#Django Wexler

[terapsina]

Let's talk books. Sorted in threes by vibes.

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I Support Women's Wrongs (murder, slaughter and body horror galore).

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How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Django Wexler - A woman from Earth is dropped into a magical realm, meant to save the Kingdom from the FoRCes of DaRKneSSss... except, unfortunately that might have been a thousand years worth of time loops ago, so it's rather time to lose one's temper and decide to become the Dark Lord herself.

Main character -> basically Deadpool (measured in sanity, humor and levels of bisexual horniness)).

Someone You Can Build a Nest In ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by John Wiswell - Shesheshen, a shapechanging monster who's rudely interrupted during her hibernation by hunters. Manages to to eat one of them, unfortunately she also gets shot by an arrow and falls off a cliff. On the bright side she meets a lovely human woman she might end up falling in love with so much... she'll want to build a nest in her (it's possible there's some Cultural Differences that need to be worked through).

Hench ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Natalie Zina Walschots - Anna's latest temp job for a villain (because even supervillains need office help) ends with her carelessly injured by a superhero, laid off and with injured mobility for the foreseeable future (because human bodies don't see much difference between getting hit by a truck and getting moved out of way by someone able to pick up a truck). Angry, disillusioned, and looking for some vengeful payback she starts compiling the statistics of exactly how much suffering gets left behind the heroes and in quick order finds a new job working for one of the worst supervillains in the neighborhood.

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Extremely Competent Women Show Up to Fix Everyone's Shit (with a whallop of romance which was actually sweet instead of irritating)

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The Witchwood Knot ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Olivia Atwater - Winifred Hall was invited to the Witchwood Manor under the pretense of being the governess for a very bratty kid, but when said boy suddenly turns into a very quiet and perfectly bland boy overnight it's very obvious her charge has been stolen by faeries (and it might have something to do with the actual reason she's there). Rescue however is complicated by some factors, one, there being something terribly dark and wrong about the house (normal houses don't have screaming faces in the walls), another, the faerie man posing as the manor's butler who would very much like to make her run screaming the way so many servants had before her (unfortunately for him, she's not even half as scared of him as she is the eyes of the father of her charge).

This one's about dealing with past trauma, and otherworldly terrors paling in comparison to mundane monsters, set in a very beautiful and dark and shiver-inducing Victorian time world where the Fair Folk are very real.

(Same world as her Regency Faerie Tales trilogy that Started with Half a Soul but it's not necessary to read that one first to enjoy this one)

Keeper of Enchanted Rooms ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Charlie N. Holmberg - Merritt Fernsby inherits a house only to be immediately taken hostage by what turns out to be a very stubborn and opinionated magical house. Hulda Larkin of the Boston Institute for the Keeping of Enchanted Rooms goes there to facilitate the relationship between the house and its new owner.

It's supposed to be a very simple job. Unfortunately there's a third POV character in this book (no, not the Whimbrel House, though I adore that house and *insert here the Rosa Diaz gif about her new puppy and how she would kill everyone in this room and then herself if anything were to happen to that dog*). Anyway, they're a bit... uhhh... let's go with Bad News.

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Heather Fawcett - As one might expect from the title, Emily (a Cambridge scholar) wants to write the first ever encyclopedia of faeries. And she's brilliant enough to do it, what she's terrible at is people (*insert autistic character alert here*).

Someone else might then say it's lucky that a fellow scholar with a far easier time at charming people has stuck his toes in her reaserch trip into the Hidden Ones... that person however doesn't understand how irritating, frustrating and maddening her academic rival Wendell Bambleby actually is.

What follows is a story filled with winter snows, some terrible fae, some adorable fae, some not-very-secret fae, the goodest of good dogs, and lots and lots of squabbling. It's the best.

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Dark and Impactful Stories about Children Who Decide on Their Own Paths

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A Skinful of Shadows ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Frances Hardinge - Kate, an orphan and the illegitimate daughter of some stuffy (and evil) aristocrats runs away because being a bastard doesn't mean she didn't inherit the family magic that allows her to get possessed by the dead.

A dead bear ghost is one thing, a Get Out situation is something else entirely.

A Sorceress Comes to Call ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by T. Kingfisher - Cordelia isn't allowed friends or the privacy of closed doors, and whenever she's done something she shouldn't - a category too unpredictable to guard against - she's not allowed power over her own body.

