The Ickabog

It took me six years to get round to reading The Ickabog at last. My excuse: it’s a story aimed at children aged 7 to 9. What’s more, I must admit I wasn’t particularly keen, at the time, on The Tales of Beedle the Bard, published after the Harry Potter series.

But whilst listening to the audiobook this summer, during a particularly dark and painful period in my life, I was pleasantly surprised and even completely enchanted by this fable with its political parallels, adapted for children and set in a fairy-tale world—with no fairies, but very human monsters. It’s worth mentioning that this story bears no resemblance whatsoever to the world of Harry Potter. Indeed, there’s no magic involved apart from J.K. Rowling’s lively, inventive prose and her sharp humour. A real favourite and a delight as delicious as Mrs Beamish’s pastries.

Originally conceived as a bedtime story that the author would read to her two youngest children every evening, the manuscript was consigned to oblivion before being rediscovered and dusted off a dozen years later, in the spring of 2020, during the first lockdown. J.K. Rowling first decided to publish it for free on her website, chapter by chapter. Later, the royalties of the book sales were donated to charity.

It should be noted that in the United Kingdom, Hachette employees attempted (fortunately without success) to boycott the publication due to certain statements by the author that were deemed transphobic.

From Fable to Political Allegory

Once upon a time, there was a tiny country called Cornucopia . . . The king at the time of which I write was called King Fred the Fearless. He’d announced the ‘Fearless’ bit himself, on the morning of his coronation, partly because it sounded nice with ‘Fred’, but also because he’d once managed to catch and kill a wasp all by himself, if you didn’t count five footmen and the boot boy.

J.K. Rowling, 2020 - Little Brown - 282 pages (7h52)

The story is reminiscent of Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, which tells of a cowardly and vain monarch who is duped by his advisers. In Andersen’s tale, the illusion is based on gullibility and the fear of ridicule; in Rowling’s, it becomes an instrument of domination with very real consequences for the entire population.

Here, then, the scam is not about clothes but about a popular legend: a monster said to inhabit the marshes, with everyone seemingly having their own version of the story. Then the Ickabog becomes a threat that certain people have a vested interest in making it seem credible and, ultimately, a pretext for the two manipulative advisers to impose their tyranny and bleed a prosperous nation dry with increasingly exorbitant taxes, whilst the king, blinded by his own vanity, fails to realise what is going on under his rule.

Lies upon lies upon lies.

The initial lie is no longer enough: further lies must be concocted to protect it, and those who challenge it in turn become enemies who must be silenced or made to disappear. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is not necessarily coincidental.

It was the joyful faces that upset him most. 

A regime that thrives on fear needs a population that is anxious, docile and convinced that it is in danger. Laughter and joy then become almost subversive.

From Bogeyman to Human Monster

“Mind you don’t leave the garden while I’m working,” parents all over the kingdom would tell their children, “or the Ickabog will catch you and eat you all up!” And throughout the land, boys and girls played at fighting the Ickabog, tried to frighten each other with the tale of the Ickabog, and even, if the story became too convincing, had nightmares about the Ickabog.

Fear is the perfect tool for tyrants: once it has taken hold, people pass it on to one another, sometimes without meaning any harm (the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes). Those in power therefore no longer need to impose their narrative constantly: society starts repeating it of its own accord.

Daisy wished that she too believed in a monster in the marsh, rather than in the human wickedness she’d seen staring out of Lord Spittleworth’s eyes.

And the most frightening danger is not always the one we are told to fear. It is sometimes easier to believe in an external monster than to acknowledge human cruelty, especially when it is concealed behind institutions and official rhetoric. Even today, some people prefer to see incompetence where malice is, in fact, glaringly obvious.

When the Energy of Despair Opens Our Eyes

Sometimes—I don’t know how–people who live many miles apart seem to realise the time has come to act. Perhaps ideas can spread like pollen on the breeze.

Hope does not come from the miraculous disappearance of evil, but from the moment when people stop blindly believing what they are told. Without giving away the plot—since this is a fairy tale (without any fairies), in which nothing is glossed over (murder, violence, abuse), courage and truth ultimately triumph over evil when those who have allowed themselves to be blinded by power or caught up in its workings finally open their eyes.

Through humour, fantasy and caricatures, J.K. Rowling shows in The Ickabog that fairy tales are not necessarily naive or disconnected from reality. Their imaginary worlds can sometimes expose mechanisms that are otherwise difficult to recognise in everyday life. 

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The Missing 'I' of AI

AI: everyone knows what this acronym stands for by now. Since the introduction of ‘chatbots’, artificial intelligence has permeated our daily lives and become an integral part of them in just a few years. So much so that many are questioning the implications—and even expressing alarm about the future of humanity—in the face of the rapid, uncontrolled deployment of cutting-edge technology that remains largely misunderstood.

Artificial intelligence is going to change everything in the world, except how men think and behave.

Warren Buffett

Meanwhile, our attention is deliberately diverted by other forms of invasion—more immediate and more vociferous, yet just as anxiety-inducing. The good old trick of distracting us from one thing by drawing our attention to another. The Matrix saturates our mental and physical space for one purpose alone: to prevent any breakthrough of the Spirit (flash of insight).

You’ve all seen at least one sci-fi movie in your life, or read dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, This Perfect Day and a couple of Asimov’s stories—the list is by no means exhaustive. So there’s no need to explain how technological advances serve human slaves just as much as their masters, albeit to vastly different degrees.

Ghost in the Machine

Too much information running through my brain
Too much information driving me insane

"Too Much Information", The Police (1981)

In “Intelligence in Front of Its Own Mirror: From the Lawnmower Man to the Illusions of AI”, I discussed the dangers AI poses to human consciousness and the harmful consequences of its misuse.

Today, this dangerous trend is no longer merely theoretical: it is creeping into classrooms where laziness has replaced effort, into our ears through a deluge of artificial music, and into our numbed minds, which no longer read but demand summaries of everything—just like that Gen Z influencer who publicly complained about books containing ‘too many words’.

The findings of the latest OECD PISA survey¹ are unequivocal: we are facing a historic decline in young people’s reading comprehension and reasoning skills. Teachers see this on a daily basis: critical thinking is being delegated to algorithms, attention spans are dwindling, and cognitive laziness is taking hold.

This intellectual atrophy is by no means accidental; it goes hand in hand with the systematic destruction of what elevates us as human beings: art and nature. Both are essential to our mental balance.

But it's the same ‘logic’ everywhere: forests are cleared to make way for rows of solar panels or data centres; trees are replaced by surveillance camera poles; and centuries of human creativity are plundered to feed algorithms. The living world is destroyed and replaced with concrete, silicon and control.

And it is but a short step from the disfigurement of our natural environment to that of our cultural landscape: the machine is now striking at the heart of our entire creative ecosystem. In just a few years, platforms and social networks have been overwhelmed by a synthetic tidal wave: music churned out in vast quantities by plundering the voices and works of artists, whether signed to record labels or working independently; videos mass-produced ad nauseam with haphazard dubbing; images generated in two clicks… cultural theft is now global and unabashed.

Ghostwriters in the Shadows

On this moonlit night, my friend GPT
Lend me your quill to churn out an essay²

The publishing world is where the decline is most noticeable.

Every aspect is affected: algorithm-generated covers, shoddy machine translations, audiobooks read by bots... Publishers who still value the human touch now feel compelled to label their products as ‘human interpretation’. How long before we see ‘written (or translated) by a real person’ labels on books in our bookshops?

But there's worse to come: this ease of production gives rise to a host of ‘fake authors’ who, after typing in a few prompts, mistake the ability to generate text for a genuine calling to write books or poetry.

