Jasmine Regis’s world consisted of teaching ungrateful kids, apart for the attentive Andrew. These mundane concerns are pushed out of her life, like so many other things, when the Jinx invades the Earth. Seemingly unstoppable, immune to conventional weapons, they pour through wormholes murdering the men and stealing women. Jasmine escapes the initial attack with Andrew, but as the Jinx depopulate the world of women; the males left behind become her greatest threat....

Jinx Town (2015. 306 pages) is a new science fiction series by Sam Stone. The story is a cross between fantasy, with its use of magic and sci-fi with the alien invasion theme.

Through most of the book we follow Jas as she tries to survive the end of the world with only Andrew as a companion. However, we are shown other characters and their stories, especially Gerald the GP (who for a time is able to avoid the maelstrom by living in a rural area) and Taylor and his remaining soldiers. Eventually the three strands of the narrative are brought together at the close of the first half of the book. The second is based in Jinx Town, situated on another planet, where the women are being used to repopulate a society which lost all its females to a plague.

These elements alone would make for a fairly good pot boiler, reminiscent of pulp science fiction of the thirties, However, Stone has added a decidedly modern element with the use of graphic sexual descriptions.

The sexual descriptions and politics of the book are likely to cause division within the readership. Not that this sort of thing is unknown, as this form of sexuality married with science fiction and fantasy has already been well explored, especially in the late sixties, by John Norman in his Chronicles of Gor series of books, although these did go further into the territory of BDSM, than this present novel does.

Still the first half of the book contains graphic descriptions of rape as well as consensual sex and you get the general feeling that the author thinks women so irresistible that a shortage would immediately bring out the worst in men, she may well be right. However, the argument against rape is rapidly undermined when the women who have been taken by the jinx discover that their humanoid captors are not only seven feet tall but generously proportioned, turning the women in to complicit partners in their own rapes.

I’m not a puritanical person by nature, but you get the feeling that either the author is trying to ride the Fifty Shades of Grey tide, by spicing her story up – I’m hoping that this is not the case as Sam Smith is a much better writer than E. L. James - or that they have been included for shock value as they add little to the overall plot. Their inclusion ultimately unbalances the story to its detriment.

5

Charles Packer