Rough Canvas by Joey W. Hill

TITLE: Rough Canvas
AUTHOR: Joey W. Hill
PUBLISHER: Ellora’s Cave
LENGTH: Novel (roughly 121k)
GENRE: Gay BDSM erotic romance
COST: $7.99

Thomas abandoned his New York art career to return to his quiet North Carolina upbringing when his father died and his brother got in a life-changing accident. Now, 18 months later, the man he left behind is back, asking for Thomas to take one week to find his muse again. Marcus is the Dom Thomas never realized he needed until he met him, and it takes his return for Thomas to realize just how much he misses it. One week. A lot can happen then. Especially when Thomas has never been able to deny his Master anything.

There is no doubt about it. Joey Hill knows how to paint pictures with her words. Her prose is dense, packed with detail after evocative detail. She strips down her characters to their barest emotions and then layers it all back on again, much like Thomas’ paintings. When she writes a D/s scene, you feel it. I can even forgive frequent headhopping when it's written as evocatively as this.

The drawback in this particular story is that you feel it in scenes that feel wrong within the context of the story. I have issues with Marcus. Serious issues. While Thomas is a sweet, smalltown boy, Marcus is a self-professed bastard with a mean streak a mile wide. And not even in the Master sense. He reacts in ways that alienated him in my eyes long, long before any sort of explanation came for his behavior. By the time that explanation came, over 90k into the story, I didn’t care how bad Marcus’ background was. I didn’t like him. I didn’t understand how he could profess to be Thomas’ Master and let Thomas' health issues slide for months, and I didn’t know why at least a hint of that truth couldn’t have been offered. He says he loves Thomas, but does he do anything more about helping him than strapping him in an iron maiden? No, not really. I wanted to shake the jerk and demand to know what medical journal told him the cure for panic attacks and a bleeding ulcer was fisting in a BDSM club.

The plotline flipflops between Thomas giving in to Marcus, the two of them having great sex, maybe even a serious emotional moment, then bam! Fight. Then it starts again. Over. And over. And over. All the way to the end. Even disliking Marcus as I did, the author had me for probably the first half of the story, but eventually, the sheer repetition of it all just grew too weighty. Toss in my issues regarding Thomas’ health that go nearly ignored for the bulk of the story, and it was a serious chore to slog through the second half of the story. As soon as I saw the jump in time to 3 months after the week they spent together, I knew it was going to be a losing battle. An evocatively written battle, but a losing one, just the same.

Readability	7/10 – Dense, descriptive prose gets bogged down by unnecessary length and repetition
Hero #1	3/10 – Mean and untrusting, it’s very difficult to see why Thomas loves him so much
Hero #2	7/10 – Thomas was lovely, though dense and a little too flipfloppy for my tastes
Entertainment value	5/10 – While I can enjoy the beauty in the prose and some of the hot scenes in the first half of the story, the unbelievability of the second half combined with too much back and forth makes it a difficult read.
World building	9/10 – It’s painted with words, just as adept as Thomas’ work
TOTAL:	31/50