Nick Pageant, The Dotted Line

[Ulysses]

This is not Tolstoy, but then that’s not why I read things like this, is it?

Nick Pageant is another new author to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading “The Dotted Line.” It’s very short—hardly a novella—and yet is smart, sharply written and—the biggest attraction—very funny.

Jimmy Sommers is a little desperate to get a certain handsome doctor to like him. Jimmy is also a few sandwiches shy of a full picnic, and adopts the last resort as his first resort. The result is Bill, a demon straight from Hell.

Bargaining with the devil is, historically speaking, a tricky affair. The fact that Bill is not exactly what one might expect a demon to be doesn’t really help. In the ensuing hilarity, Jimmy discovers that he might have a little more power over his own destiny that he imagined. Possibly the moral of the tale is twofold: never underestimate how others see you; and there’s no accounting for taste.

I've already bought two more by Pageant: Beauty and the Bookworm, and its sequel: Boo.