Book Review: Woom by Duncan Ralston

“Trust me when I say, this is messed up.” – MATT SHAW, author of Sick B*stards.

“I believe pain lingers,” Angel said. “Do I believe in spirits? In the supernatural? Probably not.”

The Lonely Motel holds many dark secrets… and Room 6 just might possess the worst of them all.

Angel knows all about pain. His mother died in this room. He’s researched its history. Today he’s come back to end it, no matter the cost, once and for all.

Shyla, a plus-sized escort, thinks the stories Angel tells her can’t be true. Secrets so vile, you won’t want to let them inside you.

But the Lonely Motel doesn’t forget. It doesn’t forgive. And it always claims its victim.

“This book is a wet dream of abnormal sexual psychology.” – Mort Stone, My Indie Muse

WARNING: Don’t buy this book if you have a weak stomach, if you’re easily disturbed, or if you’re looking for a light horror read. THIS IS NOT THAT BOOK. Seriously. You’ve been warned.

My Review:

I was lucky – or unluck, depending on your point of view and upbringing – enough to be incredibly sexually active as a teen. I met a girl on a blind date at the movies (Ghostbusters II) and she ended up being a freak. I’ve often told everyone who’s come into my life since that they should track the slayer of my virginity down and buy her dinner, otherwise I wouldn’t be responsible for that thing I do with my tongue. Only a couple dozen people know this information and I can guarantee you none of them are reading this book review. Their husbands/boyfriends won’t let them. Good riddance. I should be safe.

She became less of a girlfriend over the years and more of a research subject. Nothing and nowhere was off the table. It was difficult to find and keep friends since most of them couldn’t have gotten laid if they crawled up a chicken’s ass and waited. Thinking that me and my actions were the envy of their ignored boyhood is a disturbing thought in hindsight. Since those days, I’ve battled through failed marriages and went through girlfriends like a cleanly man goes through underwear. My teenage sexual escapades were less pleasurable and more tortured, and it’s taken me over thirty years to come to grips with this.

I recall being barely sixteen, laying in a bed I had no business being in. Her parents were slumbering just across the hallway in the old home and my young conquest was sleeping as though she couldn’t care less about anyone busting in the room at any given moment. All I could do was stare at what little of the ceiling my sight offered and wonder about the composition of the alien fluids stickily drying atop my soon to be manhood. My, how the uninformed mind wanders. Yes, young, promiscuous girls are aliens left here by the earliest of Earth’s visitors as torment. Biblical demons who lead young boys and straying men to their demise via premature exploration or blackmail, considering the age or relationship status of the victim. If there truly is a God, then bless them all.

Duncan Ralston has managed to author a book which executes all those sickly thoughts that clouded my brain as an overly active sexual teenager with no boundaries. I refuse to offer spoilers because every turn of the page needs to reveal these secrets in the way they were meant to be discovered. By the time you’re finished, not only will you have endured the journey placed at your feet by a masterful wordsmith, but all those demented thoughts you had while invading high school era sheets will finally come to fruition.

Think of it as a short story collection glued together by a man’s cryptic confession of pleasure, pain, and finality. Just like those terrorizing teenage romps in barns – I’m from Texas – that ended in exhaustion just before sunrise, it’s a potential shotgun blast full of rock salt to the ass from a pissed off father you won’t soon forget. A reminder that, no matter how sweet and solid the recipient of your current physical involvement may be, those questions still remain, they’ll never go away, and that little Susie Homemaker wouldn’t dare let you perform those types of experiments on her baby maker. How hard? How deep? Exactly how much can a person live through? Will the newspapers have the balls to tell the whole story without stumbling on the grotesque truth?

Remember in school when you could turn to the back of the textbook, flip it upside down, and have all the answers to the quiz? That’s what Ralson has managed to do here, except the book is a chick, and she likes it in the back while flipped upside down. This is what I got out of the book. Your experience may vary depending on your own personal level of sexual experience. The fact that you’re a special kind of twisted will have nothing to do with it.

C.