Review - All These Roadworks, The Silver Leash
- 14 hours ago
- 13 min read
I am going to be doing occasional reviews for other creators in the N/C erotica and comic space, doing some cross promotion of worthy works of art.
In that spirit, I'd like to introduce you all to:
The Silver Leash Book 1, by AllTheseRoadworks
Part I: The Review, as a product
One of the difficulties of writing a review for a story that you like is the divide between reviewing it as a product that is for sale, and reviewing it as a work of art. I am much more interested in the latter than the former, and that means I need to focus more on flaws or questions I have about the work than I do on the elements that made me love it so much, so I have elected to do an segments reviewing it as a book for sale first.
I got into writing erotica because I had trouble finding the sort of erotica I wanted to read: plot-dense non-con that relies on the drama around the sex to serve as the primary conflict in the story, using them the same way a race movie would use the races or a shonen uses the rounds of a tournament… but sexier. One of the major struggles in doing this is that your main character is either a victim, in which case the author needs to work hard to continue giving her agency throughout the story to be a protagonist, or the main character is a rapist, and you need to work to keep them at least relatable to read about, even if not sympathetic. I’ve done both with varying degrees of success. In the Silver Leash, I found one of the rare examples of this being done, and done well.
The Silver Leash (Book 1) is a roughly 80k book focused on a dominant male main character who, on his 18th birthday, learns he has the power to manipulate women’s sexuality using a strange ability that he learns is called the Silver Leash that allows him to link their arousal to any thought currently in their head, so long as they are at least a little aroused and vulnerable, and the thought is in their head in the first place to be linked. Through a series of events, he decides he is going to use this power to punish the mean girl clique that goes to his school by humiliating them and ruining their lives, the same way they ruined the lives of a teacher he liked. In the space in between, needs to figure out more about how his power works, his own complicated family history, and what is going to do with the girls in his life that are quickly turning into a minor harem around him.
If anything about that sounds like something you’d enjoy, I recommend you stop reading now and buy this book. It’s quite good, it's not a long read, and there are future installments to come. This first book focuses on the first of the three mean girls, Gwen – Think of her as a redheaded Regina George, if her dad was Harvey Weinstein.
Like me, AllTheseRoadworks releases his stories for free over time. This one is fully released at this point, but there will be at least 2 more books in this series for sale. You can check the book out here.
Now, onto some discussion of the story, and why I like it so much.
Part II: Critique
The magic system in this book is really great. The rules that it functions by are set up early, and they are never broken. The power of the main characters to use them is limited by their own experience and the headaches they get, with the promise this will expand over time as they gain more experience. A common phrase about a hard magic system is that the better you can anticipate what it can do and how characters will use it, the easier it becomes for the author to use magic to solve the plot without it feeling like cheating, and we are well into the threshold here: I feel like I understand what the power is and what it can do well, and what its limitations are and what the dangers are of ignoring them (removing leashes can drive people mad or kill their sex drive entirely, and I’m not positive if overuse can cause brain damage yet or not but it definitely causes pain and unconsciousness.) Furthermore, its always a good sign when the questions the story gave me about the power (what happens if you give contradictory leashes?) is something the author also thought about, and ends up mattering.
I really like the way this book opens. It starts at the perfect time in Jake’s life, just minutes before everything changes, and establishes Madison immediately as his kinda bitchy older cousin (and manages to hint right away at her having secrets of her own… because, of course, this power runs in their family. It goes through his first few uses of the power before he is really thinking about it, before she slaps him down and we start having a solid look at what “informed consent” looks like in a world where people like Jake and Madison are practically demigods capable of changing people’s sex drive with a snap of their fingers. From here, we establish early on a main theme of this story that we are going to be revisiting and contrasting against – Responsible use of this power that amounts to a (fairly loose) form of mind control.
The way it transitions into Jake proposing the takedown of the Cat Clique is… a little weak in this theme. It jumps a little quickly from “You need to use this power responsibly” as the primary theme to “No, we are totally ok with planning specifically to rape the Cat girls.” This is somewhat justified by watching how the mean girls fuck with the school librarian and Madison being A-ok using her power to fuck with deserving targets, and explained by Jake and Madison both being clearly rape-fetishizing from the start, but even so it jumps a little quickly between these two. It would have been easier to keep us unapologetically rooting for the “good guys” if their intended way for this to go was tamer at first – sort of following self defense principles that returning to them the level of violence they put out is fair play. They went after Miss Weaver and caused her to lose control of her life and humiliated her, so having Jake and Madison plan to cause them to lose control of their own lives and sexuality in a way that would be humiliating feels fair, and easier for “good people” to justify to themselves as it’s a little more aloof and less personal. Then, after Gwen gets more aggressing towards them and more rapey herself, the escalation into where the story is going feels more natural. This did do some damage to how relatable and sympathetic we find our heroes after how quickly they jumped into being willing to do something worse and more violent than anything we’ve seen evidence of the Cat Clique doing yet.
