I had a small side-track with a novella called
The Breaking by Dusk Peterson. It's a freebie that introduces a series of novellas partially aggregated into a number of volumes. The series is called
The Eternal Dungeon which won a Rainbow Award for best gay fantasy in 2011.
It's a rather interesting premise about the use of torture to break prisoners into confessing their crimes but coming from the fairly unique angle of the torturers setting the prisoners' interests before their own. In this particular world, this was the birth of its modern psychology. So I read the freebie first novella to see if I would be interested in reading the whole series.
It was pretty good actually. There really wasn't any LGBT content in the first novella so I'm assuming same-sex relationships and/or sex scenes are either an incidental or fundamental component of later novellas given its award. There seems to be a reasonable amount of scope for continuing to explore the psychology of torture, but given how restricted the setting is, how the inhabitants of the dungeon relate is likely to become a focal point at some stage.
Anyway, I may buy the first volume of 4 novellas in the series and give them a go a bit later. It's a bit pricey at about $8 for 420 pages, but given I've read the first novella it's not like I haven't had a pretty good sample. It hasn't dissuaded me and it's not like I'm risking the mortgage on my house.
Quote:
'Do you have any questions?' the Seeker asked. 'About the routine of the dungeon? The times you will be fed? The questions you will be asked? The instruments of torture I use?'"
The prisoner knew that the Eternal Dungeon was a place where suspected criminals were broken by torture, and he was prepared to hold out against any methods used against him – except the method he could not anticipate.
Arrested on the charge of committing a particularly horrendous murder, young Elsdon Taylor arrives at the Eternal Dungeon in fear of the harsh methods used by the torturers, called Seekers, to draw confessions from their prisoners.
But his Seeker's methods are for more devious than Elsdon had expected. Now Elsdon is faced with a choice that will shape his future . . . as well as the future of his Seeker.
This novella can be read on its own or as the first story in the first volume of The Eternal Dungeon, an award-winning historical fantasy series set in a land where the psychologists wield whips.
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