Title: Secret Santa
Author: Rebecca Leigh
Length: 6,035 words (35 pages)
Publisher: Silver Publishing
Genre: m/m contemporary paranormal
Rating: D+
Blurb:
Martin’s gig accepting presents for the annual Marine gift-giving drive becomes less mundane when a new Santa arrives at the department store. This year, Martin will experience Christmas as he never has before–and find out if Santa is real.
Review:
My rating for this story, I acknowledge, is given in large part due to personal taste and preference, but all reviewing is subjective to a degree. I enjoyed the first half of this story quite a bit, but once our main protagonists went from heated glances across the store at Christmas, to actual interaction it stopped working for me.
Martin doesn’t really mind standing in the department store collecting gifts for kids in his uniform. He’s got no family to spend Christmas with, so it keeps him busy, and this year he has an added bonus. He can keep an eye on the store Santa whom he’s seen in the change room and he’s smoking hot under all that red velvet and white fur.
As the days pass, they start to make eye contact, and soon Santa makes a move on Martin in the change room after all of the employees have left, which they continue at the Santa’s castle display in the store. This was where things went wrong for me. There is rather a D/s edge here, which was fine, but Martin never once says “So what is your name?” He constantly refers to the man as Santa and even within the story he’s referred to that way. Reading descriptions of Santa doing dirty sexy things to a naked guy IN Santa’s castle was rather off-putting to me. To think of small children going up there to see Santa after they’ve been having sex was distracting to me.
The next day Santa offers to take Martin home, but still, Martin is referring to him as Santa and that is used in the story as his name. “Santa walked across the street. Santa sat down.” In my mind, it took the Daddy/boy dynamic to a whole other level, which I suppose culturally, I just found unappealing. Also, Martin’s continuation of the “role play” seemed odd and just didn’t work for me.
I can’t say there was anything wrong with the style of writing, and as I said, until the two men hook-up I was quite enjoying it, but after that point it just didn’t work and the paranormal aspect seem tacked on in order to justify the continued use of the name Santa rather than what I expected given that the tags do not mention it being a paranormal story. So perhaps in part my discomfort came from a fantasy twist I wasn’t expecting.
I am but one reader, and others may have no issue with the usage of Santa in place of a more traditional name. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether this type of thing will be for them or not.
Meh.
Some people probably find it very sexy, it just didn’t work for me.
Oh I was curious to see what you’d say 🙂 I just couldn’t get past all the horrible double entendres out of my head. Yeah, this one ended up being on the No Way Jose list.
I think if it had been going for humour it might have worked, but it seemed to take itself a bit seriously to me and that made it feel more weird than funny. But hey, everyone has their own preferences.