Rating: 4 stars (Spotlight Review)

Jake McAllister had left his hometown of Rockville and his white-trash family as soon as he was old enough. Years later, a semi-successful horror writer and a very successful alcoholic, Jake finds himself returning to the very place he’d been drinking to forget. Trey, Jake’s 17 year-old half-brother, is the pride of the family. A good looking high-school kid with his whole life ahead of him, Trey hasn’t been the same since he started dating Myra; and their mother, Jolene, thought Jake could help.

Pulling up to his childhood home, Jake saw that nothing had changed; the lawn was still overgrown, beer cans strewn about and an old Camaro rested on blocks in the middle of the yard. His mother, Jolene hadn’t changed either, still dressing in tiny pink tank tops, low slung cut-off shorts, showing blotchy white thighs and sporting long purple glittery nails wrapped around a can of Old Milwaukee. Sadly, this will be the best part of Jake’s homecoming as he is about to be taken on a demented ride through hell at break-neck speed.

Starting with the revelation that Jolene has been torturing Jake’s abusive step-father, evidenced by the appearance of said man, naked, fingerless, toeless and bloodied, flinging himself into the sliding glass door of the kitchen – and he’s one of the lucky ones. For now, anyway. It seems the whole town has gone mad. Men enslaved by the women through lust and women eager to serve their Priestess, Myra. Oh, I should mention Myra is a demon intent on harvesting the souls of the entire town.

Through Myra, the women can make the men fall in massive lust with them and follow their every command, which would have been quite handy during my bar trolling days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for dominating men just as much as the next girl, but this takes it to a whole other level.

I have to say that Bryan Smith did a fantastic job. The story flowed, the characters were well-developed and interesting and the writing was flawless – ok, except for the part where he’s describing one of the women and her calf muscles “gleamed.” How do muscles gleam? Smith does mention that some think this book is semi-autobiographical, that Jake was a metaphor for himself; although he denies it. Personally, I don’t think a man could have written a book about women torturing men by using their womanly assets and their wily ways, resulting in a bloody Armageddon, if he hadn’t experienced it firsthand. Of course I mean that "metaphorically".

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Publisher: Dorchester Publishing Company, Incorporated
Pub. Date: January 2009
ISBN-13: 9780843961935