by D.K. Stone
STONEHOUSE PUBLISHING
2023/$22.00/330 pp.
Full disclosure: Romance novels are not on my reading radar, so I hesitated to review Alberta writer D.K. Stone’s paranormal romance, Inescapable: A Ghost Story, her fourth adult novel in the mystery thriller and romance genres.
Romance publishing is a multi-billion-dollar industry with a long list of subcategories that includes paranormal (ghosts); historical (often called bodice-rippers); fantasy (think dragons, witches); steamy erotic (Fifty Shades of Grey); and LGBTQ+. Crucial to any romance novel, however, are two absolutes: a conflict-driven love story and a happy ending.
Set in Calgary during the 2013 flood (exotic setting!), the plot in this book revolves around Aimee, a former art student and much younger wife of the famous Canadian painter Georges Westerberg. Being the full-time muse of her self-absorbed painter-husband has left no room for Aimee’s own art. Georges’s death at the start of the novel precipitates several plot drivers. His ghost exerts menacing control over his young widow; a family squabble ensues over his legacy and estate; and handsome Bear Cardinal, a Giller-prize-winning writer from the Tsuut’ina Nation, is commissioned to write Georges’s biography.
Predictably Bear is everything Georges was not. He’s supportive of Aimee’s art making, and he possesses, from his own rite-of-passage vision quest, a personal and cultural understanding of the thin interface between the spirit world and this one. When he asks Aimee about her abandoned artistic practice, she hesitantly confides: “I sort of… channel my artwork,” even to the point, she confesses, of seeing ghosts. No worries. Bear gets it. (I’ll admit I winced here. It’s a sign of our times that Stone thanks a “sensitivity reader” (unnamed) for reviewing the manuscript. I assume this was to check for appropriation/appropriateness issues around using a First Nations character as the love interest who solves all of the protagonist’s conflicts.)
An accomplished landscape artist herself, Stone has created a coterie of supernatural grief therapists and lifestyle coaches through the ghosts of famous artists—Kahlo, Caravaggio, Warhol and others—who visit Aimee at her art restorer job at the Glenbow Museum and counsel her to live her best life with Bear. These encounters are delightfully entertaining.
Queer theorist Hannah McGregor cites the appeal of romance novels. “I want to be cared for and sheltered from the violence of the world…. Romance publishing, as an industry, very successfully markets these normative desires to millions of readers.” Even within the restrictive tropes of the romance genre, innovation can flourish, as long as it delivers a happy ending. No need for a spoiler alert here. Inescapable delivers.
Jannie Edwards is a poet, teacher and editor in Edmonton.
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