Villains & Virtues: Throne in the Dark

Image credit: Harry Harthog

While I absolutely adored the scenic and mouth-watering excursions around Taiwan that was Taiwan Travelogue, with bookclub postponed for a month, it should come as no surprise that I dove right back into fantasy the first moment I got. I was gifted A.K Caggiano’s Throne in the Dark by a very dear friend back in June and now having finished it I am keen to get her on the phone for a little bookclub to hear her thoughts on it.

Watching films and reading books that are recommended by close friends is another unique and fascinating experience that humans get to enjoy and navigate. Of course it’s different for everyone, but I personally find that my reading experience is already shaped a little by the fact that I’m diving into a book that a friend with similar tastes has read and enjoyed enough to share with me. There’s a sense of obligation to put in the effort and read the whole thing, even if you struggle or find that the writing is not working for you. Then there are character and narrative choices that you can’t help but wonder, ‘did she like this bit or also find it predictable?’.

Damian Maleficus Bloodthorne is a powerful bloodmage who has just completed his life’s work, to create the most powerful talisman of enthrallment history has ever known. With it, he can finally fulfil his destiny to release his demonic father from imprisonment so that darkness and villainy can cover all the world. Well, that was the plan until he runs into a pretty little thief called Amma who accidentally becomes the harbouring vessel for the talisman. Stuck dragging Amma across the land and trying to find a way to remove the talisman, Damien’s concrete plans have started to crumble. Even more so when Amma’s caring nature and bubby demeanor starts to stir up feelings in Damien that contend with the usual ones of villainy and malevolence.

It’s worth nothing that reading the Author’s Note at the end of the book can sometimes help to alleviate the negative feelings you have about the work or help you to better understand what the author was trying to achieve. This was certainly the case for me with this book. I originally thought that this was going to be another YA fantasy romance to join the ranks of the Scholomance or Little Thieves trilogies in my library, when actually it’s a little bit closer to Once Upon a Broken Heart (though not as enthralling). According to Caggiano’s note at the end, Throne in the Dark was supposed to be a standalone parody, but became something bigger as, “the sincerity of the story insisted on seeping through the cracks in the absurdity”.

Knowing this made it a lot easier to understand some of the tonal choices that were made throughout the prose and helped to alleviate some of the annoyance that I had with it. Unlike Once Upon a Broken Heart where the writing is so overloaded with syrupy adjectives that it can’t be anything BUT a piss-take, the prose in Throne in the Dark is blunt and descriptive with smarmy and whimsical asides that break up the narrative flow to ensure the reader is in on the joke. There are many moments in which the author’s voice can be clearly heard making metafictive remarks on the genre, not to mention the vague, summarizing chapter names. While I can appreciate the intent behind these choices, I personally felt that it didn’t really add anything to the story, merely stopped its trajectory for a breather.

Then we have the caricatured characters of Damiel and Amma. Their central romance story is pretty predictable and even though Amma’s motives remain a mystery until the third act, I still picked what was coming pretty early on. The chapters flip between the perspectives of Amma and Damien while still being written in the third person omniscient. This works perfectly well, but I would have liked it if there was a little more insight into their characters. Annoyingly, we don’t really get a sense of who these characters are and what they feel, their story is sort of written in a hand-wavey way that rides on them being token genre pieces.

Because the humour does not really come across as obviously or early as one would like, these tonal choices and the caricature protagonists just prove to be a little bit annoying and make it easy to put the book down. Had I known from that start that it’s meant to be a parody, I might not have felt as strongly – though probably still a little annoyed because it now feels a little bit lazy to let everything ride on, ‘ah but that’s the joke’.

Image credit: Penguin Books Australia

Having said this, the story itself is actually kind of compelling and I am definitely interested in the fantasy world that Caggiano has created. There are supporting characters that are truly fascinating and a whole bunch of lore that only gets hinted at throughout the tale. While I realise that the exposition dump is not a preferable means of learning about the world, there are ways in which to make them more interesting and when used to educate readers about the world they find themselves in, they can make stories even more compelling. It's also a very visual world and story: honestly, it would probably do very well as an anime.

Throne in the Dark is not a bad book, it’s a solid fantasy story that has some very memorable scenes. But in a rapidly expanding subgenre like YA fanta-roms, a book that is mildly amusing with unsubstantial characters can fall into obscurity. It was interesting enough to get me through the entire thing (which is 500+ pages), but I didn’t experience any strong feelings while reading it and did find it easy to put down and walk away from. I have not decided if I will continue with series.

Author: A.K Caggiano, 2022-2025

Published: Sourcebooks, Casablanca, 2025

Throne in the Dark is the first book in A.K. Caggiano's Villains & Virtues series.