I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’ll be up front from the outset here: I was dreading writing this review. It’s always an abysmal feeling writing a negative review knowing that the piece is deeply personal to the author, and especially when the piece is utterly well-intentioned, clearly hoping to be a guiding light for individuals with creative aspirations, mental health issues, and in this case, internalised ace/aphobia. My thoughts on this book are not intended to downplay these struggles and if I hadn’t agreed to review it, I would probably be holding my tongue on this one entirely. But here goes:

I was extremely intrigued by the premise of Kill Your Darlings, and especially the promise to explore mental health themes through a queer lens, but unfortunately, I found the execution to be extremely lacking. I would love to tell you what I enjoyed about Kill Your Darlings first, but it has little to recommend it. The prose is bog-standard, with overreliance on tired metaphors that, in my opinion, really cheapen the protagonist’s mental health struggles (we get that depression feels “dark,” and “hollow.”) I wasn’t fond of the protagonist’s voice: lampshading tropes is only funny when used sparingly, and coupled with swearing, it seems to be the only source of humour in her arsenal. The pacing of the narrative is all over the place, and the narrative itself is overstuffed with identical, cookie-cutter fight scenes with poorly established (or non-existent- we’ll get to that) stakes. The world of Solera feels dime-a-dozen, with very minor creative flourishes, such as reptilian elves, to try and differentiate itself: it was not believable for a second that this was a bestselling fantasy series (again: we’ll get to that). Most egregious for me were the characters, the emotional lynchpin of this book. The characters were utter ciphers with tired dialogue, who often lacked internal consistency. And that’s putting aside their dubious actual role in the narrative (I swear, we will get to that!) Whilst reading, I was merely bored by how predictable they felt, but upon reflection, I wonder if Kill Your Darlings doesn’t stray into a few unfortunate stereotype: the black gay best friend is fine on his own, but when a character has no depth beyond standing around and smiling encouragingly, he becomes less palatable.

Okay, we’re getting to it: Kill Your Darlings keeps returning to a central question: whether or not Solera is real, or just a figment of the protagonist’s imagination. It desperately wants to have it both ways, and comes up with several plausible-ish explanations about how it could exist and how the protagonist might be here. I’m 100% okay with this approach in theory, and I’d say I even prefer it: some of my favourite portal fantasy type stories leave the question of whether the adventure really took place hanging unanswered. In this case, however, I think the narrative itself simply isn’t strong enough to withstand it. Firstly, it’s introduced early enough that things sort of… Stop mattering. Character’s actions become insignificant as their consequences are thrown out the window in favour of hand-wavey wish fulfilment powers. The question of reality can be immaterial when the journey the character went on has changed them so significantly and tangibly that it no longer matters- because the change is real. Kill Your Darlings doesn’t convince me that the protagonist has changed, it just tells me she has. Perhaps its largest problem is that overreliance on “tell not show.” We’re told that the protagonist has found the will to fight her darkness, but there’s not really a meaningful difference between how she acts at the start of this narrative and the end. She just has a tendency to list pleasantries about Earth towards the end- hot chocolate and movie nights with her friends. At best, it’s shallow, at worst, it’s very NHS CAMHS rhetoric: “have a cup of tea and a bath and you’ll feel better.”

(I’ll briefly note here under a spoiler tag:

Spoiler

I hated the twist that the protagonist was not a bestselling author, but an unpublished nobody working retail. Not because I think that there’s anything wrong with that, or because I believed for a second that Solera felt like best-selling fantasy novel material (it doesn’t) but because it’s totally unnecessary. It would have been genuinely interesting to have a highly successful novelist still struggling with depression: unfortunately, depression doesn’t really give a fuck about whether you’re personally successful or not. It was also an interesting source of tension between the protagonist and her editors that her depression was affecting her work and had led her to make cynical choices and end her series in a grimdark murderfest which was going to tank her reputation- and that source of tension totally evaporated the minute this was revealed to be false. Why did the protagonist even believe this in the first place? This twist takes away more than it adds.)

Speaking of how the protagonist acts, because we know right away that Solera might not be “real,” it encourages the reader to be especially circumspect of the characters: how they act is one of our biggest clues here. And the characters simply don’t respond realistically to the protagonist’s presence in their life, and their professed outlooks don’t align with their actions. They profess a distrust of her, but go along with all of her ideas. They have very little time to bond with her, but they’re proclaiming themselves lifelong friends at the end of just a few days. You could excuse all of this with a simple “Well, they’re not real,”- but then why should the reader care about any of the goings-on of Solera, or any of the relationships in this book? It’s important to remember that from the Soleran characters’ perspective, the protagonist is a parasite infesting the body of one of their dearest friends, who just so happened to be the key to winning the years-long military campaign they’re waging against the BBEG. I’ve got to take a moment here to mention her love interest- the tension between them is extremely bizarre, and I personally found it really uncomfortable. Firstly, the protagonist writes YA fiction: this character is, if I’m remembering correctly, early 20s at the oldest, and the protagonist is both ten years older and also, arguably, kind of his mother, because she made him up? The protagonist even makes an Invasion of the Body Snatchers joke with regard to their relationship, yet within a few days, Mr. Right is proclaiming that she is not like other girls, because she can chat science with him. I have not personally had the experience of the love of my life being replaced by an alien consciousness inhabiting their body, but I think it would take me more than a few days to fall in love with them- much less look at them without feeling a mountain of grief and cosmic horror. At the start of the narrative, there is a question about where the character the protagonist usurped, Kyla, has gone, and whether she is okay and can be recovered. Kyla is entirely forgotten by everyone by the end of the narrative. Perhaps because the author wants us to have decided that Solera truly isn’t real by that point? The characters are really just props for the protagonist to learn about the magic of friendship here, but by their very nature as props, they undermine their own purpose. They have to be real people to impart the need for real human connection, and they’re not real people. It’s a catch-22.

I hate that I hated this book. Whilst I’m very fortunate to be healthier now, I spent a very, very long time struggling with treatment-resistant depression. I was fully expecting to connect to this character, but I really couldn’t whatsoever. I’ll also mention under a spoiler that while there is a content warning at the beginning of this book, there is an

Spoiler

extremely detailed and graphic scene of a suicide attempt that I don’t personally feel was necessary- especially details regarding how the protagonist sourced objects used in the attempt. I actually think this is potentially dangerous information to include and I don’t see what would be lost by scrapping at the very least that line.

I’m giving this two stars because I really respect what it’s trying to do, even if I feel like it failed. If you want a book with a similar focus on mental health, exploring the premise of a fantasy world and the argument of escapism vs. bleak reality through a queer lens, I would beg you to read Peter Darling by Austin Chant, which, whilst not a perfect read, is in my opinion a much stronger and more careful exploration of these themes.