Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Historical, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Drawn by promises of excitement and freedom, how could Callum resist Berlin?
It’s the end of 1932 and the Weimar capital is the heartbeat of the gay world, where a man like him can find companionship and love, even in the shadow of looming political disaster.
Still, Callum feels unseen, until he discovers a place where the dead mix with the living, an organization devoted to studying the supernatural, and a man in each world that could capture his heart… or seal his fate.
Haunted Hearts – Everyone deserves a happy ever afterlife! Haunted Hearts is an Own-Voices Paranormal Romance Series about love and the things that go boo in the night. Join us on our romantic journeys over ten books from some of your favorite authors! Be sure to read the entire series so you don’t miss a moment of falling in love, or sometimes falling into a happily ever after-life! Each book is a standalone but why not read them all? Everyone deserves the HEA!
The Review
A horror story wrapped in a ghost story, wrapped in a wartime intrigue thriller—with a love story at its core. I don’t know how else to describe this mesmerizing novella by Christian Baines.
It’s the story of Callum, an impecunious young Brit from Nottingham, visiting Berlin with his lesbian cousin in order to get a taste of the notorious nightlife for which that city was known under the Weimar Republic. Overlaid onto this modest premise is the world of 1930s horror movies, including one which I can’t even name because it would give away the surprise at the center of the story. Of course, the historical context for the story is Germany in 1933, just before Hitler’s rise to power begins to transform the world.
Echoes of Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories” abound; and two pieces of real history—Nazi leader Ernst Rohm and Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute on human sexuality—both play significant roles in the story, showing that the author knows his history as well as his pop culture.
What starts off as a “young folks on the town” story quickly turns both surreal and frightening, as Callum is dragged into scenarios he doesn’t comprehend. He transforms from an anonymous provincial tourist into a person of interest to any number of denizens of Berlin’s paranormal shadows. Callum, whose only goal was to see something of a gay life impossible in Great Britain, finds himself falling in love with a young man who speaks no English and whose beautiful faced is badly scarred. This romantic moment is the trigger for an increasingly alarming series of events during which Callum finds the world he thought he knew replaced with something he could never have imagined.
It’s a very powerful book—well-written, fast-paced, and haunting, to use a word from the book series’ name. Baines has created a tale that is far more than just clever; it merges history and fantasy in a way that will remain in the reader’s mind for a long time.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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