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Original slash novel: Faith & Fidelity
I was browsing through the new books at the library and came across a title called Faith & Fidelity by Tere Michaels--I figured it would be a standard romance, which isn't really my cup of tea, but I read the blurb on the back cover out of curiosity anyway and it said:
New York City Vice Detective Evan Cerelli has lost his wife, the only person he ever loved and slept with. He's trying to get on with his life, build a life for his children. Former Homicide Detective Matt Haight is a ladies' man, all sex/no commitment. He's depressed, having a midlife crisis, and not sure where his life is headed.
The two find friendship in the bottom of a shared bottle. When the friendship turns to love, it shakes two straight men to the core and flips their lives inside out. Kids, families, careers that are not gay-friendly -- can all the love in the world overcome the obstacles to faith and fidelity?
I immediately did a double-take and flipped over the book to take a better look at the cover and sure enough, there are two guys on the cover illustration, not a man and a woman. "Whoa, the library carries slash fic!" I thought, with a bit of surprise and amusement. Not that there aren't plenty of books with gay characters in the library, but they're more literary or Young Adult types of novels than the equivalent of gay Harlequin romances. It's the only copy in the local library system, and it's published by a small indie company that specializes in erotic romances, so I suspect that it was probably a donation from a patron--or one of the librarians is a closet slash fan! ^_^ Or I suppose it could have been ordered due to a patron request/suggestion.
In any case, I was intrigued enough to borrow it, although I suspected from the description that it would turn out to be kind of cheesey--but hey, it's a library book, so it's not like it's costing me anything. And when I took it home and read it, I was pleasantly surprised because it turned out to be a pretty good story--the characters are likable and three-dimensional, and I cared about them enough to root for their romance and get frustrated when Evan gets cold feet and breaks up with Matt in the latter half of the book. This being a standard romance story (apart from the leads both being male), I didn't really doubt that the breakup would be anything but temporary, but I still found myself anxiously reading to see if (or more like "when") they were going to get back together again.
My only real complaint is that it suffers a bit from "gay only for you" syndrome, but I can't fault the author too much for that since it's a common trope in BL manga and fanfic, too. I mean, I don't really believe that Steve and Danny from Hawaii Five-0 are gay or bi, but I'm perfectly willing to suspend belief when reading a good fanfic. OTOH, I hold professional fic to a higher standard than fanfic.
Evan has only ever been romantically/sexually involved with one person: his wife, who was his high school sweetheart, so it's plausible that he never had the chance to figure out that he could be attracted to men. He had a tough childhood with an indifferent mother and an abusive stepfather, and it's strongly implied that he was drawn to his wife Sherri partly because of her warm, loving family. However, he did genuinely love her, and I like that the author didn't take the cheap out of making Sherri a bitch or portraying the marriage as a mistake or one of convenience. I also liked that Sherri's family began showing some cracks in their "perfect" facade after her death, and Evan has to come to the realization that maybe those flaws were there all along and he overlooked them because he had idealized them as the perfect family.
Matt, on the other hand, is a longtime bachelor who's drifted through a string of one night stands and failed relationships, and I find it harder to believe that he never once had an inkling that he could be attracted to guys. I know that it happens in real life, that someone who identifies as straight can unexpectedly find themselves attracted to someone of the same gender, but it just seems a bit implausible to me that both Evan and Matt would fall into this category. Maybe I'm nitpicking a bit, but the story would have felt more believable if, for example, Matt was bisexual and realized that he'd been repressing his attraction to men until Evan came along.
Or at least, that's what I was thinking until the latter half of the book, when as mentioned above, Evan panics and breaks up with Matt--not entirely without reason. He's already a bit freaked out about being attracted to a man, and top of that, he's still grieving for his late wife, and on top of that, he's worried about how being outed would affect his career and his kids, and is afraid that his in-laws might try to take them away from him. So I sympathized with him, but I wanted to smack him upside the head because he handled the situation so badly--instead of discussing his concerns with Matt, he basically broke up with him and threw him out of the house without explaining why. This isn't a complaint about the author's writing, I hasten to add--it's perfectly in character for Evan, who always tries to handle everything himself without relying on other people. It's one of those situations where you care about the character so much that you get angry at them for doing stupid things that jeopardize their own happiness, even if it's logical and in-character for them to do those stupid things! (In fact, I've had readers tell me similar things about my own characters, which I take as a compliment, that they care about the characters enough to get upset with them. So maybe it's poetic justice that I find myself getting frustrated with someone else's characters! ~_^)
Anyway, getting back to Matt--during the breakup, he goes out seeking some solace, or at least forgetfulness, and I don't want to give away too many spoilers, but let's just say that he discovers that he can be attracted to guys other than Evan. So although the author doesn't explicitly say so, it seems like he may have been bisexual all along and didn't realize it, or maybe refused to acknowledge it. Although he honestly seems not to have had a clue until the sparks started flying with Evan.
