Title: Captive in the Dark: The Dark Duet (Volume 1)
Author: C.J. Roberts
Publisher: C.J. Roberts (29 Aug 2011)
ISBN: 978-0615429502
I’m pretty bombproof when it comes to subject matter – there’s not a lot that can shock me – but if I’m going to tackle something harrowing, the balance has to be absolutely perfect: the writing has to be solid, the story clever, the characters worth the emotional investment. So having read the synopsis for this book on Amazon and come face-to-face with the pretty blunt warning about its content (‘This book contains very disturbing situations, dubious consent, strong language, and graphic violence’), I wondered how I would get on with Captive in the Dark and what I might be letting myself in for.
An amazing book, as it turned it. I am not exaggerating when I say C.J. Roberts – who wrote and published Captive in the Dark herself – had me in the palm of her hand from the prologue. Lately, it’s been a bit of a struggle to find BDSM erotica books that stand out from the crowd and have something truly unique about them (one power exchange plot can start to feel very much like another) but Captive had me absolutely glued. To the point that I couldn’t even put it down to do the dishes – and let me tell you, scrubbing a dirty pot one-handed is hard. I devoured the entire book in a day, that’s how good it was, and then immediately visited C.J. Roberts’s website to find out when Volume 2, Seduced in the Dark, was due. (As you’ve probably guessed from the title, Captive in the Dark is part of a series.)
The premise is a challenging one. The book’s prologue introduces us to Caleb, who is, for all intents and purposes, stalking eighteen-year-old Olivia Ruiz (Livvie), a poor high school student living in a not-so-savoury part of Los Angeles. Caleb is a slave trainer – a man who teaches girls to become pleasure slaves for the gratification of wealthy men – and he plans to kidnap Olivia, smuggle her out of the United States, train her, and sell her at auction in Pakistan. Olivia’s sale has a purpose other than money, though; it will help him instigate a revenge plot against a man named Vladek Rostrovich – a shady Russian whose past is inextricably tied to Caleb’s.
When the book begins in earnest, we learn that Olivia’s abduction has taken place and, unbeknownst to her, she is en route to Mexico. Her kidnapping is traumatic enough in and of itself, but her arrival over the border is when her nightmare really begins. It signals the start of a dark psychological battle between her and her captor, Caleb, who is absolutely determined to break Olivia down to her core in order to create the perfect, saleable, sex slave. Olivia is equally determined to fight and resist him – even if it means bringing the full force of Caleb raining down upon her. And when I say force, I really do mean it. (‘I like to hurt you Kitten…it’s what gets me off.’)
For all intents and purposes, this is a story about human trafficking but C.J. Roberts doesn’t make it anywhere near that simple for the reader. Against all odds, she manages to grab hold of this incredibly emotive and difficult subject and turn it into something dark, edgy and powerful. The key to her success? Well, in my opinion it’s largely to do with her amazing and brilliant characterisation of Caleb. As I read the prologue, I wondered how on earth she was going to redeem this man – a human being who is single-minded in his focus, and almost (almost) completely remorseless about what he is doing.
‘There was only one obstacle between him and vengeance. The last true test of his soullessness – wilfully stripping someone of their freedom.
He’d trained so many he no longer remembered their names. He could train this one too …’
And the short answer is that she doesn’t. At least, not in the way that you expect her to. Caleb is absolutely a product of abuse and the criminal underworld he’s a part of – sadistic, cruel and unforgiving – and Roberts doesn’t give into the temptation to give him a hearts and flowers makeover to make things easier on the reader. Not even when Olivia’s thoughts and emotions start to become tangled towards him. What she does do, however, is let us to glimpse where Caleb has come from and in doing so, helps us understand why he behaves the way he does. Despite wanting to hate him, I began to find myself torn in my feelings towards Caleb and, heaven forbid, seeing him as being deserving of sympathy. He is the ultimate anti-hero.
In heaping praise on the characterisation of Caleb, I can’t fault that of Olivia either. Given the bleak nightmare she is thrust into, she has your empathy from the very beginning but as the novel progresses, she also gains your respect. She is fundamentally powerless against Caleb but that doesn’t stop her from trying to escape the horror she finds herself in. She has grit, but she also has a sense of self-preservation.
Interestingly, Captive in the Dark is told in both the third person and first person, with Caleb’s thoughts and actions being observed and Olivia’s coming directly from her. Reflecting on it, this was a smart choice on the author’s part because it allows the reader to experience the full impact of the trauma and abuse that falls upon Olivia (‘I was my pain and nothing else. No thoughts, no emotions, only a body screaming to be released’) and to examine Caleb’s rationale for the way he behaves at a slight distance – almost in the same way that he examines himself. This becomes more and more important as the book progresses and he tries to understand his increasingly complex feelings towards his captive (‘He wondered, not for the first time, what the fuck he was thinking. He knew this was the last thing he should be doing, inviting her into his space’). When the tenuous thread of humanity that’s present in him emerges, it is all the more believable because we’ve been able to see what has led to its appearance. Ultimately, the reader becomes as confused as Olivia is about Caleb; he stands as a dark, yet steady beacon within the even darker world Olivia has been dragged kicking and screaming into. Is she suffering from Stockholm syndrome? Is the reader, for that matter?
If I had to pick on one thing to improve Captive, it would be the editing. As with a most self-published books, it could have been a little tighter. There were some punctuation errors and some minor typos but, really, for an indie title, the standard was pretty good.
Captive in the Dark won’t be for everyone. It is gritty, twisted, and goes places some readers will be uncomfortable with. However, if you are open-minded and enjoy the psychological dynamics of power-exchange (in this case, not quite consensual and with a heavy dose of sadism) I think you’ll devour this book. I can’t say it’s an ‘enjoyable read’ – the subject matter doesn’t allow it to be – but it is undeniably erotic and disturbing in equal measure and I cannot wait for the second instalment to be released in September.
Read it. I dare you.
Captive in the Dark: The Dark Duet (Volume 1) is available from: Amazon.co.uk (Kindle ; paperback), Amazon.com (Kindle ; paperback).
