Julia Wilson

Character: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

World: ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

I keep hoping that I’ll like at least one Romantasy book someday so I can participate in the hype, which feels very lonely at this point to be left out of, but this ain’t it, chief. Dear God, when will it be? Will the day ever come?!

Goodreads classifies two stars as “it was okay”, and that perfectly encapsulates my experience here. This book was thoroughly okay. Silver Under Nightfall tells the story of Remington “Remy” Pendergast, a vampire hunter called a “Reaper”, who has a difficult relationship with his famous and now crippled vampire hunter of a lord father. Remy is ostracised by his peers, often being accused of being part-vampire due to his very Blade-esque birth, and being the subject of ire of his father’s hated rival Lord Astonbury. To get bounties, Remy has been engaged in a years-long, not-so-secret sexual relationship with Astonbury’s wife, the Lady Giselle. But reports have been sweeping the kingdom of Aluria that a new breed of vampire is rising, far more deadly than those seen before, and tackling the problem are the vampires Lady Xiaodan Song and her fiancé, the Summer Lord Zidan Malekh, King of the Third Court. They invite Remy to uncover the source of this Rot with them, but defeating the Rot isn’t the only design the couple have on him (•̀⩊•́)

I thought going into this that if there’s any Romantasy book I would like, it’s going to be this one. I liked the first chapters, I love both of the Netflix Castlevania shows (this book was conceived as Castlevania fan fic), and Remy is the type of protagonist I’m such a softy for: an angsty, unloved noble son out to prove himself. But, to my dismay, I quickly discovered that this book was falling into the exact patterns that I’ve so disliked in other Romantasys. Is it so much to ask that a Romantasy book focuses more on the Fantasy side of the scale than the Romance side? Please?! Because dumb decisions keep getting made for the sake of the Romance and it drives me crazy!

I knew the book’s fic origins coming into it, but I did not expect to have to approach it like I would a fic. And by that I mean, Silver Under Nightfall feels like in order to fully understand what is going on, you need to have an understanding of how Castlevania’s world status quo works, and that you need to accept stuff is just gonna be like dat sometimes. The first warning bells that something was up were in the book’s approach to worldbuilding. An advantage of fan fic is writers and readers can jump into a story that already has base ingredients; you know who the characters are, and if it’s set within the same world as the original media, then you don’t have to worldbuild. If the fic is an alternate universe (AU), then light worldbuilding elements are often introduced to explain how Rey and Kylo Ren operate in this not-Galaxy Far, Far Away rather than in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Cool? Cool.

Silver Under Nightfall is operating in this same, light understanding place where the characters who aren’t Remy aren’t particularly fleshed out beyond a couple of traits, and the worldbuilding is flimsy and handwavey. In other words, it’s written as “just go with how everything in the background works because you’re here for shipping”. Just go with how the worldbuilding works; just go with how society’s elite seem very casual and relaxed with how they interact with each other (and for that matter, how Zidan is king of the Third Court but leaves the running of it to everyone else so he can hang out in the Fourth Court what??); just go with how Remy’s ostracism works; just go with how vampires and humans have super sketchy, not-really-logical rules for their co-existence in this world (umm, hi, vampires drink human blood, and no one seems overtly concerned about this ever?); just go with how events like random monster attacks or battles suddenly happen in order to have a plot. Just go with it, okay? For the ships! This approach to the story only contributed to the fan fic feeling I got whilst reading, and it came to the point I was picturing and hearing the characters as Trevor and Sypha and Alucard and my God am I tired. I’m so tired.

I like Remy as a character. I like how his situation is set up with the circumstances of his birth, and how it as well as his relationships affect his professional and social standing, and the feelings that are born from it. It’s a great way to set up drama for when Xiaodan and Zidan come into his life and are able to offer balm to Remy’s soul and help with the Rot. Can Remy overcome the lifetime of prejudices stacked against him? How would his relationships with his father and Lady Giselle change after meeting Xiaodan and Zidan and offering his aid to save the people who fear and even hate him? Can Remy learn to accept and love himself despite everything he’s gone through? I was eager to see. Xiaodan and Zidan are the other two characters that flesh out the core thruple of the story. Xiaodan is fine I guess, and Zidan is just Alucard. Specifically S1 & 2 Alucard, but yeah.