I was quite amused to see that the book's Amazon entry comes with a fanfic-style warning: Publisher's Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable: Anal play/intercourse, male/male sexual practices. The book does read like a slash fanfic, as I originally suspected it would, but it's pretty high quality fanfic, so I don't consider that to be an insult, especially since there are some great fanfics out there that I prefer to published fic. Readers who are fans of cop show "bromance" pairings would probably like this book, although I should add that the focus is on the romance and that the police work is incidental to the story.
I do like that the author handles the romance in a fairly realistic manner: this isn't a happy fantasy BL manga world where homophobia doesn't exist. Both men are initially frightened by their attraction to each other, and even after they get romantically involved, they still worry about how family and friends and coworkers will react. Not surprisingly, it's Matt who comes to terms with his feelings first, since he has the least to lose. He's single with no family and few personal ties, while Evan has his children and his career and his in-laws to deal with--more than anything, he's scared of losing of his kids. Ironically, they're hurt and confused when he breaks up with Matt, because they adore Dad's "friend" and don't understand why Matt doesn't want to see them anymore, not to mention that Evan mopes around miserably while he's gone.
One thing that impressed me about the book was that the supporting characters were also fleshed out and three-dimensional, when it would have been easy for the author to pay them short shrift and focus on the main characters. Evan's detective partner Helena is awesome--she's a strong, smart woman who loves Matt like a sister but doesn't hesitate to call him out when he's acting like an idiot. She reminds me a bit of Jill from Petshop of Horrors. Evan's kids are cute, but not overly so--there are enough sibling squabbles and (in the case of the oldest daughter) teenage angst to make them seem like real kids. Vic, who is Evan's boss and Matt's friend, is another great character--he tries really hard to be understanding when they break the news to him, but he's so taken aback that he doesn't handle it very well at first. It's not the ideal reaction, of course, but it does make him human, and he also grows and changes a bit over the course of the story.
The sex is relatively tame compared to most NC-17 fanfics I've read, but it's still pretty hot and handled very nicely. I liked the sense of urgency balanced with awkwardness that seemed realistic for two guys having gay sex for the first time, with them being a little panicky and unsure of how to proceed. It did bother me a little bit that they never once discuss safe sex, though much of what they do isn't high-risk. Presumably Evan is clean since he's only been with his wife previously, but Matt has, shall we say, been around the block a few times (with women if not with men), and you'd think that the subject might come up, if only to say in passing, "Don't worry, I've been tested." YMMV, since some readers think that discussion of condoms or safe sex ruins the romantic atmosphere, but personally, it takes me out of the story a bit unless the characters in question are the type to be careless about protection--or unless it's a fantasy setting like Harry Potter, where one can rationalize that wizards have spells for that sort of thing, or a sci-fi setting in which STDs have presumably been eliminated. It's mostly a minor nitpick in an otherwise good story.
I loved the book enough that I plan to buy the two sequels, since the library doesn't own them. There's one called Love & Loyalty, which actually focuses on a minor character from Faith & Fidelity, and a direct sequel called Duty & Devotion that returns to Evan and Matt's story, picking up where the first book left off. They're available as both trade paperbacks (on Amazon) and e-books.
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I think the word lube or vaseline must be repeated so many times in Special Forces that it has become part of the sexiness of the act xD. Then I went to read some manga where one guy kisses the other and in the next frame *bam* open your legs and that's it and I'm just speechless..because seriously, not even vaginas can be so open so fast...
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I've learned not to expect much realism from manga, but yeah, some of them really do leave me speechless, too.