Because her mother is an evil sorceress (think Regina and Cora... except somehow even worse). An evil sorceress that has found herself a Squire to lure into a marriage.

Hester is an old maid living with her brother, a Squire (well look at them coincidences), when said brother acquires a woman clearly set on his fortune. The plan is only to save her brother, except Hester can't help noticing how the woman's daughter keeps flinching in her mother's presence.

In The Lives of Puppets ⭐⭐⭐⭐ by TJ Klune - A family can be an android inventor, his human son (*homoromantic asexual alert*), a sadistic nurse droid, and a very emotional roomba.

And it can be a very happy family. Until one uncovers and wakes up an android that shares a very Skynet past with one's father, said father gets kidnapped, and one has to go on a journey to get him back.

(A book I like to call Sci-fi Reverse Pinocchio)

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Unraveling an Unjust System (and a hero that - on a scale from occasionally to constantly - hears a disembodied voice directly in their heads okay the connection between these three is a bit of a stretch but they're all great books so shut up)

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Hell for Hire ⭐⭐⭐⭐½ by Rachel Aaron - 5000 years ago Gilgamesh conquered the heavens, enslaved the demons and made it so that the only road to magic humanity had access, was through him.

Now, however a mercenary team made up of free demons gets hired by a Blackwood witch to protect him (and his familiar, the talking cat named Boston) while he puts down roots (literally) inside the new forest grove he's about to start so that he can stand up against the warlocks after him.

The witch quickly becomes the best client Bex and her crew have ever had (after all, warlocks under the rule of the Eternal King Gilgamesh are slavers of their kind, they are delighted at the chance to kill some).

Vespertine ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ by Margaret Rogerson - In a world where the veil between the living and the dead has been kinda broken Artemisia (*another autistic character alert*) is training to be a Gray Sister (magic nun).

Until her convent gets attacked by possessed soldiers and she has no choice but to pick up a Saint's Relic containing a malevolent revenant to protect it.

Problem. Only a Vespertine is supposed to do it. Another problem. The only one "alive" who can teach her to be a Vespertine is the revenant. Another another problem. The revenant cannot be trusted and if she loses control to it, the death toll will be counted in cities.

Terminal Alliance ⭐⭐⭐⭐¾ by Jim C. Hines - Post Zombie Apocalypse, where some aliens showed up, sort of cured the zombies and took the (mostly) cured zombies into their military.

Which leads us to Marion Adamopoulos, also known as Mops, the Leutenant in charge of Shipboard Hygene and Sanitation of the Earth Mercenary Corps Ship Pufferfish.

Right up until a bioweapon turns the entire crew except her crew back into zombies. Congratulations, she's the captain now.

(Space Janitors save the universe story).

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[ninja-muse]

This book! This book!

I'm a fan of:

sporking fantasy tropes

female antiheroes

pop culture references

competency porn

hot messes

hot messes who somehow are also hyper-competent???

fourth wall breakage

unapologetically queer people

animal-people

time shenanigans

great fight scenes

footnotes

laughing

And this book delivered! I knew I had to read this as soon as I heard about it. (Woman caught in a time loop decides not to be the Chosen One, but the Dark Lord? Hello, yes please.)

It's been a while, like maybe a year ago with Perilous Times, since I've had so much fun with a comic fantasy. I have a serious case of the gimmes for the sequel now.

[ianthe-is-a-bitch-and-i-love-her]

I've been eagerly anticipating Django Wexler's latest book, How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying, and it did not disappoint. It lacked his trademark ambivalently aspec protagonists, but it's got plenty else to recommend it. Our protagonist Davi is the Chosen One, summoned by Ancient Magicks from our modern world to save the ancient fantasy kingdom from evil and defeat the Dark Lord... except that, after nigh on a thousand attempts ending in abject failure and agonizing death, she's sick of this shit and ready to try something different.

Her narrative voice is pretty jarring at first, all gratuitous callousness and memelord edge, but it didn't take long to adjust to, and it took on an air of tragedy as it became clear that, after centuries of bashing her head against the same unsolvable problem, these contextless quips and references were basically all she remembered of her "real" life. The overall tone reminded me of nothing so much as Nevernight, with its cheerfully crapsack world, pitch black humor, and frequent tangential asides, but it's execution was far more deft, never straying into the excessive gratuity or clumsy moralizing that Nevernight is sometimes prone to.

