NICKED, fun and games holy-relic heist comedy

NICKED
M.T. ANDERSON
Pantheon Books
$28.00 hardcover, preorder for delivery on 23 July 2024

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning and bestselling author of Feed comes a raucous and slyly funny adult fiction debut, about the quest to steal the mystical bones of a long-dead saint

The year is 1087, and a pox is sweeping through the Italian port city of Bari. When a lowly monk is visited by Saint Nicholas in his dreams, he interprets the vision as a call to action. But his superiors, and the power brokers they serve, have different plans for the tender-hearted Brother Nicephorus.

Enter Tyun, a charismatic treasure hunter renowned for “liberating” holy relics from their tombs. The seven-hundred-year-old bones of Saint Nicholas rest in distant Myra, Tyun explains, and they’re rumored to weep a mysterious liquid that can heal the sick. For the humble price of a small fortune, Tyun will steal the bones and deliver them to Bari, curing the plague and restoring glory to the fallen city. And Nicephorus, the “dreamer,” will be his guide.

What follows is a heist for the ages, as Nicephorus is swept away on strange tides—and alongside even stranger bedfellows—to commit an act of sacrilege. Based on real historical accounts, Nicked is a wildly imaginative, genre-defying, and delightfully queer adventure, full of romance, intrigue, and wide-eyed wonder at the world that awaits beyond our own borders.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I seem to be on an historical-queerness religion-themed heist novels jag. Remember RECITAL OF THE DARK VERSES?...now this fascinating, also ripped-from-the-history-books tale of Saint Nicholas of Myra's hajj to Bari, Italy. Y'know, the Chamber of Commerce never really changes, "bring on the punters and their gelt!" is their mantra no matter the language or the time period. "King Arthur" at Glastonbury? Heck, they needed a new roof and GoFundMe wasn't a thing yet. Now add the attraction of Octavian Nothing's author writing for adults for the first time, and I'm gaffed through the gills.

I loved the Octavian Nothing duology, so it wasn't like I had some hill of ignorance, or resistance, to climb. Author Anderson's got a deft way with words and a sharp eye for the telling detail (the dog-headed man who's actually dog-headed is a great start). The seamless way he weaves the medieval world-view into the actions and conversations of the characters; the unstressed way they assume things like miracles and visions are remarkable but unsurprising; the effectively limned but never foregrounded way the quest to steal the saint's relics gets justified, all make perfect sense despite being quite mad.

By twenty-first century standards.

Sexuality is part of the picture so limned, but there's no sex to speak of. It wouldn't have added a thing to the story. It's not glued on awkwardly to tick a box, and it does have a bearing on how the innocent and quite trusting Brother Nicephorus deals with the way his vision is, erm, repurposed by the roguish dashing thief Tyun, but it is not made up out of nothing. I like thngs like this to make sense, and it does. Our Brother, who sets the plot in motion, rides the waves of others' needs and actions. He changes, he learns about his god-given nature, and he changes those he must surround himself with. And it is, for a wonder, all really fun and funny to read.

The wonders of comedy applied to matters of great religious import are many...the idea of a miracle is, inherently to me anyway, funny. The nature of the "pox" afflicting Bari, and the purported miraculous excretions from Saint Nicholas's bones intended to cure it...well, comedy gold! Resurrection, which we see, just...well...I've had surgeries enough to know that there's a lot involved in resurrection and none of it is supernatural. People can and do wake up when it's supposedly impossible. The way Author Anderson does it is, honestly, so affirming, and so full of the joy of being alive inside a body, that I nearly cried several times. "Never forget that your life is a wonder...Never forget that there are miracles everywhere, and you are only present in this world to see them once." This is exactly true, though the miracles aren't religious in nature.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out how much fun with wordplay there is. Start with the title: Nick (as in Nicephorus, "bringer of victory"), to nick, Old Nick, Saint Nick...you can find more. These grace notes and the general vocabulary Author Anderson uses all flavor the read with an old-fashioned, yeasty head of foam on this draft of literary ale.

Delighted me; will delight anyone who liked Our Flag Means Death, the Locked Tomb series, and Ocean's Eight and its sequels.

RECITAL OF THE DARK VERSES, translation of Mexican poet's bizarre, fact-based religious heist novel

RECITAL OF THE DARK VERSES
LUIS FELIPE FABRE (tr. Heather Cleary)
Deep Vellum
$17.95 trade paper ,available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A masterful undertaking of historical literature, following 16th century religious fervor in a picaresque novel about Saint John of the Cross.

In August 1592, a bailiff and his two assistants arrive at the monastery of Úbeda, with the secret task of transferring the body of Saint John of the Cross, the great Carmelite poet and mystic who had died the previous year, to his final abode in Segovia. When they exhume him, they find a body incorrupted and as fresh as when he died.

