Cleansed cover art

Cleansed

Chaos Reigns Trilogy Book 1

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Cleansed

By: G. S. Scott
Narrated by: Sean Duregger
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £14.99

Buy Now for £14.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

The world is in the grasp of the God of Chaos, his only mantra: Do as Thou Wilt. In the slums of Tuilar, Dirge is an apprentice to the Brotherhood of Assassins who worship the god of Death. His only friend Jacob, a jovial young man, feels at home in the world as it is, but Dirge craves structure.

When Chaos orchestrates the Cleansing, a mass slaughter of children, people stand up against him. Amid the revolt, the prophet of the forgotten God of Order appears. Drawn to the ways of Order, Dirge finds himself at odds with those who raised him. The gods of Chaos, Death, and Order clash, their followers facing off in bloody battle, and Dirge must decide whether to honor his adopted family or the calling to his heart. Jacob believes they should stay out of the fray, wanting nothing to do with any of it.

Hope and honor are Dirge’s shield as he wallows in uncertainty and remorse. The gods are at play, and the world is their game board. How can Dirge choose when men and gods alike are deceitful? The decision he makes may well damn him.

©2018 Scott Smith (P)2020 Scott Smith Epic Fantasy Fantasy Young Adult Fiction Heartfelt

Listeners also enjoyed...

 We Who Burn cover art
Jarren Heartwood cover art
The Antiheroes cover art
The King Must Fall cover art
Ascendant cover art
Web of Eyes cover art
Crimson cover art
Paragon cover art
The Ties That Bind Trilogy cover art
Sins of the Father cover art
The Red Hunter cover art
Monsters Omnibus cover art
Child of the Flames cover art
New Spring cover art
Six of Crows cover art
Elantris (1 of 3) [Dramatized Adaptation] cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
I loved the narration of Sean Duregger, is perfect and makes you see the characters

This is a dark fantasy , you will taken on a journey of waring Gods, Clans families. It’s hard to know right from wrong and who to trust.

enjoyed

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The Lord of chaos has one rule do as you wish. They really have no rules and no structure and I was well. Until the Lord of chaos was a great cleanse and to start with he wants to kill all the children and for the first time in this crazy and wielding society some start to think maybe the Lord of chaos it’s not as great as we thought he Was. Durge has never felt comfortable in this world and the older you get the more he disagrees with his adoptive family, unlike his best friend Jason who is fine with the status quote. It isn’t until the brought that God of order appears that garage DOC has something to fight for and it will fit him against those he loves those cows friends. This book was so good and unlike most chaos that’s going to be a method to this madness and it will blow your mind I believe that’s going to be a book to and if so I can’t wait to read it. I really love the judge I love the world building when they said the leader was the Lord OF chaos I thought it was another book about Trump, but know this is hell real well and man is it entertaining. I thought Sean Drager who usually does such a great job did a freaking awesome job in the spot. He was good in the devils gospel but in cleansed he should win some kind of award he is one of my favorite narrator in this audiobook is a great example why. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes alternate universes with Picture perfect descriptions likable and those you love to eat it’s all in this book and I can’t think of one thing I didn’t like about it.

All hell is broken loose and it’s normal

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I was offered a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review...

Cleansed, which is either the first book in a series or the second - depending on where you look - follows the exploits of Dirge, an Orphan who has been indoctrinated into a league of assassins at a young age. The world around Dirge is defined by the conflict between a variety of fundamentalist faith systems and when one of these, The Lord of Chaos, orders the murder of all first born as a sacrifice to it Dirge finds himself on a brutal course to defend the innocent.

However, all is not quite as it seems and Dirge's journey is not a simple one.

To begin with I was not all that impressed with G. S. Scott's Cleansed, probably due mainly to Scott's choice to begin his tale very early in Dirge's life and leaving me with three or four chapters in which very little seemed to happen. I didn't take much from these chapters and it seemed to me that starting later and essentially jumping into the action sooner would have been a better option, perhaps telling the earlier episodes in flashback, but this was not to be.

I persevered and was glad that I did. Once the story begin to come together it comes together rather well, with interesting characters and an increasingly shifting story where no one is clearly heroes or villains.

The narration was done by the usually very reliable Sean Duregger and for the first time I was in two minds about his performance with Cleansed. Usually I like his narrations a great deal but in this case I found it a little grating in parts. This was mainly due to the accents he used for many of the characters. I have to say here that I am English and in my job I routinely have meetings with people from all over the UK, so I am used to a variety of British accents (in addition to having my own of course) and none of Sean's accents seemed quite right to my ear and it was only when I consistently reminded myself that this was set in an alternative fantasy land, with inhabitants who just happened to have British sounding accents, that I managed to get past it.

I imagine the vast majority of listeners will not be bothered by this in the slightest, and many will be impressed with it as Sean does quite an impressive range of accents for this tale, as well as many different characters. So I think it likely that most will disagree with my thoughts concerning his use of accents, and they may be right to; as on a second listen I may even disagree with myself!

Overall Cleansed was a good experience, far better than I imagined it being and well worth your time if you enjoy dark fantasy stories. I liked it enough that I would listen to further stories in the series, and it has even made me consider seeking out something similar to read in the future in a genre I usually do not read; which to me sounds like an endorsement!

Not what I was expecting...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I received a free copy of this audiobook for an unbiased review.

This novel feels like an 18+ movie that's been subjected to overzealous editing so as to achieve a 15 rating. It so desperately wants to be "grimdark" but just falls slightly short of the mark despite meeting a lot of the criteria for such an appellation. Due to various religions being the growth medium for the plot it reminds me greatly of "Wolf in Shadow" by David Gemmell but the erratic storytelling can be jarring at times. The main character, Dirge, is hard to pin down to any one archetype being neither a hero, antihero or villain and it's this complexity that'll draw you in more than the plot.

The audio is crisp with no noticeable fluctuations in volume or quality. Sean Duregger's narration is smooth and each character is easily discernable from another which is quite an achievement considering the numbers he has to contend with.

Overall this is not the strongest opening to a trilogy but there is enough intrigue to warrant listening to book 2.

Has potential

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.