Imagine if you will that the mythical gods of the ancient world — Greek, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, etc. — were all real, and interacted with each other. They form the elite society of the time, and they even have their own boarding school where the younger gods can learn about history, warfare and seduction — all the godly arts. As private schools catering to the rich and powerful, narturaly there’s a secret society that nobody is supposed to know about, yet everyone seems to be a member of.
The Order, as this society is called, includes many of the teachers as well as students at the school. The Order claims new students that are still ‘virgins’, to man-on-man sex at least. Marduk is seduced and tricked into becoming The Order’s latest recruit without knowing what that entails. He becomes the great god Samash’s slave, and must service the sexual whims of all the members of the order whenever they request him.
Marduk is crushed by the betrayal of gods he admired and friends he thought he could trust. He is further frustrated to find that The Order seems to have influence in every corner he looks for help. The only way out of his enslavement he is offered is to participate in the recruitment of a new god to take his place, which means betraying another god in the same way Marduk was betrayed.
The setup of “Claimed By The Order” requires a rather significant suspension of disbelief. Even for fantasy, there’s quite a lot of improbable situations to buy into. However, once you get past the first few chapters, you can more easily forget that these are supposedly gods (although conveniently without their powers) and just pretend that they’re privileged young men in some high class college.
The situation Marduk finds himself in may be harder to swallow for some. Strictly speaking — and we know you love it when we’re strict — this isn’t BDSM. Marduk doesn’t really agree to becoming a slave to a master, he has no safe word and no ethical way to escape his situation. It’s an entirely non-consensual situation, and the blurbs for the book are quite clear about this.
Apparently the gods like to play rough, but since Marduk is a god himself, any physical damage they do to him is healed quickly. However, what actually happens is left more to the imagination. We get very few detailed descriptions of the scenes that play out between Marduk and his tormentors. What actually gets described is little more than rough sex, with perhaps some light bondage. Unless non-con is your kink, this book doesn’t offer too much for the hard-core kinkster.
Once you strip away the superficial trappings of kink and fantasy, what you’re left with is a rather predictable romance. The course of Marduk and Akad’s love is not true, but its twists and turns are rather standard fare in romance stories. This is where writing can make a big difference, and fortunately the writing of “Claimed By The Order” is competent, if not especially inspiring. The story as a whole is different enough to be interesting, if not particularly memorable.
“Claimed By The Order” is available from Amazon
