Slave-Mines of Tormunil
8) Slave-Mines of Tormunil, Aran Ashe, 272 pages
Okay. This is bondage porn. I admit it. But as a writer of bondage porn, I occasionally get the urge to see what’s being done in my field. Some of it is good, but there are, inevitably, horrors in store. Horrors that make me laugh even as I fling the book from me with an exclamation of disgust. This is one of them.
By the end of this book, you will know more about pain and bondage than you ever wished to know. Not because of skillful evocation of the master/servant theme on the part of the wisely pseudonymous author, but because by the denouement you too will understand the hideous kinship that draws one back to that which torments you, despite the horror. Because you will have felt it. I could not put this book down. It was that gleefully bad.
Now. If you don’t want to read a long and snippy review of a book that stands out as bad even in a genre that routinely produces excrementally terrible fiction, then go no further.
In an effort to reproduce in you my initial reaction to this book, I shall, as I customarily do, include the back-cover synopsis. Because, honestly, when diagnosing an illness, one must begin where the pain begins. And it began in italics.
‘She is a virgin,’ Josef warned. ‘I noticed her chain. But you like attentive me, my sweet?’ Leah’s eyes closed softly in assent and her cheek pressed against Roanen’s palm. The first pangs of possessiveness stabbed at Josef’s heart. ‘Lift her for me,’ Roanen whispered. ‘Let me touch her love-chain.’ Leah’s thighs were shivering. Roanen glanced sidelong at Josef but spoke to Leah. ‘If your master will consent to leave you with me then your night is scarce begun.’
Leah, a pretty young slave from the Citadel, has been claimed as body-slave by Josef, the handsome outlander who must now assume the responsibility of training her in the Tormunite ways of lust. Together they embark upon a quest for the lovely milk-slave Sianon, reportedly abducted by soldiers as a vessel for their pleasure and cruelty. Josef’s worst fears are confirmed when he discovers that Sianon is being held in the notorious fleshpots of the mines of Menirg. Powerfully erotic fantasy fiction by the author of The Handmaidens.
Now, this certainly gives us an idea of what to expect: bondage, humiliation, training, and ravishment. What it does not indicate, what it cannot possibly describe, is the Lovecraftian horror lurking within.
Let me make this clear: I don’t expect tremendously much from my porn. I really don’t. I mean, not every book is going to be The Story of O, nor should it be - sometimes all you want is a quick wank. So, for purposes of porn (not art) a grinning acquaintance with elementary grammatical rules and adherence to basic narrative structures is all I ask. Beyond that, I realize that I am fishing in a progressively smaller pool. That said, let me single this book out as stunningly bad on the simplest level: that of the individual line.
Allow me to cite a single paragraph as example, from a randomly-turned page - page 85.
They emerged at a clearing looking on to the castle across the lake. Leah was cast down on to a cool, mossy hummock. ‘Lie down. Keep still,’ said Cren. She was belly up, her buttocks raised on the hummock, her legs spread ope, her arms flung outwards. Before the penis touched her between the legs, the shudders came, shudders that Leah did not understand and could not control. She cried out. As her arms crossed over her eyes and her tears resurged and her little virgin’s chain was burst asunder, she wanted only to be held and loved. That was the need that Leah clung to. Saniskav toyed with her sex and smacked her knob until - ‘She’s wetting . . .’ he whispered knowingly. Then her plundered sex stretched wide, and wider yet round Crenan’s fully swollen penis, and though her wet had made her slippy still she felt as if her sex would split. The penis drew out. Through barred fingers Leah glimpsed the shaft glistening in the dawn light before Saniskav started to masturbate her again - causing the feelings, taunting her little knob into aching sweetly - then spreading her open by her broken strands of chain so he could smack inside her sex - not hard - yet steadfastly enough to make her insides tumble. ‘More wet coming - look, lad . . .’
I can go no further, despite the presence of the following in the very next paragraph: “He neither spoke nor caressed her face but thrust until her fingers clawed the ground and a hot, watery flood of semen came inside and it felt as if he had peed against her womb.”
