Long Live Evil: Don't mess with the story too much
What not to do if you get sucked into a fictional story.
Long Live Evil
By Sarah Rees Brennan
Published by Orbit Books, 2024
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Stories about stories can work in any genre, but they seem particularly suited to fantasy, which often features worlds built on myths and legends and tales the characters tell each other. Plugging a character who has some sense of how fantasy stories work into one of these worlds can yield some interesting results. That sort of plot also fits into the subgenre of “portal fantasy,” in which a person from the modern world or some other non-fantastical milieu enters a fantasy realm and becomes acclimated to an unfamiliar and dangerous setting.
Long Live Evil provides a metafictional version of the portal fantasy by taking a person who is a fan of a popular fantasy book series and giving her a chance to become a character in the story. Rae is a young woman who enjoys a series known as “Time of Iron,” although she mostly experiences it vicariously through her sister, who is a real superfan. When Rae contracts terminal cancer, she is visited in the hospital by a mysterious woman who offers her to opportunity to enter the world of Time of Iron, and if she can obtain a magical life-giving flower within a certain window of time, she’ll be healed in the real world. Rae sort of accepts, not really believing that this woman is for real, and before she knows it, she wakes up in a new body in a setting she knows all too well.
The problem is, Rae has assumed the identity of a character named Rahela, who is known as “The Beauty Dipped in Blood” and is one of the villains of the tale. That wouldn’t be so bad, since Rae tended to identify with the heels of the story when reading the books, except she joins the story at the moment when Rahela’s treacherous actions had just been exposed, and she is about to be executed for her crimes. This means she has to scramble to get out of the situation and then figure out how to survive in a cutthroat world of courtly intrigue.
Rae’s solution is to embrace her role as a villain and come up with conniving schemes to help her achieve her goals. She passes herself off as a prophet, using her knowledge of upcoming events in the story to get in the good graces of the king and manipulate things in her favor. And it mostly works, at least at first, although her actions begin changing events, making the story play out differently than she expects and causing more and more chaos.
Following Rae along on this journey is pretty enthralling, as we see her walk a tightrope between self-preservation and a desire to make sure the story hits the right beats. It helps that while author Sarah Rees Brennan has built a pretty good world here, she regularly questions Rae’s expectations and makes her reconsider what she thinks she knows about the characters. While Rae had been a fan of King Octavian, who is destined to become a tyrannical Emperor who controls legions of undead soldiers, she learns throughout her interactions with him that he’s much less appealing in person. And while she had been less than enthusiastic about her character's rival, a virtuous princess named Lia, getting to know her reveals that she has more depth than Rae had previously realized.
To make things even more interesting, Rae befriends the Golden Cobra, another character who she believes will join her in her villainous schemes. But it turns out that he’s in the same boat as her, being a person from the real world who had entered the story. He chose to take a theatrical approach, crafting his character into a flamboyant schemer who blackmails his way into wealth and power, but he’s actually a fanboy of another character: the king’s right-hand man, Marius, a virtuous warrior scholar who is known as “The Last Hope.” His main purpose, aside from using his wiles to survive, is to try to encourage a romance between Marius and Lia.
All of this gives Brennan plenty to work with, but she has a lot more on her mind than just having a real-world person run roughshod through a fantasy setting. While Rae starts off not caring about how her actions may affect others, believing that this is a fictional setting where nobody is real, she begins to build relationships with other characters, coming to care about whether they will survive and how they can avoid the impending disasters. One of her most interesting relationships is with a guy named Key, a commoner who became her personal palace guard. He starts off as an unrepentant killer who only cares about his own interests, but as Rae gets to know his backstory, she starts to see him as a real person and care about what will happen to him. She gains his loyalty by taking actions that other members of the nobility would never even consider, but this ends up forcing her into positions where she has to choose between her own survival and her loyalty toward those she has come to care about.
While most of the book is told from Rae’s perspective, it occasionally shifts to let us see the world through other characters’ eyes. Several chapters are told from the perspective of Marius, and his ultra-honorable approach to life makes for a fun counterpoint to the cynical way Rae approaches things. He spends a lot of the book being confounded by the Cobra and angered by what he perceives as villainy, although he eventually comes to realize that the Cobra is more honorable than many of the other nobles. It makes for a pretty fascinating arc while also providing plenty of drama throughout the story.
And that’s the other interesting thing the book does, making sure that drama keeps happening despite Rae’s best efforts. Since she knows the major plot points that the story will need to hit, she tries to help the other characters avoid danger by letting them know what to watch for or instructing them on what they need to do. But she apparently doesn’t realize that doing so would remove much of the conflict and drama from the story, and she’s surprised as the story adjusts itself around her to make sure interesting things keep happening. In the end, she realizes that she had gotten much of her interpretation of the story completely wrong, and she ends up stuck in an unprecedented situation with no idea what’s going to happen next. The same is true for readers, who are going to have to wait for the sequel to find out.
This is an incredibly fun book, one that takes readers’ knowledge of fantasy stories and expectations about how they will play out and twists them, letting us see that the experience of being plunged into one of these stories would most likely not turn out the way we think it would. The story is full of humor and enjoyable characterization, but even though Brennan is playing with fantasy tropes and archetypes, she continually comes up with interesting and unexpected ways to approach these ideas. Plus, she builds some real drama into the story and comes up with lots of exciting action, building to a pretty epic climax that involves violence, death, and world-shaking stakes. It all makes for a very satisfying experience, and if other readers are like me, they’re going to be waiting impatiently for the next volume.