This system not only further reduces their tolerance for frustration by offering the illusion of immediate results (without the months or years of hard work that go into creating a genuine work), but also inflates their egos. Buoyed by the applause of a gullible audience, they delude themselves into thinking they are creators, when in fact all they do is operate a machine that they could not do without. Some are so trapped by their own pretence that they are unable to hold a live conversation or answer questions about their own books without outsourcing their thoughts to an algorithm first.

Intellectual Onanism and Hacked Prose

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It's based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer

"Paperback Writer", The Beatles (1966)

The price of this collective delusion is the systematic flooding of the self-publishing market. On Amazon, in particular, this ceaseless stream of soulless texts, published for prestige, profit, or both, stifles authentic creativity and drowns out emerging authors amid a cacophony of empty words.

In response to this invasion, the industry's safeguards are proving to be nothing but a farce: their so-called ‘AI detectors’ are just blind algorithms, incapable of distinguishing between synthetic prose and human-written text—to the point of classifying the US Constitution of 1787 as a machine-generated text³!

For aspiring writers, the consequences are twofold. Not only is their work lost in the mix, but overwhelmed publishing houses may also reject it after turning to these ‘detectors’ as a stopgap measure, lacking the time and resources to review every submission.

Playing Along or Being Played by ‘I’?

Can't you see anything on the horizon?
Stranded souls who dropped anchor with their pens here
And stopped writing...

"Aux sombres héros de l'amer", Noir Désir (1989)

Algorithms never doubt. They know neither the anxiety of a blank page nor the exhaustion of having bled to extract every word from the depths of our wounds. They merely calculate the most probable sequence, polishing the sentences with a veneer of unsettling perfection.

But is it really perfect? What is perfection? Don’t they say that ‘better is the enemy of good’?

What AI regurgitates after siphoning off our writers (and our artists) is nothing but a slick, soulless pastiche. After all, it's our imperfections, our rough edges, our wounds put into words and our words made flesh that contribute to our inimitable signature (what some, like Stephen King, call the ‘author’s voice’, and others the ‘vibrational signature’). The famous crack in everything through which the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen put it.

Writing is not simply a matter of recycling one’s cluttered thoughts by dumping them into a machine in the hope of giving them form, but rather a—often therapeutic—wrestling match with language. By outsourcing this effort, we abandon our most precious asset: critical thinking.

Whispering Isn't Playing

Anyway, I’d like to tell you
That everything I’ve ever written
I’ve drawn from the ink of your eyes

"L'encre de tes yeux", Francis Cabrel (1980)

It is precisely this intimate connection that Stephen King describes in On Writing: A  Memoir of the Craft. For him, writing is a form of telepathy that enables the same scene to be conjured up in the reader’s mind without direct communication. Whilst algorithms can certainly reproduce (rather than create) the form of a text, their lack of lived experience prevents them from capturing its essence.

Because AI feels nothing. And it is precisely in order to feel that people read. And write, too.

What about humour, puns, those double or triple meanings and other semantic twists—which, for me, have almost become a hallmark? I don’t think AI is capable of that. At any rate, not of genuine humour—the sort that enchants the mind, releases endorphins and neutralises negative energy, thereby lifting our spirits and freeing us from what weighs us down.

For genuine humour is a form of creative intelligence. It elevates us and brings us closer to our Spirit. After all, don't we say of those endowed with such humour that they are ‘witty’ or that they ‘have a sharp wit’?

For that to happen, AI would need to become capable of self-awareness, as Christelle Dabos, author of The Mirror Visitor, recently pointed out: “Perhaps it will have this capacity for spiritual awakening that we have failed to achieve, and perhaps it will transform itself into a great Buddha?”

I wouldn’t be that optimistic, but I wouldn’t dismiss the tool altogether. When I entrust it with the task of untangling the knots in my inconsistencies, it leaves me free to comb through the details and pick out the nits.

I love a challenge, and there’s no better fuel for dispelling the prevailing gloom than showing the machine what we’re made of.

Whispering isn't playing. We only get the upper hand by crowning our pieces. The machine will not replace humans… at least, not those who remain sovereign. The others? They will replace the machine. Look around you: it’s already happening.

Endnotes

1. ^  Source: PISA 2025 Results: France.
2. ^ This is actually my own pastiche of the French nursery rhyme "Au clair de la lune".
3. ^ Source: That Time When the American Constitution Resulted as AI-generated.

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Six of Crows

As mentioned in my previous review, this new two-part series by Leigh Bardugo, also set in the Grishaverse, more than fulfils all the promises that the Grisha trilogy failed to fully deliver. Somewhat more than that, even. I absolutely love it!

The Six of Crows duology—whose title both refers to card games and the Crow Club, the gambling house run by Kaz Brekker—takes place two years after the events of the Grisha trilogy (unlike the Netflix TV series, which set them at the same time, whilst deviating significantly from the original storyline) and focuses primarily on Ketterdam, the capital of Kerch, an island nation inspired by the 19th-century Dutch Republic and, to a lesser extent, by New York (New Amsterdam), Las Vegas and Victorian London.

Leigh Bardugo, 2015 - Macmillan - 1059 pages

Welcome to the Crooked Kingdom

The underworld of Ketterdam is ruled by rival gangs. Kaz Brekker, the youngest and most ambitious player in the local mob, who combines intelligence, secrecy, charisma and danger, is best known for being a master thief. Willing to do anything for money, he is tasked by wealthy merchant Van Eck with rescuing a Shu scientist from the Ice Court, an unbreachable stronghold in Fjerda. The prisoner is the inventor of jurda parem, an extremely addictive and deadly drug that greatly enhances the abilities of Grishas. Should it fall into the wrong hands, it could have devastating consequences.

For this heist of a lifetime, in great Ocean’s Eleven style meets Game of Thrones (according to the author), Kaz aka Dirtyhands—quite an ironic nickname for someone who never takes his gloves off—starts recruiting his dream team: a spy who defies the laws of gravity, a runaway with a privileged past, a sharpshooter who can't walk away from a wager, a convict with a thirst for revenge, and a powerful Grisha.

The storytelling is structured around the different points of view of the Crows—a motley crew of battered teens who, at first glance, may have nothing in common, but are driven by a shared desire: taking revenge on life.

Crows remember human faces. They remember the people who feed them, who are kind to them. And the people who wrong them too.

Not only does such a narrative choice provide the essential psychological depth to understanding the characters and their interactions by allowing us to get inside their heads, it also enables the author to withhold certain details in order to preserve the element of surprise surrounding her many plot twists. 

And despite these glimpses into their past and wounds, the story never loses momentum and maintains a brisk pace. For in Ketterdam, anything can be traded. Not just blows. People too.

When Everything and Everyone Has a Price

Ketterdam is, quite literally, a city built on trade, but one in which commercial logic ultimately comes to encompass even human beings.

Kerch had been built on trade, but how much of that trade had been the human kind? 

Young Grishas, snatched from their families in their homeland by Kerch slave traders, are sold into brothels in Ketterdam; while others, fleeing the civil war in Ravka, get exploited in different ways, under the guise of contracts and unrepayable debts. And the more one pays, the more they believe they own the other person.

The Menagerie was one of the most expensive pleasure houses in the Barrel, but its customers were no kinder than those who frequented the dollar houses and alley girls. In some ways, Inej came to understand, they were worse. When a man spends that much coin, said the Kaelish girl, Caera, he thinks he’s earned the right to do whatever he wants.

