The general rule with books involving male-male romance has been that readers who are only interested in the romance have to endure endless subplots and secondary characters that do not interest them or add much to the story in order to get to the good stuff. There's the straight best friend and all her issues. There's the antagonist, usually an old flame, causing problems. There's the sporting event or cooking contest or wedding or workplace drama that interrupts the story repeatedly. Why? Those subplots make the book longer. The author can't very well come up with a full-length novel if he or she writes only about the main romance. Dragging out the enemies-to-lovers theme or the slow-burn "why are they too stupid to realize it" charade of ignoring what's right in front of them gets tiresome over two hundred pages. Too, having sex scene after sex scene involving the same characters grows old even in the most adept author's hands.
Readers might think that Luke Hartwell's solution of giving his protagonist eight love interests might be overkill. We assure you, it is not. Luke begins with two university freshmen baseball players who are roommates, but the book contains almost nothing about baseball. On purpose. When the protagonist, Carter, tries an experiment of finding one guy to hook-up with for each day of the week, readers get to meet eight (yes, we know there are only seven days in a week, but one of them sends a sexy cousin when he can't make it) extremely hot guys who are multi-faceted and looking for more than just sex. One is a football player and rodeo cowboy, another is on the university wrestling team, another is from Azerbaijan, the oldest?a mechanic with a rock-hard body--is married (yes, we know), one is a history major, one has a sexy step-brother who makes an appearance, and then there's the baseball teammate.
The plot twists are so juicy we would love to mention some of them here, but we don't want to spoil anything.
It may sound like too much, but as Carter says when asked if he can handle so many men: Of course he can! And you, dear reader, can handle all of these hot guys, because Hartwell builds his characters carefully, making you care about each character and his desires (well, at least all but one character), and, of course, all the while building the mystery of which boy or boys Carter will be with at the novel's end, making it, we suppose, like those elimination shows on television, only far sexier, not to mention gay. The suspense is addictive. None of Hartwell's characters are whiny. None of them threaten to fly off the page and bite your neck. We think you're going to like these guys. At least all but one of them, and some of you will like him.
Watersgreen House is very proud to publish Carter's Eight Boyfriends, heralding in a refreshing new subspace of literary romance fiction.