Aargh! Do you see? This is just Bad. Poor, non-euphonious word choices, overdone and stilted diction combined with sentimentality, excessive use of passive voice - it is just . . . oh, I can’t describe the feelings it provokes in me, but since this is a review, I must try. Fascination is a good twenty percent of it, amazement probably twenty percent more, the rest being sheer, simmering loathing. By God, my liver swarms with hissing bile.
I also will shamefully admit to a dash of grudging admiration for the person shameless enough to put these words to paper, even behind the veil of a pseudonym. (Be warned, Aran Ashe - the gods know you, even if we do not.)
This writing is akin to cancer-ravaged flesh. Flawed at the cellular level. If you, for some reason, read the above and yet cannot see this right off, I envy you your merciful blindness. If you see and understand, please have pity on me. This went on for 272 pages. The author does not even use ‘naughty’ words. No. There is a pseudo-literary insistence here on euphemistic (and sometimes creatively bad) language, in an apparent effort to lend seriousness to what is wank material, plain and simple. It makes no effort to elevate itself in terms of plot or character, and yet here is a prissy insistence that it is not her ‘pussy,’ but rather her ‘sex,’ or her ‘womanhood.’
Such language is usually the couch of romance novels, which cater to the easily titillated and yet still-offendable women who like to pretend they are not reading porn. And yet, in diligent years of thumbing through used romance novels for the well-creased ‘good parts,’ I have yet to see (another random page, page 79) umm . . . well, that's her whole hand going into a very bad place.
This is part three of what I think is a trilogy (yes, even porn fantasy novels come in threes - and you just watch me walk away from that pun). You haven’t missed much. In something as densely pornographic as this, there is going to be very little plot or character no matter how you cut it. And actually, what plot there is, is all right in terms of event, though the execution leaves much to be desired (like a style manual). It parades an endless variety of depravities before the reader, and therein lies this abortion’s only saving grace.
Simply by virtue of its vast and depraved cabinet of tricks, encompassing everything from ponygirls to peeing, there is going to be something here for everyone, so long as you are shameless enough to look for it. And wade (I mean that literally) through lots of stuff that most likely isn't your thing (I really wish they'd warned on the cover about the peeing -- it doesn't bother me that much, but it really isn't my thing).
I will admit, parts of it were . . . well, they would’ve been pretty hot if they’d been filmed. But they were so badly done on the page that I could no more have used them for their intended purpose than I could masturbate with a cheese grater.
And yet, I stand in awe.
I pride myself on my pornographic creativity, but this supplied me with a healthy sense of my own essential vanilla-ness. You know, it had honestly occurred to me to write a scene where a couple of villains stuff a girl with berries and then screw her until the juice runs out. It also once occurred to me to pierce a girl’s tongue and use that as a setting for a ponygirl’s bit, allowing her to be more easily steered (I didn’t do it, mind you, but, then, I have never met Mandy Moore).
But, call me repressed, I had never even thought of turning a girl into a living pee-atomizer.
Ms. or Mr. Ashe, I bow to your superior perversity. Even if most of it is physically impossible.
Even judging it against a scale of porn fiction, and not regular fiction, I am forced to rate this book at a 3 out of 10. Half of one of those points comes from it including any sort of sex at all. You would be surprised how many ‘erotic’ novels really fail to deliver on the goods. So: porn as advertised, one-half point. Two more come from the sheer creativity exhibited in tormenting these long-suffering characters, of which only one is interesting, and the interesting part of his story happened in the last book, which I have not got. The one remaining half point comes as a booby-prize - I have never laughed so hard in my life at something that was supposed to make people want to jerk off (except for that video of the little Japanese guy and the five girls with strap-ons, but that was many moons ago, and I’m still pretending I didn’t see it).
I wish to point out that this author has seven other books to his/her credit under the Nexus imprint. I am desperate to read them, but cannot bring myself to pay for such trash simply to mock and deride it when I am honestly struggling to buy dried cat kibble. But if you wish to read them, please share your experiences, be they screams of horror or bowel-tearing bouts of insane, cackling laughter.
