Reviewed by Elizabetta
TITLE: Bliss
AUTHOR: Lisa Henry and Heidi Belleau
PUBLISHER: Riptide Publishing
LENGTH: 230 pages
BLURB:
They’re always happy. Rory James has worked hard all his life to become a citizen of the idyllic city-state of Beulah. Like every other kid born in the neighboring country of Tophet, he’s heard the stories: No crime or pollution. A house and food for everyone. It’s perfect, and Rory is finally getting a piece of it. So is Tate Patterson. He’s from Tophet, too, but he’s not a legal immigrant; he snuck in as a thief. A city without crime seems like an easy score, until he crashes into Rory during a getaway and is arrested for assaulting a citizen. Instead of jail, Tate is enrolled in Beulah’s Rehabilitation through Restitution program. By living with and serving his victim for seven years, Tate will learn the human face of his crimes.
If it seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Tate is fitted with a behavior-modifying chip that leaves him unable to disobey orders—any orders, no matter how dehumanizing. Worse, the chip prevents him from telling Rory, the one man in all of Beulah who might care about him, the truth: in a country without prisons, Tate is locked inside his own mind.
REVIEW:
Beulah. The promised land… “Beulah land, my heaven, my home forever more.”
Such a great name choice for this setting… this modern-day Eden. This Beulah is an idyllic, ultra-gated community, a kind of ‘promised land’. With it’s own brand of justice. Beulah, where there is no crime. Because anyone daring to break the law pays by being ‘chipped’ into rehabilitation and service to the one you harmed.
Tate Patterson comes to Beulah with a plan to steal from the rich folks there to help his baby daughter back home in the outside slum-world of Tophet. The problem, as Tate finds out, is that the chip put in his head for a minor infraction forces him into more than rehabilitation. It’s slavery with a forced smile. Why are they, the chipped ones, always happy? Yes, all seems wonderful in Beulah.
Tate is no innocent, he’s a lad of the streets and the slums of Tophet and he’s filled with the anger of never being able to get ahead there. Tate’s plan goes to shit, though, when a quick get-away with the loot turns into his being caught for accosting Rory, also a newcomer to Beulah. Tate’s punishment is seven-years under Rory’s ownership.
So Rory is new to Beulah, too. Like Tate, he’s looking for a way to a better life than what Tophet can offer. But Rory is here legally, he’s taken a law clerk job, it’s a blessed new start for him. And he’s not at all happy with being saddled with a ‘servant’ right off the bat, even one who suddenly seems strangely and excessively eager to please. In any way possible…
ohhh… a kind of… gay Stepford Wives.
This is not really a romance. It’s a dystopian horror story– it’s about the evil that lurks within us all. It’s about how easy it is to be coerced towards what we know is wrong. And how a seemingly perfect utopia can go to dystopian hell in a hand basket.
I think the hardest thing about reading Bliss is how it pushed those deviant buttons in me and then made me squirm for liking it. The authors do a great job of setting up a prurient slavefic fuckfest…
(did I like this? Yes, I did.)
… and then yanking the proverbial rug from under my feet
(so it also made me very uncomfortable).
Is that a bad thing? No, not at all… I’d call that pretty damn good storytelling.
But, in the end, I didn’t buy the romance. I didn’t get the sweet after the sour. Rory’s complicity and his (and the authors’) struggle to put himself just enough on the side of the wronged innocent, doesn’t hold up completely. We’re given a good line for it, but it’s what ultimately diminishes the stuttering romance: that I’m asked to believe that Rory and Tate, after everything they’ve been through, might have something lasting after all. I’m not quite there. (SPOILER: Plus Tate, who, pre-chip, considered himself straight… now it seems that he’s bi… well, how much of that is after-effect from the chip? END spoiler)
Bliss a three-and-a-half star read for me. But I’m rounding up for the great premise, set-up, writing, and that twisty button-pushing (ahem), even if the bliss was way too ephemeral (sigh) and the romance too shaky.
RATING: 
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