All Hail Chaos
Sarah Rees Brennan
Not as funny as Long Live Evil
All Hail Chaos is the second novel in Sarah Rees Brennan's Time of Iron trilogy-to-be. (The third novel, Kill Your Darlings, is planned for 2027. I really, really loved the first novel, Long Live Evil. (My review.) It was simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and bitterly painful, not to mention painfully bitter.
The protagonist, Rae, is dying from cancer. She is offered a reprieve, If she enters her favorite fantasy novel and brings back a magical flower, the flower will cure her cancer. She says yes. Well, yeah, duh. Who wouldn't? When she wakes in the fantasy world, she finds to her surprise that she is not the heroine, as she expected, but the villain of the series. So she schemes and manipulates. Long Live Evil ends with her not having retrieved the flower for herself.
Rae is a thoroughly modern, sensible young woman, and her reactions to the absurd medieval fantasy tropes of Time of Iron, the novel she has entered, never cease to be funny. At the same time, Rae is a young woman who has been abandoned to die from cancer, and she is full of bitterness and pain. Brennan is herself a late-stage cancer survivor, and she writes the perspective of a dying woman with utterly convincing authority.
I am not the first person to remark that the greatest humor derives from tragedy -- laughter and tears come from the same well, Mark Twain knew it, George Carlin knew it, ... This list could be extended indefinitely.
Long Live Evil was very funny. All Hail Chaos, alas, not so much. Instead, it is a serious fantasy novel that continues the story of Long Live Evil. The incongruities that made me laugh when I read Long Live Evil are still present, but really only as plot elements. There was nothing in All Hail Chaos that made me really laugh. This, oddly, means that Rae's pain and bitterness fail to bite the way they did in Long Live Evil.
All Hail Chaos is a good fantasy novel, intelligent and moving. It is not the extraordinary work that Long Live Evil was.