Blood Moon

Stunning ... breathtaking ... mesmerizing. Brett Easton Ellis with better sex. My hot summer afternoons have been totally devoted to this hot, hot story, cleverly written, wittingly entertaining. I didn't actually count, but I think every character has sex with every other character. But this novel is more than just sex. It's a great story with fantastic dialogue. (The final conversation between Rose and Calder is a camp classic.) Darwin Porter is a name to remember. Highly, highly recommended.

...nor could I keep it down. This book has everything from drama, to sex, to religion, to sex, to mystery that keeps you on the edge of your seat, to more sex. This book got me so steamed, I had to take a shower....more than once. I had read "Midnight in the Garden" by Darwin on a recent trip to Seattle, and when I saw this, I couldn't put it back on the shelf. If you are looking for a very entertaining and engrossing read, this is it! It kept me up many nights, 'cause I couldn't put it away.*Darwin- I can't wait for your next novel...Bring it on!

Although I can understand the negative reviews generated by this novel, I still found it totally fascinating and could not put it down. If nothing else it is worth reading to discover Nancy Reagan's true talent. The sex scenes are gratuitous and the plot a bit far-fetched, but I still found the characters believable and sympathetic. It really is HIGH CAMP ("Dynasty" on steroids), and regardless of its faults, a wonderful and compelling read.

Intrigued by the widely varied opinions on Darwin Porter's new psycho-sexual thriller, BLOOD MOON, I bought a copy. I loved it! It was one of the most entertaining and exciting high-libido novels I've ever read. The negative comments from some other readers (one of whom I suspect is Jerry Falwell in drag) are MORONIC and in one or two instances, incredibly naive. This is a tour de force of gay fiction. To my knowledge, there's nothing remotely like it on the market today. The characters are both thought-provoking and sizzling, the dialogue is brilliant, and the plot is a page-turner. As for the sex scenes, they're credible, creative, and very, very hot. Set in the late 70s, in the lusty days before AIDS, the novel weaves together about a half-dozen charismatic and full-bodied characters, most of whom are in their 20s, and most of whom are chock-full of testosterone. Their lives become entwined in a murky but enthralling blend of love, greed, psychosis, and betrayal. I read the book in three days, and didn't want it to end. What a hell of a movie it would make. It was with satisfaction that I noted that much of the counterculture press from around the world has approved of this novel. Set in the fictional town of Okeechobee (perhaps a metaphor for Miami) the book appears in part to be autobiographical. Gene and Buck are two of the sexiest men ever to appear in a gay novel. Rose Phillips, the charismatic and "deviant" evangelist, and her shocking son, Shelley, were surely written in hell. They are a brilliant--and jarring-- depiction of a fiercely ambitious mother/son team. I have a dozen other books piled up on my night stand, many of which I've tried (unsuccessfully) to finish reading. But what I'm really waiting for is Darwin Porter's next novel. Blood Moon is WONDERFUL-- a spellbinder by which other contemporary gay novels should be judged!

Darwin Porter's "Blood Moon" is dazzling and jarringly original, an erotic thriller tour de force from a gifted Southern voice. I've never read anything remotely like it. Trying to imagine what might've happened if Gordon Merrick on steroids had written "St. Elmo's Fire," and then stirred it up with William Hjortsberg's "Falling Angel," is as close as I can come. I've been marked for life by the red-hot images of Gene Robinson and-more raptly-of Buck Brooke III.Brilliant and evocative, "Blood Moon" is rich with echoes and surprises. Its title, for instance, is straight out of that literary larder, the Bible (Revelation 6:12). It's even what the father of the modern day prophecy movement, Hal Lindsey, called his doomsday novel about a post-rapture society. And it's linked to witches and the Wiccan religion, too. Fact is, Blood Moon is only one appellation for October's lunar night. But you'll have to wait until page 794, to read the poignant reason for its title."Blood Moon" is the compelling saga of the university class of '71, who become interlocked lovers five years later playing high-stakes, ultra-dangerous, adult games-sex, money, and power. It's set in Okeechobee, a tropical backwater place in southeast Florida, steamy as the novel itself and only a county or two from the Everglades. (Sportsmen call the real Okeechobee the Big "O". But sexologists and Porter would mean something else by that.)Center stage is Buck Brooke III, a 27-year-old crusading, liberal journalist, that very rare breed of ultimate man who can satisfy both women and men, notorious for ruining whomever he beds for all other sex partners. Trouble ignites when Buck postpones a photoshoot for a national magazine that's named him "sexiest man alive" so he can dine with Rose Phillips, an evangelist preaching a heady stew of far-right politics with old-time fundamentalism. Under Porter's deft pacing, the reader is then hurtled through sexual neurosis and obsession, the religion business, political corruption, Presidential intrigue, hot-blooded sex, moral compromise, greed, betrayal, and cold-blooded murder toward a breathless climax that feels like slamming an abutment at 90mph. It's a book you don't walk away from.Simmering under the erotically charged prose and sensational plot is the real story: The preternatural powers of persuasion and motivation that male beauty and its stirring of desire could command. "Blood Moon" is a dramatic, narrative translation of Harvard Medical School psychologist Nancy Etcoff's "Survival of the Prettiest," a watershed in evolutionary psychology-or the "science of beauty." Moralists and extreme feminists are wrong: Caught up in the rapture of physical beauty isn't so much a "false god" as it's to a very large extent hard-wired in the human brain.What's more, in our society, beauty-male or female-is currency. With the fidelity of an author who's been longtime honing his powers of observation, Porter exquisit