Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Kevin fled his old life in St. Louis for a new startup in Memphis.  New job, new place but that was about all.  Then the dreams started, dreams that felt so real that Kevin wasn’t sure when he was awake and when he was asleep. Every night the same tattooed man gave him the most erotic, sexual experiences of his life.  Then the dream starts reoccurring, in greater detail and with more vivid feelings then Kevin has ever experienced, until it starts to overwhelm Kevin’s new life.   Then Kevin’s starts to wonder….is his night visitor real or imagined?

The Night Visitor by Ewan Creed left me with mixed emotions.  An erotic short story, it starts out accomplishing its goal. Creed gives us a vivd sexual dream, Kevin’s erotic dream to be specific.  It involves a rough looking tatted up man who Kevin pays to have sex with. It’s hot, the descriptions are sexy, and it works because the rough language goes along with the  scene unfolding on the pages.  Then the author reaches for more, more in plot, more in descriptive language, and it sort of falls to pieces.

This is our first sighting of “Vic”, the man of Kevin’s dreams:

Another man walked down the sidewalk towards him. He was tall and shirtless and moved with a swaggering confidence that came from knowing himself and knowing these streets. A dirty white wife beater was tucked into the waist of his low slung and tattered jeans. A large serpent tattoo wrapped around one shoulder, curling down his lean torso and disappearing below the elastic band of his underwear. The man looked side to side as he approached. Then he looked straight ahead. He caught Kevin’s eye and sneered.

His hair was buzzed beneath his side-angled ballcap. He looked to be a bad boy, a tasty piece of very rough trade. That was just the way Kevin liked them.

And the initial dream sequences work, the language and vocabulary is coarse, the sex dirty and hot.  It’s all pretty erotic.  But Creed has a larger agenda here, a larger plot than just the erotic dreams of a man in a new setting.  And soon the narrative is muddied with dream within dream sequences that serve to confuse rather than elucidate and the descriptive terms turn from white hot and sexy to unintentionally humorous.

Vocabulary choices such as man meat, piss slit, fire hose, man meat, and  (beautiful, glistening) tool just serve to tumble the narrative from the provocative into a giggling disbelief, never a goal for an author writing erotica.  Authors have to be careful when choosing words to represent the human sexual anatomy because it can so often turn hilarious just when it needs to be smoking hot.*

While beautiful rod is no “purple pickle of passion” some of the other vocabulary choices come close.  Plus we have pecker,prick, cock, tool, and man meat all used  within a couple of sentences of each other (sometimes within the same sentence).  It’s excessive,  too many terms kill the erotic tones of the sex scene being described instead of heighten it.

Getting past the vocabulary, then my final issues are with the plot.  I like what Ewan Creed was trying to achieve but I just don’t feel that it worked here.  The Night Visitor needs either more volume, more pages to bring off the full plot the author has planned or it needed to be cropped down further to just a short erotic story.  But by trying to pull off both elements in 52 pages, Creed ended up with a story that felt like an awkward combination of outright erotica and paranormal short story, seemly scattered and somewhat confusing.

I gave The Night Visitor a 3 star rating because there are good elements here as well as a promising plot.  And while some of the vocabulary made me giggle it didn’t have me wanting to put the book down either.  So you make up your own mind.  I kind of enjoyed this one and you might feel the same.  Consider this conditionally recommended.

Here is an example of what made me giggle: “The night visitor was a real fire hose.” “big juicy slab of meat”.

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