Content Warning: This guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of sexual offenses and sexual violence, sexism and sexist slurs, stalking, graphic gun violence and torture, and drug and alcohol use disorders. This guide also refers to the novel’s explicit depictions of sexual practices, including ones that mimic acts of sexual violence. Examples include consenting nonconsent or prearranged “rape” fantasies (the text uses the term “forced sex” fantasy, which is replicated in this guide), breath play/erotic asphyxiation, and degradation during sex. In addition, The Ritual features scenarios that it frames as “dubious consent” or “dubcon,” which are controversial terms developed in fanfiction communities to refer to supposed instances of questionable consent.

In The Ritual, power is seductive. The Lords will pay any cost to have it: Initiates kill and torture for the right to be included among the Lords, a position that guarantees professional and financial success. Yet the novel’s presentation of whether these acts are a true cost of power or a contrived one is ambiguous. Frequently, the novel suggests that the so-called “price” of power is just a way to keep its members in line, making power the purview of the Lords in a manner that is distinct from the power of its individual members.