I slogged through this reeking literary bog. I am therefore going to count it toward my final total, although I can't say I feel good about it. I may go read The Story of O again, just to remind myself that sometimes, it really IS art.
link
Okay. This is bondage porn. I admit it. But as a writer of bondage porn, I occasionally get the urge to see what’s being done in my field. Some of it is good, but there are, inevitably, horrors in store. Horrors that make me laugh even as I fling the book from me with an exclamation of disgust. This is one of them.
By the end of this book, you will know more about pain and bondage than you ever wished to know. Not because of skillful evocation of the master/servant theme on the part of the wisely pseudonymous author, but because by the denouement you too will understand the hideous kinship that draws one back to that which torments you, despite the horror. Because you will have felt it. I could not put this book down. It was that gleefully bad.
Now. If you don’t want to read a long and snippy review of a book that stands out as bad even in a genre that routinely produces excrementally terrible fiction, then go no further.
In an effort to reproduce in you my initial reaction to this book, I shall, as I customarily do, include the back-cover synopsis. Because, honestly, when diagnosing an illness, one must begin where the pain begins. And it began in italics.
‘She is a virgin,’ Josef warned. ‘I noticed her chain. But you like attentive me, my sweet?’ Leah’s eyes closed softly in assent and her cheek pressed against Roanen’s palm. The first pangs of possessiveness stabbed at Josef’s heart. ‘Lift her for me,’ Roanen whispered. ‘Let me touch her love-chain.’ Leah’s thighs were shivering. Roanen glanced sidelong at Josef but spoke to Leah. ‘If your master will consent to leave you with me then your night is scarce begun.’
Leah, a pretty young slave from the Citadel, has been claimed as body-slave by Josef, the handsome outlander who must now assume the responsibility of training her in the Tormunite ways of lust. Together they embark upon a quest for the lovely milk-slave Sianon, reportedly abducted by soldiers as a vessel for their pleasure and cruelty. Josef’s worst fears are confirmed when he discovers that Sianon is being held in the notorious fleshpots of the mines of Menirg. Powerfully erotic fantasy fiction by the author of The Handmaidens.
Now, this certainly gives us an idea of what to expect: bondage, humiliation, training, and ravishment. What it does not indicate, what it cannot possibly describe, is the Lovecraftian horror lurking within.
Let me make this clear: I don’t expect tremendously much from my porn. I really don’t. I mean, not every book is going to be The Story of O, nor should it be - sometimes all you want is a quick wank. So, for purposes of porn (not art) a grinning acquaintance with elementary grammatical rules and adherence to basic narrative structures is all I ask. Beyond that, I realize that I am fishing in a progressively smaller pool. That said, let me single this book out as stunningly bad on the simplest level: that of the individual line.
Allow me to cite a single paragraph as example, from a randomly-turned page - page 85.
They emerged at a clearing looking on to the castle across the lake. Leah was cast down on to a cool, mossy hummock. ‘Lie down. Keep still,’ said Cren. She was belly up, her buttocks raised on the hummock, her legs spread ope, her arms flung outwards. Before the penis touched her between the legs, the shudders came, shudders that Leah did not understand and could not control. She cried out. As her arms crossed over her eyes and her tears resurged and her little virgin’s chain was burst asunder, she wanted only to be held and loved. That was the need that Leah clung to. Saniskav toyed with her sex and smacked her knob until - ‘She’s wetting . . .’ he whispered knowingly. Then her plundered sex stretched wide, and wider yet round Crenan’s fully swollen penis, and though her wet had made her slippy still she felt as if her sex would split. The penis drew out. Through barred fingers Leah glimpsed the shaft glistening in the dawn light before Saniskav started to masturbate her again - causing the feelings, taunting her little knob into aching sweetly - then spreading her open by her broken strands of chain so he could smack inside her sex - not hard - yet steadfastly enough to make her insides tumble. ‘More wet coming - look, lad . . .’
I can go no further, despite the presence of the following in the very next paragraph: “He neither spoke nor caressed her face but thrust until her fingers clawed the ground and a hot, watery flood of semen came inside and it felt as if he had peed against her womb.”
