Someone Wrote a LeBron James Homoerotic Novel, and it’s Awful
An in-depth breakdown of the short story that sees LeBron James engaging in steamy man-on-man action with the unlikeliest of partners. No, it’s not Kyrie.
So, I’ll be honest. This was not an assignment I was expecting when it found it’s way onto my proverbial desk by way of GSC’s Editor-in-Chief Dan Szczepanek. The conversation went like this:
Dan Szczepanek [11:26 PM]
You good to read and review that LeBron erotic novel?
Riley Nicklaus Evans [11:27 PM]
What?
Dan Szczepanek [11:28 PM]
See my post in showerthoughts. Someone wrote an erotic novel about how LeBron James stole her boyfriend’s gay virginity.
Dan Szczepanek [12:01 AM]
Like why does that exist?
Riley Nicklaus Evans [12:04 AM]
I got it for my laptop.
Downloading Kindle now.
Needless to say, I was intrigued. I hadn’t meant to follow up “What If LeBron Were Gay?” in such a literal way, but this erotic novel, which we found on Amazon for $1.20, was too hot a topic to pass up on.
Pardon the pun.
Before I get into the meat of the story, I think it’s important to talk about romance and erotica as a genre. Romance books are by far the largest category of fiction where the majority of both authors and readers are women. As a direct result, the genre as a whole is often subject to ridicule and dismissal from large swaths of the literary cognoscente. This review should not be construed as a critique or mockery of the romance and erotica genres as a whole. Rather, it is a critical review of this particular work within the context of the genre as a whole. There are many romance and erotica writers who are incredibly talented, and whose prose belong in the same echelon as the elite authors in any other genre.
Let us begin.
The first thing to mention is that this story was not meant to be a serious work of erotica in the vein of Outlander or The MacGregor Brides. The author, Anastasia Angelique, has also penned such titles as President Barack Obama Stole My Virginity, Michael Jackson Stole My Virginity, and Taylor Swift Stole My Lesbian Virginity. Her MO is pretty clear. She writes short, silly, first person accounts of the events leading up to a sexual encounter between her and a celebrity. She then uses the celebrity’s name in her title to build intrigue and entice their fanbase into buying the book.
It’s essentially parody erotica, which would be fine if it wasn’t a terrible attempt at parody erotica. Ms. Angelique, if that is her real name, took a simple, fun concept, and beat it ruthlessly to death with horrible writing and abysmal story execution.
Horrible, in fact, may be an underwhelming descriptor for the work’s level of literary ineptitude. Appreciable grammar, punctuation and sentence structure were nowhere to be seen. I’d say that the story was never presented to an editor for proofreading, but given the multiple instances of missing words and basic spelling mistakes, it’s obvious that the story was never read over by so much as a toddler.
Granted, I haven’t read Ms. Angelique’s other stories, so it’s entirely possible that this atypical of her full body of work. That said, there are certain things you really need to do from a quality control perspective before you publish a piece of writing, and this was not her best day at the office. What I took even more issue with, however, was the manner in which the story was told.
The skeletal story structure was her beginning at the end, on the day that was supposed to be her wedding, and tracking back to recount the events that led to the aforementioned cancelling of the wedding. That checks out. Starting at the end of the story and chronologically filling in the preceding events and context is a common story structure in both fiction and non-fiction. Some may find it a little played out in the short story genre, but cliché or not, it works.
While the skeleton works, things start getting more off kilter when we begin to add meat to the story’s bones.
There were four significant actors in the story. One is the author, speaking in first person. The second is Nero, her fervently Christian boyfriend. Again, the Christian virgin is somewhat of a trope within homoerotic literature, but it works, so it checks out. The third is Pastor Roach, the local pastor, who’s weight, perspiration, and possible homosexuality was described in uncomfortable detail — but more on that later.
Oh yeah, and the greatest basketball player of all time.
So we’re working with a solid (if overused) story structure, and some cliche but workable characters. That may appear to be a case of “so far, so good”, but the story takes a marked nosedive when we delve into the actual content of the narrators recollections.
When dealing with a 25–30 page short story (only around 3700 total words) an effective author has to focus on advancing the plot, while having a keen and critical sense of what illustrative details to focus on when painting a mental picture of their universe they’ve created. In this story, the main character is all over the map. She spends large chunks of the story detailing random details that have no value in character development or progressing the plot line. For example, two thirds of a page is devoted to describing exactly how ugly a baby was. Another two thirds of a page are spent describing the gay encounter of two high school students that aren’t even part of the actual story. Nearly a full page is spent on debating over whether or not something the narrator had just said was racist.
