Reviews for Himage

The average rating for Himage based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-27 00:00:00 Pamela J Drislane Just when you thought the beast would never come along ... there it was! A novel that is at one moment an adventure, a romance, exciting, colorful, up-beat, well-written, well-researched, long enough to be a satisfying read, and -- gay. Alyson Publications did this title in 1989, and I don't know why rafts of others answering the same description didn't follow. They didn't all have to be historicals, like M.S. Hunter's Buccaneer, much less "gay pirate novels." If they delivered the goods according to the short list above, I'd have been happy to keep buying as long as Alyson kept publishing. An exciting gay adventure romance, well researched and written, at least 250pp, and fun. What was so tough? Apparently it wasn't merely tough, it was impossible. There's a handful of gay novels from this publishing era (say, 1980 - 2005) that I'd group on the same shelf as Buccaneer ... and I think probably most were penned by Mel Keegan. I'm thinking about Fortunes of War, Dangerous Moonlight, The Swordsman, The Deceivers. Now, Keegan didn't start with GMP till ~1990, and you'll shriek when I say this: I missed the first few, they blew by me. I used to buy gay books via the Bulldog Books mail order catalog in those far off days. My brain must have been out for pizza, because the first Keegan I saw, bought, read, fell in love with, was Fortunes -- gay buccaneers in the Elizabethan era, same time and location as that Errol Flynn movie, The Seahawk. (Oh, frabjous day! Fortunes could have been a project written for Errol, as Dermot Channon. I have endless fun trying to "cast the part" of Robin.) Sorry, where was I --? Enough about AG and Keegan and Errol... Suffice to say, M.S. Hunter's Buccaneer came along like a life-saver. From memory, I got it hot off the press, just arrived in Aus, late '89 or so ... I do recall it being stinking-hot weather, which to us means Christmas plus or minus a month or two. It was love at first sight. First, I was enthralled by the fact that one of the characters in the main romantic pair was African. The romantic thread is between Ozei (known as Ozzie) and Tommy Cutler (known as The Cutlass), and there are some steamy scenes as well as romantic. The supporting cast is huge; most characters are very well drawn -- unusual in many adventure books, much less gay ones. The novel is long, at 316pp of fine type, and Hunter wrote extremely well. Sadly, you note the past tense. M.S. Hunter is another loss to the art form of gay literature. He passed away some time ago, after having written only a little gay fiction. And after a lot of digging to try to find some info on him, much less an obituary, I came up empty handed. Buccaneer is therefore his legacy to this art form, and I can honestly recommend it. The story is huge, if a bit rambling. It centers on Tommy and is told in the first person with Tommy as narrator. It's a tough act, but Hunter makes it work superbly. You like the characters in his book, and the story of ambition, desire, derring-do, hazard and sensuality keep you turning pages. Sometimes the plotline is a little easy to predict, but when one has read upwards of 500 books, very little is going to surprise. This isn't the writer's fault, it's just the reader getting smart. What should amaze is the research that went into this. Does the novel have a downside? Well ... a little one. The author keeps butting in with short "documentary" segments, which might make it hard for you to keep your disbelief suspended. The first time I read the book, I just skipped them, didn't read them at all. The second time, the same. But when I was done, I went back and read the documentary parts separately. Nothing wrong with this: you actually get two reads for the price of one. The doco segments are set off into arial or some plain font, and ostensibly about Hunter's personal experiences while researching the novel. In fact, they're very interesting. It was merely the interruption to the flow of the fiction that didn't quite work for me the first time through. So -- Highly recommended. AG's rating, 5 out of 5 stars. Buccaneer is long, long out of print (god knows why) but you can get it from Amazon, and ... please do!

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-21 00:00:00 Carolyn Alder This book has everything I want in a novel: juicy plot, solid structure, detailed history, colourful setting, charismatic characters, wit & humour and explicit gay sex. Oh, I ought to add, it’s irresistibly, unrepentantly un-PC. That has a lot to do with its charm. Pirates in full regalia are right up there next to rangy cowboys in my fevered romantic imagination. Errol Flynn and Burt Lancaster swashing their manly buckles got my young heart racing, though I never understood why they’d want those silly simpering women Hollywood lumbered them with. More recently I watched Pirates of the Caribbean. Fine as far as it went, but what about the slash? Jack Sparrow was clearly a gay boy, so where was his mate? Humbug. Never to be confused with bloodthirsty pirates, 17th century buccaneers fought for King and country just as determinedly as fellows in the Royal Navy. In their own colourful, highly individualistic way. A triumph for free enterprise. Like gay cowboys and frontiersmen, men loving men, part necessity, largely by choice, 300 years ago was common in the West Indies, where there were precious few women and pretty near anything went, lawless and wild. Given a surplus of active, healthy, lusty young men, these boys did what came naturally. And had a ball. The attractive premise of this glorious ripping yarn is the existence of a self-contained homosexual community of equals, white men and black living/working peacefully together in a kind of commune or co-operative, along the lines of the famous Band of Thebes, forged from pairs of male lovers. The buccaneer and his partner or matelot enjoyed a relationship akin to marriage. All this is explained in the novel, largely by showing us how it works in practice. The novel celebrates man-man sex with loving detail and abiding joy, truly something to behold. Porn movie tropical paradise setting and sleek muscled hunks, with literary descriptiveness and emotional engagement. Company bacchanals, 3-4-somes and romantic attachments. It’s all there in blazing Technicolour. I tell you, this book delivers on all counts. Its central conceit is that Tommy’s self-written story is transcribed for posterity by author M S Hunter, working from papers held in archive on the Caribbean island of San Vito. I swear it’s real. Look for it on the maps if you don’t believe me. I’ve already booked my tickets. An island paradise with sun, sand and stimulating visual entertainment not featured in most holiday brochures, if you get my drift. The narrator interrupts the story from time to time to fill us in on background information, adding greatly to enjoyment of the history. These chapters are perfectly judged to inform so I never felt dragged from Tommy’s chronicle. The author clearly knows his stuff. It’s most educational. I’ve never before read porn with footnotes and bibliography. Seriously. It’s most annoying that M S Hunter clearly set up to write a follow-on book, telling more about the evolution of his gay paradise island, but it’s never appeared. If this is down to his publisher, I’m very cross. They should’ve hounded their writer until he produced that book. Do not miss this wonderful novel.