Hellish Twist in Tinseltown

Title: Hellish Twist in Tiinseltown
Author: Lee Avalone
Publisher: Amber Allure
Cover Artist: Trace Edward Zaber
Buy Link:
Genre: Gay/ Dark Fantasy/ Paranormal/ Ghosts/ Hauntings/ Voyeurism
Length: Novella (99 pdf pages, 16 k words)
Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

A Guest Review by Feliz

Summary Review:  A ghost and a demon hunter can fight hellish demons together, but it’s harder to overcome the shadows of the past so they can find love with each other in the end.

***This book contains  on-page scenes of violence and violent death***

The Blurb:

A fearsome demon hunter discovers only a ghost can teach him how to live…
The men of National Command Center for Supernatural Control are known for their unquenchable sexual appetites. The best perk for fighting demons is their extreme popularity among the gay population. When the war against the demons becomes a losing battle, however, too many young men give their lives for a world that once had rejected them.
Demon hunter Jon Miller couldn’t save a Hollywood mall, so how could he be expected to save the entire world? He’s had enough of the weird and wacky paranormal world until the ghost of a long-gone Hollywood star torments Jon in the worst possible way–Jon’s made to examine his feelings about being gay.
As a newly appointed deputy with the National Command Center for Supernatural Control, T. L. Nala is a ghost on a crusade. Not only is he given the opportunity to kill demons, he can make amends for being an outspoken anti-gay activist during his past life as a Hollywood movie star. Coming out as a ghost with ravenous desire for a certain demon hunter makes T. L. turn up the heat where he’d never imagined he’d go…

The Review:

Demons broke free from Hell and are attacking the human world.  Some demons  look like snakes or dragons of various sizes; they use to appear somewhere,  smelling of  brimstone and breathing fire, and they destroy/ eat/ kill people and rob people of their souls, thus creating zombies. Other demons are worse, they put on “meat suits” (i.e. take posession of a human body) in order to have sex with humans. If a gay man survives such an assault, he apparently develops special skills that enable him to become a demon hunter.  Thus, in this world, gay men are much valued, and the demon hunters are objects of worship.  (those men also seem to develop a voracious sexual appetite, which explains their popularity among the gay community). Togehter with  human demon hunters, the NCCSC also accepts other supernatural beings, for example vampires and ghosts, who can also utilize the power of certain rare semi-precious stones against demons.

Hellish Twist in Tinseltown begins right in the middle of a fight, with the NCCSC agents battling a demon in a mall in Hollywood. Jon Miller has been fed up with fighting demons for a while already, and now, sitting wounded among his dead and dying colleagues, he is about to give up. But a man in outdated clothes helps him, resets his dislocated shoulder and comforts him. The stranger’s voice strikes Jon as  oddly familiar: he’s heard it for months now every night in  his wildly erotic dreams. Confusion and curiosity tie Jon’s tongue just long enough that his superior can assign him to the new task-force around the stranger, T.L. Nala, who has shown outstanding abilities in the battle against demons. Instead of retiring, Jon finds himself living in T.L.’s house, surrounded by 1960’s antiquities, and courted/ seduced by an unsatiable ghost who after eighty years of living and death existence, finally admitted to himself that he was gay and now has to make up for a lot of lost time.

While alive, Hollywood star T.L. Nala was  known as a homophobe. When his orphaned – gay – nephew came to live with him, T.L. lost no opportunity to publicly scold the boy’s habit of taking home strangers. Which eventually cost him his life, since one of his nephew’s flings murdered him in his own house. In his first decades as a ghost, T.L. had ample time to regret his behavior, watching his nephew spiral deeper and deeper into loneliness and depression and unable to help the boy since he hadn’t yet learned to contact mortals.

With Jon Miller, it was lust at first sight for T.L. Having intruded in Jon’s dreams for a while now, T.L. is more than happy to have the sexy demon hunter in his own realm, together with another sexually very active couple of NCCSC agents. Now that he’s learned to maintain a physical body long enough, T.L. is starved for sex, and given the NCCSC agent’s reputation, he can count on their willingness to help him satiate that hunger. When Jon hooks up with a member of the house cleaning crew for a blowjob, T.L. immediately grabs his chance to butt in, literally, and turns the blowjob into a threesome, thus gifting Jon with the best orgasm of his life. Later, when T.L. reveals himself to Jon, the agent protests T.L. ‘s way of seduction a little – anal intercourse as first physical contact is a little brash, after all – but the ghost is so sexy and his sexual prowess so amazing that Jon can’t resist too long.

However, Jon wants to come to know his new lover a little better. What he learns via internet research about T.L.’s living personality is apt to majorly turn him off the ghost – and to doubt T.L.’s honesty. Can someone really change as much as T.L. claims he has? And what does it say about Jon that he has apparently fallen for a homophobic asshole?  Jon’s self-doubts are fueled even more as he’s forced to watch his brother being raped to death by a demon. Now T.L. must prove himself to Jon twice, first the honesty of his feelings for Jon and secondly to keep Jon from giving up the fight against demons.

A big portion of this book consists of (admittedly hot) sex scenes, not only between Jon and T.L., but also between other pairings, and of violent demon fights. Those scenes are not for the faint of heart – especially the killing of Jon’s brother, which happens on-page, had me swallowing hard. So, consider yourself duely warned.

As for the rest of the book, there’s enough plot, angst and backstory for this book to prevent it from falling into the porn without plot category. In fact, I thought T.L.’s life story skillfully done, and the part with T.L.’s nephew becoming reconciled with his uncle was moving. Jon’s character went through a nice development and came out better in the end. Still, I couldn’t quite relate to the emotional connection between Jon and T.L., which propped into existence rather out of the blue in my opinion.

This book is part of a series featuring the National Command Center for Supernatural Control. Most of the worldbuilding was  apparently done in previous books. It is possible to read this book as a standalone (which I did), but there are many details and background informations that may have eluded me this way. Also, this book leaves a number of questions unanswered which are likely going to be addressed in later works. This book, although quite entertaining to my more bloodthisty mood, couldn’t pique my interest enough that I’d want to read the entire series. I’d still recommend it to fans of the author and, particularly, to fans of the series.