About Suck This!
by AM Riley
68 pages / 25500 words
ISBN: 1-933389-58-3
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc
Carl has a good life for a poor kid from Boston. He has a job, a girlfriend, and a best friend who knows everything about him. Except about his occasional jones for guys. When Carl meets Vinnie, a sweet you thing with a mouth made for sin, he has a problem.
The problem is Vinnie. How can any man resist anything that pretty, that sweet and that hot? Carl knows he should, though, especially when his best friend starts poking into his private life. And when Vinnie’s vampire fangs start poking into his neck. Can Carl make up his mind what he wants?
Review
Alex Draven, editor of the High Balls, writes: The new Everyday Spectres range was billed as a 'does what it says on the tin' sort of title -- spooks and spectres and fantasy creatures going about their blue-collar everyday lives. As such, this opening salvo is dead on target. Suck This is an absolutely beautiful portrayal of a guy who's such a *guy* that the freakiest part of the sentence 'my boyfriend is a vampire' would probably be the phrase 'my boyfriend'.
Carl's a *guy*. A bit of a meathead, and a very long way from comfortable with his sexuality. When we meet him, he's boning a regular girl between working shifts on the construction site. It's just that he's also running off on the occasional weekday night to get his cock sucked by whoever he finds in Boston's gay district, on a strictly no-reciprocation basis. When he picks up Vincent, he gets a whole lot more than he bargained for. To be fair, I'd imagine that any time you catch yourself having romantic thoughts about a back alley behind a dumpster it's got to be a hard adjustment...
I think Riley avoids the obvious line that Vincent gets into Carl's blood, but he does, just quietly letting Carl come back to him, over and over until it turns into a relationship. It's never made explicit how much of the attraction is in the bite Carl picked up during their initial tryst, and how much is the allure of an alternative to Carl's increasingly badly fitting day to day life.
Mind you, I don’t think the word vampire is used at all, even though, by the end of the story, Carl knows exactly what he's signing up for and goes willingly. One of Carl's 'guy' traits is that he hates emotional conversations : both he and Vincent are doers more than talkers, and Riley lets their actions do the work –- in and out of bed -- and shows us their relationship developing, without hiding it in frills.
The opening scene –- wherein Carl's best friend since childhood, Randy, shows up drunk and spoiling for a fight while Carl's trying to pick up -– makes the dissonance between the two parts of Carl's life very obvious, and again Riley does good work of showing us Carl and Randy's world, rather than just describing it. When it becomes clear later what Randy was actually looking for, that dissonance still isn't something that can just be made to go away by wishing things were different, which makes the human world of the story seem really solid.
My only quibble with the writing style, is Riley's insistence of spelling out the accent. I get that it's set in Boston – there's no need to batter me over the head with it! The frustrating thing is that it's not needed – Carl and his friends' accents, and how different Vincent sounds, comes through in their dialogue without resorting to faux-phonetics.
I really enjoyed this story. In fact, I gobbled it down in one sitting because I just didn’t want to break –- this is the modern-world vampire story you wish you'd written, the one that's so far away from the usual overstuffed over-wrought versions of the vampire's story, that it's actually still got a pulse. A really good read –- and a great inaugural title for the line.
Sample
Fuck. Goddamn fuck. Carl banged one meaty fist into the wall behind him, hard enough to make the multitudes of framed photographs on it rattle, and swore to himself again.
If ever he needed absolute proof that the whole fucking universe was plotting against him, he had it here. Or rather, over there. Across the club, swathed in hot lights and cool blue cigarette smoke sat his best friend, Randy Pinkerton.
What the fuck was Randy doing here?
Carl looked up and down the wall against which he stood and saw no exit. As far as he could tell, the only door OUT was the one near Randy’s left elbow where it rested on a high table. The club wasn’t crowded enough either, for him to disappear into a mass of bodies and Randy with his fucking twenty-twenty eyesight was probably going to spot him any sec…
“Hey, Carl!” bellowed Randy, raising one big arm and waving it around like a fucking flag.
Shit.
Carl plastered a big, fat, fake pleased-ta-meet-you grin on his face and made his way slowly across the parquet dance floor, trying to think of an excuse for his being here.
Randy and he had been best buds for as long as he could remember. They’d met up in kiddiegarten when Randy’d dumped a load of sand down Barney Friedman’s toddler sized Izod shirt and Carl’d threatened to bloody the little rich kid’s nose if he squealed. They’d stuck like glue ever since.
They’d goofed off in the back of every class together, gone to detention together. Dropped out and didn’t let the door hit them in the ass when they left together. Had their first drunken binge on Thunderbird and his momma’s Peppermint Schnapps together. Blown chunks till they wanted to die together.
They’d worked their first construction job together. Well, until Randy’d got canned for fighting. And when Randy was dragging his sorry ass across the parking lot with his hardhat and his last week’s pay in his still bloodied fist, Carl’d told the bossman to shove his job up his flabby ass and he and Randy’d marched down to EDD and collected unemployment together.
The first girl Carl had fucked had actually been hand picked by Randy and Randy’s current girlfriend was a chick that Carl had ‘tried out’ so to speak, beforehand. They’d shared everything, he guessed. Even pussy.
Everything except Carl’s one big secret.