Having a previous experience with Hal Bodner and his In Flesh and Stone, I knew that I shouldn’t have expected to read a “classical” romance, and already the blurb, the story of a mortician who is in love with the Dead, was a good sign of it. But for the readers who love the classical romance, then probably For Love of the Dead is more “romance” than In Flesh and Stone, at least in the end. This novel is not also out of the standard for the genre (zombies and romance are not often seen together), but also for the preface, I think that it’s not of many authors to open a romance novel with an Author’s Note of 4 pages, and it’s not of many publishers to allow it. It’s said a lot on the author and the publisher.

There is always the experience of loss in a Hal Bodner’s novel, at least in the two I read, but there is also the feeling that Hal Bodner believes in love, even maybe in a love that goes beyond death. In this novel Jake is a young and handsome mortician, and the second part of his description, “mortician”, prevents him to find a man to love even if the first part, “young and handsome”, would allow him to meet a lot of candidates. Even if already with a sad experience in the past, the loss of his lover when they were still young men with a lot of expectation for life and future, Jake didn’t stop to believe in love, in the possibility to find the one, Mr. Right. And so it’s almost tender to read how he approaches the cruising dating pool, discarding possible partners even for a small detail, something unheard if you are only searching for a one night stand. But Jake is like that, he is able to see beyond the first appearance of a man, he is able to read his mind even from a facial feature. In fact he does that also with the young men he sees everyday on his morgue table, he is able to read the lost hopes in those lives taken from the world so soon, and he loves them all since apparently no one else love them.

When yet another young man ends on his table, Mark, beautiful like an angel, Jake again thinks how big a waste is, he again imagines what it could have happened if he met him before, he wonders if maybe Mark is the one. But Mark, as many before, is dead, and so, in a way, Jake is safe; he will not risk loving and loosing, he has already lost him, and so he can now love him without worries. Only that this time Jake is the tool of a bigger scheme, and when Mark arises for the Dead, Jake has to help to bring him back. See, Mark is not exactly the angel he appears, his soul is dark, and there is no “rest in peace” for him, the Dead want for him to rot in hell.

As in the previous book I read from this author, there is a lot of sex, and sometime the sex lingers on the boundaries of comfort, at least for me, but strange is, they never go beyond the limit. And again, as in the previous novel, when the sex is detached by love, it’s graphic and detailed, and when instead there is love, the author doesn’t linger, it allows the reader to fill in with its imagination. I believe it’s not a coincidence, when sex is recreational, or detached, it can be described, but if it’s love and not only sex, then lingering in details is not necessary, the true feelings already fill all the available space.

As in the previous book, for sure Hal Bodner has not written an “usual” romance, and probably it’s not a romance for all, but for sure the quality of erotic romance you have here it’s well above the average.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002ZNJM0O/?tag=elimyrevandra-20