Speaking of racism, it also bears mentioning that the content of many of these extemporaneous tangents is rather offensive. There are elements of racism, xenophobia, gender bashing, fat shaming, degradation of little people, and ironically enough, homophobia.
Homophobia. In a homoerotic story.
The offensive content is both implicit and explicit, from the use of the word “midget”, to the excessive degradation of Pastor Roach for his weight and stereotypical gay lisp, to a joke about gay marriage being an affront to straight women, to the decision to give LeBron James a small penis, which can certainly be argued to have racial motivations given the way black men have been positioned as overconfident sexual aggressors within much of popular culture. The affronts to various identifiable groups are wide ranging in both their severity and their targeting. While much of the offensive commentary is seemingly intentional for the sake of creating edgy content, it serves little to no narrative purpose other than to exist for its own sake. It deserves as much, if not more, discussion and condemnation as the rest of the numerous poorly thought out elements of this story.
With that aside, let’s get to the “good” part.
Every work of erotic fiction, parody or not, builds to the sexual encounters that separate this genre from the rest of literary fiction, which largely shy away from the graphic realities of what goes on in the bedrooms (or locker rooms) of sexually active adults. Much like the songs in a musical, they are not the entirety of the show, but they have the power to salvage something that would otherwise fall well below our expectations. And build to the encounter they did. Nearly 20 incredibly sub-par pages pass by with hardly a single mention of what we really came to see. But then, in the form of a grainy video on the iPhone of our narrator, we finally got to see if the raunchy payoff would justify the twenty page wasteland we were force to wade our way through before reaching it.
Naturally it was not.
Not only did the actual sex scene fail to rescue the work, it epitomized its place in our cultural zeitgeist as an affront to the erotic genre. To say that this sex scene was a stick drawing in comparison to the virtuoso lines of a Nora Roberts would be an insult to both the RWA Hall of Famer and stick people. Stick people are, at the very least, capable of being wildly entertaining despite their crudeness, and while the less than steamy encounter between Nero and LeBron was more than crude, aside from one throwaway line, it failed miserably to entertain me, even as an awkward, corny mess.
A later, and mercifully briefer, encounter between Nero and Pastor Roach did nothing to change my opinion.
I don’t have any established method of rating or ranking works of literature. Micah Wimmer does an excellent job or reviewing sports writing, both on grandstandcentral.com and on the Pros and Prose podcast, so that’s usually his thing. That said, there are at least 25 good reasons that we didn’t waste his time reviewing this story, so here I am. All I will say is that if I had paid any more than $1.20 CAD for my digital copy of this book, I would still be on the phone with Amazon this very day trying to get my money back.
I don’t hold any ill will towards Anastasia Angelique. I don’t even want her to stop writing erotica if that is truly her passion. I am not qualified to be the gatekeeper of who does and does not get to write and publish short stories. All I will say is that, from one writer to another, there are some elements of her work and thought process that she should seriously reexamine if she wishes to progress in this industry
To save you what I went through, and because Dan told me to, here are some of the high/lowlights of the book.
“Today was supposed to be my wedding day. Supposed to be, and if I’m telling you supposed to be, then you should realize it’s not actually my wedding day. If anything, it should be the day I pull a murder-suey, and even though I don’t plan to, I wouldn’t put it past me.”
“It’s not that I’m not a Christian. I believe in God as much as the next person. Although, I also like pizza but if I had to eat it every day I’d be bulimic. Okay, full disclosure, I might be a little bulimic but not for that reason.”
“He talked with the kind of lisp where you never know if he had a hairlip as a child or if he was just simply gay.”
“The baby looked like one of those prison tattoos they do with a heated up paperclip and bic pen ink. You see them on thugged out guys behind you at Walmart. The ones who make you want to change aisles because you know you’re the one who’s going to look like the racist asshole when you hold your hand over the card swiper while you type in your pin number like you’ve got the vault combination to Fort Knox.”
“Somebody even did a GoFundMe listing to set up a college fund for that baby who I’m pretty sure won’t even be in our country, much less our town, if the immigration department catches sight of the video.”
“Bottom line, the whole gay marriage movement has really left us straight girls out in the dark.”
“ “Take all my talents into your mouth,” Lebron said.”
Riley Evans is the Multimedia Editor for Grandstand Central, where he writes about athlete mental health, identity politics and how they interact with the world of sports. You can hear him on the Grandstand Central Podcast Network, or tweet at him here.
