Ruthless Press, $0.99, ISBN 979-8-9876574-8-5
Fantasy Romance, 2024
Ooh yes, the guy on the cover of CB Cheliah’s The Wolfman of Notting Hollow can bite me anywhere and anytime. Yes, I’m not even going to try to hide the fact that I am shallow.
Mind you, I initially misread Notting as Knotting and go, “Well, that’s nothing unusual, as the guy is a wolfman after all…” before going wait a minute and realizing I should make an appointment with the optometrist soon.
I look again at the cover, do a silly little dance of anticipation, and then my mood deflates as I start to read the story.
Cade Woodman’s boyfriend left him after a huge row, and now our dude tromps around the woods, lost in petty thoughts about how he never really likes John that much away, until he realizes that he is lost. Oh lovely.
He then smacks his face to a branch, trips right over a cliff, and blacks out.
Can I call him Woodbrain?
I know, I know, this guy is an emotional writer, which makes Cade in the grand tradition of gay romances a trembling, sensitive, crybaby hungry bottom, but come on, let’s not go too overboard with the stereotypes. It’s not smart, just annoying.
Sadly, he doesn’t die.
“Who’s there?” Cade craned his neck and squinted into the trees behind him.
“A friend,” the voice said.
“Wouldn’t a friend be sitting by the fire with me?”
Oh, a wit. There’s nothing like a bloke that can’t stop quipping to underscore the dire state of his current circumstance. Injured, lost in the woods… well, time to break out the one-liners!
The stranger offers Cade some coco—the hot drink, not anything else, okay—and Cade hisses.
He brings Cade to his home, and Cade acts like the very state of the place offends his sensibilities to the very core.
Then, it gets creepier.
“So….” Cade’s mind flashed to all the times they’d sat out naked in the summertime. All the times He and John had laid a blanket on the lawn and made love under the stars. “How long….” He stopped. Falling. Broken leg. Wolfman. With all that, the hole John left in his life hadn’t had time to become a chasm, until now. “You watched us make love….”
“If you could call it that,” Max said. “You made love, for sure, but from where I sat, he was just fucking you. He didn’t deserve you, Cade.”
Okay. I’m sure there are people out there that will find Max’s enthusiastic studying of the nature of copulating homosexuals most commendable. Me, I’m not sure if I would brag about that if I were he.
“I… what? I’m in a cave peeing in a margarine tub while a werewolf rates my sex life….”
For once, I actually feel what Cade is saying here.
Images of the wolfman jacking off in the trees while John fucked Cade doggy style on the lawn came unbidden. Cade’s cock pulsed, further delaying the pee he desperately needed. He wondered what Max had between his legs? Man dick? Wolf cock? He was never going to pee at this rate.
People, hide your dogs when Cade is in town.
Yeah, yeah, this is a comedy, but it’s so absurd and Cade is just so whiny and irritating, what with his tendency to use any situation he is in as an excuse to whine and complain.
I look at the cover again and sigh.
You know, given the tone and style of this story, the author should have commissioned a more sitcom-y cover to give the reader a more accurate impression of the kind of story they will be getting.
This cover screams a darker kind of fantasy, perhaps fantasy horror, with promises of moody atmosphere, chilling suspense, perhaps magic and action, and the official synopsis gives no hint that this story is going to be in-your-face outlandish comedy.
I like that cover a lot. I am led to believe that I will be getting a very different kind of story. Sure, I recoil at the way the author’s humor keeps missing the beat and the bullseye where I am concerned, but my disappointment is magnified tenfold by how much I want this story to be more reflective in tone and style to that of the cover art.
