Floggers’ Holiday Sale by Stormy Glenn and H.C. Brown

Title: Floggers’ Holiday Sale
Author: Stormy Glenn and H.C. Brown
Publisher: Noble Romance
Length: Anthology (46k/141 pgs)
Buy the book: Publisher

Blurb:

Hot Dom, Cold Sub by Stormy Glenn

Rafe, a very serious Dom, wants Danny the minute he spots the sexy little man dancing at Club Flogger. Rafe is used to getting what and who he wants.

When Danny refuses, it sends Rafe into a whirlwind of arousal and confusion, especially since he knows the little submissive is interested.

Can a Christmas auction give Rafe what he needs or will it leave him wanting more?

Dominate Me by H.C. Brown

Nash Mage, a six five, leather clad ball of muscle, is living on the edge. Damien, his control freak of a sub, left without a word. Teetering on the bounds of control Nash’s BDSM world begins to disintegrate. He wants what every Dom craves, a sweet innocent sub he can train to fulfill his every desire.

When Paul Martin enters Floggers Christmas Auction looking for his first BDSM experience, Nash thinks all his Christmases have come at once. Young, barely legal with a slight build, Paul is just the way he likes his subs. Nash wants this delicious man with a passion—so do the other Doms. If Nash secures the winning bid on Paul at Floggers Christmas Auction, will he get to keep his prize?

Review:

This anthology is comprised of two stories set centered around Christmastime at the same BDSM club, written by a pair of authors I’ve never read before. I’ve also never read anything from this particular publisher. After finishing this, I can’t say I’m likely to seek out work from any of them in the future.

At Club Floggers, they conduct a Christmas auction, where doms bid on the sub of their choice, buy them for a week, then bring them back for New Years and a demonstration of what the sub has learned in that time period. In the first story, “Hot Dom, Cold Sub” by Stormy Glenn, dom Rafe is obsessed with a sub he knows only as D, a man who shows up every Saturday, dances for the crowd, then leaves alone, refusing all advances. Rafe uses the auction to bid on D, then takes him home to get the boy out of his system. What he doesn’t know is that D is really Denny, the nephew of the man who trained Rafe, and he’s been in love with Rafe ever since seeing his picture in his uncle’s possession. At everyone’s advice, he played it aloof with Rafe in an attempt to get his attention, but now that he has it, he’s not entirely sure it’s everything he ever wanted.

In spite of a promising beginning, this novella, the longer of the two in this collection, quickly gets bogged down in editorial mistakes. They run the range from misused words to inconsistencies. For instance, Denny’s hair switches from sandy blond to sandy brown and then back again, you’re gets mistaken for your, and typos like if for it proliferate the text. It reads like a rough draft, and if I’d paid for this, I’d be really disappointed that I’d purchased something that looks like it never saw an editor. It’s especially frustrating that a BDSM story can’t even get the words dominant and dominate straight. Both get used incorrectly in this, the verb as a noun and vice versa (i.e., He wanted Rafe to dominant him.)

Beyond the technical mistakes, though, the story itself has few redeeming qualities to make up for them. Characterizations are flat and superficial. Both men are obsessives who frustrated more than interested me. Denny fluctuates back and forth between a young man capable of holding his own – even if he is a sub – and a wishy-washy sap, while Rafe is the worst kind of dominant I can imagine, dangerous rather than masterful. I couldn’t even get into the sex scenes, of which there are many.

The second story is “Dominate Me” by H.C. Brown. Nash, another dom at the club and Rafe’s friend, is interested in a new sub at the club, a young man named Paul. He hasn’t been interested in anyone since his recent break-up, but Paul is different. He wins him in the auction, then takes him back to his house, something he never does. But Nash’s Jekyll and Hyde personality scares Paul, and when Nash’s ex shows up, Paul doesn’t know what to think.

The technical mistakes that plague the first story are all over the second, too. Typos are the worst offender, like He hate nothing more than a sub who begged., adds for ads, and sooth for soothe, but worse than that is the internal inconsistencies within the anthology. These two stories take place in the same time period, with overlapping characters, around the same auction. Yet, where a big deal is made in the first story about the contract between the winning bidder and the sub, there is no corresponding contract or agreement in the second. Considering Paul is a virgin sub, this is a much bigger deal than it was in the first. He needs more protection both because of that and because of the threat Nash presents.

Which brings me to Nash. As much as I didn’t think Rafe was a good dom, Nash is a thousand times worse. He’s unnecessarily violent with wild mood swings, which without a safe word for Paul is unacceptable (he even draws blood from biting Paul’s neck in the shower). He’s also a raging egomaniac. The man has a life-sized picture of himself in his dom regalia hanging over the fireplace in a lounge room in his home. I just can’t care about someone so horrifically narcissistic, especially when he treats a vulnerable sub like Paul so poorly. His response to his ex’s arrival angered me further. The fact that Paul was willing to listen to anything Nash had to say after that only proved how weak Paul really was.

As an introduction to both of these authors and this publisher, this is a weak one. It’s badly edited, frustrating, and decidedly unsexy. I can’t recommend it in the slightest, and I would be hard pressed to buy anything else from them.