Last summer, our guest reviewer Tina presented a title from Yaoi Press, an American publisher working in the yaoi genre.
I’ve recently read Pinned! (also available from Amazon
Synn is a young straight wrestler who’s just reached his dream of being enrolled in the most important wrestling group. That, and his childhood hero, the man called Renegade, seems very interested in the young man. Very, very interested indeed. Synn soon hears bad stories about Renegade: he’d abused other young wrestlers, holding out the prospect of a big career to take them to bed. Yay, a gay man abusing young straight guys. Doesn’t sound too good, now does it? Well, despite the rather stereotypical set-up, I found myself gripped by the story, mainly by the way the writer manages to keep up the tension between the characters by showing that things are not what they seem, and the bad guys might not be where Synn thinks they are. There’s a lot of duplicity and treachery in this story – if not for the fact that it’s about semi-naked muscley guys wanting to boff each other, it would remind me of classical stories of political intrigue.
The art is also attractive for me: instead of the androgynous boys which seem to be everywhere in yaoi, we get well-built masculine guys who are in fact drawn more realistically than most superheroes, since their bodies don’t look like each sinew and muscle is tensed to the point of breaking.
So, I’m ambivalent toward this book: some aspects of the story are not to my liking (although I have to keep in mind that it’s not written for gay men), but I think it’s rather well-drawn and well-written. The addition of a few full-page drawings and sketches at the end of the book is quite nice, too. Oh, and there’s a cliffhanger at the last panel that made me shudder (it’s really terrifying) and laugh (it looks a bit far-fetched) at the same time. All in all, I’d buy a second volume of this story, which is the most important thing, after all.
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