(This might be a decision made for a target audience – this story is slower-burning and less overtly rapey than ATR’s usual works, so they might have decided this was critical to keep a certain demographic of his readers invested by overtly making it clear the story was still going somewhere they will enjoy. If so, this does do the job without sacrificing too much, but it does make it harder to consider Jake and Madison the good guys and not just the “not as bad” guys.)
That theme continues to build with two events. First, we meet girl number 3 in the main character's harem, Daniela. Jake’s plan to hook her into the plan turns out to be pretty heavy-handed, but the story slaps him down for it, with Madison pointing out that it was stupid and fucked up that he ended up more or less tying her to him specifically forever with a sloppy Leash, and he could and should have accomplished the same goal in a more generic way. This theme continues after Daniela figures out what has been done to her, and becomes a reluctant member of their troop. I thought this whole segment with Daniela still having all the fetishes he gave her, but refusing to go through with any of it, was an excellent way to set up the contrast between the Silver Leash and actual mind control (more on that in part 3).
A note here about Amy (Harem girl number 1, and presumably the main love interest of the story). Her role in this story is… pretty weak, and Madison’s role as a Deuteragonist with Leashes and Daniela’s role as a mole and a resisting member of the harem largely overshadow her. The main reason for this is that Jake and Amy don’t get to actually play off each other too much in a way that keeps the plot moving forward – almost every scene they have together is great and/or sexy, but they all come with a functional pause button preventing it from going further: Jake is afraid, correctly, that he can’t control his Leashes around her, and if he takes her to bed he is going to start Leashing stuff and will do something they are both going to regret… he needs to get better control over his power before he’s willing to risk it. This makes a ton of sense as a plot point, and helps win him back some sympathy points after the Cat Clique plan, but it also means their relationship kinda doesn’t go anywhere over the course of book 1. I don’t know if this book was originally intended to be split into multiple parts or not, but I feel like Jake should have progressed enough to do SOMETHING more with her by the end of the novel, story-telling-structurally speaking. Plot-wise, I agree that he has not, so more learning would have been inserted somewhere. I’m not sure how I’d fix this, but I do think it is an issue.
We also, during one of his scenes with Amy, get an expansion on the magic system that is not mentioned again, presumably because Jake is a dumb newbie and never mentioned it to Madison – Golden Leash. I would assume, based just on the color, that this is a more powerful and/or slightly different kind of lash that can be done, probably with romantic interest… but since Amy is off limits, we don’t get to see more yet… he rejects the idea firmly. This does appear to be something different though, and this does pay off later…
Finally, for a pure bit of critique… Angel sucks. He feels like a nothing character, but gets mentioned too often to be a nothing character. I feel like he might kinda matter in the future, but I think ATR had a lot of work to do to get me to care about him in any positive light at all.
The next section gets into major spoilers for the two major resolution of this book: Jake’s family history, and Gwen’s reversal. If you haven’t read the book but it sounds interesting, this is your last chance to stop and read it before I go into the ending, what happens, what works, and what I’d have done differently. Read it – this review will still be here when you finish.
Section III – Climax.
The two major plot events of the climax are how Gwen ultimately gets broken, and the details of Jake’s father.
In order to crack Gwen, they need a wound in her self-confidence big enough to let Jake in and start leashing things. They were working on it, but Gwen ultimately figures out how the good guys are trying to fuck her over before they can finish, and traps them. This culminates in a great scene that shows off how awful Gwen is when cutting loose (which is important to remind us of, since we’re supposed to still be rooting for Jake and company after this), and Jake manages to uno-reverse-card the situation by telling her that her father is a fraud, is going to prison, and is actually broke. This works to let them in, leading to a smoking hot sex scene and victory.
This isn’t bad, but personally I also can’t help but feel it’s a wasted opportunity. This is probably super personal, but this lie and how it's presented feels a little too flimsy to crack her like an egg, but the right one was (in my opinion) right there. She knows they were leaving cameras out in the house, and roughly what they were trying to accomplish, and she assumes that it was all about her because she is a self-important bitch whose full of herself (I mean, she’s right, but she has no way of knowing that).
I feel like the smarter version of this lie is something like “Too bad your daddy is going to prison, but don’t worry… I’m sure you can hitchhike up there to see him, or take the train. What? Oh, that’s adorable. You noticed we spent a bunch of money buying expensive spy cameras to spy on your family, and assumed you were the one we were recording and not your rich daddy? That’s hilarious, Gwen. Hilarious and real dumb.” The lie proceeds the same from there, and this is a logical lie that is a lot harder for Gwen to refute… because without knowing Jake has magical mind control powers, it’s a much saner reason to be doing what he’s doing. Also, it's another blow to her security and ego to be so viciously shown that the world doesn’t revolve around her and, in fact, she wasn’t important at all to what they are doing.
The scene still works to get up a wonderfully hot sex scene, and to remind us how Gwen is the worst before it happens, but I feel like it could have been improved.
