https://tsade.com/nine-sisters/puppy-mill/puppy-mill-01/
t’Sade seems to have been writing and enjoying smut fiction for a long time (the oldest mirror of his site on the Wayback machine dates back to 2001, though I guess it could go way back even more). t’Sade’s writing is covering a wide range from fantasy to science fiction and present-day stuff with some twists, often on the more hardcore side of things. Lots of his fiction is free, but you can also support via Patreon or SubscribeStar or follow on Twitter. Puppy Mill is the longest piece of smut you can read for free on his side.
It’s not often that you read a smut piece of fiction that clocks in at over 1300 pages (my ebook-reader count) and manages to keep you interested until the end without ever wavering or having anything I would call filler (filler defined as long-ass boring sections I would prefer to not read to get on with a narrative). Though I’m not sure calling Puppy Mill smut is doing it justice. It’s really a massive fantasy novel, actually two-in-one, that accidentally has some kind of porn on almost every page, covering lots of fetishes ranging from the harder to the hardest, including some tiny parts going into Dolcett-territory that could catch the unwary unprepared, though given what has happened until then it’s clear this isn’t for our vanilla friends.
I say two novels in one since you could easily break down the narrative into two major parts, the abduction of the main character Merrie and other people from the streets of her home town via magic, the following enslavement, training, and transformation into puppy girls (Merrie and the other women, though there’s one puppy boy as well), human sex slaves forced to behave like dogs, with their arms and legs cropped and their minds conditioned to follow their owners every whim (and in most cases except Merrie’s most of them start to think like dogs eventually). If that idea seems horrifying and not arousing, you should really not start reading this, as it’s the core of the story and what drives the first 500 pages or so. Merrie’s and the other women’s enslavement is really well handled, with lots of in-depth detail that covers basically all the moments from their capture, how they get trained by the different trainers at the puppy mill until their sales at the end of that arc. It’s also the part that worked best to give me an endless boner just from that.
We get little hints of the larger world this is taking place in, that to me seems like a slightly unhinged version of the Forgotten Realms, but the focus is really on the enslavement and breaking of the women at the puppy mill, on the psychology of the puppies and their trainers, building it all up with a lot of patience. Each of the puppy trainers is introduced in turn and their personal history is slowly unraveled until you reach a moment when you start to like them, despite the fact that they abduct people and force them to become sex slaves (well, I mean this turns me on, but you get why this should make them bad people objectively). And at this point, the story also introduces the first major villain, who given the overall arc of the book is more of a lightweight, but at this point does enough damage to feel like a serious threat.
What the book does really well from start to finish for most of its villains is to give us insight into their minds and histories, why they do what do and why they are in a confrontation with the main protagonists. And yet you don’t feel compelled to forgive them, they are for the most part truly evil villains you love to hate, and yet they are not some caricature evil guys doing it for the lulz or with no explanation at all. There’s a method behind the madness, which makes them all the more fun.
And if you’re wondering if the owners of the puppy mill are among the villains, yeah, wrong guess. They are among the good guys, and yet never stop their thing of taking and breaking women. It’s fetish fiction after all and this fantasy world follows slightly different rules. But not entirely.
At this point, I should probably explain why I mentioned that the first half of the book gave me a boner all the time, while the second half didn’t do as much. It’s the weirdest thing, there’s just as much sex as in the first half, but the main character has become so powerful that despite being utterly submissive, is the driving force for many developments and the sweet semi-non-consensual submission of her in the first half just doesn’t carry the same weight. Power creep has taken place, and Merrie, who is a true submissive in the sense that she gets empowered by submitting, gets powered up so much (magically) that she can take out most critters that could have threatened her at the start of the story.
This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the second half (which is basically chronicling Merrie getting sold, returning to her home town and the events that transpired there, and finally her return to the puppy mill). If there ever was an almost perfect example for “I came for the porn, I stayed for the plot”, this is it. Halfway into the book I was so invested in the characters, the world it created, and what was happening on the plot-level, I wouldn’t have stopped for anything. And as I said at the beginning, the book never gets boring. It throws so many clever and inventive curveballs you don’t see coming and sometimes you just want to applaud the author for how much he put into the story (e.g. the retroactive rape was a neat narrative device I really liked). There are proper fantasy series that never get as interesting as this one.
I probably should say something about the ending as well, since that’s one of the hardest thing for any author to do. That said, as a reader, I love a perfect ending, one that leaves me utterly satisfied, where I can close the book and not feel like I’m missing out on anything. I was actually expecting the book to meander from this plot token to that until it petered out somewhere, but instead, it managed to go back to where it all started, bring all major plot threads (including personal character arcs) full circle, introduced a villain basically hinted since the beginning and where I didn’t expect the author to actually go for it, and then ended it just perfect.
For something you can read for free, which admittedly suffers from a lack of professional editing (though given the size of the book and the nature of its content, that’s understandable), this is a massive boon and if you’re in the center of a Venn diagram that has two circles, one for fantasy and one for extreme BDSM, then this is pretty enjoyable. And the author is also working on a sequel, so yay.
Plaguehound's Lair 