Joshua, an 18-year-old, has never been in a relationship. When his new teacher, Michael, brings out suppressed feelings, Joshua decides to pursue him. However, Michael rejects him, and Joshua must face the challenges of being gay in a conservative town. Meanwhile, Michael becomes the target of unwanted affection from someone else. Both men face danger in the town. Will they escape or be overcome by the forces of repression?
Hopeful yet somber, Parkwood Hills tells the story of how obsession, revenge, and excesses are our worst enemies.
Kristian Daniels comes to shock us, one more time, with a tale of thrilling proportions. In the style that has become Daniels’ unique voice, Parkwood Hills explores themes of homophobia, hate crimes, love, parental neglect, prejudice, and social consciousness. In a set of wild characters driven by different motives, Parkwood Hills keeps us waiting for the tragic unwind of events that has become the Daniels’ signature storytelling style.
When going over themes and motives, sexual acts and practices play a critical role in Daniels’s novels. Sometimes too explicit and raw, the sexual scenes might function as a mechanism to break the status quo in the story since they come across as disruptive powers against the religious forces that oppose queerness, freedom, and diversity. By putting the characters in a swamp of prejudice, hate, and religious-conditioned love, Daniels confronts those ideas through sexual freedom, quick love, and the need to create their own families. Likewise, Daniels juxtaposes the sexual freedom of women by becoming femme fatals that tend to oppose the “heroes”, which again, could be another literary mechanism to depict how religion and conservative thinking portray women who are free to love and enjoy their sexuality outside the restrictive cages of their parishes.
Despite tragedies and sad endings for some characters, Daniels takes the opportunity to show the reader that sometimes not everything is as dark as it seems. With a strong support network, and a self-constructed family built on understanding, love, and acceptance, the members of the LGBTQ+ community manage to survive a world that focuses on destruction, ridicule, and extermination.
If you have read Daniel’s other novels, you will be at the edge of your seat expecting the big event to come, but if you are brand new, your world will be rocked violently by the unexpected events that unwind slowly during the story. With an incredible skill to build unlikeable villains – because there is no way that you will like them – Daniels makes it easy to root for the good guys and make us pray for the safety of the heroes.
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