Caitlin Rozakis
published: 28th May 2024
spoilers? some
It’s bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard’s workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something.
It’s a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is… you.
Gav isn’t really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed.
But as he realizes that nothing – from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess – is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he’ll have to answer the hardest question of all – who does he want to be?
A high fantasy farce featuring killer moat squid, toxic masculinity, an evil wizard convocation, and a garlic festival. All at once. Dread Lord Gavrax has had better weeks.
Galley provided by publisher
Dreadful was a reasonably amusing book, if entirely unsubtle in its messaging. I mean, I didn’t expect subtle. If there’s one thing a lot of books round about now are if they’re on this topic (i.e. toxic masculinity, i.e. feminist retellings) it’s unsubtle. Like, I don’t know guys, maybe I want to have to read between the lines a bit sometimes. Maybe I don’t want it all spelled out for me.
But I digress. I didn’t expect it so I wasn’t disappointed when it wasn’t. And it wasn’t a bad read by any stretch of the imagination. It was fun! The overall experience of it was good! It was a little weirdly lighthearted at times for the violent misogyny that (appeared) to be on show, yes, but overall good.
The story follows a character whose name I’ve already forgotten (good start!), who wakes up to discover he’s lost his memory. It is, however, apparent that everyone around him expects him to be an evil wizard. Oh, and he’s in the middle of a villainous plot along with some genuinely evil wizards. That he knows nothing about thanks to his memory loss.
This is a book that relies quite a bit on generic fantasy worldbuilding and doesn’t really provide a whole lot new in that respect. Which is, I guess, alright. It’s not trying to tell a story like that, it’s trying to tell a story about toxic masculinity within a fantasy context. So depth in worldbuilding is hardly the priority: depth in character is.
It’s an interesting balancing act between making Gav likeable enough to root for, while still allowing that he’s a violent misogynist. I have more to say about this later, but for now let’s stick to the positives. It’s mostly good at doing this. Watching Gav recognise his faults and challenge his own instinctive behaviours means that you’re rooting for him to overcome them and change. The memory loss is (mostly) a good vehicle for this. (Yes, I am, in part, trying to hedge what I’m saying here because there is a but coming.)
The characters around him are also fun, especially the goblins who, really, have to be my favourite part of the book. The whole network of Gav, princess (no, I don’t remember a name), evil secretary (reviews say his name is Siraco), and the goblins was clearly meant to tug on your heartstrings as some kind of found family. And I’m not above admitting that it worked to an extent. Hey, I could read a whole series of them and the villagers bullying Gav like that. Alas, not the story being told. But they were fun! As a group of characters to root for, they filled that requirement admirably.
If I had one slightly finicky complaint, it’s that memory loss of all the most horrific things Gav did was required for him to change. It’s that, actually, he does these horrific things (which, by the by, he actually did want to do. To not beat about the bush, this involves burning a woman alive because she rejects him which is what I meant earlier by the violent misogyny that just feels tonally out of place in this one) but it’s okay really because firstly, he’s a new person now who’s horrified by that behaviour and secondly, everyone around him was good and rescued the people he thinks he did this to, so really, he hasn’t done it in the first place. And he can separate present-post memory loss-Gav from past-Gav. Present-Gav doesn’t do these things, that was past-Gav’s problem. Okay, having put it like that, maybe it’s less finicky. The more I think about it, the more it seems to kind of undercut the story that the author’s trying to tell. I get it, she doesn’t want him to be wholly irredeemable and some of these things would absolutely for sure put him on that list for some readers. But I think that might have been a more interesting take: at what point do you give up on someone like this? Do you ever? Is redemption at all possible? But I get it. One, that takes a lot of skill, and two, this is a book that’s really just a light-hearted chance for one man to unlearn toxic masculinity and his incel ways. But that violent misogyny does pose a conundrum here: this is a book that is written in a way that’s quite light-hearted (or feels it, for all the obvious sexism of its main character, sorry past main character). Then you get to the reveal of what he’s done and it hits you like woah, okay. What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t really fit going back to that light-heartedness after that reveal, and it feels like doing so almost misses the point. I don’t know how clear I’m being here but basically, it’s about the dissonance of it all. It starts to feel a bit dismissive of the real violence of Gav’s misogyny.
So here we come to the strange point of me, in having written this review, thinking that perhaps I didn’t like it as much as all that. I’ve almost talked myself into giving it a lower rating (in fact, there may be no “almost” about it). The idea here might have been good, but the execution left a lot to be desired.
moonraker 