Nicked

One and a Half Stars. Between the surface-level characterizations (outside Tornik, whose backstory I found meaningful though pitifully little was done with him and a couple other interesting characters once their expositions were dumped), rushed narrative structure, boilerplate action, peculiar interpolation of modern American behavioral methods, verbiage and euphemisms amidst period-accurate linguistics, oral storytelling and cultural norms, efficient, learned yet hollow prose and the thoroughly unnecessary, forced, “current day,” DeviantArt fan fic-esque, laughably anachronistic gay shipping involving a bisexual relic hunter seeking the bones of a long-dead saint alongside a devoutly religious monk seeking the boner of that very relic hunter in 12th century Europe, obviously well-known for its sexually liberative, hippie-like tolerance of such atypical, queer dalliances, this modern reframing of a peculiar historical anecdote is left wanting nothing less than a raison d'etre.

None of the above is helped by the “romance” involved being as steamy and arousing as an Arctic swim, its development consisting of meaningless glances and grey touches before bursting into full physical bloom by the end of the third act in a manner so hokey and contrived in narrative context it must necessarily speak far more to the kinks of the author than any reasonable attempt at adherence to “real events” relative to his opening claim. There are certainly examples of how to write a believable gay romance with characters whose relationship feels natural or even charming in its development (see the game Undertale or the fantasy work of Mercedes Lackey)– what we have on display in Nicked, however, is unbaked at best, comical at worst, the story intrinsically benefiting from its absence. Those passages where their relationship was of one growing from distrustful acerbity to strife-tested, platonic companionship carried far more versimilitude than the ultimate attempt at shipping them, a cancerous trend reborn once more in the long march of literary history– one which will ultimately age this novel into total obscurity.

I was genuinely interested in reading Anderson's The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, which, as a story conceit, sounds rather to my taste, but having experienced his mischievous, deliberate, drip method poisoning of historical realities (a method far more insidious than simply remaking events out of whole cloth seeing as its efforts are to persuade the reader of a falsehood as true given the myriad facts surrounding it) and his equally noxious, Stage IV ideological carcinoma-laced Twitter feed, I will quite happily be giving this man's work a pass henceforth. Shame.