Davi is a deeply entertaining protagonist, balancing a fundamental decency with a near complete disconnect from reality after so long spent in her time loop. She's also astonishingly bisexual and unabashedly horny about it - it's always a plus for me when a book captures some of the viscerality of queer desire. Though the book fades to black for any actual sex scenes, her observations after the fact are always a delight. For anyone who's read Ashes of the Sun and remembers the scene where Beq got distracted and started talking about her special interest in the middle of getting fingered... well, you get the gist.

Definitely recommend for any fans of high fantasy subversions, isekai subversions, and traumatic time loop enjoyers (tagging @urban-sith for no particular reason)

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[kazz-brekker]

the shadow campaigns is a serious military fantasy series with lots of battle tactics and exploration of napoleonic-warfare but it is also the only military fantasy book i've read where a lesbian breakup is having possibly apocalyptic consequences for the story and characters

[telephilon]

Currently obsessed with The Shadow Campaigns and feel like the world is sleeping on it.

(Episode 1000 of me ending up in a super small or pretty much dead fandom)

[chaoskuss]

Janus bet Vhalnich, our favourit general and scorpion- nerd, having a very good time in the Southern Kingdoms after the end of book 5

I'm completely smitten by "The shadow campaigns". Seriously, I think it's one of the best fantasy series I've ever read 😌

[radedneko]

If I were an anthropologist, I'd write a paper about how their social structure, forged in long periods of scarcity, was starting to fray under the pressures of abundance and a higher birthrate, eventually resulting in a violent upheaval. But I'm not, so I'm just going to exploit it.

~How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler

[quoteablebooks]

Genre: Fiction, Adult, Fantasy, Humor

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Content Warning: Violence, Death, Suicide, Sexual content, Torture, Murder, Sexual assault, Rape, Genocide           

Summary: From bestselling author Django Wexler comes a laugh-out-loud fantasy tale about a young woman who, tired of defending humanity from the Dark Lord, decides maybe the Dark Lord doesn’t have it all wrong after all, perfect for fans of Terry Pratchett and KJ Parker.

Davi has done this all before. She’s tried to be the hero and take down the all-powerful Dark Lord. A hundred times she’s rallied humanity and made the final charge. But the time loop always gets her in the end. Sometimes she’s killed quickly. Sometimes it takes a while. But she’s been defeated every time.

This time? She’s done being the hero and done being stuck in this endless time loop. If the Dark Lord always wins, then maybe that’s who she needs to be. It’s Davi’s turn to play on the winning side.

*Opinions*

I watch a lot of bookish content, which is why my TBR continues to grow and not shrink, but this is another read influenced by social media. It was a five-star read for the Booktalker (booksandlala) and the premise sounded interesting to me, so I requested it from the library. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was not what I got out of this novel. This was a satirical, fourth-wall-breaking romp through this fantasy world of Wexler’s creation. While I enjoyed my time in this world (though with a few critics) this novel will not be for everyone.

How to Become the Dark Lord or Die Trying follows Davi, a chosen one sent from Earth to a fantasy realm to save the Kingdom. The only problem? She keeps failing at this task and dying over and over and over again. The good news is that she always returns to where she started, a pool where she first emerged—the bad news, after a couple of thousand years that gets really old. Eventually, Davi decides that she wants to be on the winning team and tries not to save the kingdom, but become the Dark Lord that eventually destroys it. While there are a lot of false starts on this path as well, eventually Davi has a small horde of Wilders, and on her way to the meeting that will choose the next Dark Lord. However, without knowing how things work on this side of the world, Davi has to rely on her wits and a whole lot of luck to get the title she so dearly wants. Then again, if she dies, she can just try again, right?

The way that Wexler wrote this fantasy novel was reminiscent of a Mel Brooks movie, though I would not state that it is executed as well as one of those movies. Davi takes every well-worn fantasy trope and turns it on it’s head during her time attempting to become the Dark Lord, including murdering her quest giver multiple times. The issue I have is that near the end of the novel, is that Wexler attempts to go from a funny romp to serious questions about the world and Davi mentally manages the change in her understanding of how the world works. I understand that satirical novels need a plot, but the shift to serious lore and Davi losing her mind a little was a pretty serious shift, which is then forgotten after a couple of chapters.

