I’ve encountered many characters in my time. Some I liked, some I didn’t care about, a few I loved. Not since the time I read Harold Robbins have I came across a character I disliked as immediately and thoroughly as Luke McKade, the hero of Wild Enough For Willa.

When we meet Luke he’s having a run of bad luck. His wife and unborn child have died in a car accident, and his half-brother Little Red, fresh out of jail and terminally ill, wants him dead. Little Red also wants to kill Brand Baines, the lawyer whom Little Red holds responsible for his incarceration. When Luke goes to Mexico to find Little Red and stop him from killing Baines, he finds Willa, drugged and tied to the bedposts, calling for help. He assumes she’s a prostitute (she’s not). When Luke gets turned on by seeing her helpless and humiliated, it’s gross. When she comes onto Luke in her haze, thinking he’s Baines, and he almost rapes her, it’s beyond gross. When she sobers up and asks him for help, he offers her a thousand bucks to sleep with him and delights in objectifying her. And we’ve only just begun.

Willa’s judgment is beyond bad. She was in love with Baines, who abused her, she’s attracted to Luke, and she chooses to marry Little Red, the ex-con with six months to live, after knowing him for all of an hour. She does this for the sake of the baby she carries, believing that Little Red’s family will welcome her with open arms. Surprise! They don’t.

Flash forward four years: A plane crashes near Willa’s New Mexico home. When she investigates she finds a fortune in cash in a cave. Little Red has died, his relatives are trying to push her out of her home, and she has a four-year-old son to support, so she decides to steal the money, knowing full well it has unsavory ties. Luke, who pops up every now and again to proposition and insult her, suddenly appears and tries to stake his own claim to the money. They consummate their relationship in the cave; in the afterglow Willa pulls Luke’s gun on him and leaves him defenseless so he can be found by the people she’s stealing the money from (this is the second time she’s left him in a life-threatening situation). Does this sound like a loving couple to you?

I don’t want to give the impression that I expect every character to be Joe or Mary Sunshine, or that I can’t appreciate a guilty pleasure. But this story was so disturbing and soulless that I couldn’t even enjoy it as camp, despite the fact that people say things like “Vengeance is mine” and “Damn your hide.” The tone is maudlin and the prose is frequently chopped up into one-sentence paragraphs that are supposed to have a dramatic effect but only make it seem that the characters take an unusually long time to process information like, “Little Red needed a doctor.”

I read this book in one sitting; prolonging the experience would have been painful. I know that writers try to evoke a strong reaction from the reader, but somehow a love story that makes my skin crawl doesn’t seem appropriate. Not that I consider Wild Enough For Willa a love story. No amount of eleventh-hour apologies or penance was going to convince me otherwise. I will concede that Like and Willa deserve each other. When she planned a romantic evening by recreating the night they met (yes, she tied herself up), I just knew these two were going to live hatefully ever after.