Blood and Lust

Oliver Frey (Zack) and writer Roger Kean are strong on dastardly, sadistic villains and they don't come much nastier than in this book in which kids are hijacked off the streets to provide live gladiatorial fodder for a sick live and DVD audience. The other side of the coin is that the dregs scraped from the street, especially Clint, a London east-end hustler, turn out to have within them the stuff of heroes. As in all the best adventures, just when all seems lost, good triumphs over evil. Better still, Clint and his companions in adversity are all hot, sexy guys whose lust for life and each other is fired up by the peril of their circumstances. If the villains are brutal, then the young guys forced to be gladiators, are hot, raunchy, hard as iron but with hearts of gold. Clint reams and creams his way to a magnificent climax - and not just in bed with the seductive Danny who becomes the love of his life. Zack's drawings leave deliciously little to the imagination. Keep them coming.

I have read most of Zack books, because there has only been one that fell below his usual standard. Blood & Lust is one of his best. If you know Zack's stories at all you will know that they have a male tomale sex theme but they also have a good story so they do not fall into the trap of just being pornography with a very poor story. Try one of his books you will either like them or hate them. This a good book.

I bought Blond & Lust via Amazon`s sister site Bookdepository but liked the book so much I thought I should make a recommendation on here also. Roger Kean and Zack have been producing great gay fiction for some years now alongside their other writing and artistic projects. And Blood & Lust is a clear example of the synergy that exists between this pair of craftsmen of the written word and drawn line, and it is, in my opinion, probably one of the best they have produced of its kind to date, albeit as Charles Edward, who also helped bring this book about in its revised form, called it `a little dark.` And in all honesty it is a `dark` homoerotic romance within which Roger Kean does not pull any punches in his story telling, and neither do the characters in this tale of blood intermingled with physical lust beautifully illustrated by Zack. Roger Kean has authored several volumes on classical civilisations, as well as his sensual works, and clearly he has drawn on this frame of reference to essentially mesh together in this book a tale of the old and the new with verisimilitude. Where the butchery of the Circus in Rome is brought up to date and tempered with the modern attitudes to those who are surplus and without purpose in our largely metropolitan World. Think Gladiator and Spartacus mixed up together with the awful arena of `chav bating` on the Jeremy Kyle Show and you have the elements of the book. And as such it asks a pertinent question in the process of reading; what happens to those who are on the fringes who are now normally despised and won`t be missed? Blood & Lust gives us the most nightmarish of scenarios of what could be happening right now to those lost boys. And Roger Kean skilfully tells their story in language that both thrills and at times sickens the reader with ruddy realism painted in his compelling words on the page and backed by Zack`s wonderful drawing accompaniment. Mixing effortlessly what is historic brutality with the base appetite for histrionics so current now in our media; so that bloody barbarism and lustful buggery are joined together on the pages and leap up to thrill, startle and then stun us as we read. Blood & Lust is not a lovely story, it is searing one that is `dark` but there is light at the end of the tunnel and the journey to the end in this book`s telling of Clint and his combatant comrades in arms is not the happiest, but it is one of the best books of its kind I have read of late. That delivers a real and uncomfortable perspective on modern life and the attitudes that have been foisted on us by those who have `dark` minds and even darker tastes, who operate in plain sight of us all and so the story acts as a cautionary tale. Such that Roger Kean gives us the commercial Coliseum within the pages of Blood & Lust, and then, as now, there is the strict dichotomy of roles - the select few watch from on high and denigrate those beneath, each aping the roles of Gods and monsters in fabled antiquity. This book shows that again but further it teaches the reader of our age to reflect and recognise who really are the `Gods` and who are the real monsters. A great read with fantastically sexy illustrations.