Paris April Press, $0.99
Contemporary Romance, 2016

Contrary to what the cover may lead you to think, the actual title of this thing is Unfreezing. not UN Freezing. Mind you, considering what an impotent joke the UN has become these days, freezing out that bloated entity may not be such a bad idea.

Anyway, forget the UN, this one is about something even more useless: the Academy Awards.

Chance Lanconi is… hold on, let me quote from the story… “the great screenwriter and brilliant observer of hot guys” as well as “the famous Manhattan super-agent turned Hollywood screenwriter”. Well, he’s also down with agoraphobia, which means one has to shag him indoors and never anywhere else. He’s invited to the Academy Awards ceremony because he’s so hot like that, but he’s not sure how he’s going to do it in person.

Nolan Condor, meanwhile, is, and I quote this thing:

Too young for Chance, definitely. Twenty-four or twenty-five. Damn, though. That face of his looked even better close-up. Model-worthy cheekbones. Naturally perfect eyebrows. Why hadn’t Chance Googled a photograph of his new hire? He’d assumed the guy would be a classic nerd complete with old-fashioned Coke bottle glasses. Stupid assumption. Even movie nerds didn’t look like that anymore.

Okay, all the superlatives associated to the blokes in this story are getting ridiculous.

Moving on, Chance has hired Nolan to create a robot of himself to attend the award ceremony on his behalf. As I’m sure most people will expect, these two are soon playing nuts and bolts of a different kind.

Parker Avrile’s story resides in an odd kind of neither here nor there. It has a naughty dog, plans for a robot to walk down the red carpet at the Oscars, and Chance doing his best to be a histrionic but hot and skinny version of a most stereotypical drama queen role played by Nathan Lane, and yet it’s not farcical or over the top enough to make the whole thing a fun kind of outrageous. It’s a story that wants to be over the top, in other words, but it falls short of being even halfway that.

As a result, Chance just comes off as an unnecessarily overwrought whinebag making mountains out of molehills all the time. Looking past his phobia, he has everything most people can only dream of—looks, money, hot guys falling onto his lap so easily—so it gets tedious to follow this guy as he bleats endlessly about his exes and his endless insecurities about his latest fling being not 100% perfect.

The whole thing feels banal and unimportant. This makes the short story feels more longer to read, as it’s too easy to put it aside and never feel the urge to quickly get back to it.

Still, I can’t consider this a bad read, at least from a technical standpoint. The author has an upbeat, charming style which, in my opinion, is more suited for outrageous romps, which is why I’ll always feel disappointed that this story unwisely never goes off the rails. Come on, have the robot terrorize everyone on the red carpet and snatch off a few wigs!

It’s just that Chance’s issues never feel interesting, and the story, therefore, just goes on and on without pulling me into it and making me care about the happenings on the pages.

Oh well, at least he and his bland trophy boyfriend are happy, I guess.