Title: Opening Doors
Author: Joshua Skye
Length: 12,969 words (35 pdf pages)
Publisher: JMS Books
Genre: m/m contemporary humour paranormal
Rating: C
Blurb:
While preparing for the annual scouting jamboree, a good-looking and lovable goofball makes an appointment to get the required physical. But instead of going to his family physician, he goes to see a new doctor.
After a series of humorous and sexy examinations, he leaves with a whole new outlook on life.
Blurb:
I think how much readers will enjoy this story depends largely on your sense of humour and ability to see the story as a lark rather than as a serious contemporary. I think I fell somewhere in the middle. Our unnamed narrator is 18, getting ready to graduate and more concerned with hanging out with his friends and having sex with his girlfriend than being a grown-up, however hounding from his parents forces him to make an appointment for a physical with a new doctor. The whole experience is weird and awkward and becomes even more so when the doctor comes on to him and he suddenly realizes the idea of having the doctor have sex with him is not a bad idea, however just as he’s reaching climax in the doctor’s mouth, the nurse (and presumed wife of the doctor) enters, leaving it awkward all around. However our guy is now determined to befriend the only gay kid he knows at school and get some.
Some people may find the whole idea of a doctor taking advantage of an 18 year old patient off-putting, but as I said, if you take it as a serious contemporary that will likely bother you, but it’s meant to be a bit of a lark and his embarrassment about what’s happening and his ready acceptance of it takes it a bit into the fantasy zone. Our narrator is young, he’s crude, he’s a boy. Probably anyone who has or has hung around with many teenage boys could relate. His crude language and thoughts make him very much a teenager. However there was an undercurrent of nice guy. Yes, he was befriending the gay guy to get laid, but he also told his friends to back off and grow up when they started giving them a hard time, and he finds he really does like Jacob and maybe there could be more than just a one-off, but both of them seem happy to start there, until our narrator’s parents end up home early. Awkward.
There is a paranormal aspect at the end which I won’t reveal, but I was left with a bit of a blinky response. I so did not see it coming and to be honest, I thought it was really odd and didn’t work for me at all. I thought the story could have gone a lot of different ways and once you got past the doctor/patient scenario, I would have been happy to read more about our narrator and Jacob and whether they move forward as boyfriends, but then … boom, surprise, the end.
So my reaction was mixed. I did like our narrator, I kind of went with the flow with the doctor scene even if it was a bit confusing, there were some amusing parts, and he was definitely not a 40 year old in an 18 year olds body, but the ending just threw me off and left me going “wow” but in the “what was that?” way rather than “amazing” unfortunately, it didn’t completely ruin it for me, but I think a lot of the potential was lost due to the ending.
