Slave-Mines of Tormunil (Nexus)

Rating:
Summary: Slave-Mines of Tornamil
Review: I enjoyed this book. The slave owner actually cared for his slaves and didn't abuse them. However everyone else did. But in the end you can see real love. However it is very explicit and some cruel things are done to the women. But in this kind of book you expect that or you wouldn't be reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Aran Ashe's devious inventions at high-speed
Review: True to the form of his Lidir Chronicles, Aran Ashe offers up bizarre and bewildering devices of torment that are intricate, difficult to visualize, impossible to realize, and yet smolderingly arousing to read about. But whereas such memorable entries as "The Slave of Lidir" and "Pleasure Island" developed these teasing devices in wonderfully excruciating slo-mo detail, "Slave Mines" throws them out in profuse, but undeveloped, abandon. For instance, the intimate piercing performed in "Pleasure Island" isn't realistically inflicted or healed, at least by contemporary standards, but Ashe treated his heroine's mixed-up emotions and physical responses, slowly but surely yielding to pride and sheer arousal, in incredible detail. Here, by contrast, tons of piercings and esoteric sexual practices are tossed out, but they don't get dwelt upon in the same luxurious way. Perhaps Ashe got tired of developing everything in such close detail. Fair enough, and "Slave Mines" offers many sensual tableaux: regardless of pace, Ashe is a grand master at imagining fetishistic gear and bondage games and, in his less highbrow way, he is clearly a worthy heir of Anne Rice and her "Sleeping Beauty" Trilogy. But this series is also less emotionally well-developed than the Lidir Chronicles. This can definitely be enjoyed for its sensational inventions and change of pace, but this doesn't meet the standards for "different but equal" to Lidir.