Reviewed by Stephen K.
TITLE: The Twelfth Knight
SERIES: Guardians of Camelot
AUTHOR: Victoria Sue
NARRATOR: Greg Boudreaux
PUBLISHER: Victoria Sue
LENGTH: 7 hrs and 26 mins
RELEASE DATE: November 21, 2019
BLURB:
To battle an ancient evil, the greatest weapon each hero will have is each other.
Hundreds of years ago, facing defeat, the witch Morgana sent monsters into the future to vanquish a humanity King Arthur wouldn’t be able to save. The king might have won the battle, but now, centuries later, a few chosen men will have to fight the war.
Merlin always hated being named after some mythological wizard. His dad had been obsessed with the magic man of King Arthur’s court before his untimely death – a loss that had sent Mel reeling in a downward spiral. He is ill-prepared, to say the least, for the outrageous claims of a proper English knight bent on overcoming evil.
Born a commoner, Lancelot was never supposed to be a knight in his own time. Never mind that now in a modern world, he is so woefully untrained to protect. Thrown into a battle centuries in the making, this flawed hero and a young man too used to battling monsters of the present day will have to come together in a last desperate fight to save humanity.
Can Mel and Lance defeat the greatest enemy the world has ever known?
Or, in the midst of fighting evil, will they discover the real threat has always been a shattered heart?
And what if the one fight they cannot ever hope to win is with themselves?
REVIEW:
While many who write M/M Fiction are quite capable, it’s a real joy to discover an author who’s a gifted storyteller as well. By the end of Chapter 1 in this tale by Victoria Sue, we’ve already had:
- swashbuckling sword-fighting action in the streets of Manhattan
- the introduction of an unforgettable pair of likable main characters
- some beginnings of the exposition of this complicated plot
- some character backstory & development
- and perhaps most importantly a few laughs.
“Tresors”, and “Ursus”, and immortals, Oh My! In one brilliant section, the author creatively makes use of a tech-savvy Gawain giving Val the results of an electronic background check to quickly and painlessly give us an information dump on Merlin’s background.
Chapter 2 is almost as thrill packed. We begin to meet a few more of the cast of characters, and we hear more of the mythos that drives this book series, while gaining more details of the main character’s backstories.
By Chapter 3 we’re in the group’s Flatbush safe-house, and while Val is certain that Mel is “a” “tresor” he shows his doubts about Mel being “his” tresor.
Initially that’s because of his unrequited Guinevere fantasies, but we later learn that before the Battle of Camlann, Val was a straight-identified married man with a son (Galahad); plus Val was born a commoner, and there’s some chance that Mel really is a reincarnation of Merlin. Val’s convinced that he’s certainly not worthy of that powerful a mate.
The author has clearly done some research into the historical mythos and skillfully weaves those details into this urban fantasy. And though swordplay abounds, I would not call this your typical “slash fiction.”
I was listening to this late at night, and by chapter 3, some of the exposition had quite literally put me to sleep, but that was as much the fault of my weird sleep schedule as the author’s prose. After sleeping on it a bit, I’ve decided that perhaps the initial world building and the sheer amount of backstory one has to deal with when there’s a roughly 1500 year age difference between your two main characters was to blame as well.
Val’s continued reluctance to acknowledge Mel as his tresor does start to wear though. I was raised to respect my elders, but there were times I just wanted to reach out and slap him. However, as Mel comes to learn, understanding someone who’s lived more lifetimes than you’ve lived years, requires some master level empathy.
At one point in the tale, there’s some talk of how Val came to be called “the Twelfth Knight.” Being the completist that I am, I just had to recheck my recollections of Shakespeare… Yep, Twelfth Night is the Shakespeare play in which the Duke suffers a bit of homosexual panic believing he’s fallen for another man. Of course, in the Elizabethan play it was a bit MORE confusing in that we had a boy, playing a girl, who was pretending to be a boy, to gain favor with the Duke. – Here Val is no Duke, and the spunky Mel resolved to stop pretending to be anything he’s not at about the age of ten.
This book is NOT your typical M/M romance tale. Those looking for a simple piece of light, romantic entertainment might be disappointed. This more nearly approaches historical fantasy, spending time developing the mythos of these current-day knights errant. To be sure, there are m/m erotic elements, and I’m hoping that the future volumes will trend more that way, …once the extensive Arthurian groundwork has been laid.
Given Val’s reluctance to recognize Mel as his “Tresor,” (the other half of his sundered soul), the sexual content is less frequent than is found in many M/M romances, but what sex there is, is well written, satisfying, and fits into the overall story.
The narrator Greg Boudreax is a voice acting veteran with over 100 works to his credit. His experience shows. He’s great at pacing, and does an estimable job with the vast amounts of detail that this book includes. He also does a great job with voices; giving Mel, Gawain, Tom, Val and even the female Ali, distinctive, personable, and likable vocal characters of their own. In less talented hands, this book might have become a bit more of a slog.
As it is, this was fun to listen to and I’m eager to begin reading the second volume in this tale. I will probably revisit chapter one from time to time, just to relive the joy of discovering this epic couple, the laughs, and I want to know more about just how exactly, the waifish Mel laid out the hulking 1500 year old warrior Val.
RATING: 
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