For a kick off, the cover has to one of the worst covers in the history of publishing. Period. A touch hyperbolic you may think, but let me paint a mental picture and then tell me what you think. (And, yes, I do know the written in tablets of stone axiom about book covers and judgement, but, hey, we all do it, so why pretend?) Luridly coloured - think overexposed holiday snap - and slightly blurred - and not in that mood setting good way, either - it is a photoshop nightmare.

Its prime purpose is clearly to set out the book’s stall. Though, considering that the connotations of the whole fnar fnar concept of the pool boy are well worn, you’d have to be a right old thickie lumps not to realise this is going to be a novel of deep throating rather than deep thinking. Fine, nothing wrong with that. I’m quite partial to a slice of slap’n’tickle meself. Sometimes I even partake in it.

But do we really, truly, need a generic West Hollywood cheese boy in the buffed buff on the cover to sledgehammer home the point that this is a piece of light (hand) relief dick lit. I mean: why? The model isn’t even a get-the-juices-flowing horndog. With his bland, gymorexic body and dumb as you like grin, he looks too tampon sanitised to be anything approaching sexy. And it certainly ain’t artfully shot; said model is weirdly perched half in the pool and half out like he’s been blown ashore like a piece of driftwood. The whole effect is like the 80s has projectile vomited over the cover. Even more laughably, under Mr Beached Beefcake, the publisher has felt the need to leave us in no doubt about what lies between the covers here and has helpfully provided the subtitle ‘An Erotic Novel.’ No? Surely not? And there was me thinking it was an unearthed Harry Potter manuscript. Harry Potter and the Pool Boy of Venice Beach, perhaps?

The narrative, such as it is, is also on the déjà vu side. You don’t have to be a clairvoyant to see how the plot and characterisation are going to pan out. In case you’re interested (and if you are, please stop that now), here’s the drill.

Gay middle aged novelist Robert Fine is searching for a summer pool boy for his beach house and a young straight boy, the porno named Kent Tacoma, arrives to be interviewed. Can you see where we’re going with this, yet? Well, of course, he gets the cough, cough, position and before you can say, “Bend over and clean out my pool filter” a boss/hired help relationship develops that keeps work tribunals in busy business the world over.

I don’t object to the read it all before plot and cliché raddled characterisation because sometimes the predictable can be fun if it’s written with a touch of personal panache and individual style. Here, though, it’s just erotic fiction by numbers, bereft of a single witty, well-crafted idea, situation, line, anything in fact.

Worse still, it reduces sex to such a mechanical, Mills & Boonian level of boredom you end up wondering why the author even bothered opting for the erotica genre in the first place.

You might as well write a book on knitting if you’re going to construct sex scenes like this: “My lips parted slightly as my own rod shot a few droplets of white jizm into my shorts. I peered crazily at the structure between Tacoma’s thick thighs. I was glued to it. Concentrating on its mass and weight. And then easily, I surveyed his cock: the head was bulbous and purple, uncut and titanic, almost two inches wide, maybe even wider. A stake if you’ve ever seen one! Shocking and real! Completely available for my drooling, spying needs.”

Again: huh? Is Clinger describing some heat and lust or documenting the contents of a butcher’s window? From the tone and ambience of the passage, you’d never know.

The raunch-factor is set to zero and no amount of exclamation marks is going to up the sauce ante. The problem here isn’t that the sex is too explicit, it’s that it’s not graphic enough. The sex is too dry when anyone worth their shags knows good sex is meant to be as wet as, well, a pool. The novel actually does a disservice to sex and its myriad pleasures, sucking the life right out of its boner.

A critic’s blurb on the press release describes The Pool Boy as “a dick-jolting read that will make you hard.” Unfortunately, for me, this is flaccid fiction that barely gets the blood pumping for a half hearted semi.

The Pool Boy, by R. W. Clinger
Published by: Starbooks
Released: 18 October 2007
ISBN: 1891855530

Buy the R. W. Clinger’s The Pool Boy online and save yourself some money while you make your own mind up about this erotic novel.