A genre-savvy romp with heart and depth
There’s a bit of a trend going around SFF these days, a willingness to break the fourth wall and allow characters in books to resemble readers not only in demographics features (the traditional meaning of ‘representation’) but also in knowledge of the genre. Jill Bearup’s charming Just Stab Me Now (2024), in which an indy writer tries to force her characters to participate in tropes that they have too much depth for, is one. Another is Django Wexler’s hilarious How to Become a Dark Lord and Die Trying (2024), in which a woman caught in a portal fantasy time loop decides to use skills learned from video games, such as ‘slum-running’, to take advantage of her 1000 years of repeated experience. Dark Lord also engages with another trend that has always been bubbling away in our collective genre-consciousness: the idea that the bad guys might have something to say for themselves. This is not a new idea. Natalie Zina Walschott’s Hench (previously reviewed here on NOAF), an unflinching indictment of capitalism and US health care systems, came out in (2020). But it stretches back literally centuries. I first encountered it in the last century, when my elementary school teacher read to us The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by John Scieszka (1989). And some – including my mother, who taught Milton at our local university – have argued that that Satan got all the good lines in Paradise Lost (1667).
So, drawing on this wealth of cultural history, Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil is hardly a novel idea; but it is a moving, thoughtful exploration of it. We open with Rae, a young woman dying of cancer. Her medical care is about to bankrupt her family, and it’s pretty clear that she’s not going to survive anyway. Her world has narrowed to her hospital room and her visitors – who no longer include her friends (they deserted her when she became too much of a downer) or her mother (who works around the clock in order to stave off bankruptcy a little longer), but do include her little sister, her beloved littler sister. Her sister has been reading aloud to Rae from Time of Iron, the first in an epic high fantasy series that Rae started reading late in the game, mostly because her sister adores it.
Rae thinks the best parts of the series are the later books, when the love interest from Book 1 succumbs to his grief at the loss of his beloved, and becomes the Evil Emperor, who is just awesome. She never really paid much attention to Book 1, before all this evil descent kicks off, and even though her little sister is reading aloud to her now, she’s having difficulty – what with chemo-brain and dying – paying much attention.
Then, a mysterious lady enters the hospital room and offers Rae a choice: she can play out this ongoing death, or she can enter the world of Time of Iron, acquire the magical healing flower of Life and Death, and return to her life in the Real World. She is not the first person to have been offered this opportunity, but she would be the first person to succeed. Hesitantly, Rae takes this unlikely one-in-a-million last chance, and steps into Time of Iron.
Unfortunately, she steps into Time of Iron in the middle of Book 1 – the one she’s not as familiar with – and worse, she steps into the shoes of Rahella, on the eve of her execution, which is the rightful comeuppance for her dastardly misdeeds. So Rae must, naturally, find a way to avert execution, assemble a team of minions, and get herself to the Flower of Life and Death on the one day of the year that it blooms – only a few weeks from now. And she must do it as the villainess. Since playing by the rules and trying to be good has so far gotten her nothing but a lingering death in a hospital bed, Rae decides to seize life with both hands, and be as selfish and evil as she can. Because evil is awesome. And also sexy.
This book draws heavily on familiar tropes from high fantasy, at two levels. On the outer level, the Rae’s-story level, we have the portal fantasy combined with the time-constrained Quest narrative for the Magical Maguffin. This works very effectively to structure Rae’s actions and provide high-stakes life-and-death motivation throughout all the rest of the events of Long Live Evil. But it is merely reflecting pressures from the inner level, where the internal book, Time of Iron, which hosts Rae’s Quest, is almost entirely constructed upon a heavy scaffolding of more tropes upon tropes. We get snippets of this host-tale at the beginning of each chapter, and they are all very high fantasy. Everyone’s got descriptive epithets: The Lady Dipped in Blood, the Golden Cobra, the Last Hope, the Iron Maid; everyone’s plot arc tends toward misery; and although we only ever see Book 1, the series itself has so many books.
It all feels very Game of Thrones in its general vibe; but there are familiar elements from other traditions too. Fairy tales are one such contributor. The reason Rahella (as in-book villainess) is originally caught is because her victim – who is also her little sister – confesses her woes ‘privately’ to an oven, which somehow is connected to a room elsewhere where sympathetic ears can overhear. I’ve never quite understood how this architecture is supposed to work, but I recognise it from The Goose Girl, and I’m sure that this isn’t an accident. Then we’ve got Rahella’s punishment, which Rae’s first task is to avert when she steps into Rahella’s body: to be forced to dance in red hot shoes until dead. This fate was originally a punishment for Snow White’s stepmother in one of the bloodier versions of that fairy tale. Beyond fairy tales we’ve also got some extreme Joseph Campbell going on. The rise of the Emperor is necessarily preceded by a trip to the Ravine, where the Emperor-to-be must vanquish the undead to gain his power, all very Hero’s Journyishly. Then, at one point, musical theater makes an appearance.
There are a couple of ways to interpret this hodge-podge of familiar elements. One is simply that Time of Iron, like any high fantasy book, is part of a genre, and engages with conventions that we expect any competent genre writer to be familiar with. Palace intrigue, trips to the underworld, attacking hordes of undead monsters – these are the bread and butter of high fantasy books; and there is more than a bit of winking at how silly it can all get. The snippets of Time of Iron at the beginning of each chapter are all highly, highly purple. This is distinct from Rae’s own narrative, which is characterised not only by its genre-savvy recognition of the tropes and types around her, but also by highly effective meditations on the effects, physical, social, and psychological, of living through treatment of terminal cancer. Beyond writing style, the ways in which Rae’s experiences affect her interaction with this fantasy world are nuanced and thematically tight, because Sarah Rees Brennan is no slouch in the writing skills department.
But there’s something else going on here, too. When Rae is invited to step into Time of Iron, she is told that this world is real because people believe it is real. And as she starts to take action to further her own aims, she sees the world itself responding. She is able to change the story from the inside. And if she can, then so have other people who have been offered this chance to save their lives. Time of Iron, the book, is written by ‘Anonymous’; and as Long Live Evil unfolds, it becomes clearer and clearer that the whole story of Time of Iron may not be the tale of a single writer. Rather, it is a kind of joint consensus, constructed by the engagement of thousands and millions of readers, and also by the uncounted number of people from the ‘Real World’ who have had the opportunity to step into this world and change it, as Rae is doing.
In this way, Time of Iron itself is not just an internal, tropey, silly high fantasy tale that Rae, winking at the readers of Long Live Evil, is going to spank with her genre-savvy smarts. No, it is a love letter to high fantasy as a whole, and a love letter to the fans who jointly construct the genre, and who engage with it deeply, whole-heartedly, unafraid to show their hearts and fall in love and fight and grieve and live whole lives in this alternative reality.
The very structure of the book highlights this intent. At first, we see everything through Rae’s eyes alone. But as she becomes more embedded, as the other characters become less characters and more people in her eyes, we start to see the story through their eyes; eyes untainted by genre-savviness; eyes of people for whom this world, this rich, dangerous, beautiful, unpredictable world is the only reality they know.
This book is the first in a trilogy, and so does not wrap up the story in book 1. If that’s going to be a problem for you, please buy the book now without reading it, or take it out from the library and return it unread, or request it from your library, or do whatever it takes to tell the publisher that this book is loved and wanted and the remainder of the trilogy should be published. This is for us, friends. Brennan is reaching out a clawed fist with love and affection for our genre and us, the readers. It would be churlish to reject it.