A child unfit to take over the business empire? No problem: you get rid of them as if they were a faulty appliance and father a new one to replace them.

Sickening political correctness and corruption go hand in hand. Wealth breeds impunity. The Merchant Council governs in the name of prosperity, with the blessing of the gods. Any resemblance to our present-day society may not be entirely fortuitous.

A minister of Ghezen might stand at that altar and rail against slavery, but how much of this city had been built on taxes from the pleasure houses? How many members of his congregation employed boys and girls who could barely speak Kerch, who scrubbed floors and folded laundry for pennies as they worked to pay off a debt that never seemed to grow smaller?

In te, Domine

The gods in this series are not mere symbols. In the Grishaverse, every society has its own beliefs, and these can be used to justify behaviour that ultimately has little—if anything—sacred about it.

Thus, whilst in the Grisha trilogy Leigh Bardugo explored how faith could transform people into saints or monsters, in Six of Crows she pushes this much further by showing how beliefs can serve as a moral veneer for a deeply corrupt system.

Sacred is Ghezen and in commerce we see His hand.

Not only in Kerch, but also in Fjerda, where faith is used to breed and legitimise hatred.

What stands before you is the next generation of drüskelle, the holy order charged with protecting the sovereign nation of Fjerda by eradicating your kind.

In te, Domine. Who truly dominates? Djel through the Drüskelle, or the Drüskelle in the name of Djel to justify their savagery?

For hatred is a poison. A fiery blaze that consumes from within and requires constant nurturing, like an insatiable demon, forever demanding more offerings to keep it under control.

An illusory sense of control that traps you in a spiral of violence and pain until the vessel implodes. Hell is an inner prison that we hold within.

The Prisons We Hold Within

What wounds had his commanders exploited to put that look in his eyes?

Of all the things that hold us captive, hatred is rarely innate. It often stems from a wound that is exploited to fuel this dependence.

So as mentioned in my review of the Grisha Saga, behind the hatred for Grishas is envy, a sense of being deprived of something, and the need to destroy what one cannot possess: “What did it mean to aspire to serve Djel, only to see his power in the gifts of another, to know you could never possess those gifts yourself?”

And, of course, drugs as a literal poison—jurda parem, which alters perceptions and disrupts the body’s chemistry, ultimately destroying it.: “Once the drug has run its course, it leaves the Grisha’s body weakened and the craving is intense. It’s quite debilitating.”

But addiction does not arise solely from a poison, whether real or metaphorical, that enslaves the individual. One can also get hooked on something that momentarily gives them the impression of regaining control.

Thus, the characters spend their time trying to break free from something, whilst stuck in their own wounds, obsessions or needs, which they seek to numb or channel: violence for the gangs, gambling for Jesper, or revenge for Kaz. “Brekker, his Wraith queen, his rotten little court of thugs. A fearless breed, hard-eyed and feral, hungrier for vengeance than for gold.”

And, of course, the most powerful of them all: fear—particularly the fear of death.

Zoya used to say that fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.

No Mourners, No Funerals

The Crows' motto is a cynical reminder of their invisibility in the eyes of society. Outcasts who struggle to survive, against all odds, in the lawless grey areas of the underworld, and who, upon their death, are piled up like dregs onto a funeral barge.

We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.

“Stop treating your pain like it’s something you imagined”, Inej tells Jesper. “If you see the wound is real, then you can heal it.”  

It is only by taking a clear look at the Real that we can free ourselves from the illusion.

Wounds and scars are not exclusive to the nobodies. Kings bear them too, as King of Scars—the title of the next instalment in the Grishaverse which I’ve only just started reading—already suggests.

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The Grisha Trilogy

After suffering from a severe bout of literary indigestion caused by cheap, disposable domestic thrillers, immersing myself in Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse was truly delightful. This rich world, which I discovered through the Netflix series Shadow and Bone, comprises a trilogy and two duologies, along with a handful of short-story collections and a graphic novel. A fictional world largely inspired by early 1800s Europe—particularly Tsarist Russia as the model for Ravka, where most of the Grisha trilogy takes place.

Grisha are considered sorcerers, although they themselves refer to their gifts—which they call Small Science—as extensions of the natural world, since they cannot create anything, but only use and alter what already exists. Both feared and revered, they serve the war-ravaged kingdom, fighting in the Second Army under the command of the Darkling, a Shadow Summoner. Ravka is cursed. It is split in half from north to south by the Shadow Fold (or Unsea), a swath of malevolent darkness populated by monstrous creatures known as volcra, which feast on human flesh.

While crossing the Unsea with her First Army regiment to resupply the eastern part of the country—which has been cut off from its shipping ports—Alina, a young orphan and cartographer, discovers her power as a Sun Summoner while trying to save the life of her childhood friend, Mal. A discovery that will change her fate—and that of the entire nation—forever. For what do we do when faced with something we don’t understand? We either fear it, fight it… or turn it into an object of worship. And in the Grishaverse, these three different responses can sometimes overlap.

Leigh Bardugo, 2012 - Macmillan - 1248 pages

Otkazat'sya and Grisha

Alina goes from being an ordinary citizen to becoming a Grisha and discovers what goes on inside the Little Palace, where members of the Second Army—regarded as an elite force by the Ravkan masses—are trained and prepared.

One thing did stand out to me: the word the philosophers used to describe people born without Grisha gifts, otkazat’sya, “the abandoned.” It was another word for orphan.

Certainly, the term Otkazat’sya, used by Grisha to refer to the ‘ungifted’, speaks volumes about how this minority views the majority. But this distinction works both ways, thereby creating a grey area that allows for a better understanding of the motivations and stakes of both opposing forces. For while Grisha consider themselves a class apart, their difference also becomes, in the eyes of others, a source of mistrust and fear, even as defects to be eradicated: “When they were in their cups, some of the nobles made it clear they think all of the Grisha should be rounded up and executed.”

Except for Ravka (and for a very specific reason that I cannot reveal without spoiling the plot), reactions range from rejection to persecution, including exploitation, slavery, and human experimentation, but the underlying mechanism remains the same: the other becomes a thing simply because they are different—a difference that inspires both fear and envy.

Most rogue Grisha ended up in Novyi Zem. Aside from Ravka, it was the only place where they didn’t have to fear being experimented on by Shu doctors or burned by Fjerdan witchhunters. Even so, they had to be cautious about displaying their power. Grisha were valued slaves, and less scrupulous Kerch traders were known to round them up and sell them in secret auctions.

The Fjerdan Drüskelle take this logic to the point of absurdity by justifying their barbarism in the name of faith, even though their behavior contradicts the moral principles they claim to defend: “There are witchhunters who don’t eat animals, won’t wear leather shoes or kill a spider in their homes, but they’ll burn Grisha alive on the pyre.”

The Lives of Saints

But faith isn't just about targeting enemies. It can also produce saints. And when Alina herself becomes the object of a cult, the line between belief, devotion, and manipulation becomes much harder to define.

Peasants love their Saints. They hunger for the miraculous. And yet they do not love the Grisha.

Once again, the polarising clichés of good vs. evil and light vs. dark are brought to the fore. Alina becomes the chosen one, the object of a collective projection of hope, fear, faith, and a longing for miracles: “There is a fine line between fear and veneration.”

Ultimately, deifying a person is not so different from demonising them. In both cases, the human being disappears behind the symbol. This is illustrated by the account of the martyrdom of Sankt Ilya, who was drowned in the river by the villagers for bringing one of their own children back to life after a tragic accident while ploughing:  “Maybe it was not just horror or righteousness that drove them, but anger as well.”

