Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Blood & Soul
AUTHOR: A.L. Wilson
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 67 pages
BLURB:
Chase is an exorcist without a lot of money to his name. It might have something to do with him taking on cases for nominal fees, or maybe because he occasionally stops in motels and pays for sex. Whatever the cause may be for his downtrodden luck; he moves from place to place, snagging up odd supernatural related jobs.
In his most recent interlude, a family is concerned that a beautiful European woman has put some sort of hex on their ailing relative. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem, were the old man not sitting on a fortune. Desperate to keep their hands on the money, they offer to pay Chase to look into the situation.
At first he’s not inclined to accept, being as this does not seem like subject matter for an exorcist, but after having a dream including crying children in a spooky mansion, he opts to look into it. Dreams about crying children are never good omens in his line of work.
True to form, when he arrives in town, the old man is dead and a raven-haired woman and her enchanting son have taken over the inheritance. The icing on the cake is they are living in a creepy house that just happens to be the one Chase saw in his dream.
It becomes a race against time to find out the true nature of the woman and her son, as children start to vanish from the small town and Chase hears shrieks in the night. The young exorcist fights to keep his mind on the situation at hand, but the male youth of the house is gorgeous and enticing. Is he also a prisoner of this strange woman’s magic and needs to be set free, or is he a fiend intent on seducing and killing the exorcist that’s getting in the way?
Will Chase find love in this difficult case or will the exorcist become a ghost?
REVIEW:
Chase has been hired by a family to check out their father’s new wife. Seems that something shifty is up with her, and her son, and they would rather not have dear ol’ dad play victim to some money-grubbing gold digger. Sadly dear ol’ kicks the bucket before Chase can even get to his home, and badly it turns out that money-grubbing gold digger would have been a good thing compared to what the old man had actually married: a banshee. So now Chase is having to figure out how to un-banshee a banshee, all the while trying desperately (really he is trying) to stay out of her son’s pants. Because Lysander may be hot, but chances are he’s going to be the death of Chase.
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this as much as I did. The way it began, with the awkward tenses, kind of threw me off, but once the story got going it was actually quite enjoyable.
I would love to more about this world. It seemed like the paranormal wasn’t so much of a secret, and I enjoyed Chase’s not so orthodox approach to exorcism. Well, at least the parts that didn’t involve some truly icky clothing choices. For someone as obsessed with cleanliness as I am, Chase having to wear clothes covered in black-vortex-of-doom slobber just squicked me out. But as long as I don’t have to think about his exorcism wardrobe, I’m good. I’ll just block that out and go about my merry way, ok?
And while sleeping with the enemy(‘s son) is probably an easy way to a quick death, it did add a nice bit of danger to the whole thing. We never quite know if we can trust Lysander. In fact we are given ample proof that we should do nothing of the sort…and yet you kinda want Chase to chase him anyways.
This was a good story and despite the weird present tense it is written in, Chase’s voice really does come thru quite well. And I really wouldn’t mind finding myself back in this world, because there is just so much that I don’t know yet, that I want to.
RATING: 
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