First Contact

by Kay Ellis

Small town café owner Jack Hale steps in to help a group of homeless teenage boys, not expecting his act of kindness to go any further than giving them a hot meal. But there’s something about Dax. Something that gets under Jack’s skin, making it impossible to turn his back on him.
When the town’s Christmas Eve celebrations are interrupted by the arrival of alien ships tearing their way out of the ground, Jack finds himself running for his life with Dax and the small boy Dax saved from certain death.
Abandoned at birth, Dax has grown up knowing not to expect too much out of life. They might be fighting for survival, but Jack still takes the time to show Dax that he matters.
As they grow closer, Jack realises Dax could be someone special. More than that…he’s something special. Dax doesn’t know it, but he could be mankind’s last hope.

Genres: Science Fiction, M M Romance

156 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 4, 2017

About the author

Kay Ellis lives in rural Oxfordshire with her two daughters. She has written stories from an early age, starting with an epic adventure penned at primary school which sadly had to end when a hard-hearted teacher refused to supply any more writing paper.

Over the years Kay’s style has changed as she has grown more confident in her writing, developing a relaxed and informal style. She has also become braver in content, turning her hand to writing gay and straight erotica.

Kay writes for the love of writing and from a fear her head will explode if she doesn’t have a release for her vivid imagination.

It’s only now Kay has found the courage to submit work for publication, having recently finished in the top three of a national writing competition.

Kay Ellis can now be found on Facebook.

Reviews

[Qin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mostly good book, this mix between Sci-Fi and romance suffers from bad pacing, a bothersome lack of explaining for the major plot line (one looks in vain for a rationale behind the twin mysteries that are the boys with the silver eyes scattered world-wide and their alien raiders), an almost naive approach to verisimilitude (too much suspension of disbelief here, as seen when a staff sergeant decides to cover up for Jack and Dax after they take down the cylinders just because the boys have spared his and some of his soldiers' lifes) and a cramped scale which turns the second half of the novel into an extended synopsis rather than a full-on narrative. Once Jack, Dax and Scottie are on the run from the cylinders (the author's own moniker for the killer spaceships), things happen far too quickly: the human friends and foes our triad encounters are dealt with in desultory fashion, and scenes which ought to have been key are either skipped or reduced to the bare bones. Several other defects include the insta-love of Jack for Dax; inconsistency in the way Scottie's PTSD is portrayed (he is repeatedly shown as sticking to Dax's arms lest he shrieks, to the point of wetting them both rather than leave this comforting embrace, yet so soon as a woman enters the story his behavior changes and he swiftly follows said female); pointless agenda on the part of some minor characters (to wit, the sheriff's going out of his way, with two helpers no less, to retrieve Dax for his own twisted games despite the looming danger of the cylinders); and the very abrupt epilogue, which looks almost like an afterthought and provides closure both minimal and fabricated. Last but not least, the author tends to fling crucial facts in the reader's face with no preparation whatsoever, no matter how utterly asinine some of them turn out to be: Dax has a self-lubrificating rectum (!); though he does not know what he is he formulates out of the blue a battle plan to which the military is only too ready to assent; one mere glance at a cylinder allows him to guess that the entire alien armadillo is a collective grid; and so so and so forth. The weak voice of the first-person narrative (Jack's, a most average guy) combines with undistinguished writing and the fair number of typos and dropped words to further take the reader out of the story. Yet there is a solid emotional core to this tale of love forged in the most unlikely of circumstances which spoke deeply to me; whence the three-star rating, markedly generous but not totally undeserved.

[Tünde Kasza tóth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. Good characters, realistic personalities, a story that wasn't half bad. But there was this scene that made me wanna hit Ellis. I believe the author have never ever spent a minute in wet clothes in cold weather. Because otherwise there wouldn't be a scene where the characters could get rid of their wet cold clothes, but they decide to take a slow walk around the military base and check out the cafeteria food first.