Likewise, this so-called devotion to Sankta Alina is also beginning to take on predatory overtones: “The bodies pressed tighter, pushing and shoving, shouting at each other, each wanting to get nearer. My feet lost contact with the ground. I cried out as a chunk of my hair was ripped from my scalp. They were going to tear me apart.”

Faith does not merely produce saints. It can also become a powerful means of mobilising crowds, for good or for ill, ultimately transforming sacrifice into a virtue and death into a reward. As the Apparat points out: “They will make war without fear and die rejoicing. There is no greater power than faith, and there will be no greater army than one driven by it.”

The Black Heretic

What is infinite? The universe and the greed of men.

The lust for power does not stem solely from those who lack it. Those who hold it may, too, come to crave more, as illustrated by the Darkling’s journey—a man whom injustice transformed into a blind avenger, to the point of committing acts from which there is no going back. At the outset, however, his intention was both honourable and legitimate: he wanted to protect the Grisha, who had long been persecuted and forced to live in fear: “We would be Ravkans, not just Grisha. That dream was the seed of the Second Army.”

But in his determination to protect his own, the line between defence and domination eventually became blurred. And when power over matter was no longer enough, the temptation was to draw upon what is forbidden: Merzost.

In Ravkan, the word for magic and abomination was the same. Basic Grisha theory stated that matter couldn’t just be created from nothing. But that was a tenet of the Small Science. Merzost was different, a corruption of the making at the heart of the world.

However, it would be too convenient to reduce the Darkling to the embodiment of darkness in direct contrast to the Sun Summoner. His journey is also that of a man shaped by persecution, fear and anger, who ultimately ends up replicating some of the very violence he sought to combat. And here, we can clearly see the extent to which fiction mirrors the reality of the Matrix. Suffering may explain actions, but it does not justify them.

Shadow and Bone

Behind its apparent contrast between light and darkness, the Grisha trilogy ultimately questions our relationship with power, difference and faith. It is, however, a pity that the romantasy elements and the heroine’s endless dithering all too often prevail over the rest of the plot, at the expense of its narrative flow.

The Darkling would also have benefited from deeper characterisation and a greater presence in the story. But my judgement is probably biased by Ben Barnes’s excellent performance in the TV adaptation, which, for once, does the story justice, even if it doesn’t always strictly follow it to the letter.

I also think that combining the Grisha trilogy with the Six of Crows duology was a brilliant idea, even though Netflix ultimately decided to cancel the series after two seasons. Fortunately, Six of Crows—which I’m currently reading—fulfils all the promises that the Grisha trilogy failed to fully deliver.

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The Perfect Recipe

With every major bestseller comes a host of copycats, eagerly welcomed by publishers to keep the presses running whilst the hype lasts. Especially when Hollywood jumps on the trend. So, after the plethora of wizards and vampires spawned by the Harry Potter and Twilight phenomena, the hype has now shifted to fast-read domestic thrillers—inspired by Freida McFadden’s international bestseller The Housemaid (also a major feature film)—stepping into the breach she opened up.

The sincerest form of flattery is imitation, right?

Count My Lies, Sophie Stava (2025)

If only it added some additional value to the blueprint; a touch of originality to the tropes; and a dash of substance to the archetypes. It would be too much to expect, as fast reading obviously implies quick writing. At least based on the five thrillers I’ve recently wolfed down—I know, I just couldn’t help myself.

Guidelines

Imagine a ready-made template for novels, like the visual templates provided by some graphic design platforms online. All you would need to do is fill in the placeholders using a list of preset tropes: motifs, recurring themes, typical situations, relationship dynamics, character archetypes, plot structures, narrative techniques, storytelling conventions, and so on… And there you have it—a bestseller that you may even turn into a series (just like The Housemaid and The Perfect Marriage) to double the jackpot and keep topping the bestseller list of the Amazon jungle, for as long as BookTokers are on your side.

1. Book Presentation

Pick a title that's simple, short and archetypal, along with a somewhat clickbait-y tagline.

• The Housemaid: "From behind closed doors, she sees everything." (Freida McFadden, 2022)
• Count My Lies: "I'm your friend. But can you trust me?" (Sophie Stava, 2025)
• The Waitress: "I was watching him. But he was watching me." (K.L. Slater, 2024)
• The Perfect Marriage: "His mistress is dead. His wife is his only hope." (Jeneva Rose, 2020)
• The Perfect Divorce: "Till death do us apart. Yours. Not mine." (Jeneva Rose, 2025)
• One of Us Is Dead: "Sublimely bitchy." (Jeneva Rose, 2023)

Go for a simple, symbolic front cover design featuring a keyhole, a styrofoam cup, wedding rings, a comb and a pair of scissors… but keep the colour scheme to no more than two or three different shades.

2. Style

Preferably write in the present tense, in the first person, and alternate characters’ points of view.

Although the basic idea is not a bad thing, it does have a few pitfalls when the murderer takes part in the storytelling and certain details that might give away the final twist need to be left out. However, authors tend to focus too much on throwing red herrings while failing to provide genuine clues or subtle psychological details as well. As a result, attentive readers, who could not possibly have seen this coming (unless they figured out the underlying mechanics), invariably feel betrayed by the far-fetched deus ex machina twist in the final act. That's the fly in the ointment.

Oddly enough, in The Waitress, only the lead character speaks in the first person. Which breaks the natural flow of the storytelling. This is even more noticeable in the audio version, where all three points of view are read by the same voice actress unlike in other similar audiobooks with multiple points of view.

Use short sentences, as you would in a screenplay or dialogue prompt. Avoid metaphors, semantic fields, and overly literary phrasing as your target audience might otherwise lose interest. What’s more, it will be all the easier to adapt for film or television.

Incidentally, a TV series is in the pipeline for Count My Lies. And The Perfect Marriage is currently being adapted for the silver screen.

3. Characters

Your lead characters must be in the same age group as your target audience, namely firmly in their thirties. Not too young, as many tropes common to the genre—such as marriage, property, careers, complicated divorces and established neighbourhoods—wouldn’t work; nor too old, for the main characteristic of ‘youth culture’ primarily involves trapping people’s minds in illusory bubbles of timelessness, which are ultimately bound to eventually burst.

Readers should be able to relate and think: “This could be me”. Turning everyday life into a source of anxiety is the very principle of domestic thrillers.

First, it was the smell, the dead giveaway of the Chanel No.5, so classic, so expected. This is matched with the monochrome outfit adorning her well-maintained figure. Not a shred of personality in her outward appearance, which itself tells you everything you need to know about her. Her features are hard and are kept in place by routine visits to a plastic surgeon, but the kind who does a superb enough job that only a well-trained eye can even tell that the skin isn’t 100 percent natural. The entire entrance is punctuated by the final click of a black Manolo Blahnik heel (never Louboutin’s, “red is ostentatious”), announcing that she is here and ready for her proper allotment of attention, which by normal tally is all of it.

The Perfect Marriage, Jeneva Rose (2020)

Inject a touch of glamour with a strong emphasis on luxury and good looks, which are more important than character depth. Don’t hold back on glitz and glam, and don’t forget to remind readers just how incredibly hot husbands or lovers are. Lust makes up for loss, and it's important for the narcissistic mindset to hear that often.

Be sure to overdo on stereotypes: negligent cops who aren’t exactly bright; sloppy coroners who’ve never heard of such a thing as DNA; abnormally well-behaved, docile kids who do exactly as they’re told at all times…

4.  Final Tips

When you tell the truth—at least, if the truth is boring, which it almost always is—people begin to fidget, their eyes glazing as their attention wanes. Eventually, they realize, snapping to with a sheepish Oh, I’m sorry, what were you saying?, trying to feign interest.

