Sleep Tight by Laura Marie Altom

I’m not really sure why I do this to myself. I called my friend who works in a used bookshop and asked her to pick me out a couple of books. She asked what I wanted and the only thing I could tell her was that I wanted something evil. One should never leave an opening that big for trouble. Especially since one of the two books she picked for me was a romance novel.

Sleep Tight by Laura Marie Altom… Bah! What an evil book. Occasionally I like to read a Harlequin, get it out of my system which is a throw back to the days when I lived at home. My mother had a closet full of those books and I never had to pay for a single one of them. My aunts provided the crack and for some reason, my mother collected them, even though she didn’t read them all that much. And me, who will read anything with words on it, read a bunch of them. I really don’t think that was a very good idea to expose a young mind to such questionable material.

Anyhow, back to the evil book. First we have a down-on-her-luck Tooth Fairy who pretends to be a hired Bugoslavian princess to make some extra cash. Next, we have a budding Boogeyman who thinks his mother is being conned by this faux-princess and kidnaps her to his in-the-middle-of-nowhere rustic family farm. The farm is so rustic, it doesn’t have indoor plumbing. (I am so not making any of this up.) The first half of the book is spent with them bickering and fighting and of course, the fighting of the sexual tension. Not to mention, she is an exceptional homemaker and completely turns the little rundown home into something nice and homey while he is out plowing the fields the old fashioned way. (Metaphor? Who’s to say.) So basically, the first half of the book causes a little bit of eye rolling but it is holding pretty close to the general formula. (And for the record, I have no problems with the formula. It is loved by millions for a reason.)

And then wham, I was completely taken by surprise when it turns into an interesting fantasy novel. Yeah, I know, stupid me. Tooth fairy, boogeyman; you would think that would be enough to tip me off. As our hero is being taken over more and more by his dark side, he forces himself to pull away from his innocent angel, the symbol of goodness and light in the world. He cannot allow the bad voice in his head to hurt her. The angst dripping off these pages is enough to give Angel pause and gawd, how I love angst. (Not really sure why cause I can’t imagine putting up with it in real life.)

And then secrets are revealed about him and then about her and you are not really sure what is going to happen and the world could come to an end because of the evil lord of the Underworld and... And what does the author do? Wave a magic wand so I freaking hate the ending. She killed it. Why couldn’t she write a real fantasy novel that allowed her have a messy ending? That allowed her to create something with real meaning? Nope. That is why this book is evil and my friend had no idea when she passed it off to me. It looked innocent but it was so very, very deceiving.

The second book holding to the theme of evil was Adultery for Adults and yep, I bought that one too. Not that I have any plans to go in that direction but I’m exceedingly interested in finding out what advice someone might have for the adulterer in the 1960’s.