The internal logic of this novel did not work at times well, which I didn’t get too hung up on given that this is a humorous novel, but I did catch it. The biggest one is that Davi does not remember anything about her life before coming to this fantasy world, she mentions this multiple times, yet she uses almost exclusively pop culture and known references from our world. You would think that after a couple of thousand years, she would forget movie lines along with what she used to do for a living. You would also think that she would catch on to the lore and myths of this world and use their slang. She is able to speak Wilder, but decides to confuse everyone around her constantly by continuing to talk in Earth references. I get that it is the humor of the novel, but it didn’t make sense within the logic of the world Wexler developed.

While I enjoyed my time with this novel, but most readers will know within the first twenty-five pages whether they like the narrative voice or if it is going to drive them insane. When describing the humor and overall narrative voice to a friend, I stated that it reminded me of Youtubers, especially in the gaming sphere, in the heyday of its popularity. Think like Smosh or early Markipler and Jacksepcticeye. If that is not the type of humor you enjoy, Davi is going to get on your nerves immediately. At times, I even found her a bit too much but I was enjoying the twist on a fantasy novel that I was able to push through those instances, which happened mostly at the beginning of the novel. Another writing aspect that did not really work for me was any time Davi was thinking about sex, which was a lot (see my comment about Youtuber humor). Now there were not the more egregious issues of a man writing a female main character, but there was something in the way that he wrote her horniess that made it clear the author was a man. I am not saying that women cannot be extremely horny, it is the way that it was written. I wish I had a better way to describe it. Again, I watched a lot of Youtube in my day so I was able to deal with it, but I can see it being an issue for other readers.

I personally did not like Davi a lot, but the surrounding characters were enough to push me through when she was extremely annoying. Still, even the primary romance didn’t hold my attention, mostly due to the issue I had with how Davi was written in terms of her thoughts on sex and her pursuing those needs. I did like her love interest, they were one of the few sincere characters in this novel.

I know this all makes it sound as if I didn’t enjoy the novel, but I had a good time while I was reading it. I just never found that I wanted to pick it back up. This is a story that I am interested in seeing where it is going, especially given the ending, but I will be picking it up from the library. This is a 3.5 read

[mitchlivinglife]

A fun read. The author is inspired by Re:Zero and you can really feel it. The writing is conversational and quippy, but does have moments of sincerity. It’s strikes the tone of a dark comedy the best of any fantasy book I’ve read. A solid 7/10, brought down by the beginning. I’m looking forward to book 2.

[deni-art]

Been thinking about the series a lot lately so I made a portrait painting of my favorite possessed soldier and Infernivore cause it doesn't get enough love :))))

[a-very-sparkly-nerd]

Has ANYONE read The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler?? It's one of the best books I've read, and it doesn't have a page on fan wiki, and there is absolutely nothing on ao3 or wattpad (I was desperate).

I need to talk about it or I'll DIE

[nzbookwyrm]

May 2025

[matrim-cauthons-hat]

i related greatly to Winter Ihernglass because i too am promoted against my will and gay

[kazz-brekker]

curious to know how much longer the shadow campaigns can keep up the running joke of marcus not knowing that winter ihernass, his companion in being a straight-laced soldier guy made to deal with the weirdness of their genius boss, is actually a lesbian woman

[aceinabook]

The City of Stone and Silence by Django Wexler Wells of Sorcery # 2

Character 4| Setting 4| Plot 3.5| Writing 3.5| Enjoyability 5

Rating: 4

Book 2 continues where book 1 left us with Isoka and the crew being dropped off at this island and trying to get control of Soliton.

This book does Dual POV which I always really enjoy. I love that we got to see Tori in Kahnzoka and see what she had to deal with in the mean time while big sis is fighting some major battles.

I really enjoy the juxtaposition on Tori getting more cruel and Isoka getting kinder. It really shows how your environment and what the people around will do to you.

If I am being honest I think Tori is too hard on herself, but I enjoy the way the narrative and Tori(i am believing she is kind of an unreliable narrator…) frames herself as this book goes on.

Loving seeing Isoka realizing it's not all just on her shoulders and seeing that she needs to rely on her team. It is very good.

I enjoyed Prime as an antagonist until he told us what he wanted….he just felt so basic. I am not a fan of villians that are just basic? I love them to have a little better motivations.

I am excited to see what happens in the final volume what will happen and what Kuon Naga will do