Hunk House [Hardcover]

Ben Tyler (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After scourging gay Hollywood in last year's Tricks of the Trade, Tyler turns his satiric sights on reality TV with incendiary results. Those with a taste for malicious mischief will enjoy this heady concoction of plot-heavy, door-slamming farce mixed with explicit gay sex and Tinseltown name-dropping (with the latter fictionalized just enough to avoid legal action). Although it's generally all in good fun, there's a trip to a dungeon (run by the priest at St. Ethel Mertz the Divine) that may separate the men from the boys. When a scandal gets Hamilton Peabody demoted to the position of programming director at a small local TV station in Dulcit, Iowa, he comes up with an idea to get himself back into L.A. and the limelight. He creates the reality TV/game show Hunk House (a mixture of Survivor, Real World and Queer as Folk) to resuscitate his career. Six gay men volunteer to be holed up in a haunted Victorian mansion equipped with cameras to record their every move, and one household member gets voted "out" each week. However, the small town can only find five gay contestants, so Bull, the station's straight repairman, is coerced into joining the show. Readers may be able to guess the results but not all the twists that the story takes to get there.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Here is a perfect summer read: fast-paced, exploiting a concept that's all the rage, and tricked out with appealing characters and witty dialogue. It begins with a problem. How can a small-town, family-owned cable station in Iowa boost ratings? Try a reality-TV show in which six gay men are locked in a house for six weeks of 24-7 coverage. And no sex, please. Five volunteers and Bull, a determinedly straight station employee who gets pressed into service, are blindfolded and taken to a Victorian house in which each guy gets a bedroom and the rules read to him by an Entertainment Tonight refugee who fervently hopes making Hunk House a success is his return ticket to LAX. The games begin, points and demerits are assigned, and at week's end comes the vote to determine who stays and who goes. Surprise! (Well, maybe not.) Sullen, buff Bull stays. Meanwhile, a "phantom lover" has been visiting nightly, much to farm boy Luke's joyous amazement. Who is it? Yearning minds and bods want to know. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Kensington Books; First Edition edition (June 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0758200153
• ISBN-13: 978-0758200150
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,903,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ghastly, December 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Hunk House (Hardcover)

Nothing is more painful than fluff or camp that can't even rise to the level of guilty pleasure. Tyler's novel suggest a pilot for a gay Aaron Spelling TV show written by a smug high school sophmore who thinks he's sophisticated because he knows how to curse. The "bitchy" humor (oh so knowing, if you've spent your life under a rock) makes you wince, and the characters are totally cardboard. If you want to give a fun camp novel for Xmas, skip this stinker and give one of the Patrick Dennis reissues, Little Me or The Joyous Season

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Wow.. Bad., August 23, 2002

By 

Michael T. Rognlien (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hunk House (Hardcover)

As with a couple of the other reviewers, I read Mr. Tyler's first novel, "Tricks of the Trade" and actually enjoyed it.. it had a good premise and a character we were able to get to know.

"Hunk House" has a good premise, but as much as I hate to sound harsh, this book is a complete waste. I don't expect to be reading North & South when I pick up a book that has almost-naked men on the cover, but come on.. the TV show in the story is constantly on the brink of disaster, and so is this book.

I'm disappointed that the best this author could do with this story is regurgitate stereotypes, have HORRID, trite dialogue and story lines (i.e. characters who go from straight to gay in less than a paragraph) and an acid-tongued protagonist who lacks talent for anything other than swapping one-liners with the boss' daughter. Unfortunately, the only things that were even remotely endearing about any of the characters in this book were not revealed until near the end, and by that point I was completely uninterested. Skip this one..

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not quite the fun house I expected., October 29, 2002

By 

Robert Edler "Master Of Mystery" (Saint Louis, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Hunk House (Hardcover)

"Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't you write a book that capitalizes on the popularity of those reality TV programs like Big Brother, but only use all gay guys. It doesn't have to be good because it's only for light summer reading. What have you got to lose?" Well, time for one thing. It's not that the concept was a total mistake from the start. It might have worked if the author had watched some of the reality TV shows and discovered that they're popular because of the interaction of the people who are on them. Then he might have developed his characters to make them interesting. Instead he centered his plot around the producer (Hamilton Peabody) and his attempt to develop a hit cable TV show that will propel him from his lowly programmer job in Dulcit City, Iowa back to Hollywood where he belongs.

I only read this book because I had read Ben Tyler's first novel Tricks Of The Trade. While I had liked some things and disliked others in that book, I thought the author had some potential. Unfortunately, he didn't realize or even show it with this novel. None of the characters win you over. And the plot seems hacked together. Actually, I thought the book could have ended twice before it finally did.

But my biggest complaints with the book are the author's choice of villains and his lack of technical expertise. Holy misogyny, does he have something against women? In both of his books so far the villain has been a woman who is so viscous, conniving, bitchy, whiney and deceitful that she would make Cruella De Vil with PMS look good. As to technical expertise, he should researched a TV station or video production house before he started this book. I doubt that even the smallest TV station in Podunkville would edit a TV show on VHS equipment, much less store the master tape on a VHS cassette.

Hopefully, the author will put a little more effort into his next novel, which is currently being written.