Review: The Bedding of Boys

The Bedding of Boys by Edward Lorn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When hebephile Regina Corsi sets her sights on young Nevada barnes, she'll do whatever she can to get him in her clutches. But how hard can it be for a gorgeous woman in her thirties to seduce a horny fourteen year old boy? And what about Ghost, the sheeted figure that does Regina's bidding?

Just after I reviewed Tampa last year, Edward Lorn emailed me, worried that he'd just wrote the same book. I said his approach was probably different and told him not to worry about it. Turns out, I was right.

Set in the town that gave Bay's End its name, The Bedding of Boys is about sexual predator Regina Corsi and her prey, Nevada Barnes. It's also about male and female sexuality and the differences thereof.

When the tale begins, Nevada is living happily with his parents and foster brother August. August spends a lot of his time catatonic with periods of wakefulness but there's much more to him than meets the eye. Regina is a predator and Nevada soon falls under her gaze. The mysterious Ghost following Regina around seemed like a pretty way to conveniently keep Regina under the radar until it was explained.

Edward Lorn clearly remembers what it's like to be fourteen, to be perpetually horny and to be as hard as a shovel handle at the slightest provocation. It's all too easy to see how Nevada gets entangled with Regina.

When things go off the rails, they do in a spectacular fashion. The ending was pretty much what it had to be after everything that came before it. After all, you can't very well have a train heading toward a chasm with no bridge suddenly stop at the last minute.

I loved the callbacks to the other books set in Bay's End, like Fog Warning, Life After Dane, The Sound of Broken Ribs, and Cruelty. I'm not sure The End will recover from this one, though.

If I had to pick something to bitch about, it was the way Ghost's origin tale killed the momentum toward the end of the book. It was necessary and I'm not sure of any other way that information could have conveyed. It still felt like a speed bump, though.

While it's not my favorite Lorn book, this one is up there, just a notch below The Sound of Broken Ribs. 4.5 out of stars.


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