Review of Dark Silence (The Bound Subject #1) by Katze Snow

by Katze Snow

3 stars

Claude Galen was brought into this world to train slaves, not to want them.

When his latest victim, a twenty-one-year-old boy named Tristan Kade, begins to see Claude for who he truly is, only one thing can be done to stop Tristan from escaping: punish him.

Trapped in a padded white room with no windows or doors, all Tristan can do to stay alive in this world is to obey Professor Galen.

Submit to him.

Yield. Break.

But what happens when Tristan's body is trained to work against him? When he starts to crave the pleasure instead of fear it? When he begins to see the man behind the monster?

With it being Halloween week we delved right with this Dark Thriller ……romance – not really, from Katze Snow.  It is a dark, psychological erotic thriller and, although satisfied the dark we felt it missed the building of connection between the main characters.  We enjoyed it, we think, but left us felling a bit sad, and wishing the second book was here already.

What did we love?

-      -    If you are looking for a Dark read, pick up Dark Silence.  There is kidnapping, sexual exploitation, torture; it is twisted and sadistic in parts.  But, not to say anything is too much, we didn’t find ourselves putting  it down because it was too much (unlike some Dark reads that we have had to stop reading!).

-     -     We really enjoyed the set-up of the story, the part before Tristan was kidnapped.  There was great tension that kept us flipping the pages just to see how this would all play out.

-     -     Connection to Tristan.  To be honest we felt for Tristan, Katze Snow builds a likeable character in Tristan and we really did like him.  We felt the horrible things Claude subjected him through and wanted to wrap him up and take away all the hurts.

What took away from the story?

-        -  Editing – call us snobs but poor editing, or continuity takes away form a book, it takes us out of the story.  There are quite a few examples of bad editing, or continuity issues; he was wearing PJs and then the next page, his jeans are getting too tight – hmmmm.

-       -   Tropes – there are a lot of tropes going on here.  Virgin, closeted, struggling with his sexuality, and add that to the human experiments subplot, daddy issues it was a bit much.

-       -   Character Development – we feel in this Dark genre that there needs to be a serious connection between the kidnapper and the one being tortured.  And we struggled to find that.  We didn’t feel that Claude made any choices to lure Tristan over to being submissive, rather just kept pushing and pushing at Tristan’s boundaries.  WE just didn’t feel the connection between these 2 men, and subsequently we truly didn’t feel the push/pull struggle of Tristan wanting and hating Claude at the same time. Claude had no charm and we didn’t feel lulled by his attempts to woo Tristan into doing what he wanted.

-       -   The End – yes, we know that this is a series, but ugh, the end just snuck up on us and we were left feeling wha???????

Dark Silence is the first in The Bound Subject series.  It is and interesting read, dark, yes, but doesn’t push too many bounds.  The one reason that we read Dark Romance is the idea of Redemption that however bad things are there is hope.  But, with it being a continuing book series we didn’t get the satisfaction of a wrap of other the story and it has kind left us feeling a bit wounded.