I guess I’m always going to be a bad shipper though, because I was not very impressed when the characters were much more concerned about their hormones and who-used-to-be-fucking-who and now who-is-fucking-who rather than the gosh darn plague that is threatening the existence of the kingdom. Mutating, undying vampires are spreading throughout the kingdom? Hmm, that is a problem, but a more pressing concern is getting Remy to understand that Zidan is trying to flirt with him instead of kill him, according to the amount of words dedicated to each subject. How does elite society’s dynamics work, what with Remy being the only child of a rich and powerful man and therefore a valuable asset for politics in this feudal society? Eh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This must be a weird society for social politicking to not be important. I don’t even know what the nobility in this world are even for except to be vampire hunters, which like, is a weird career for them to all pick due to the presumably high mortality rate; wouldn’t there be mini power crisises all the time in this case?! Do those born to noble families have a choice to not be Reapers? Do they even do anything that requires them to govern as lords? Who knooows~

I’m also still not clear on what the dynamics of the humans and vampires in this world are, because it’s this situation where some vampire courts are feared by humans and some aren’t, despite vampires needing to drink human blood to survive, and why would an alliance even be on the table when one group actively need to prey on the other in order to exist? I don’t understand how vampire lore really works in this book; vampires are more akin to superhumans who are sometimes scared of silver and the sun if they’re too young. At around the 60% mark, I had to take my hands off the wheel and stop holding out hope that the book was going to become interested in exploring its worldbuilding in any kind of seriousness or tackle its pandemic-infection-Rot plot with the concern such a thing should warrant (we just had our own plague, we know how this works), and instead I had to approach the plot as a series of things happening to support the thruple getting together. Which I really didn’t want to do, but had to for my own dang sanity. Otherwise I would have ended up yelling what, why?? at the book more than I already was, which is just exhausting to think about. There was also a point where Remy tells Xiaodan and Zidan that he is twenty-three and entered his relationship with Giselle when he was fifteen, but apparently he’s only known Giselle for five years? 🤨 The maths ain’t mathing here.

I am really, really not the Romantasy target market, am I?

But with that all being said, here is my actual soapbox for the day and the reason I wanted to write this review in the first place: I have problems with the heavy-handed approach to Remy’s reaction to his abuse, specifically related to his views on romance and sex.

What I liked about it: Remy had to be told it was abuse, and the surprise he had because not only was he getting something out of it (sex and intelligence), but because there was some element of consent to it. I have no complaints about this. I really liked it. Sometimes, people need a third party to tell them something is fucked up for them to realise oh, that actually is fucked up and it’s impacting my life in a negative way. I liked how it also fed into Remy’s feelings not just on what Giselle was doing with him, but in how his father was fine with him being used in this way and how he didn’t care that it was the worst-kept secret in the kingdom (which begs the question of why this whole thing was never the explosive scandal it should have been and is instead treated as hot gossip, but that’s just getting into my worldbuilding problems I’ve already talked about), and how he felt the difference between the unhealthy and healthy relationships when Xiaodan and Zidan entered the picture.

Now, gather closer around my soapbox so I can talk about the execution of good drama. Remy is a bucket of issues due to his home, romantic, and professional lives which have left him with low self-esteem where he feels like everything is his fault and that he needs to earn the right to exist. For him, life consists of neverending guilt and favours exchanged, and this is a setup that I’m very interested in exploring because of the way such an outlook can impact the decisions characters make in response to that pain. What I’m not particularly interested in is other characters playing armchair psychologist with the low self-esteem character several times, where they tell them, over and over, that it’s okay, you are worthy, you are loved. For those of you not steeped in fan fic culture, this is a specific subgenre called whump, and it’s very popular within the angst circles. It’s also something I have never liked reading because these stories are written as emotion porn and, in my most humble February 2024 opinion, are the most boring version of it.

Personally, it’s more interesting to have this psychology thrumming along as subtext that informs actions; Martha Wells is really good at doing this. Having one scene like this where another character offers insight to the low self-esteem one is great, but Silver Under Nightfall has several, which is where the problems start to creep in. It puts the story into a position where whump scenes are used as the primary emotional release from an easy to access source, and therefore stunting the characters from being ... well, characters. Characters are not people, and there’s this weird paradox where we often want characters to behave like real people whilst not behaving like them at the same time. By this, I mean there is a difference in these thoughts and emotions happening to real people; junk needs to be cleared from the brain via constant reassurance in order for a message to sink in. But in fiction, this is called being repetitive and treading water, which for the lifeblood of a story is bad because you need to grind things to a halt to have these scenes happen past the first one.

In short: whump provides a short-term hit for catharsis which is good in a single dose, but overall catharsis should not be met by several small doses like this; instead, it should be met by a larger one delivered by the completion of a more challenging arc. Xiaodan and Zidan are already on Remy’s side; them offering comfort to Remy does not bring him long-term inner peace. That needs to be obtained from confronting the source of the problem, which is Remy’s father.

Also, if I have to read one more conversation that involves some variation of, “YOU USED TO BE *insert name here*’S WHORE, YOU WHORE, THERFORE YOUR POINT IS INVALID” in any book, I might just walk into the ocean; it’s such unimaginative, boring high school drama. 👏 Be 👏 more 👏 CRE 👏 A 👏 TIVE 👏 ! 👏

Okay I’m done. Weeee~!