One Star, Would Not Reincarnate Again

Here is the last thing I do alive, and I want it on the record because I think it is funny: I post a review.

It is 11:48 on a Tuesday and I am at my desk with a vending-machine pretzel and a one-star takedown of A Throne of Thorned Hearts, the romantasy doorstopper that has been squatting on every bestseller list for nine weeks like a toad on a wedding cake. I have read all six hundred and forty pages of it. This is not a flex. This is a confession. Nobody made me. I do it to myself, the way some people pick scabs and some people text their exes, because I am a book reviewer, which is a job you invent for yourself when you love stories too much to ever risk making one.

My blog is called Marginalia. Eleven thousand subscribers. People are mildly afraid of me, which is the only kind of power available to a person who has never finished writing anything of her own.

(There was a manuscript, once. Forty pages, in a drawer that is technically still open. I showed three of them to one person I trusted, and they said "it's nice," in the tone you use for a child's drawing, and changed the subject, and I learned the lesson that has run my life since: a thing you make can be reviewed, and a thing you only review cannot. I closed the drawer. I picked up the red pen. I have held it ever since like it is the railing on a very high balcony.)

The review is, if I say so myself, a masterpiece of cruelty. I have spent forty minutes on it. My favourite line, the one I read back twice and grin at like an idiot, is about the villainess. Lady Seraphine Vossberg. The cold, scheming, beautiful rival whose entire personality is being mean to the heroine and then dying. I write:

Seraphine Vossberg is a cardboard cutout fed through a woodchipper of clichés. The author kills her in chapter twelve and the book does not even have the decency to mourn. Neither did I. One star. Would not reincarnate.

I hit Publish.

I take a triumphant bite of pretzel. I take it too big and too fast, because I am pleased with myself, and pleased people are careless people, and the thing about a pretzel is that it does not care how many subscribers you have.

It goes down wrong.

I would like to tell you my life flashed before my eyes, that I saw my mother, that I made peace. What actually flashes before my eyes is the publish-confirmation toast in the corner of my screen, that little green tick, Your post is live, the last sentence I will ever write glowing there in fourteen-point serif. Would not reincarnate.

The universe, it turns out, has read my work, and the universe is a petty critic.

---

Death, for the record, is a one-star experience. No light. No tunnel. Just dark, and the specific indignity of choking, and then a long sentence of nothing with no full stop on it.

And then there is a full stop, and it is the smell.

I wake up because something smells atrocious, a thick perfumed rot of roses and beeswax and woodsmoke, the smell of a candle shop that lost a fight with a florist, and I am lying on my back on something far too soft, under a weight of fabric that pins me like a polite avalanche, and the ceiling above me is the wrong ceiling. It is carved. It is carved with thorns. Little gilded thorns, picked out in gold leaf, marching across dark beams in a pattern I recognise, oh, I recognise it, I have read about this exact ceiling, this is described on page eleven, the thorn-and-gilt of Castle Ravensgilt, where the Bloom grows up the very walls.

No.

I sit up. The avalanche of bedding slides off me. I am wearing a nightgown that costs more than my car. My hands come up in front of my face and they are not my hands. They are pale and ringed and the nails are perfect, and that alone tells me everything is wrong, because I have not had a manicure since a wedding in 2022.

"My lady?" A girl's voice, soft, frightened. "My lady, you cried out."

I turn my head. There is a girl by the wardrobe, maybe fourteen, in a grey dress and a white cap, holding a folded shift against her chest like a shield. Plain pretty face. Worried eyes. And I know her. I do not know how I know her, but I read her, the way you read a stage direction. Briony, lady's maid, devoted, killed in chapter nine to give her mistress a reason to weep prettily.

My mouth is dry. I have to try the question twice before it comes out.

"What," I say, "is your name?"

"Briony, my lady." She bobs. "Are you, are you unwell? Should I fetch the physician?"

Briony.

I look down at my too-perfect hands. I look at the thorn ceiling. I look at the wardrobe behind the girl, a wardrobe the size of my old flat, and I notice, on the vanity beside it, a signet ring with a black rose pressed into the wax of a half-sealed letter, and the letter is addressed, in a hand I have somehow always known, to the Margrave Vossberg, from his daughter, the Lady Seraphine.

(In the book, this is page nineteen. This is where we meet the villainess. The author describes her, and I quote, because I have it memorised, I memorised it specifically to mock it, as a beauty as cold and useless as a knife in a glass case. I gave that line its own bullet point. I called it "the most effort the author will expend on her before her funeral.")

I get up. My legs are not my legs, they are longer, and I cross the cold floor on someone else's feet and I find the mirror, the enormous gilt-framed mirror, and I look into it.

She is beautiful. Obviously. They always are. Black hair, grey eyes, a face like the cover of the book I one-starred. She is also twenty-six, my age, which the author got wrong, the book says she is twenty-two, and I file that small inaccuracy away, because nothing else in this entire room is on my side.

