The world of dreams fascinates me and, when written well, can provide endless fodder for fantasy and paranormal romance. For this reason, the premise of Dreams’ Dark Kiss intrigued me, but aside from good ideas and some unintentional hilarity, this novella delivered disappointingly little.

Though overall the novella didn’t work for me, the author starts with unique characters and some rather interesting ideas. The heroine, Ciaran Letang, is a psychopomp. This means that she can ferry the souls of the dying over to the other side, and the trips she takes with these dying souls reflect their last wishes. As the story opens, she is doing just that when something unexpected happens. Her mission accomplished, Ciaran should be able to leave the dreamscape and wake up, but instead she is trapped.

Even worse, a bane hunts down Ciaran and in a harrowing scene it appears that the bane is going to rape her. Ciaran calls out for help, and this is where things get truly strange. Various dream creatures come by, and Ciaran actually turns away a couple of them. Quite frankly, if I were about to be raped by some otherworldly creature and a rescuer came to my assistance, I wouldn’t be too picky about who saved me. Not Ciaran. She does not know if another creature will come along after she turns away the first two, but she eventually settles on a porpoise and allows him/it to come to her rescue. And yes, you’re reading this right. I could not make this up if I tried.

As it turns out, the porpoise is none other than Keoni Maka, a dream guardian. It’s Keoni’s business to protect dreamers while they sleep, but he has more than the usual interest in Ciaran. Keoni is puzzled as to how a psychopomp with limited powers would find herself in Ciaran’s situation, but as terrifying creatures from The Dreaming make it clear that she is in fact a target, he fights alongside her. Having gotten out of a bad relationship, Ciaran is loathe to get involved with Keoni or anyone else, but as the story moves along, romance readers will not be surprised to see her change her mind.

The author very obviously thought out her world and while complex, it does make sense and hang together cohesively. I have to give her credit for that because I know that this is no easy feat. In addition, the lead characters are quite unique and I appreciated that as well. Keoni is a native Hawaiian and Ciaran is a Londoner of West Indian heritage, and the author works their backgrounds into the story in ways that make these characters feel like real people. The author also does a good job of working attitude and humor into her story which lightens some of the darkness in what can be at times a rather heavy tale.

Unfortunately, the story also had some flaws I just could not overlook. The villains are too simplistic in their eeeeevilness, and the references to villain sex were just way over the top and actually took me out of the story. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to be laughing at these scenes, but I have to admit that I was.

In addition, while the ideas behind the story were interesting, sometimes they got lost in awkward phrasing. The dialogue between the characters often felt forced rather than flowing naturally. Keoni would work various Hawaiian words and phrases into his speech, which sometimes worked but at other times, he stopped to explain himself and that would break the mood of the scene. In addition, the story occasionally lapsed into Barbara Cartland mode, full of ellipses and exclamation points. For example, at one point, Ciaran recalls her attack by the bane, and, “She suspected – though she couldn’t explain why-if the beast had succeeded in mating with her, the result would have been…a very real pregnancy!” At this point, I had to remind myself that Ciaran is supposedly a strong and modern woman rather than a wide-eyed and fragile little child bride.

Unfortunately, all of these missteps had the cumulative effect of making me feel entirely too distanced from the story. At times, the over the top villains seemed cartoonish and ridiculous, and I also just kept putting down my Kindle because, well, it’s easy to stop reading a story that one doesn’t feel invested in. As a result, it took me over two weeks to read this short novella. Dubbin has very interesting ideas, she has created quite a world in this book, and with some polishing up, she could be a writer to watch. However, in its current form, Dreams’ Dark Kiss just isn’t one that I can recommend and it’s rather close to being a trainwreck.