Jake’s father, on the other hand, is done perfectly.
We learn fairly early in the story that Jake’s dad Dean was a massive piece of shit, and the exemplar of how not to use this power… and a large part of the reason Madison was so interested in slapping down Jake early and often. He used his power without restraint or morality, turning everyone around him into his slaves and sex toys. We are told the rest of the family dealt with him, and its implied he was forced to just walk away and never come back.
Now we see him, and if anything, Madison undersold how awful he is.
We see what actually happened to him, and everything about this scene is hot and makes sense. His family had leashed him practically into madness, and left him in a sanitarium, and they keep checking in on him to make sure he’s still captive and useless. The only issue is… they are wrong. He’s escaping, today. And he wants his son back.
This scene is the perfect culmination and expansion of the magic system. I mentioned earlier that the magic system made me wonder what happens if you pushed it in a few ways mentor Madison didn’t think about or mention, and now most of those questions I had get answered and pay off. We learned earlier that leashes are permanent and can’t really be removed, but they can be ignored… by giving yourself multiple lashings the other way, and layering them on top of each other until your kink for being powerless becomes insignificant compared to your raging lust for being powerful. By leashing himself over and over and over again, he has slowly been able to pick away at the bindings on him without driving himself mad – or at least, leaving him no more mad than he was already.
How Dean was defeated and how get gets free are a mirror image of each other as well, which is ironic and useful. His family managed to get to him with a gay relative, who was logically able to Leash him without being Leashed himself. The same problem happens now with his newest warden, who is a lesbian and unable to Leash him while able to be leashed. It’s a neat parallel construction, and makes a lot of sense.
Finally, we get a new magic extension: his Midnight Leash, which is something he’s been working on while captive. It works a little closer to mind control than the silver leash does – fundamentally, it still works the same, but the target isn’t aware of what they are doing. In this way, it functions more like hypnosis usually does in this genre of stories. It still isn’t QUITE mind control though. More on this later.
After raping his captor, he keeps her around as his newest stooge, and escapes, presumably going to find Jake. 10/10 scene, no notes. This scene pays off readers for paying attention and thinking about how the systems could work, then tells them they were right. It also expands it to up the stakes for next book.
Personally, I do hope that he is a secondary villain of this series, and not the main villain. This is just a structural thing – since we set up the Cat Clique… and Cat’s piece-of-work mother… as the main antagonist at the start, and we don’t see him at all until basically the epilogue of book 1, it would feel a little bad if he completely usurps the main villain role in the story, just by being the absolute worst. I hope he is a secondary villain, there to mostly be a foil to Jake and cause problems for him, Madison, and Amy, while not taking over the villain role completely. Either way, I won’t be disappointed, but… see below.
Section IV – Predictions
Because I know I always like to read these from my readers. If they are invested enough to be reading closely, noticing things, and guessing what happens next, I know they are really into the story.
Prediction 1) Cat or Karen Weatherwill have the Silver Leash, or something similar we haven’t found out about.
There are two hanging plot threads here. The first is Miss Natalie Weaver – why was she targeted, why was she masturbating in school to be recorded (and how did they know she would be?) and why is she obeying their blackmail so thoroughly afterward? The second is that Gwen is utterly convinced that she has been Mind Controlled by Jake, and has to obey him, and we know that is now how his power actually works. Putting these together, Gwen has seen a power like this in use before – either someone is lying to her about how it works, or it does work differently. The logical person to have this powerful, both in universe and from a meta consideration of the story structure is either Cat or her mother, and I’m inclined to think it’s Cat, because:
Prediction 2) Karen and Cat are connected to Dean.
We know that Dean had enslaved his wife Miriam and built a harem of slaves and prostitutes around himself. We also know that Karen and Miriam went to school together, and they are still living in the same town now. This all highly implies that all of this is still happening with the same web of people, in the same place. I strongly suspect that Cat is Dean’s daughter. I also hope that Karen is not just another thoroughly leashed and corrupted victim of Dean, but instead is closer to being the source of his fucked up worldview and morality. ATR writes gender traitors well, so I think it would be hot, but I also hope Karen is thoroughly a villain in her own right for storytelling reasons.
Prediction 3) We have not seen enough collateral damage from Dean yet, but we will.
We know that freeing Miriam from Dean basically turned her ace, but she is the only victim of Dean’s that it is specifically mentioned by Madison that the family tried to undo and turn back into a functional person. This implies that a) his other victims, fucked as they were, were still good enough to proceed with life, or b) that they don’t know about who all of them are. Given that I’m pretty sure nearly all of them should be in this town, I think there is some really dark stuff still going on beneath the surface here where innocent eyes like Jake and Madison and Amy and Daniela haven’t seen it yet… but we will.
I look forward to future entries! You can read any work by ATR on his website, https://alltheseroadworks.com/. I enjoy him quite a bit, and I hope you will, too.
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