#Review - The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston

The Dead Romantics
Ashley Poston
Harper Collins, 29 September 2022
Available as: PB, 345pp, e, audio
Source: Purchased/ audio subscription
ISBN(PB): 9780008566562

I came to The Dead Romantics having loved Poston's Once Upon a Con series of geek-themed fairytales, and it didn't disappoint - either in its similarities or in its differences.

The main similarity is perhaps that at the story is both fulfilling and referencing the romance genre, though creating a background to that which allows things to be seen from quite a different perspective. In Once Upon a Con that was the geek culture of fandoms, in The Dead Romantics it's... something else.  (The general no-nonsense affect of Florence Day does also I think make her a spiritual sister to Elle Wittimer or to Imogen Lovelace).

The main difference from the earlier books is the way that's done - here, Day is herself a romance writer, albeit a ghostwriter for renowned romance star Ann Nichols. So we get something of an "inside publishing" critique too, replete with scary editors, writers' block and even plagiarism.

Day left her little home town to make it in big in New York, where she's now flailing rather, her writing stymied by her conviction that romance is dead leaving her unable to kindle the flame that she needs to finish her latest novel - which she ought to do by tomorrow. In fact, as we learn when she's called back to said hometown, there is more to her departure from the place than appears at first sight. Poston delights in giving us Day's backstory, and explaining why she's estranged from her family of undertakers. The whole thing is an audacious mix of the incredible and of raw human emotion, and Poston carries it with complete success - by the midpoint of this novel, I was booing Florence's high school nemesis and screaming for her to recognise what's going on when her love interest turns up from the city.

Part of the reason she can't, that she's distracted, goes back to the events of ten years ago, and part is due to a more recent tragedy, and I don't want to spoil either, so all I will say is that Florence Day has one of the most complicated romantic lives you can imagine, as well as some peculiar talents that ought to make things easier but don't. And those distractions, those problems, she has to confront - well, they're literally matters of life and death, the barriers to happiness that you'd expect in romance being rather more unyielding here than in general.

Reader, I will not give away the ending. If you've got your genre right you may get a general sense of how things turn out - our maybe not. But I can say that it's a magnificent, satisfying and intricate story with bold and fun characters and a very down to earth sense of what is, at the end, important. 

A hilarious and rather moving read, showing that, in the midst of death, we are in life.

Recommended.

For more information about The Dead Romantics, see the publisher's website here.