her debts and buy her a diamond ring or ten before he blows everything away on booze, drugs, and prostitutes, but hey, things are never that simple in fiction. A ghost of a dead groupie hovers nearby, dripping with hatred and jealousy reminiscent of jealous teenage girls being confronted by the fact that their latest pop idol has an active sex life that doesn’t involve those girls. And that’s just the start.
The Witching Moon is actually a familiar story of a rock star and a damsel in distress making magic while the heroine worries too much about being used or what not when she should be enjoying the moment and auctioning his underwear on eBay. The paranormal trappings feel like cosmetic decorations to a familiar tale – this one could have easily existed without the woo-woo.
Still, this one could have been very readable if… well, I have to admit, it is very readable, especially when it comes to that scene in the shower. But this one is plagued by too much exposition – too much telling of background details, too little showing, in other words – that really shouldn’t be present in the work of a veteran author like Ms Wilde. Is this a reprint of some long out of print title?
This is not a bad read by any means, but I believe I have read better and more polished efforts from Ms Wilde. Still, I hate to sound so shallow but I have to admit: that shower scene is really, er, well written.
