Thanks to NetGalley, RBmedia, and Recorded Books for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review.
If you too are a fan of Samantha Allen’s previous lesbian Sasquatch-related work, well, I actually have no idea if you will like this or not. It’s completely different. Instead of horror, we’ve got romance, instead of reality TV satire, we’ve got an aging movie star coming out of the closet (while being a ghost). And the “sex” in this . . . you’ve just got to read it. I cannot describe it you, and anyway I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
As the title says, Roland Rogers is a ghost, but he’s not fully gone. Having woken up dead in the snow and laboriously dragged his incorporeal self back to his house, learned to email with nothing but his lingering effervescence, and then contacted his agent, he’s ready to tell his life story, and finally come out of the closet as gay—and he needs to do it before his body is found under the snow. Enter our main character, Adam, an ex-Mormon writer, most famous for having written a coming out memoir about being a gay Mormon. Roland read this book and liked it a lot, so he thinks of Adam first thing. Adam hasn’t been having great luck with his career after his buzzy debut, and this would be a HUGE break for him.
It’s great fun watching the two “meet” and learning to work with Roland’s “condition” in order for Adam to get the story he’s being paid a lot of money to write. The story is very, very silly at times, in a very weird way. And it will also resist giving you what you want, so just be prepared for that. I am not calling this a romance novel for a reason, because that comes with expectations. But even while it’s being very weird, there is also a strong emotional core here. Even dead, Roland has some things to work through that he couldn’t in life. And Adam hasn’t exactly been thriving.
The only reason I didn’t give this five stars is Roland’s best friend, a woman he was fake dating for a very long time, and who views Adam as competition. I just felt weird about her and didn’t quite get what the author was going for with her (besides providing conflict). Still, even with that complaint, this was a really good time.
I wonder what genre Samantha Allen will bring her weird to next.