Count My Lies, Sophie Stava (2025)

Once all the ingredients have been added, spread them out in the mould and give it a final twist at the end of the cooking process. If the mix is too thick, dilute it with irrelevant trivial details.

Also, do not hesitate to retell the same events from the other characters’ perspectives. It creates the impression that there are hidden clues, while saving you the trouble of having to plant any real ones.

Ethics Go Rat-a-Tat

The bully forgets they’re a bully. The victim never does. 

One of Us Is Dead, Jeneva Rose (2023)

As I pointed out in a previous article on Freida McFadden, “the most disturbing aspect is undoubtedly the moral ambiguity of all her characters, which tends to normalise borderline personality disorder and manipulation as the standard way of relating to others.” And the everyone’s-a-psychopath or borderline trope comes up consistently, to varying degrees, in all the books mentioned above. This is particularly true of Jeneva Rose, who seems to take perverse delight in allowing the triumph of deviant ethics with total impunity.

You certainly do not want to show manipulators and psychopaths in a bad light. After all, we ought to help shift the Overton window in favour of a completely dehumanised, predatory society governed by Ahrimanic Intelligence, just as Rudolf Steiner prophesied. Some like to call it ‘alternative’, but what kind of alternative are we actually talking about?

The liar, the cheat who tried to ruin my life. It's all over for him. For me, it's only just beginning.

The Waitress, K.L. Slater (2024)

Fundamentally, the reason these kinds of books are so popular is mainly because our souls get bored with the numbing routine of everyday life and long to experience the thrill of danger and the unexpected—without any consequences. 

When we're saturated with information, we no longer have the desire to engage in deep thought, because everything brings us back to this distressing world. So we find comfort in the tales we tell ourselves, and these stories tell us in turn. Ultimately, vicarious fear allows us to gain perspective on our concerns and defuse our own fears. 

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The Mirror Visitor

Thirteen years ago, I finally opened A Winter's Promise for the first time, after weeks of hesitation because the original title in French struck me more as a romance than as the most remarkable work of fantasy since Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. And it was French, no less. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you are certainly familiar with the story behind The Mirror Visitor tetralogy, as I’ve mentioned it on numerous occasions—namely in 2017 and more recently in 2024, as part of an extensive interview with its author, Christelle Dabos.

Today, The Mirror Visitor—which has sold over 1.3 million copies and been translated into some twenty languages—is back in the spotlight at French-language bookstores with the release of the graphic novel adaptation, a very faithful and successful rendition of the first volume illustrated by Vanyda, which I invite you to discover via the short trailer above, made by yours truly.

Christelle Dabos, 2013 - Europa Editions - 2437 pages

For me, it was the opportunity to immerse myself back into this world that I hadn’t revisited since the publication of the final installment of the series in 2019. And to rediscover it from the fresh perspective of the Consciousness of the Real.

The God Who Felt 'Threatened'

In the beginning, we were as one.
But God felt we couldn’t satisfy him like that, so God set about dividing us. God had great fun with us, then God tired of us and forgot us. God could be so cruel in his indifference, he horrified me. God knew how to show his gentle side, too, and I loved him as I’ve loved no one else.  […]
And one day, when God was in a really bad mood, he did something enormously stupid. 
God smashed the world to pieces.

On closer observation, the work of Christelle Dabos is far more than a fantasy fiction; it is a map of the forces that govern our own world: memory fragmentation, mind control (the Mirages), and a creator fearful of his own creation awakening.

Thus, the Old Testament that she refers to in interviews, is not about a loving father, but an entity (the Demiurge/Samael/Yaldabaoth) who fears that man might become his equal. 

“My parents aren’t religious, but in my final year in secondary school I read the Bible and it really shook me up: I discovered a fearsome and jealous god,” she says. “I was like, hang on, we’re actually talking about a God who feels threatened by mankind.”

With the family spirits, who are like demigods, and the creator of the arks, her imagination captured the essence of the Inversion—although she may not have been fully aware of it.

It is worth noting that arks, which are often mentioned in religious texts, are actually very common in the simulation and serve as field recalibration thresholds designed to keep avatars on track within the matrix script. Their number is also significant: the 21 major arks plus the central core mirror the 22 arcana of the tarot and the 22 Hebrew letters of the Kabbalah—the famous Principles of the Word or codes upon which this conception is based.

Oblivion as a Key Issue

It wasn’t entirely Artemis’s fault, however, if she had so little memory. Nothing stuck firmly in her mind, events flowed over her without lingering. This predisposition to forget was probably to compensate for her immortality, a safety valve to avoid sinking into madness or despair. Artemis knew nothing of her past; she lived in an eternal present. No one knew what her life had been like before founding her own dynasty on Anima, several centuries back. For the family, she was there, she had always been there, she would always be there.
And this was how it went for each ark and each family spirit.

Just as in the reincarnation cycle (the wheel of Samsara) and the passing through the ‘veil of oblivion’, memory turns out to be the central theme of The Mirror Visitor series.

Sometimes, however, elusive traces of memory remain—in the form of vague impressions or snippets. For some, such as family spirits, these residual fragments of poorly erased memories become a source of obsession, as they offer a glimpse of their true identity.

An obsession that the author herself admits to sharing: “I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with it. Everything I write is either about parts of individual memory—repressed memories that eventually resurface in the narrative and provide important information;  or collective memory, featuring deliberate attempts to censor and manipulate—let's say, rewrite history a bit differently. People don't have to know everything. So it does intrigue me, but why that much? Where does it come from?”

Why does it intrigue her so much? Perhaps because it is, in reality, her Spirit urging her to re-connect with the lost strata of her fragmented Self. Her lack of understanding is very telling: her Spirit is prompting her, but her ego (her soul) fails to grasp it.

A World Shaped by Illusion and Deceit

There had been no transition from the previous setting; it was mind-boggling. The ambassador burst out laughing when he noticed Ophelia’s expression—behind her dark glasses, her eyes were popping out of her head.
“Precisely what I was telling you, varnish over filth! There are illusions lurking almost everywhere around here. It doesn’t always make much sense, but you’ll soon get used to it.” He sighed wearily. “Masking poverty! Saving appearances—that, in some ways, is the designated role of the Mirages.”
Ophelia wondered whether it was just to be provocative that he himself wore the clothes of a tramp.

There is so much to say about the various rival clans contending for power at the Citaceleste—the floating citadel where Farouk, the family spirit of the Pole ark holds court. Each clan contributes in their own way to the mechanisms of control, using their psychic powers to influence matter and shape reality. 

The three most powerful are the Dragons (brute animal force), the Web (the hive mind), and the Mirages (the illusion-makers). 

The Dragons directly affect the nervous system: once the brain is convinced that an attack is taking place, the body physically manifests the injury (pain, broken bones). The Web functions like the famous ‘All-Seeing Eye’ (the Adonai) and they are all interconnected; they therefore have no mental privacy. 

© Vanyda

Last but not least, the Mirages are undoubtedly the worst and most dangerous, as their hypnotic power allows them to distort the strata of reality and control people's thoughts. Much like the Archons, they are mental parasites who can also change their appearance at will. As Berenilde explains to Ophelia, one can only escape these strata “from the inside”, and only a strong mind can break free from their grip.

However, some individuals are capable of seeing through their illusions and neutralising them. They're called the Nihilists. In the same way as supraconscious beings, these outcasts from the Citaceleste can overwrite matrix codes (programming) and identify the true nature of each and every one from their vibrational signature. Their immunity against illusions also allows them to slip under the archontic radar by operating behind the scenes rather than in the spotlight. Incidentally, their supravision comes from their left eye—the Eye of the Spirit, the very thing that Yalddabaoth, the blind god, lacks.

