Long Live Evil
3.0 Stars
4-1-2025

This is an isekai novel (wait! wait! stay with me) about a lady who, on her deathbed, is transported into the grim fantasy world of the hit novel, Time of Iron. She is promised that if she can get the McGuffin from the Royal Arbor in 30 days she will be returned to her world and healed, otherwise ... ? The author immediately takes this in 4 or 5 interesting directions, e.g. our MC has been placed in the shoes of a character who is to be executed in ~24 hours for her villainy, she has only vague memories of the plot events of this fantasy novel, her own interventions in the plot immediately send any previously established plot wildly off the rails, characters that she thought she knew take on different aspects in light of new developments, and questions are raised about who exactly is a real person and who is a character and what is the nature of the reality shared between her world and the fantasy world.

In many ways I liked this. There was frequent, fun, patter, sort of the stuff you might find in a detective novel but more silly. I liked how the author communicated the general plot of the original Time of Iron, filling in the made-up fantasy world in small doses so that we could understand what is going on/who these people are as well as understand how the original novel is being subverted. I liked many of the characters, both in the original and modified form, and I liked the author's willingness to have things lurch wildly off the rails at regular intervals. It reminded me a bit of those BBC comedies, where a stage crew tries to soldier on with a production of A Christmas Carol while everything careens off the rails. And the plotting is not all comical, i.e. some of the schemes are crafty and turn out to be genuinely interesting reveals.

On the downside, the book never fully decides what it is going to be. Is it going to dive into the infinite depths of meta-ness, like Philip Palmer would do? Is it going to settle down with one interpretation of its world, and then use that as a foundation to build up characters that are fleshed out and that we really care about? Eh. It kind of picks some from both paths, and ends up not entirely succeeding at either. Or to put it another way, the book is a bit of a mess. A cheerful mess, but still. Sometimes characters are well written, other times they sink to stock roles and lines. Sometimes the author wants to make the point say that all of these characters matter, and that they each have their own lives and individuality and should be cherished as such, and then other times she will have several dozen people die for a minor joke. There's numerous speeches about the way "evil" or "criminal" is a social construct defined by those in power, but they don't really go anywhere. People make yet more speeches about actually being evil, but then do not do anything even slightly evil. There are numerous talks about how there are unfair and hypocritical double standards for men and women's sexual behavior, but I'm not sure how relevant these talks are outside of medieval/conservative circles. Anyway! As mentioned, a cheerful mess.