How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying

• Author: Django Wexler
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publication Date: May 21, 2024
• Publisher: Orbit
• Series: Dark Lord Davi #1

Thank you to Orbit and Angela Man for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: casual mention of self-harm and suicide (due to unique circumstances of character), discussion of sexual assault (no on-page assault), violence, profanity

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 is onto something after all.

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.

I want to preface this by saying that I’m a huge fan of fantasy, and it’s been my most frequently read genre for the past few years. I’ve read Wexler’s more serious fantasy series, and was amazed at his way with words, building complex worlds and characters, and creating a story I couldn’t put down. This one, however, is a departure from his usual work, and I couldn’t wait to find out more about it.

Since I’m clearly behind schedule, I made use of both the print copy I received, and an audiobook that I checked out of the library. I strongly recommend the audiobook version—Jeanette Illidge is the perfect narrator for this story, and there are numerous footnotes, but Illidge delivers them as perfectly snarky asides without any break in the action.

After a thousand years of trying to fight the Dark Lord and save humanity, only to fail and die every single time and wake up in the same miserable time loop, something seems to have snapped in Davi. Instead of continuing to fight the good fight, she decides to switch teams and become the Dark Lord herself. We aren’t really given much info on how she ended up in this alternate universe time loop, although Davi clearly hails from Earth, and while she’s been fighting the Dark Lord for a thousand years, she’s still pretty up to date on pop culture references somehow. I chalked it all up to willing suspension of disbelief.  

I couldn’t help but crack up while reading this book. Davi’s character is sassy, sarcastic, and snarky to the max, curses like a sailor and has an out of control libido, but there’s also something that I found incredibly endearing about her. I got the feeling that she’s not the kind of person that everyone will love, but I sure did, and I couldn’t wait to hear more of her story. While she’s working towards being a Dark Lord, she still has her moral compass and doesn’t go against that. She isn’t quite a morally gray character, but she’s toeing the line.

The plot of the story was an interesting one. Wexler’s standout talent with comprehensive and detailed world building and well-rounded characters is on display in this book—Davi and the characters around her are all so wonderfully rendered, when it could have been so much easier to make them one-dimensional. My only issue with Davi’s character is that she falls into the bisexual stereotype of wanting to get with basically everyone around her, implying that bi people are all slutty, when that is one of the most common misunderstandings about bisexuality. 

Davi is confronted with a world where humans aren’t welcomed, and there are all sorts of other creatures. The main ones that we encounter are orcs and wilders, a type of shifters, with fox-wilders being the most common ones in this story. But we also see some other creatures, and some sort of guardian-type character that is never seen outside of his armor. I couldn’t help but crack up when Davi had this thought, quickly followed by a statement, because it’s totally something I’d do, although not sure if I’d do that while being actively tortured:

“It’s hard to tell how anything lands with Artaxes, since he wears his iron armor like a second skin.¹

¹He seriously never takes it off. How does he poop? I have to know how he poops.

‘How do you poop?’ I ask him.”

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Rather than putting out a book with the same old tropes that fantasy readers find over and over, Wexler really subverted the tropes and the genre by switching things up and going in a completely different direction. I can see Davi not appealing to everyone—because not everyone wants a story with a crass, hypersexualized, foul-mouthed, irreverent heroine, but if you don’t mind the cursing and all the other jazz that comes along with Davi, then you’ll enjoy this one. But beware: It ends on a major cliffhanger, and now we all have to wait for the next book.

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