Through the Smoke and Mirrors of Oblivion

To read an object requires forgetting oneself a little, to leave room for the past of someone else. Traveling through mirrors, that requires facing up to oneself. One has to have guts, y’know, to look oneself straight in the peepers, see oneself as one really is, plunge into one’s own reflection. Those who close their eyes, those who lie to themselves, those who see themselves as better than they are, they could never do it.

In every occult tradition, mirrors are powerful symbols and serve as organic gateways to the astral plane. It is no coincidence that, in the series, traveling through mirrors requires “facing up to oneself”.

It is a way of bypassing appearances and the deceptions of the matrix. Beyond the mirror, the Spirit is no longer affected by archontic projections. Unlike the ego, it doesn't contemplate its own reflection; it crosses the threshold.

Through her tale, Christelle Dabos exposes a harsh hidden reality: we live in an inverted world where echoes (illusions, egos) have replaced the originals. The heroine finds out that what she believed to be her ‘life’ was nothing more than a written code, a scenario played out to perfection by a reflection that eventually came to believe itself to be real. Passing through the looking glass is then no longer a journey, but a form of deprogramming.

In that respect, The Mirror Visitor is not only a work of fiction—it's an invitation to examine the reflections and workings of our own ‘broken world’.

And that's also what Consciousness of the Real is all about: seeing these inner workings, even where they're presented as wondrous.

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The Writing Machine

Normally, I’m not in the habit of wasting my time and energy disparaging things I could easily ignore. But sometimes, it’s not that simple. And when attention gives way to detached (unbiased) observation, criticism may prove constructive — or even highly instructive.

Appearances can be deceiving. And sometimes they are deadly.

The Housemaid (2022)

Intrigued by the phenomenon surrounding Freida McFadden, who, in just a few years, has become the world’s best-selling thriller author, I took a closer look at the works of the “Taylor Swift of the literary world”, as some like to call her, “where extreme mediocrity is rewarded time and time again” (sic). However, despite her phenomenal commercial success and devoted fanbase (the ‘McFans’ of the TikTok generation), Freida McFadden is far from winning universal approval, and her meteoric rise has been marked by controversy.

So what is she criticised for? On the one hand, she's been accused of plagiarism on multiple occasions, although no formal evidence has ever been produced. On the other hand, her overly impersonal and simplistic style, and her hastily written, poorly edited books, are a source of irritation. Her fast-paced publishing schedule, combined with her medical career (as a brain injury specialist) and her avoidance of the media, has even fuelled rumours that she may be using artificial intelligence in her writing process.

I do love him. So much. But I don’t trust him.

The Tenant (2025)

According to her detractors, Freida McFadden is the queen of fast reads, i.e. “literary snacks to consume like fast food, literally and figuratively”. It turns out that this criticism is far from unfounded. Given that unlike many who form opinions based on hearsay I only rely on direct experience, I must confess that I literally wolfed down several of her novels in a matter of days. 

Actually, I didn’t read them: I listened to them. Over breakfast. And late into the night. A wise decision. For good voice actors can always make it sound better. But that’s not really what literature is meant for in the first place. Also, just listening tends to bypass critical analysis. Our minds don’t filter information in the same way as they do when we’re reading. It’s uploaded directly into our subconscious. While this can be helpful if we’re actively processing the information, it’s dangerous when we’re in a passive mode. Fortunately, I’m in constant vigilance mode now.

How to Make Literary Big Macs

So what makes these thrillers so addictive? The thing is, Freida McFadden doesn’t tell stories. She sets up emotional loops. And if we’re hooked, it’s not because they’re good. It’s because they’re astral.

It is a formulaic, industrialised template with the same pace and structure from one book to the next, using a database of interchangeable characters, situations and tropes. And as systematic as this formula may be, it does work. 

Multi-perspective novels using two (or sometimes three) points of view, structured around a three-act narrative arc, with very short chapters that always end on (often clickbait-style) cliffhangers designed to recapture the reader’s attention and keep them on their toes — a narrative dopamine rush that the astral is particularly fond of.

A triangle of vacuous, ultra-stereotypical generic characters, all within a precisely targeted age group; impossibly handsome, flawless men, always paired with women who are in a league of their own (sic); a first-person narrative in the present tense, allowing for immediate and effortless identification.

Mystery Man is hot, to say the least. He has thick black hair and coal-black eyes, with a level of intensity that sends yet another lightning bolt through me. His strong jaw makes him seem utterly in control and confident. His face has that pleasing textbook symmetry. He’s wearing a black T-shirt that shows off his lean build and makes his dark hair and eyes seem even more intense.

The Boyfriend (2024)

The grotesque naivety of the protagonists (often women, but not always), which makes them completely oblivious to the massive red flags, is on a par with the worst B-movie plots. It’s a gross misdirection ploy designed to justify the far-fetched final twists that you never see coming. 

At least, as long as you haven't read more than one novel. And also provided you don't pay too much attention to the blatantly misleading clues, which are often gratuitous and never explained. The author is banking on the reader's short attention span, assuming they just want to go with the flow without thinking too hard. To hell with the inconsistencies, as long as the adrenaline's pumping!

There is never any catharsis. Nothing gets morally resolved. And that opens up a frequency hole in the psychic field. The reader is left in a state of emotional limbo. Hence the addictiveness. And most people won't even realise it. 

All of Them Psychos

Identity theft and parenticide are recurring themes in Freida McFadden’s books. But the most disturbing aspect is undoubtedly the moral ambiguity of all her characters, which tends to normalise borderline personality disorder and manipulation as the standard way of relating to others. 

I am so lucky. I have a beautiful house, a fulfilling career, and a husband who is kind and mild-mannered and incredibly handsome. And as Nate pulls the car onto the road and starts driving in the direction of the school, all I can think to myself is that I hope a truck blows through a stop sign, plows into the Honda, and kills us both instantly.

The Teacher (2024)

Her role reversals blur the clear distinction between predator and prey. Since everyone is ‘a bit twisted’, no one really is. Ultimately, this dilutes the concept of predation. And trivialises psychopathy.

“In 1833, Dr. James Prichard formulated an early version of what we now call psychopathy. He called it ‘moral insanity’. People diagnosed with moral insanity were thought to make bad moral judgments but had no defects in their intelligence or mental health. Psychopaths, too, are often clever and sane and are more likely to do things that are widely considered to be immoral.” (Source)

And contrary to popular belief, psychopaths are actually the ones who experience the strongest emotions (and are therefore a major source of fuel for the matrix). 

“These people generally have very high levels of frustration, internal anger and intense disgust, which drive them to behave in an aberrant manner,” explains Iso V. Sinclair. “They get a certain thrill from tormenting others. A psychopath becomes one as a result of multiple traumas, and their emotions are so intense that they dissociate and seek revenge. This reaction can be scientifically explained by a lack of mirror neurons, which, due to repressed emotions (often dating back to childhood), leads to a total lack of empathy.” (Source)

Read as You Are^†

Let’s take off our rose-coloured glasses: this simulation is a world of psychopaths and predators. Freida McFadden is simply pointing this out to us. And paradoxically, people keep coming back for more because they’re unaware of the source of their needs and desires, which, like their thoughts, come from outside themselves.

I believe that any human being is capable of terrible things if you push them hard enough.

