reviews_and_ramblings | A Christmas Carl by Ryan Field

A Christmas Carl is the retelling of the Dickens’ seasonal story A Christmas Carol, and so, yes, most of you already know what will happen to Carl during the Christmas’ night, he will be visited by three ghosts, of the Past, Present and Future Christmas, and he will learn from his own mistakes. But this is the “gay” version of the story, and so Carl is not an old a bitter man, he is a young and bitter gay man. Carl hates Christmas since 15 years before, on a Christmas night, he lost the love of his life, Victor. From that moment on, Carl has denied all his old self, closing his heart in a cold safe, and little by little changing in a man that Victor would not recognize.

The most interesting thing of the novel is to read of the little “gay” details the author manages to fit in the “classical” Christmas tale. Carl is fit and handsome, Able, his employee, is a young man who dresses well his low waist jeans, the Ghost of the Christmas Present has high heels red shoes, and the Ghost of the Christmas Future is Quentin Crisp. Moreover, Carl not only enjoys sex with his past lover Victor, but we also read of different other sexual encounters he has in the next future, that more or less serve to prove that Carl is slowly descending in the darkness of loneliness, but in one of them, he is with high knee black boots and black leather long coat… Carl could be descending in hell, but damn it if he is not doing it in full black leather style!

So the story is a mix of naughty and nice; all the Christmas feelings around, the bells ringing and the people doing good action is the nice part; the use of very graphic details to describe Carl’s sexual life and even his intimate body part, is the naughty one. And the “naughty” word has here the joyous connotation of Christmas time, since even if detailed, I always felt like the author was blinking his eye to the reader, he was never really “bad”, he was more like a child who was stealing a cake under his mom’s nose.

Basically the story is a romance, but again it’s not a romance with a too much pink clouded perspective. There was a moment in the story, while Carl was reliving his last Christmas with Victor, when he says that after Victor, there hasn’t been anyone else in his life. Me, as an obtuse romance reader (and yes, as a female obtuse romance reader, and yes, I’m joking... don’t take me too seriously…) promptly jumped to the idea that Carl had no one else in his life since Victor, that he was always faithful to his first and only love, that he spent his life alone mourning his lost lover… only to find in the next chapter Carl, with the above said black leather boots, cruising for anonymous sex! It made me think, really. I though on Carl’s words, “There hasn’t been anyone else since then”… for Carl they meant that no one else has been in his heart since Victor! For absurbo, me, the romance reader, was thinking to a trivial thing like sex, and instead Carl was speaking of something more deep and romantic, like his heart. Carl was really more romantic than the romance reader that was me.

Again the author manages to write a light romance that it’s not light at all, it has a lot of hidden layers and each reader will find the one he/she is more interested in.

http://www.ravenousromance.com/fantastica/a-christmas-carl.php

Amazon Kindle: A Christmas Carl

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