Huh. Not ... terrible.
Okay no, some of the technical stuff is frankly awful: jism is a word the author's gone with, 'hole' gets used WAY too much, and the prose gets so bad at times it's almost more than a body can take.
But there's something very weirdly compelling about the story; it's so loaded with tension it feels like it's on a hair-trigger, and you're never sure who's going to do what. Alex and Liam have this stop/start, jerky pattern of behaviour that should be annoying -- and there were times when I wasn't sure but that it was just poor writing -- but somehow the author pulls it off, and all the conflict fucking smooths out the bumps the prose leaves behind.
I kind of liked all the awkwardness, to tell you the truth. It made the characters raw and a little confused but there was a vein of honestry running underneath it, if you could ignore the way the conversations didn't always feel completely linear. The overarching plot wasn't bad either: a major villain, psychological and physical torture -- just enough looming evil to justify how the story lurches from one thing to another. The characters aren't in control and nothing goes smoothly but again, it kind of fit.
(There's a LOT of non-con, which is maybe the siren song that called to me (and TW torture fic has always been my Achilles heel, so). I can't really point the P2P finger at this because I don't really know and don't really care, but if it turned out it was I wouldn't be totally shocked)
I'd recommend this if you can get past the first 20 or so pages, where the writing is the most stilted and uncomfortable. After that it settles down into ... something, I can't put my finger on what exactly, but it settles down.
1