I open the borrowed mouth. The reflection opens hers.

"Okay," I say. The word comes out in a clipped, glacial, courtly accent that I did not put there. The body knows how to talk even if I do not. "So that's bad."

She rose from her bed pale with the malice that was her nature, says a voice.

I freeze.

It is not Briony. Briony is still by the wardrobe, twisting the shift, looking at me. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, smooth and warm and faintly pleased with itself, a storyteller's voice, a voice that has done a great many readings at a great many firesides, and it said that sentence about me, about malice that was her nature, in the unmistakable cadence of a narrator describing a character who cannot hear her.

Except I can hear her.

I stand very still. The mirror-girl stands very still. Briony has not reacted at all, which means Briony did not hear it, which means it is either in my head (possible, I just died, I am allowed) or it is something much worse and much more interesting.

"Did you say something?" I ask Briony.

"No, my lady."

She did not, of course. The maid knows her place, the voice says, fond and grandmotherly and absolutely chilling, as the Lady Seraphine has always known hers: to want what she cannot have, and to be punished for the wanting.

I do not answer it. You do not answer the narration. That is rule one of being a sane person, which I am clinging to by my expensive fingernails. But I think, very clearly, in the privacy of a skull that may not be private at all: I know that voice. I have heard that voice for six hundred and forty pages.

That is the author. That is the omniscient narrator of A Throne of Thorned Hearts. That is the smug, telling-not-showing, head-hopping authorial voice I spent four paragraphs of my review eviscerating.

And it is in the room with me.

---

Let me tell you what I know. Knowing things is my one skill and I have no others.

I know this book. I know it the way you know a song you hate, every dreadful key change, every cymbal crash where a quiet moment should be. I know that this is Vaelmoor, and that the magic is the Bloom, the rose-and-thorn garden sorcery that the author never bothers to give rules to. I know that the heroine is a farm girl with a prophecy named Aurelia, and that the love interest is the Crown Prince, Lucian Drathmore, who is described as cold and brooding and is given no other adjectives for the duration of the series because the author thought "cold" was a personality.

And I know what happens to Lady Seraphine Vossberg.

She schemes against the heroine. She gets caught. She is framed for a poisoning she did, or maybe did not, the book is sloppy about it, and at the great Thornfall masquerade, in front of the whole court, the cold prince denounces her and she is dragged out and beheaded, and the narrative gives her death exactly two sentences before it cuts to Aurelia and Lucian dancing.

It happens in chapter twelve.

I close my borrowed eyes and I count, because counting is what I do when the numbers are the only thing not screaming. If I am Seraphine, and this is the start, then I am somewhere around chapter one. Maybe two. The book is not generous with timestamps, but the betrothal season has just begun, which puts the masquerade, and the block, and my head in a basket, roughly eleven chapters away.

Eleven chapters. Nobody has told me how long a chapter is in days. The author did not say. The author did not say a lot of things, and now every single one of those lazy little gaps is a place where I could die.

I open my eyes. Briony is still watching me, terrified, devoted, doomed in chapter nine.

Here is the thing about me, the thing I have never put in a review because it is the only soft part I have left: I cannot stand to watch a side character get killed to make a main character sad. I have one-starred a dozen books for it. It is my single most consistent critical position. The story does not get to murder the help for atmosphere.

In the book it is two sentences and a comma. The blade came down. The court applauded politely. Across the floor, Lucian led Aurelia into the first dance. I remember thinking the comma in there did more work than the corpse. I remember being clever about it. I am standing in the corpse now, and the comma is not funny any more.

So I am, apparently, in a book that intends to behead me in eleven chapters, and the first coherent thought I have, the very first plan, is not how do I escape.

It is: Briony does not die in chapter nine. Not on my watch.

Which, I will realise much too late, is exactly the kind of thought that gets a villainess noticed.

I square the shoulders that are not mine. I look at the maid the book has scheduled to bleed for someone else's character development.

"Briony," I say, in Seraphine's beautiful glacial voice. "I need you to do something for me, and I need you to not tell anyone, and I need you to understand that from this moment you and I are going to be doing things very, very differently."

The narrator's voice comes back, and for the first time it is not smooth. For the first time it has the smallest, coldest hitch in it, the sound of a storyteller turning a page and finding the next one already written in someone else's hand.

That, it says, is not what she says next. A pause, fond and patient and absolutely certain, the voice of someone in no hurry at all, because they have already read the ending. But it does not matter what she says. She is the Lady Seraphine Vossberg, and the Lady Seraphine Vossberg dies in chapter twelve. I have written it. I am very good at getting there.

The thorns on the ceiling catch the light. Somewhere under the floor, the Bloom hums, patient as a held breath.

I have eleven chapters. I have just been informed, by the thing that holds the pen, that it does not intend to let me keep them.