Rating: 3.5 stars
Buy Link: Amazon | All Romance | Amazon UK
Length: Novel
Making Men is an erotic fantasy set in a world where only men exist. It is commonplace for men in this world to have polyamorous relationships and incest isn’t a taboo. Rather, it is expected that men in a familial relationship will be loving and giving (emotionally and sexually) to the young men they raise.
Tony and Kevin are at college and have a close bond—Kevin has regular BDSM sessions with Tony as his sub, but they also do the vanilla thing, too. Tony’s younger nephew arrives, and Tony is immediately involved in the enterprise of turning “the boy” into a man. Tony laments how cold his uncles are, and how they didn’t do their duty to the boy, but he eagerly takes up this mantle. To be clear, Tony is roughly 22 and the boy, his nephew, is 18. They have sex together and (eventually) with Kevin. I was kinda put off by this, but I was almost inured to the “shock” because there had been a lot of random sex leading up to that point blunting the incest-sex impact. Tony and the boy’s relationship is not the only example of incest; others talk about having sex with their fathers in great detail.
Again, this is erotica, and the making of men involves a lot of sex. It begins at waking and it ends when everyone is too exhausted to make more seed. Speaking of seed, it is a big part of the narrative, as the men in this book revere semen. They like it everywhere. They leave it everywhere. (This includes beds, stairs, hallway walls, the grass outside, and within as many men as will take it…yes, everywhere.)
As far as the plot goes, I struggled to find a thread of it. The book is a collection of vignettes that follow the escapades of Kevin, Tony, and the boy. Despite being a triad, they are not exclusive, and they make connections with other men at school seemingly all the time. For the bulk of the vignettes, Kevin, Tony, and the boy have a lot of sex together, or with others. Until they don’t. And yes, that transition—from loving open triad to amiable see y’all around—was just as abrupt within the book.
Initial world building was absent. I almost thought this was contemporary until I recognized that there were no women in the world. At all. Being devoid of women meant that the men had to procreate, yet the manner of this was never discussed. Some unsexy issues (read: scat play) were given page time, however. This book reminded me of Anne Rice’s Beauty series due to the ethereal setting and the unprotected sex with strangers that never stops.
Unfortunately, I didn’t really connect well with any of the characters. Kevin is overly intellectual about sex and seed. He waxes on and on about how experience and learning make seed better, and each man should always be improving his seed to share with the others—to improve their seed. Tony is totally loving to Kevin and the boy, but then he goes and cools off entirely. And the boy is young, selfish, and immature. He seems self-sabotaging and it irked me. By the end, I liked them all far less than at the beginning, but that was a shortcoming of the plot as the paths Kevin, Tony, and the boy embark upon are melancholy and divergent. It was an interesting read—not a romance—thus, not my fave kind of book. Any kind of sex that men can have alone, with each other, as a group, or in their minds is on the page, including some BDSM scenes and a gang-bang that left me, and the boy, ice cold. While I didn’t find all of it sexy, there were some very hot scenes, to be sure. I’d say it’s a Happy For Now ending for some of the guys, and a sketchy resolution for others. I did learn the boy’s actual name, but by that time I didn’t care much.
