Review: Touch of a Ghost by L.M. Brown

Author: L.M. Brown

Pages/Word Count: 74 Pages

At a Glance: Overall, a bit angsty as well as bittersweet

Blurb: What if you could only touch your lover one night of the year? Halloween night is all you have when in a relationship with a ghost.

Drew Jessop wants a life without ghosts. He doesn’t want to see, hear, or talk to them. Ignoring them should be relatively simple. But Drew soon finds that Benji Richards, an eternally gorgeous ghost from the fifties, is not so easy to ignore.

Halloween night is approaching and both Drew and Benji know what it could mean for them. From sunset to sunrise, it is the one night of the year when a mortal can feel the touch of a ghost.

Review: The blurb from this book had me a bit worried, but intrigued as well. I don’t really like to read serials or find unhappy endings in my stories, but that wasn’t the case here. I really enjoyed the concept behind this piece because I hadn’t ever read anything like it before. Being able to see ghosts has long been a topic of interest, and the concept has been used for several books and television shows, so there are some rules you see used over and over in the genre, and I am always surprised when someone comes up with something new. It keeps clichés new and exciting in my opinion.

I liked that while Drew could see and hear the ghosts, he couldn’t really touch them. Nor could they physically return touch. The ghosts could, however, interact with other objects and reality, and that was interesting for me. On Halloween, though, our couple’s dreams came true, and it appeared to have side benefits for the lovers as well. The reasons why were sort of hand-waved away, but it was nothing that tore me out of the story.

Overall, a bit angsty as well as bittersweet, with the lovers only being able to physically connect on one day a year, but the fact that they could talk and somewhat interact made up for it. I really liked the bit of reality that was injected when Drew’s parents stepped in to weigh their opinions on his relationship. Object lesson here is that there is more than sex to a relationship, especially between the human and the ghost. And it is a lesson they both learn after Drew almost dies. The result of his near death experience gives the couple a happy side benefit that really sweetened this little story.

Like all the other authors I’ve chosen to review, and just like some of the others I’ve read, I think I’ll look for more works by L.M. Brown in the future.