Gale Ian Tate
Self-Published
26 December 2025
444
eBook - EPUB
MM Dark Romance
ARC via NetGalley
Vale tastes potential like other men taste wine—notes of desperation, hints of untapped brilliance, the full-bodied flavor of someone ripe for unmaking. Kieran plays for spare change in subway filth, that stuttering voice transforming into something holy only when he sings. Sick. Abandoned. Already intimate with the architecture of suffering.
Exquisite.
In Vale's remote studio, lessons in music become lessons in metamorphosis. The basement grows familiar with the symphony of Kieran's breaking—canvas bags and careful suffocation, fingers that teach through calculated trauma, the wet percussion of tears against concrete.
Each session strips another layer. Each perfectly placed touch rewrites the boundaries between salvation and damnation.
In the space between breaths, between the hand that holds the throat and the mouth that gasps for air, something hungry awakens. Kieran writes "Poison Saviors" with blood under his fingernails, not knowing he's penning their wedding vows. Not understanding that when he finally kisses back, he's teaching Vale a new kind of suffocation.
And Vale, collector of broken beautiful things, discovers too late that some possessions hollow you out from the inside—leaving you desperate for the very poison you've been feeding.
Discordant Cultivation is a book that is hard to review and rate given the dark, toxic relationship it portrays, as there's a part of me that feels rating such a book highly suggests acceptance that such a relationship is okay or encouraged. However, I am going to set that aside and look at it purely academically. This book is certainly very dark; however, the author offers an extensive warning about that before the story begins, which should be enough to discourage any readers who could potentially find this work too much. Once we launched in, things kicked off rapidly and the intense relationship between Vale and Kieran began. I thought the early dynamic was interesting and worked well; however, as the book progressed, it began to feel a bit too familiar and repetitive in some places, while in others the lengths Vale was going to occasionally sat right on the line of what I could find acceptable, and I am generally open to a bit of darkness and toxicity in my reading and viewing. The song lyrics were interesting and I could see them working well in a real song; although I struggled to imagine how the songs sounded from the limited description provided. I figure they'd sit in a sort of emo-indie-rock area. The ending took me a little by surprise, but it felt satisfying in a way too. All up, I have decided to give this book 3.5 stars. I felt it could have done with a little trimming here and there to avoid repetition, and it is certainly a niche work that is not going to suit everyone's reading palate, but if dark toxicity is your thing, it's definitely worth a read.
I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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