Review - Gilded Cage of the Tentacle Elite by Kit Luxe
Gilded Cage of the Tentacle Elite
by Kit Luxe
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Volume 1 of The Tentacle Elite
Tags: Science Fiction Novelette Tentacles Non-Consensual
Posted in Book Reviews on February 28, 2026
The Galactic Alliance arrived on Earth with promises to make everything better, and they did, for some. Theo lives on the streets, outside the system. He eats food he finds discarded in dumpsters and sleeps in alleys well out of sight from the main streets. That’s to avoid the “sweepers” that round up homeless people. There are all sorts of stories about what happens to the humans collected by the alliance sweepers. One particularly cold night, Theo is starving when he stumbles on a box with food and warm blankets in it. Part of him knows it’s a trap, but Theo is so cold and so hungry that he falls into the clutches of the Alliance. He wakes to find himself in a vast warehouse where he is cleaned, collared, and purchased by one of the aliens to be a sexual plaything.
This start of a series of novelettes that imagines a dystopian future where a large group of aliens have arrived to save the Earth from itself. Life improves for some, but to “pay” for the changes, the aliens effectively kidnap the poor and homeless to sell them into slavery. The world-building of this future is very well done and takes up about half of this first book.
The story is told entirely from Theo’s point of view. We don’t get any of his background to tell us why he’s on the streets, but the picture we get of him is entirely believable. The events leading up to Theo’s capture make sense, and his reactions during his processing feel real.
Where things fell apart for me was after Theo gets “acquired” by one of the aliens. After all the elaborate world-building, I was expecting more than a single scene between Theo and his alien master. The book could easily have been twice as long to give us a view into Theo’s journey that matched the build-up.
“Gilded Cage of the Tentacle Elite” is available from Smashwords.