Never Lie (2022)

Fiction, then, is not the problem. The problem is passive consumption. Consumed on autopilot, it becomes a form of mind-altering substance. Consumed with clear-eyed awareness, it becomes a mirror of astral mechanisms. 

Notes et références

• ^ A hint at McDonald's slogan “Come as you are”.

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Once Upon a Broken Heart

In 2025, a Page Odyssey, I introduced you to the Caraval three-book series released in 2017 by American author Stephanie Garber. Now I'd like to review a follow-up trilogy by the same author, which I found equally enjoyable. Published in 2021, Once Upon a Broken Heart is set in the same fantasy world but focuses on the fate of a new protagonist, a hopeless romantic whose discernment is inversely proportional to her exaggerated saviour complex — something that smacks more of compulsive recklessness than conscious heroism, and seems to make her a magnet for every psychopath on earth. Among them is the very ‘borderline’ Jacks, also known as the Prince of Hearts, previously featured in the last two volumes of Caraval, who becomes the captivating central figure of the series.

When Fairy Tales Go Sour

While the previous story ended on a note of triumph and resolution, this one begins on a decidedly darker, more ambiguous note. Stephanie Garber explains that she actually wanted to tell a fairy tale with murder added to it: “I thought it would be fun to have a girl solve a murder while falling for someone she suspected might actually be responsible for the murder,” she says

Evangeline Fox is a bit like Cinderella: an orphan, bullied by a greedy stepmother, and secretly envied by her stepsister. Almost caricaturally naive, she maintains an unquestioning belief in the existence of soulmates, twin flames, and other persistent, deceptive myths such as Everlasting Love. Hence her devastation when, overnight, she finds out that despite being deeply in love with her, her sweetheart is about to marry her stepsister. 

Evangeline had a gift when it came to believing in things that others considered myths—like the immortal Fates. She opened the metal grate. The door itself didn’t have a handle, forcing her to wedge her fingers into the tiny space between its jagged edge and the dirty stone wall. The door pinched her fingers, drawing a drop of blood, and she swore she heard its splintered voice say, Do you know what you’re about to step into? Nothing but heartbreak will come from this. But Evangeline’s heart was already broken. And she understood the risks she was taking. She knew the rules for visiting Fated churches.

In desperation, she bargains with the charismatic Prince of Hearts to stop the wedding. But as the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for”. As soon as her wish is granted, she immediately regrets it. Fortunately, nothing is ever set in stone forever — not even her. Except that nothing ever comes for free either, and her second chance granted for a fresh start quickly turns out to be a bittersweet, poisoned gift. 

Just like the deadly kiss of Jacks the Cursed, whose heart has stopped beating, as revealed in Caraval. Even though the broken heart in the title officially refers to Evangeline's, it seems that Jacks' has suffered even greater damage — enough to turn him into a Fate — although the author remains unclear about the circumstances.

Stephanie Garber, 2021 - Flatiron Books - 1232 pages

How Far Would You Go for Happily Ever After?

This opening question alone on the back cover captures the main theme of the series and brings up several others: What is happiness? What is eternity? And most importantly, why would anyone want to confine the very essence of life — which is supposed to be an ever-changing flow — to a fixed, permanent state?

Jacks became immortal, though it is unclear how, in the wake of a romantic tragedy caused by a curse cast upon him. His heart has stopped beating, but he still has the power to affect the hearts of mortals. The curse that turned him into a Fate is not only emotional, it is ontological. It is worth noting that, from an occult perspective, the heart is the symbol of the inner core of the soul. 

It is a frequently recurring symbol in fairy tales. One example is Snow White, whose heart the hunter, sent by the Evil Queen, is tasked with retrieving. The heart is part of the mechanism of entrapment. It is a vessel for memories and vital energy.

In this series, immortality is vampiric. It requires blood. There's even a blood-sucking tree: “Anyone clever enough to find the tree and brave enough to drink its blood will be human no more, but immortal”. This comes at the cost of sacrificing the person you love most. However, the end appears to justify the means. Even in fairy tales.

And given all the backstabbing, curses and other failed (or successful) murder attempts, the quest for immortality is anything but glorious and actually drives people mad. It entraps them in never-ending cycles and patterns in which the original wound is replayed over and over again. Even when memory is altered or fragmented, something always remains. Lifelines seem to keep repeating. Forgetting does not eliminate the wound: it simply obscures it.

Jacks Out of the Box

If the heart is regarded as a carrier of memories and vital energy, Jacks stands as a quintessential anomaly. He no longer possesses his own — at least not in the same way as everyone — and yet he exerts influence over other people's hearts. He does not merely convey a desire or an illusion: he reactivates wounds, expectations, and hidden legacies.

Jacks is undoubtedly one of Stephanie Garber's most compelling characters. He is somewhat akin, albeit darker and more complex, to Archibald in Christelle Dabos' The Mirror Visitor series.

What makes him so intriguing is that his apparent cruelty is not gratuitous, unlike what his behaviour in Caraval seemed to suggest. It stems from a more ancient mechanism. He is not only ambiguous, he is the product of a system that transforms wounds into functions. The archetype of the tempter linked to the forbidden fruit — the iconic red-juiced white apples, which he eats in all circumstances.

He is not just a tragic seducer. He is the fulcrum of a memory that transcends individuals. His apparent nonchalance is more of an armour than a sign of indifference. When you are doomed to outlive those you love, attachment becomes a liability. For an immortal, to love a mortal is to accept that you will lose every time. 

Jacks does not play with hearts out of cruelty. He shields himself from a world where every promise has an expiry date. While trying to avoid getting hurt, he ends up hurting others. And that is undoubtedly the real curse: the one that dooms him to kill any woman he kisses if she is not his true love.

“Every Story Has the Potential for Infinite Endings”

This raises an important question: do the characters in this series really choose their actions, or are they simply replaying predetermined storylines?

Amidst curses, prophecies and spells of secrecy – which prevent them from telling the truth – speech itself seems to be under control.

The Valors, the first royal family of the Magnificent North, had constructed the arch as a passageway to a place called the Valory. No one knew what the Valory contained, since the stories of the North couldn’t be fully trusted, thanks to the story curse that had been placed on them. Some tales couldn’t be written down without bursting into flames, others couldn’t leave the North, and many changed every time they were told, becoming less reliable with every retelling. In the case of the Valory, there were two conflicting accounts. 

The tales of the North catch fire, become distorted and inconsistent, and ultimately shape reality. History is no longer a reliable reference point: it is instrumentalised.

Whereas Caraval celebrated the illusion as spectacle, Once Upon a Broken Heart offers a glimpse into what goes on behind the scenes.

The warm, theatrical atmosphere of Valora in the South gives way to the colder and harsher setting of the Far North. The arches hold more than just wonder: they open the way to power struggles, coveted magical artefacts, negotiated alliances, and rumours spreading faster than the actual truth.

The media shape reputations, fabricate scapegoats, and pass judgment based on hearsay. Magic turns to strategy.

In this deceptively enchanting world, full of contradictory tales, alternate timelines, amnesia, artefacts, and mythical creatures, where certain truths cannot be spoken, Evangeline finally stops blindly believing the stories she is told. She learns to discern, to observe, to connect the dots rather than surrender to them.

Following on from Caraval, which presented illusion as entertainment, this series explores the reverse side of storytelling: its capacity to manipulate as well as expose. Stories may deceive, conceal, and influence perceptions — but they may also be a source of empowerment. It all depends on who is telling them, and who chooses to believe them.

Beyond the balls, curses and oaths of eternal love, the series questions the power of the narratives that shape our perceptions. Admittedly, it remains a romantasy aimed at a young adult audience, where gloom is tempered by enchantment. But beneath the glittering veneer lies a more troubling question: do the stories we tell ourselves construct our reality, or do they merely distort it?

