Do you like being scared – terrified, even – and then banging the thing that’s scaring the heck out of you? “The Nightmare’s Kiss”, Skyla Gray’s first installment in the Monster Research Facility series, begins with some unusual coincidences that take down-on-her-luck psychology major Mara Vance back to her hometown in the Arizona desert for the first time in years. It gets weird, it gets tense, and there’s some serious steam in this suspenseful debut paranormal romance.
After living in Los Angeles, Mara never thought she’d go back home to the desert, but she has a job offer from a mysterious institute known in town as The Facility. The locals think the place is bad news, a secluded, high-security warehouse thought to be associated with unexplained disappearances, but Mara thinks the offer is too good to pass up. She quickly learns that the locals are right to be afraid.
After signing a stack of NDAs, Mara is brought into a darkened room, where behind a sheet of one way glass she’s introduced to Subject X-13, “The Nightmare,” an amorphous, shadowy mass of negative energy. Over the subsequent days, Mara performs scientific experiments on X-13, testing its endurance and her own sense of ethics. Sometimes he looks and acts positively human, and she has to torture him. The stress builds up fast.
Mara can’t leave her job at the office, and starts to dream of X-13. At first, it’s absolutely terrifying, a humanoid creature with long claws staring at her as she sleeps. But she starts to understand him more and wonder if these are truly just dreams, or something deeper, something more intimate. Okay, it’s something a lot more intimate! Nightmare’s got a thing for Mara, and the feeling’s mutual. Now they just need to figure out how to help him escape from these experiments that torture him…
Equal parts X-Files, SCP, and monsterlover romance, “The Nightmare’s Kiss”’ is a super fun and steamy romp that’s genuinely suspenseful. Gray does a terrific job of building tension and a sense of danger in the early part of the book when you have no idea what this creature is. Is he a sentient blob? A smoke monster? Slenderman? The novel moves fast and the steam is truly steamy.
“The Nightmare’s Kiss” is the first in a series (#2, “The Revenant’s Heart” was just released) which follows different characters and creatures at the institute, building a self-contained horror romance universe. It will be fun to follow this series as it grows and develops. Check out Skyla Gray’s website and info on her writing at: https://skyla-gray.com/books/
Ronald Sampson