Aargh! Do you see? This is just Bad. Poor, non-euphonious word choices, overdone and stilted diction combined with sentimentality, excessive use of passive voice - it is just . . . oh, I can’t describe the feelings it provokes in me, but since this is a review, I must try. Fascination is a good twenty percent of it, amazement probably twenty percent more, the rest being sheer, simmering loathing. By God, my liver swarms with hissing bile.
I also will shamefully admit to a dash of grudging admiration for the person shameless enough to put these words to paper, even behind the veil of a pseudonym. (Be warned, Aran Ashe - the gods know you, even if we do not.)
This writing is akin to cancer-ravaged flesh. Flawed at the cellular level. If you, for some reason, read the above and yet cannot see this right off, I envy you your merciful blindness. If you see and understand, please have pity on me. This went on for 272 pages. The author does not even use ‘naughty’ words. No. There is a pseudo-literary insistence here on euphemistic (and sometimes creatively bad) language, in an apparent effort to lend seriousness to what is wank material, plain and simple. It makes no effort to elevate itself in terms of plot or character, and yet here is a prissy insistence that it is not her ‘pussy,’ but rather her ‘sex,’ or her ‘womanhood.’
Such language is usually the couch of romance novels, which cater to the easily titillated and yet still-offendable women who like to pretend they are not reading porn. And yet, in diligent years of thumbing through used romance novels for the well-creased ‘good parts,’ I have yet to see (another random page, page 79) umm . . . well, that's her whole hand going into a very bad place.
This is part three of what I think is a trilogy (yes, even porn fantasy novels come in threes - and you just watch me walk away from that pun). You haven’t missed much. In something as densely pornographic as this, there is going to be very little plot or character no matter how you cut it. And actually, what plot there is, is all right in terms of event, though the execution leaves much to be desired (like a style manual). It parades an endless variety of depravities before the reader, and therein lies this abortion’s only saving grace.
Simply by virtue of its vast and depraved cabinet of tricks, encompassing everything from ponygirls to peeing, there is going to be something here for everyone, so long as you are shameless enough to look for it. And wade (I mean that literally) through lots of stuff that most likely isn't your thing (I really wish they'd warned on the cover about the peeing -- it doesn't bother me that much, but it really isn't my thing).
I will admit, parts of it were . . . well, they would’ve been pretty hot if they’d been filmed. But they were so badly done on the page that I could no more have used them for their intended purpose than I could masturbate with a cheese grater.
And yet, I stand in awe.
I pride myself on my pornographic creativity, but this supplied me with a healthy sense of my own essential vanilla-ness. You know, it had honestly occurred to me to write a scene where a couple of villains stuff a girl with berries and then screw her until the juice runs out. It also once occurred to me to pierce a girl’s tongue and use that as a setting for a ponygirl’s bit, allowing her to be more easily steered (I didn’t do it, mind you, but, then, I have never met Mandy Moore).
But, call me repressed, I had never even thought of turning a girl into a living pee-atomizer.
Ms. or Mr. Ashe, I bow to your superior perversity. Even if most of it is physically impossible.
Even judging it against a scale of porn fiction, and not regular fiction, I am forced to rate this book at a 3 out of 10. Half of one of those points comes from it including any sort of sex at all. You would be surprised how many ‘erotic’ novels really fail to deliver on the goods. So: porn as advertised, one-half point. Two more come from the sheer creativity exhibited in tormenting these long-suffering characters, of which only one is interesting, and the interesting part of his story happened in the last book, which I have not got. The one remaining half point comes as a booby-prize - I have never laughed so hard in my life at something that was supposed to make people want to jerk off (except for that video of the little Japanese guy and the five girls with strap-ons, but that was many moons ago, and I’m still pretending I didn’t see it).
I wish to point out that this author has seven other books to his/her credit under the Nexus imprint. I am desperate to read them, but cannot bring myself to pay for such trash simply to mock and deride it when I am honestly struggling to buy dried cat kibble. But if you wish to read them, please share your experiences, be they screams of horror or bowel-tearing bouts of insane, cackling laughter.
I slogged through this reeking literary bog. I am therefore going to count it toward my final total, although I can't say I feel good about it. I may go read The Story of O again, just to remind myself that sometimes, it really IS art.
link