Thus commences a series of adventures and misfortunes, with characters that seem to be drawn from mythology. The story written by Luis Felipe Fabre masterfully intertwines with the verses of the friar, as if in them he had prophesied the delirium that would surround his own posthumous transfer. Fabre's text is a highly entertaining novel, full of a sense of humor that manages to honor the mystical poetry of the Carmelite while inviting the reader to reflect on issues such as the sacred and the profane, the body and the soul, and spiritual (and carnal) ecstasy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is another novel inspred by actual events. Unlike Amy Chua's fictionalized take on a horrible man's murder, this is so wildly OTT from its start to its finish that I was never sure if I should be laughing as hard as I was...it was AT the inept thieves and their looney beliefs, not gently with their haplessness...or just shaking my damn head at how religion screws people up and over seven ways from Sunday. There's nothing to it, I thought. Pick it up and the snark will flow like spice from Arrakis.

I think there might really be a God, because that was so very not what happened.

This is a piercingly beautiful translation of what I'm sure is a glorious read in its native Spanish. The author's very clearly a poet...who else would've chosen St. John of the Cross, that queer-coding mystic (itself Catholic code for "weirdo we can't afford to ignore") poet, and his deeply hilarious and utterly inappropriate post-mortem heist-cum-road-trip from his monastery to Segovia, there to be enshrined until finally officially made a saint? The best part is that this is fictionalized, not fictional. This weirdness really happened! History is so very much more peculiar than fantasy. Humanity, in all its unpreditability, can't be bettered by one human's imagination. Just the bare facts of the saint's life...impoverished yet noble childhood, imprisonment and torture for being Too Much for his monastic brethren, summons by St. Teresa of Ávila (herself a mystically horny writer) to join her in founding the Discalced Carmelites.

The book is structured around verses of the saint's poetry. It is part and parcel of the reading experience. I, famously allergic to poetry, would rush right out to buy a copy of the translator's edition of St. John of the Cross's works. The reason is simple: This is, for all its mannered construction and sonorous linguistic register, the horniest stuff I've ever read that wasn't ab initio meant to be one-handed reading. Reading the quoted passages to my Young Gentleman Caller, I realized how very badly I miss having him in the same place as me. If you get my drift.

The thing that most surprised me about this read is its playfulness. Not one page doesn't contain something to raise a smile or a happy reflection. This is not something I ever expect from a story about a religious figure, though that was short-sighted of me...the mystics were by definition not religious figures but spiritual seekers co-opted by religion. The three stooges who are sent to convey the body of St. John of the Cross to Segovia are not religious figures but servants of power tasked with a temptingly valuable object's care. That the object is a body really isn't that important to them, as it wouldn't be in that time and place. Holy relics were objects to be traded, stolen, acquired, and coveted, not a person's Earthly remains. Holy people were of a different substance than mere mortals and were thus not treated in death as were us dirtballs.

This is completely part of the story. I am not religious (let go of your pearls, Mary, it's not the first time you've heard that) but am very much of the mindset that, once one's done with the meat of the body, it ought to go back to the earth that formed it. Every so often, as the posthumous indignities were wrought on John of the Cross's person, I found myself surprised into awareness that this was a person's flesh. The casual presumption that the problem with the things happening to the flesh were centered around others's claims to ownership of it, not the horror of doing these dreadful things to a person (even though a dead one) jolted me.

The prose in this translation is, to my soul's ear, exactly right in its register of formal, mildly archaic, still fluidly readable English. Different enough to give the effect of listening to someone with a beautiful voice speaking to you in foreigner's English...a thing I myownself enjoy...but not to everyone's taste, I know. Be aware of this fact before buying...the Kindle edition, available the tenth of October, allows one to try a sample before buying and the sensitive-to-Otherness would do well to try before committing to ownership. Alternatively, an excerpt appeared on the LitHub website.

One aspect of the English read that I found extra-pleasurable was the mental image of reading a translation of a story about a Translation was quite piquant. It's one of the more rareified pleasures of reading translations, but a deep one. In general, the Anglophone world sees little appeal in reading translated literature. This really is never more sad to me than when discovering an imagination as agile and as horny as Author Fabre's is. This story, fact-based as it is, should be on everyone's radar. The pleasures of being in the deeply, delightedly earthy and Earthly company of the three men who Translate the holy remains (though not wholly, pun intended) as they discover themselves and their Otherness in his company are readily available to you thanks to Translator Cleary and Deep Vellum.

No less a luminary than Valeria Luiselli (Lost Children Archive, The Story of My Teeth) thinks this book should make waves among Anglophone readers. Happen I agree. It certainly should, and let it start with you.