Our Protagonist is a woman named Davi. She has been conscripted via Portal Fantasy into becoming a Chosen Hero. Unfortunately for her, she has also been stuck in a All You Need Is Kill style timeloop which always ends with her horrible death at the hands of the Dark Lord (if she doesn’t do it first). She has suffered through a very high number of deaths for centuries and finally comes to the conclusion that if she can’t beat the Forces of Darkness…
…Her efforts are at first not very successful, since the Forces of Darkness are not much interested in acquiring human recruits. (The mutual antipathy is very high.) However, Davi acquires enough of a back log of “well, that didn’t work,” deaths in order to fake it till she makes it. This enables her to get a toehold in with a small band of “Wilders” and from there, begin the long quest to become the Dark Lord.
This was an extremely violent book with a lot of really black humor! Davi is a traumatized hot mess of a character due to her many, many deaths. She is very much not-sane, and it spills over in the frenetic energy of her thought processes and actions within the narrative. (Her stress was making me anxious other words: Good job, author!) She is also reckless and somewhat thoughtless, which fits in with all the trauma. (So many maladaptive coping behaviors. So. Many.) I did not expect her to get as far as she did.
How to Become the Dark Lord also has some interesting implications about the setting. That is, there are some hints that the black-and-white setting is more gray than Davi initially understood (or understands) it to be. There are also some indications that the humans are the “actual” bad guys. (In the sense they are invaders attempting to wipe out the people living there.) The ending is just as much of a hot mess as the Protagonist, and I am really looking forward to seeing where the writer is going with this.
This review is based on a galley copy received from NetGalley.
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