Review:
Long Live Evil, by Sarah Rees Brennan
| Series: |
Time of Iron #1 |
| Publisher: |
Orbit |
| Copyright: |
July 2024 |
| ISBN: |
0-316-56872-4 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
433 |
Long Live Evil is a portal fantasy (or, arguably more precisely, a
western take on an isekai villainess fantasy) and the first book
of a series. If the author's name sounds familiar, it's possibly because
of
In Other Lands, which got a bunch of award nominations in 2018,
She has also written a lot of other YA fantasy, but this is her first
adult epic fantasy novel.
Rae is in the hospital, dying of cancer. Everything about that
experience, from the obvious to the collapse of her friendships,
absolutely fucking sucks. One of the few bright points is her sister's
favorite fantasy series,
Time of Iron, which her sister started
reading to her during chemo sessions. Rae mostly failed to pay attention
until the end of the first book and the rise of the Emperor. She fell in
love with the brooding, dangerous anti-hero and devoured the next two
books. The first book was still a bit hazy, though, even with the help of
a second dramatic reading after she was too sick to read on her own.
This will be important later.
After one of those reading sessions, Rae wakes up to a strange woman in
her hospital room who offers her an option. Rather than die a miserable
death that bankrupts her family, she can go through a door to Eyam, the
world of
Time of Iron, and become the character who suits her best.
If she can steal the Flower of Life and Death from the imperial greenhouse
on the one day a year that it blooms, she will wake up, cured. If not,
she will die. Rae of course goes through, and wakes in the body of Lady
Rahela, the Beauty Dipped in Blood, the evil stepsister. One of the
villains, on the night before she is scheduled to be executed.
Rae's initial panic slowly turns to a desperate glee. She knows all of
these characters. She knows how the story will turn out. And she has a
healthy body that's not racked with pain. Maybe she's not the heroine,
but who cares, the villains are always more interesting anyway. If she's
going to be cast as the villain, she's going to play it to the hilt. It's
not like any of these characters are
real.
Stories in which the protagonists are the villains are not new
(
Nimona and
Hench come to mind just among books I've reviewed), but they are
having a moment.
Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer
came out last year, and this book and Django Wexler's
How to Become
the Dark Lord and Die Trying both came out this year. This batch of
villain books all take different angles on the idea, but they lean heavily
on humor. In
Long Live Evil, that takes the form of Rae's giddy
embrace of villainous scheming, flouncing, and blatant plot manipulation,
along with her running commentary on the various characters and their
in-story fates.
The setup here is great. Rae is not only aware that she's in a story, she
knows it's full of cliches and tropes. Some of them she loves, some of
them she thinks are ridiculous, and she isn't shy about expressing both of
those opinions. Rae is a naturally dramatic person, and it doesn't take
her long to lean into the opportunities for making dramatic monologues and
villainous quips, most of which involve modern language and pop culture
references that the story characters find baffling and disconcerting.
Unfortunately, the base
Time of Iron story is, well, bad. It's
absurd grimdark epic fantasy with paper-thin characters and angst as a
central character trait. This is clearly intentional for both in-story
and structural reasons. Rae enjoys it precisely because it's full of
blood and battles and over-the-top brooding, malevolent anti-heroes, and
Rae's sister likes the impossibly pure heroes who suffer horrible fates
while refusing to compromise their ideals. Rae is also about to turn the
story on its head and start smashing its structure to try to get herself
into position to steal the Flower of Life and Death, and the story has to
have a simple enough structure that it doesn't get horribly confusing once
smashed. But the original story is such a grimdark parody, and so not my
style of fantasy, that I struggled with it at the start of the book.
This does get better eventually, as Rae introduces more and more
complications and discovers some surprising things about the other
characters. There are several delightful twists concerning the impossibly
pure heroine of the original story that I will not spoil but that I
thought retroactively made the story far more interesting. But that leads
to the other problem: Rae is both not very good at scheming, and is
flippant and dismissive of the characters around her. These are both
realistic; Rae is a young woman with cancer, not some sort of genius
mastermind, and her whole frame for interacting with the story is fandom
discussions and arguments with her sister. Early in the book, it's rather
funny. But as the characters around her start becoming more fleshed out
and complex, Rae's inability to take them seriously starts to grate. The
grand revelation to Rae that these people have their own independent
existence comes so late in the book that it's arguably a spoiler, but it
was
painfully obvious to everyone except Rae for hundreds of pages
before it got through Rae's skull.
Those are my main complaints, but there was a lot about this book that I
liked. The Cobra, who starts off as a minor villain in the story, is by
far the best character of the book. He's not only more interesting than
Rae, he makes everyone else in the book, including Rae, more interesting
characters through their interactions. The twists around the putative
heroine, Lady Rahela's stepsister, are a bit too long in coming but are an
absolute delight. And Key, the palace guard that Rae befriends at the
start of the story, is the one place where Rae's character dynamic
unquestionably works. Key anchors a lot of Rae's scenes, giving them a
sense of emotional heft that Rae herself would otherwise undermine.
The narrator in this book does not stick with Rae. We also get viewpoint
chapters from the Cobra, the Last Hope, and Emer, Lady Rahela's maid. The
viewpoints from the
Time of Iron characters can be a bit
eye-roll-inducing at the start because of how deeply they follow the
grimdark aesthetic of the original story, but by the middle of the book I
was really enjoying the viewpoint shifts. This story benefited immensely
from being seen from more angles than Rae's chaotic manipulation. By the
end of the book, I was fully invested in the plot line following Cobra and
the Last Hope, to the extent that I was a bit disappointed when the story
would switch back to Rae.
I'm not sure this was a great book, but it was fun. It's funny in places,
but I ended up preferring the heartfelt parts to the funny parts. It is a
fascinating merger of gleeful fandom chaos and rather heavy emotional
portrayals of both inequality and the experience of terminal illness.
Rees Brennan is a stage four cancer survivor and that really shows;
there's a depth, nuance, and internal complexity to Rae's reactions to
illness, health, and hope that feels very real. It is the kind of book
that can give you emotional whiplash; sometimes it doesn't work, but
sometimes it does.
One major warning: this book ends on a ridiculous cliffhanger and does not
in any sense resolve its main plot arc. I found this annoying, not so
much because of the wait for the second volume, but because I thought this
book was about the right length for the amount of time I wanted to spend
in this world and wish Rees Brennan had found a way to wrap up the story
in one book. Instead, it looks like there will be three books. I'm in
for at least one more, since the story was steadily getting better towards
the end of
Long Live Evil, but I hope the narrative arc survives
being stretched out across that many words.
This one's hard to classify, since it's humorous fantasy on the cover and
in the marketing, and that element is definitely present, but I thought
the best parts of the book were when it finally started taking itself
seriously. It's metafictional, trope-subverting portal fantasy full of
intentional anachronisms that sometimes fall flat and sometimes work
brilliantly. I thought the main appeal of it would be watching Rae
embrace being a
proper villain, but then the apparent side
characters stole the show. Recommended, but you may have to be in just
the right mood.
Content notes: Cancer, terminal illness, resurrected corpses, wasting
disease, lots of fantasy violence and gore, and a general grimdark
aesthetic.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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