In this smoking hot tale of m-m love, the author spins a mythic story of Tom falls hard for an older an older man he meets in a gym with mixed feelings of fear and attraction. Meanwhile, the older man puts Tom through a sexual initiation involving BDSM and brutal, sweaty sex. In the process Tom's hatred of his own body and gay urges is transformation in very positive ways. Musclebound is a story that takes Tom from innocence to experience, ordeal to triumph. "Laura Antoniou . . . elevates the genre of SM erotica ... in storyline, character development, passion and humor. ...the dialogue achingly real, and the sex is as hot as you'd ever hope for. ... these books are the next best thing to being there." -Kate Bornstein (author, My Gender Workbook)
This is the story of a 21-year-old man, Tom Kake, who has just arrived in New York from Nowhere, Alabama. He is looking for a job when he sees an ad in the window of a small gym called Gold Metal Gym that is within walking distance of his new apartment. He decides to try his luck and apply for the job.
Tom is gay, but never revealed it to anyone, relatives or friends. He chose to settle in the Village and found a little apartment there.
Ronald A. Marcus, the owner of the gym, is an impressive hulk, but a bastard of the worst kind. He offers his naive new employees to be paid crap, but promising them to prepare a free but adapted physical training program for them in his gym.
Tom gets a hard-on just to speak with Marcus. But he finds the salary too low and decides to try to find something else. Without a college degree, all he finds makes Marcus’ offer seem princely. So he decides to go back to the gym, hoping that the job is not already taken.
If Tom finds Marcus exciting, that is nothing compare to what he feels for Will Rodriguez, a beautiful Hispanic young man who trains at that gym. Tom finds Will simply stunning. But even if Will warns Tom not to take the job at the gym, Tom takes it anyway. Will told Tom not to go in Marcus’ office alone. But Tom does not understand why.
In his office, Marcus forces all his new young employees to have sex with him while he records everything without their knowledge. Then he threatens them to send the recording to their families, friends and to a distribution network of amateur erotic films if they do not submit to his every whim.
As Tom is not yet out of the closet and thinks that it would kill his good Catholic mom and dad to learn that he is gay, he accepts Marcus’ conditions and begins a difficult physical training while he begins to work as maintenance manager. But, in fact, he more or less becomes the slave of Marcus and his very ugly assistant named Frank Dobbs.
The rest of the story describes the abuse suffered by Tom and all those, but Frank, who work at the gym and some clients who train there too, including Will. The author also describes how the employees will unite their forces against Marcus and Frank to find out where the records are hidden and destroy them, and thus be freed from Marcus and Frank.
Tom and Will then go to live in California. In the very last sentence, we discover that their ordeal may not be completely finished, since Marcus also moved to California and plans his revenge.
The only problem is not that we don’t know well enough the background of the characters as some reviewers suggested, but the repetitive mistakes.
I gave it 3.5 stars but because I so much loved Laura’s other books, I round it up to 4 stars.
Note that this story happened at a time when one still recorded on tapes.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
I finished this book a day or two ago, and literally was FUMING throughout – so much so, that I made myself take a cooling off day before writing this review. That being said, I did force myself to finish it to try and figure out the point of the book. Before getting into the review itself, I have to say that I am floored that anyone would dare publish this book – yes, I firmly believe in freedom of speech, but this tale of sexual abuse without conscience (among many other missing pieces), is what perpetuates stereotypes and damages progress. Just saying.
This story was only about sex (sorry, ABUSE) – the plot was not developed, nor was there depth in the characters – which was surprising, as at the beginning, you could see some depth trying to be painted. Unfortunately, that’s where the development ended – and in fact, the character that was discussed, did not end up “coming to life.” There were brief flashes of a consensual relationship between two characters, but even that was peppered with abuse. The characters were not relate-able, the setting was not appeasing, and there was nothing to really grab onto (unless, of course, you enjoy reading about long-ongoing abuse…).
Out of four… Overall Read: ♥ (zeroes if I could) Sex Heat: ♥ Plot: ♥
I do not recommend this read for… ANYONE. And furthermore, I will never be purchasing another eBook from this publisher.