There were so many things wrong with this book, I decided to make a list:
*Poor writing - this book lacked competent editing. (Parish instead of Perish, lots of missing commas, lots of passive sentences)
*Poorly written - this book read more like a catalog than a story rich with world building and catastrophic history. Every scene lacked emotional or sensory depth. It felt like each scene was written out, by hand, as a bullet point list, and then slapped together in a Word doc to form sentences.
*Bad Gay Porn - this book was just one big, poorly made gay porn. The sex lacked any tension or erotic development. It was like "insert TAB D(ick) into slot A(ss)" and then upload input (cum). It was mechanical, boring, and lacked all semblance of good, erotic fiction. Also, where the hell were all the women? There was one woman in the book (besides the slave) and she was a goddess who was mentioned off-hand a few times and described in a scene without much depth. She wore a blue dress, had green eyes, and looked on over the arena with bloodlust... Okay, so where are all the slave women? I understand this author was going for the LGBT angle here, but most gladiators were also very into women. Even the dominus would have had a wife. It was like the world, post-cataclysm, was one big sausage fest.
*Flip-flopping POV - I can't tell you how many times the POV changed mid-scene, repeatedly, from the MC to the antagonist to some other random dude in the room, then back to the MC. Then there would be whole scenes in one POV, so I know this wasn't an intentional pattern. It was just poor writing and scene building by an author who cares little for his craft and more about throwing cocks together on the page.
*Laughable Fight Scenes - this book is about gladiators training and fighting in the arena for the gods' favor. The fight scenes were so slow, jumbled, and poorly formed, they were laughable. I think Mr. Bella was trying to write a SPARTACUS: Blood and Sand/Gods of the Arena fan fiction and failed miserably.
*WTF - the blurb of this book makes the reader think the gods, especially, Eloy would have a major part in the book's development. He is barely there, other than two to three scenes were he's showing what a complete asshole he is, and then the one where he rapes (of course, he's a god, he doesn't consider it rape) the MC with his *12 inch cock*! A FOOT-LONG COCK! Holy shit! Not only is this physically impossible to be pleasurably impaled by a 1-foot cock, it sounds incredibly painful. The human pelvis doesn't just contain some kind of flesh sleeve where cocks of all lengths can safely plunder the depths. Women have a cervix and then a uterus--which is an exit, NOT and entrance. Now, anal sex is obviously doable, but with a foot-long penis you are literally pushing your rock-hard penis into the sigmoid and then transverse colon, which runs the risk of perforation, sepsis, and then a painful, agonizing death. So, as sexy and fantastic as a 12 inch penis sounds on paper, it performs more like one of Vlad's impaling spikes than a tool of pleasure. Anyway, all that so say Eloy (with the 12 inch, god-penis) completely disappeared for the last 2/3rds of the book.
This book was a poorly written, thrown together, ignorant, stupid, and utterly terrible excuse for erotic gay fiction.