Synopsis
They’re dying for a chance at love.
America’s #1 dating show, Love Shots, gathers young, sexy singles in a tropical villa to compete in cheeky challenges, find love, and win a huge cash prize—with no small amount of drama.
Things go off-script when a recently ejected competitor reappears in the villa. But she isn’t the girl the cast remembers… Something is deeply, horribly wrong with her, and she’s not the only danger lurking in paradise.
These 20-year-old influencers must fight to survive against a security team they believed was there to protect them, an onslaught of terror they can barely comprehend, and producers who have a decidedly sinister finale in mind, all while desperately trying to escape an isolated island.
But what chance do they have when hundreds of cameras are aimed at them, watching their every move?
Love Island meets Jurassic Park in this twisted, thrilling satire from the author of Carapace and The Narrows.
Review
Inspired in equal measure by Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and reality TV’s Love Island, Travis M. Riddle’s Love Shots blends the concepts of beach-ready bodies looking for love (brains optional) and celebrity fame on a tropical island with gory, chompy-stompy monster horror.
Riddle’s premise is certainly an intriguing one, but it suffers under its own hefty weight. Love Shots is overly long, poorly paced, and unsure of what the central focus should be. The first half of the book is essentially a romance that centers almost exclusively around way too many witless, hapless, 20-something influencer-wannabes and their search for love via a streaming game show. After about 200 pages of reality TV fluff, Riddle decides to finally switch gears and deliver on the horror element, introducing the monsters secreted away on the island that he had been only very minimally teasing. This turns Love Shots into an all-out gorefest as doomed romances, battle-tested bonds, and maybe even that one true love rival an inexplicable cadre of carnage-wreaking monstrosities.
Unfortunately, by the time Riddle settles into his groove and delivers on the hook he lured us in with, it’s too little too late. So much of my interest had been squandered with the sophomoric romances and will-they or won’t-theys, and my patience tested with a handful of largely interchangeable young adults, none of whom are nearly as remotely interesting as Riddle has convinced himself they are. This aggravation wasn’t eased by two contestants sharing nearly identical names, Lara and Lauren, who are both vying for the same man, Tom. Tom’s narcissistic, sexist, and manipulative, and like all good manipulators he does a swell job hiding his flaws and fooling others. I was ready to see him violently slaughtered in the good name of catharsis by around page 150. By page 175 I was wondering where the hell the horror elements were and debating if I should tough it out for another 300+ pages (WTF) or call it quits.
The inherent structure of Love Shots doesn’t exactly make for a walk in this not-Jurassic park, either. At nearly 500 pages long, Love Shots has five, count ‘em, five whole chapters. I don’t typically have a preference for chapter length. I’m not on either Team Short Chapters or Team Long Chapters, but I have to admit, I do like to have actual chapters. Love Shots is an overwritten mess as it is, but having chapters that amount to three-plus hours of reading time makes for one long ass, exhausting slog. I didn’t feel any sense of progress working my way through this thing, and after several hundred pages of tepid romance and very little actual sensual island sexiness, I grew to loathe having to pick up this book at all. I was investing a hell of a lot of time in a book that refused to deliver either sex or violence, and readers, I was irate.
But then Riddle finally managed to surprise me on page 209. Love Shots was finally getting good.
For a little while, at least. The monster aspect is creative, original, and fun, and of course much of the horror devolves into stupid people doing stupid things and getting their comeuppance. To Riddle’s credit, there is a smart, and sadly still wholly necessary in this day and age, theme revolving around basic human rights and sexuality, as Love Shot Island is revealed to be a test pool for christofascists, eugenics, and the nightmare of conservative politics writ large. It’s a welcome bit of commentary here in the 21st freaking Century, in an America hellbent on rolling the clock back to the 1800s, if not earlier. Riddle just takes too damn long to get there with the whole point-making.
And that’s the central problem with Love Shots. It’s just all too damn much. The politics are spot-on and the horrors infesting the island are ingenious – they’re just saddled beneath too much mundanity and pointless explorations. The book is overwritten, to the point that we get a four-page long list of all the various things in life one young victim will never be able to experience. This is all laughably capped off with, “The list of things they had never done was endless.” But holy fuck, Riddle certainly gave it the old college try!
There’s a really good book or an absolutely killer novella in here somewhere. It just needs some severe content editing to help trim the loads of extraneous fat and gristle. Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to start their story as close to the end as possible. Riddle ignores this advice to his detriment, opting instead to start as close to the beginning as possible and then dragging every little thing out for as long as humanly, or perhaps inhumanly, possible.
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