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The Dark Days Club

As mentioned in 2025, a Page Odyssey, the issue with book series is often that the plot runs out of steam and gets bogged down, usually falling flat like a soufflé in the grand finale. Stephen King's Dark Tower seven-book series is a very good example of this phenomenon, whereas J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga is a perfect counterexample. In the former, the author goes with the flow without really knowing where he's headed. In the latter, her imagination is channelled into a roadmap that is sufficiently detailed to prevent her inspiration from straying too far from the main narrative arc, at the risk of losing readers along the way. 

Originally published ten years ago, the Lady Helen trilogy is the exception that proves the rule, falling into the second category of narrative consistency and masterful development from beginning to end. It is a huge favourite of mine that I wanted to share right away.

Jane Austen-Style Romance and Dark Fantasy

To set the scene, its author, Australian Alison Goodman, views it as a cross between Pride and Prejudice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A book of manners tinged with dark fantasy.

On her website, she explains how, before she started to write the first of the Lady Helen series, she spent eight months reading books and watching documentaries about the English Regency (1811-1820), which was a time of excess for the aristocracy, but also a period of uncertainty caused by the Napoleonic Wars, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the social unrest that came with it.

More specifically, for Book 1 — The Dark Days Club — she studied Regency London and what was called “the Season”, which went from about January to June while Parliament sat. She says, “It was the busiest and most important social season when young ladies made their debut to polite society and entered the marriage mart.”

The second book — The Dark Days Pact — took her research to the seaside resort of Brighton and the summer social season, and Book 3 — The Dark Days Deceit — is all about the spa resort of Bath and the winter social season.  

Alison Goodman, 2016 - Harper Collins - 1515 pages

So Lady Helen Wrexhall is a young English aristocrat about to be introduced to Queen Charlotte's court — a crucial moment for her social and marital future. She lives under the guardianship of her very uptight uncle — some sort of Regency-era Vernon Dursley — and her kind aunt who treats her like her own daughter. Orphaned since a shipwreck that claimed her parents' lives, she also has to deal with a reputation tarnished by scandalous rumours of her mother's treason.

Lord Pennworth’s views on women, and unholiness in general, were often expressed, both at home and in public. He was an admirer of the evangelical Hannah More, although unlike that moderate lady, his own particular brand of piety was made of choler and spit. His vehement campaigning against the bawdy houses had captured the attention of the caricaturists, who had rechristened him Lord Stopcock in their savage cartoons. On one of her midnight forays into his papers, Helen had found a published engraving of him by Cruikshank. She had been forced to stuff her fist in her mouth to stop from laughing at the uncanny depiction of him as a cockerel: huge barrel chest thrust out, round eyes bulging, and florid face colored in the bloated red of the coxcomb drawn atop his head.

Deceivers vs Reclaimers

Even before her presentation, the disappearance of a maid leads her to a hidden reality: London is home to demons infiltrating all strata of society.

Enter the handsome, brooding Lord Carlston, who has returned from exile after being suspected of murdering his wife. He belongs to the Dark Days Club, a secret organisation appointed by the home office to maintain balance in the face of vicious (and numerous) demons known as Deceivers.

These creatures, much like vampires (and Archons), feed on the vital energy of humans and their emotions — fear, violence, chaos, lust. They live inconspicuously among them, produce offspring destined to serve as their hosts when the bodies they occupy become compromised, and even attend high society events. Some within the Club itself whisper that Bonaparte could be one of them. As long as their existence remains unknown, they maintain the status quo. So the supernatural world does not stand apart from the real world: it coexists with it, invisible to most.

Deceivers are not mere predators driven by instinct. They operate within a framework, a pact, a form of negotiated balance that regulates their violence without ever eradicating it. They can survive, thrive, and circumvent their demise — always at the expense of others. The chilling thing is not only their predatory nature, but the sophistication of the system that makes it possible: an organisation where the survival of some methodically depends on the gradual eradication of others. Their threat goes beyond the individual. It infiltrates lineages, moves from body to body, leaves traces that cannot be erased without damage.

They are not just monsters. They are masters of persistence. The struggle is not between pure Good and a caricature of Evil, but between two forces compelled to act in a world where every decision creates casualties.

Lady Helen discovers that she herself is, by nature, a member of this club — a direct heiress. She possesses a special energy and gifts that make her a Reclaimer and force her to choose: to remain in a rigidly codified existence of privilege and carefree living, or to step into a more stimulating but infinitely more dangerous world, where madness is as real a risk as death.

How Lady Helen Holds the Reader Spellbound

What makes this series a page-turner that you can't put down isn't just its fantasy element. The perfectly recreated historical setting alone provides a solid foundation that makes the characters strikingly real — so perfectly portrayed that the personality of the ultimate antagonist was enough for me to recognise him as such, even though his identity is only revealed at the very end. It's as if words could produce a vibration and make fictional characters 'real'. This gives us food for thought about the nature of this simulation, doesn't it?

But let's get back to the characters created by Alison Goodman.

Lady Helen's gradual evolution from a naive upper-class young woman to a Deceiver-slayer and soul-Reclaimer is very well crafted because, from the outset, behind her apparent submission to the oppressive social constraints imposed on women of her time, she never passively accepts her fate, educates herself in secret on subjects considered ‘unladylike’ and fights against this new identity that destiny has imposed on her. Her journey is as much internal as it is physical: it is one of emancipation in a society that drastically limits women.

Her mentor, Lord Carlston, embodies the figure of the maverick hero, bearer of forbidden and morally ambiguous knowledge that disturbs conventional thinking. He is shrouded in an aura of mystery, so much so that it is impossible to know where he stands, as the line between good and evil is blurred. Think of him as a kind of Sirius Black who never went to Azkaban.

Lord Carlston was handsome, Helen conceded, in a hard, angular way that made the men around him seem somewhat effeminate. Yet there was a ruthlessness to the set of his mouth that was decidedly repellent. His skin was unfashionably tanned—both Andrew and Aunt Leonore had mentioned he had been on the Continent—and the brown of his eyes was so dark that it merged with the black pupil, making their expression impenetrable. It was very disconcerting and gave him a flat look of soullessness, like the eyes of the preserved shark she had seen in the new Egyptian Hall. Helen lifted her bare shoulders against a sudden chill. How apt. There could be no soul in this man: he was a murderer. And possibly an abductor. She wrapped her fingers more firmly around the head of the fan and the miniature. Just in time, for her aunt was turning to introduce the men.

Not to mention a gallery of colourful secondary characters, full of light and shade, with qualities and flaws that make them all the more human.  

“A number of the minor characters are my interpretations of real historical figures”, explains Alison Goodman. “The Prince Regent, of course, as well as Queen Charlotte and Princesses Mary and Augusta, Beau Brummell, Lady Jersey, Lord Byron, Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Perceval, and John Bellingham. The events around Lord Perceval and Bellingham are also true—Bellingham did assassinate the Prime Minister—and my depiction is entirely based on newspaper and magazine reports from the time, as is my description of the terrible Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

Even the “villains” in the story always have a good reason for being so. It is these subtle nuances that, in my humble opinion, make it so endearing, to the point that a certain nostalgia sets in once the very last page has been turned.

While the members of the Dark Days Club have returned to their immortal resting place on our library shelf, the Deceivers are still very much among us. It is up to us to exercise the vigilance of a Reclaimer's gaze and our neutrality so as not to provide them with any more precious loosh.

© La Pensine Mutine. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.

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