This review contains mild spoilers

“Don’t listen to stories encouraging you to be good, telling you to shine in a filthy world and patiently endure suffering. Screw suffering. It’s too hard to be good. Do the easy thing. Do the evil thing. Grasp whatever you desire in your greedy bloodstained hands.”

When being evil is just too good! 

When Rae thinks her life is over, when her illness slowly consumes her remaining strength and her days are spent in a hospital bed, she gets the chance to do what all book lovers can only dream of, enter her favourite fictional world. It starts with a bargain. A mysterious woman tells Rae that if she can obtain the Flower of Life and Death from the Imperial greenhouse then she will have the chance to live. The kingdom of Eyam is a fictional place that is well known to Rae being as it’s from her sister Alice’s favourite book series, Time of Iron. In fact her sister is so obsessed with the books that in sharing her love for them she has also drawn Rae into loving its narrative and beguiling characters. So of course Rae takes the chance and enters Eyam but immediately all is not quite what it seems—for one she’s not in the body of the hero, she’s Lady Rahela, the evil stepsister due to be executed the very next day. Yet Rae is determined to succeed in her quest and so she gathers a team of villainous characters to aid her and change the course of their lives. But for how long can these villains really survive? 

Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan is a novel which hits you in the face with its fun factor and drags you down into the depths of a dark and twisted tale where evil triumphs in the most delicious ways.

Immediately Brennan draws you into Rae’s journey from the real world to the world of Eyam and gives us such outrageous scenes that I couldn’t help but read this novel with a large smile on my face. Now, the use of contemporary slang and idioms in fantasy is not usually something I like to see but here it works so well. Essentially Rae is a contemporary young adult and so Brennan uses that in a brilliant comedic way. We learn that Rae has lost so much due to her illness, she’s isolated, angry and left with very little options but given the chance at life, she seizes it in the most dramatic of ways. Once in Eyam, the rest of the characters within that world do not know where Rae is really from and therefore their confusion at her modern turns of phrases actually made me laugh, as did all the references to pop culture such as Rae’s story of Lord Ross and Lady Rachel, which was obviously a nod to the show Friends! We are then treated to an abundance of other charming and alarming scenes including a fantastic musical number which I adored, chaotic scenes of fighting with ghouls and a manticore and some pretty evil twists. 

As we delve further it becomes clear the prominent point of this novel is to look at villains, the art of storytelling and stock characters such heroes, villains, kings, princesses and so on, in a tongue in cheek kind of way, looking at them in different lights, turning them on their heads in surprising ways and Brennan achieves that so cleverly here. I did feel a touch overwhelmed with all the characters and their narratives as there is a lot to get your head around, however there came a point where everyone started to fall into place and from then on the book couldn’t be prised out of my hands. The epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter helped as they  gave snippets from various chapters of the original story of Time of Iron giving us some context into its characters yet it also punctuated how Rae’s influence was greatly changing the narrative. 

This is definitely a more character driven book with the plot unfolding slowly and in my opinion, quite unpredictably. Every character is so unhinged you never quite know what they’re about to do next, but each captured me in their own devious ways. This book explores villain tropes and subverts their ideals in fascinating ways, for example Rae throughout calls herself a villain because she’s in the body of one but looking closely, she never really does anything truly villainous. She’s just a woman trying to shape her own story, to survive in a world that doesn’t want her in it. Whereas in contrast her sidekick Key is a psychopath, a killer with no remorse, a deceiver, a thief and a man who will do whatever benefits him regardless of the consequences. Yet Brennan makes him likeable, she makes us sympathise with his backstory which is something we come across rarely, a villain isn’t always given a solid reason for their behaviour. Key is ultimately one fucked up impulsive character but he was without a doubt my favourite of them all. 

‘She curled her fingers in under the blood-slick straps of his armour.

His cracked leather gloves caught on her hair.

“You don’t have to kill if you don’t like it,” Key promised. “I’ll kill them for you.”

“Kill who?”

Against her hair, she felt his mouth curve. “Everyone.”’ 

From the supporting characters Brennan treats us to an array of eclectic delights. Most notably here is the Golden Cobra, who is absolutely nothing like his name suggests. Cobra quickly became one of my other favourites as his passion for performing arts and his flamboyant personality was something that I just loved. In a weird kind of way Cobra felt very much like a cinnamon roll, especially in his close but turbulent friendship with Lord Marius, the Last Hope, who was one hell of a complicated mess. Lord Marius hated and loved Cobra much like he hated and loved himself. He was a man who had sworn to never kill but every fibre in his being was bred to be the ultimate warrior. Then there was Emer, Lady Rahela’s maid and Lady Lia who was Rahela’s shining sister. Both of these were a touch tricky to warm to at first as they represented more moral characters, (which strangely wasn’t as fun!) but even then they were prone to betraying those they should have been loyal to, so there was that. Another interesting character was King Octavian who was supposed to be the just and upstanding hero but in Time of Iron is fated to become a tyrant emperor. Yet through Lady Rahela’s eyes we see he’s just a horny man who is too used to getting his own way, and oh how I loved seeing others put him down. 

The entirety of Long Live Evil took me on an unexpected and strangely enchanting ride and so chef’s kiss to Brennan for revelling in playful banter and unhinged escapades. I have never rooted for the villains as much as this novel made me.

‘The world was hard and cruel. It bore down and broke you into a thousand pieces. When nobody believed in you, when even you couldn’t believe, you must arrange your broken pieces into a terrifying new shape. You could believe in the fantastic recreation of yourself.

In the end, she was lucky. She’d been granted her dying wish.

If the ending couldn’t be happy, at least it would mean something.

She would do something great before she died. She would be an unforgettable part of the story.’

ARC provided by Nazia at Orbit Books in exchange for an honest review—Thank you for the copy! All quotes used are taken from an ARC and are subject to change upon publication.

Long Live Evil will be out 1st August 2024 but you can pre-order HERE