I was conquered by this book; in fact I was nearly put into a coma by it. I battled to stay interested in any of the characters but in the end the constant onslaught of predictable cliché just made me want to curl up and give up the ghost.

The author starts the book with a dictionary definition of the word ‘love’ and then it’s all down hill from there. Following in his lightly pressed footprints I checked up on ‘conquered’ in Webster’s.

It’s a good description of how this book left me feeling. Subdued, overcome and defeated.  After the second story (of 14) and an overwhelming sense of a haemorrhage of enthusiasm coming my way I started to guess the endings to each of the short stories in this anthology, either I’m a master of this kind of fiction or this is predictable formulae. I suspect the latter.

Anyway, this is supposed to be erotica, there is very little sex in it at all, unless you count the black slave and the young master of the southern plantation ( groan……) who gets his cock out at one point, and yes it’s Mandingo time. Even when there is some sex in the book it’s as arousing as a half chewed bus ticket and just as memorable. One questions if Mr Carroll has ever been in love, had sex or even ridden a bus, it might have added some passion to this staid collection of vacuous nonsense if he had.  The characters are 1.5 dimensional, the love unconvincing and the erotic content like snow in Las Vegas (where this book hails from); fake, short lived and peculiar.  

This is Carroll’s fourth book in this series. If you like gentle, insipid, non threatening and downright silly stories about ‘love conquering all’ then perhaps give this book a miss.

If you’d like to read any old crap knocked out without any kind of regard or respect for the modern sophisticated gay reader, which you could get for free on the Web but would rather pay for as you’re some kind of super gay smuck then this cheap gay pulp is the book for you.

This whole book is supposed to be about the triumph of love, how it conquers all in its path, but this book is a triumph only of the delusion of the author. Reader, I despair!


Out now: £12.99
From the publisher’s website here: