One does not simply walk into 2026 without a good book to read. As luck would have it, I can recommend one straight out of the gate. Django Wexler’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying is the foul-mouthed, irreverent comedic fantasy novel that will set the tone for your own year of mischief and mayhem, should you choose to have one. And honestly, why wouldn’t you?
“The Dark Lord” by melbourneflower is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Davi has absolutely had it with the time loop she’s stuck in. Once an ordinary 21st-century girl just living her life, Davi has spent the past thousand years or so in a D&D-type fantasy world, trying to save the Kingdom from the Dark Lord. She doesn’t know how she got there, and she doesn’t know how to get out. But one thing she knows for certain is that this is absolute BS, and she’s not having it. If she can’t defeat the Dark Lord, Davi reasons, she might as well become the Dark Lord.
Normally the time loop/Groundhog Day trope leaves me cold. It’s been done, and far too often it’s done just to be clever about things. Wexler has managed to create a time loop that I actually enjoyed, and that’s largely because Davi is an incredible protagonist. She’s foul-mouthed, sarcastic, delightfully sex-positive, and determined to win whatever game she’s in by any means necessary. Underneath it all, she’s a good person, but: she’s a good person who’s been pushed past her limits and is now an utter chaos gremlin. Given our current sociopolitical climate, this is a position a lot of readers will be able to relate to.
A word of caution: a lot of the humor in this novel comes from situations that are technically not in the least funny. Because Davi has been through her loop so many times, she knows who she’s going to meet and what’s going to happen. Once she decides to flip the script, however, she’s got to improvise, and some of those improvisations have unpleasant results for a variety of NPCs.
For example: early on, Davi makes a choice that had me drop the book and say OH GIRL, YOU ABSOLUTELY DID NOT, and then laugh like a horrified loon for a good thirty seconds. If that’s not your humor vibe, this is probably not your book. Tbose of us who are not-so-secretly feral trash pandas, however, will take great joy in watching Davi do and say the most outrageous things a person might do in any given situation. It only works, though, because we know Davi is a good person in a ridiculous situation; watching her try to break out of it is incredibly cathartic.
No Dark Lord can do it alone, so of course Davi manages to make a variety of friends and allies who rally to her cause. I love the flipped script and the obvious humanity of the folks who, in any other story, would be the villains. These “enemies,” known as wilders, run the gamut from orcs and rock people to a variety of sentient animals. None of them have any good reason to love humans, so it’s critical that Davi’s pretense of being a wilder holds up; this creates a lot of dramatic tension as the story plays out, building to a hilarious climax in the final pages.
Other useful information to know before reading:
- There’s a lot of violence, torture, and sui/ideation in here. It makes sense in the context of Davi’s predicament, but if those subjects squick you, pass by.
- There are footnotes, and they are glorious. Best use of footnotes in fiction I’ve seen in a while.
- The Dark Lord trials, when they finally happen, are quite clever.
- There is a sequel, and you know what that means. Cliffhanger alert! It’s quite clever, though, and the sequel is out, so you won’t have to wait for your next Davi fix.
Tl;dr: do you like fantasy novels? Do you have a snarky sense of humor? You need How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying in your life. Hurry up and read it so that you can move on to he sequel, Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me, which I will be ordering up from the library as soon as I publish this post.
