We’re reading our way across America...one romance at a time. And, to make it even more fun, we’re doing it in order of incorporation into the United States.
Tennessee: Trial by Fire by Jo Davis
First, a disclaimer. Firemen: I don’t really get what all the fuss is about. Sure, they’re big and they’re brave and rescue kitties from trees, probably have to work out a lot to pass their rigorous physical requirements and save lives in between checking smoke detectors and patting their Dalmatians, but whenever I have heard anyone wax eloquent about the joys of any man in flame-retardant uniform—and they do—I’ve just never understood the fascination. I mean, if they’re so sexy, why wasn’t there one as a member of the Village People?
And yet I decided to read Trial by Fire, the first in Jo Davis’s series, The Firefighters of Station 5. Why? Purely, friends, because it is set in Tennessee—the sixteenth state to join the Union, and which it actually honors in pretty decent fashion—and because of all the disparate novels we have so far covered in this, our Perfect Unions series, we have yet to address that blush-inducing subgenre we can probably best label contemporary erotica.
Another disclaimer: I don’t normally read contemporary erotica. Look, I’ll treat with a J. R. Ward or a Larissa Ione and not bat an eyelid—Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance have in many ways become synonymous with literary naughtiness, a fact to which I have long been resigned; thanks very much, Anne Rice and Tanya Huff—but I like my real-world romances just as I like my Regencies: sweet and traditional, with most, if not all, of the naked taking place behind closed doors. And if I do find myself reading a book that unexpectedly offers up a bunch of frank, occasionally freaky, sex stuff, I tend to merely skim those (sometimes inconveniently frequent) scenes, catching only the occasional word or phrase—perhaps a “hard length” here, or a “moist center” there—’til I at last get back to the, for lack of a better word, plot. I do realize this may seem like someone claiming to buy Playboy for the articles, but it’s not a prude thing. I just, quite simply, find all the painstakingly-described positions and staccato-paced pulsating of various appendages kind of…dull. It’s like, okay, I get it, he’s hung and accomplished, she’s stacked and willing, it’s never been this good for either of them before, and, look, hey, handcuffs! Whatever. Can we please get back to the child that has been abducted or the innocent woman framed for murder?
Because, yes, often in contemporary erotica there is a matter of some urgency at hand—a crime to be prevented or solved, a company takeover to be thwarted or engineered; happily, though, none of it gets too much in the way of a little light bondage—and things are no different here at Station 5, where a grisly series of arson murders commence and bring together elementary school teacher Kat McKenna (her curvaceous body made, of course, for sin) and the delicious six foot five, muscle-bound firefighter Howard “Six-Pack” Paxton (his troubled childhood having led him to lead a sexually adventurous life, natch). There is a vicious killer on the loose, gunning for Howard—and, by extension, Kat—with pretty much the entire book taken up with horrible crime, both seen and described, Kat’s constant fretting over Howard’s emotional unavailability, Howard’s almost as constant affirmations about how Kat’s the best thing that ever happened to him—too bad he’s so unworthy of her love, haunted by dark secrets He Will Never Tell—and various vacuous, role play-ish sexcapades which read as so formulaic they could have been ripped from the pages of S&M for Dummies. (And yes, I actually read it. Since I knew I would be writing about it here, I thought it only right that I read every word of the sex stuff instead of paging forward as I would ordinarily, at least until improbably impressive shafts stopped being inserted into orifices seemingly ill-equipped to handle their might and grandeur, blah blah blah. The things I do for America!)
The dialogue throughout is so appallingly vapid as to make one wonder if our author has ever actually carried on a real live conversation, and her villain is so cookie cutter rent-an-evil, I feel like he must surely be violating several copyright protections. We also have the other denizens of Station 5 to take into consideration, in their various layers of obligatorily smoking hotness, all of whom clearly have their own tales to tell and freaks to get on—dude, one of them is even a virgin!—and whose adventures continue in, so far, the puntastically-titled Under Fire, Hidden Fire, Line of Fire and Ride the Fire,this last released early in 2010.
But let’s really get to the heart of things here. Because… look. I get that there are perfectly attractive men in the world who labor under the unfortunate names with which their parents bestowed them. Clive Owen is awesome, but… really, Clive? Sounds like an accountant. Or what about Colin Farrell? He’s delicious, but Colin is a name best suited to some kindly storekeeper or postman you’ve known since kindergarten. And even the devastatingly devilish delight that is George Clooney has surely long suffered under a name like George, which now seems to best belong to the very old and the very young, to long-dead English kings and more than one cocker spaniel. True, as Shakespeare said, “What’s in a name?” And yet, with the hero of this book named Howard, I have to confess that it took me several chapters to get past it. Howard. It’s just not an appealing name. Think about it: Howard Hughes. Howard Cunningham. Howard Wolowitz. Howard the Duck. Not sexy. (Though in the latter case: awesome!) “Six-Pack” is also just about as sucky as a nickname can get—it’s for his abs, of course, not his love of beer; in fact, our hero doesn’t drink—and the way that Kat, when given to any introspection at all, refers to herself very formally as “Katherine Frances” is just about as tiresome. Names: not Jo Davis’s strong point.
So, will I be reading more of her work? Um…no. Although, the second book in this series, Under Fire, does happen to be the story of firefighting “boy genius” Zack, and I am rather curious to see how Davis renders this young stud’s purported smarts, since the evidence given in this first outing made it surprising that Kat and Howard ever graduated high school. Also, Book 5 is the romance of team captain Sean—whose family died in a car crash pre-book—and his only female subordinate, the lovely Eve, which is presaged in Trial by Fire and which I wouldn’t entirely hate to see play out. Station bad boy Julian gets it bad for Kat’s lawyer sister Grace in here, and their story also has promise…dammit, I can’t believe I am even contemplating reading more books in this horrid series. On the other hand, at least I can console myself that if I do, I am under no further obligation to suffer yet more of that truly pedestrian attempt at titillation that Davis and her ilk consider “erotic." Which means I can skip it all, doing away with those pages entirely—and then none of these books will take me longer than twenty minutes to read.
Rachel Hyland is Editor in Chief of Geek Speak Magazine.
