I have mostly been gravitating towards cozy fantasy lately, but I have read some still excellent fantasy recently that have a decidedly higher body count that I still wanted to share with you. I won’t judge you if you’re feeling too sensitive to read them right now.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. Read by Moira Quirk and Sid Sagar. Tor/Macmillan Audio, 2025. ISBN 978-1250799081. Listened to audiobook on Libby.

In what feels like a World War I-era world, scholar and failed soldier Owen Mallory has lived his whole life obsessed with stories of Sir Una Everlasting, the legendary medieval lady knight who sacrificed herself to save the reign of Queen Yvanne and put the kingdom of Dominion on the map. In the modern day, she’s a legend whose stories fill books for children and whose stylized image is used on recruitment posters. When a copy of the actual book that inspired the stories shows up on his desk, he does not hesitate to start a translation of it. This leads him to travel back to the time of Una Everlasting, where only he can make sure the story proceeds as it has passed down to make sure that Una becomes the inspiring legend that started an empire. But as Owen follows Una’s path, he grows closer and closer to the real person, so that it grows increasingly difficult to lead her to her death.

And then their stories – both medieval and 20th-cenutury feeling -restart, over and over again, heartbreaking every time. Both Owen and Una start to question their roles, what they’ve been told are their duties, looking for ways not to have to sacrifice each other. There are reflections on the meaning of patriotism, empire, and war, while Owen additionally has to think about what it means to have grown up someone who is visually clearly not the “pure” ethnic background of the country he grew up in and serves.

This book was everywhere in the fall, and it took months for my name to come to the top of the hold list. I’m glad I waited for the audiobook, though, as the narrators did an excellent job with both characters. The story is gripping, thoughtful, with a powerfully tender romance. I will probably never read it again, though, because it was just so hard for me to see the characters I came to care so much for die over and over again in different bloody ways. If you are less tender-hearted than me, you’ll probably do better with it. It’s still a book that sticks in my head, several months after reading it.

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. Read by Morag Sims and Will Watt. Harper Voyager, 2025. ISBN 978-0063446243. Listened to audiobook on Libby.

Alice Law wanted to be a magician since she found out that was an option. She worked as hard as she could through undergrad in the U.S. and made it to graduate school at Cambridge, working for the most prestigious professor there – Jacob Grimes. She has been living the grad student life, overworked, overcaffeinated, and definitely underpaid, with no time for friends or proper cooking. Then Professor Grimes explodes in a magical accident that Alice blames herself for. Between the guilt and the prospect that she might never graduate without her advisor, Alice prepares to go through Hell to bring him back. She’s joined by Professor Grimes’ other student, her rival Peter Murdoch. Surely, since both of them are powerful magicians and stellar researchers, they’ll have successfully pieces together the classical literature – European and Asian – to make a map that will lead them to him and then out again – even if it’s been decades since anyone made it back from Hell.

Unsurprisingly, Hell is not as straighforward as Orpheus made out, and Peter and Alice find themselves facing trials both part of the official journey, and decidedly more recent. Do they actually have the resources they need? How far can Alice make it partnering with someone she doesn’t really trust? And who knew that Hell was full of people trying to research and write dissertations? Though Hell is literally dark, the ending is a happy one, which was a relief after Babel.

Especially at the beginning, Alice is not a very sympathetic character, willing to do whatever it takes to get what she wants. It’s also hard to understand why she and Peter are so very determined to save the professor, who seems like a worse person with every flashback to Alice or Peter’s memories of him. Some of the story is meandering and slow – probably deliberately, because Alice and Peter don’t always know where to go or what to do next. However, there are interesting characters along the way, and Alice grows over the course of the story. The narrators also did a mostly good job – Morag Sims does the bulk of the narrating, with just a few chapters from Peter’s point of view. She reads with a native English accent that sounded appropriate to Cambridge to me,though I unfortunately couldn’t recognize a true Cambridge accent. Alice, though, is American, and Morag reads things in Alice’s voice with an American accent that has the distinct sound of a Brit trying to speak American. Overall, though, this is worth listening to, especially for fans of dark academia.

This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me. Maggie the Undying 1. by Ilona Andrews. Tor, 2026. ISBN 9781250377265. Read from a library copy.

Maggie’s favorite fantasy books, set in and around the city of Kair Toren, have carried her through the roughest parts of her life for the past decade. She’s been waiting just as long for the cliffhanger that ended the second book in the trilogy to be resolved, and for the heroes she cares about to win against the villains. Three days before the story opens, she woke up naked in a ditch in what is clearly Kair Toren, easily recognizable by the mage tower. Unfortunately, she’s broke and without connections. Fortunately, she knows where everything is, where she is in the book timeline, and what is going to happen. If she can keep herself alive long enough, she might even be able to change the timeline enough to save the characters she cares about and prevent some of the major atrocities in the book from happening. All of this requires putting herself in a lot of danger. Fortunately, she’s come back to life after every murder attempt so far, even if it hurts like the dickens. Unfortunately, the world is full of secrets and characters that weren’t in the book. Also, knowing that she shouldn’t trust people is not working to keep her from really, really caring about them. But worst of all – the plot doesn’t want to be changed.

The inital concept here is hilarious, and there are a lot of light and humorous moments. However, the world seems something like the world of Games of Thrones (which I have deliberately not read). There are multiple factions of unscrupulous people in charge willing to kill lots of other people to get what they want, people selling children into slavery, tortured in the streets, etc. A lot of this violence happens in short summaries of the past, where we learn about the things that characters have or plan to do as reasons that Maggie wants to stop them. (For those who are sensitive to it, one of the summary flashbacks involved dogs having been killed, though no dogs were killed on page.) I am a sensitive person, but having the separation of Maggie describing what she read and on-page violence described in somewhat less detail kept this from being too much for me. The romance with a knight Maggie befriends has the potential for lots of steam but is so far mostly yearning because of trust issues and also not knowing when she might be yanked back to our world. He is definitely the strong alpha type which is not really my favorite, but also seems like what you’d expect if you were dropped into an old-school fantasy book. Maggie also builds up a household for herself, mostly of people she’s rescued, many of them the minor characters who got side mentions at most in the original books.

I’d never read Ilona Andrews before, though I’d heard of her, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maggie and most of the major characters read as white, though some of the important, mostly off-page characters are Black, which was confirmed when I found a bunch of character art on Ilona Andrews’ blog. It took me a few chapters to get really into it, but then I was hooked – thinking about it all the time, telling everyone around me to read it. The only thing that kept me from starting it over again from the beginning was the number of other books on my shelf waiting to be read, though I did go on hold for the audiobook on Libby. There’s just so much detail that I want to go back and catch! Still – reader beware: the epilogue ends on a cliffhanger, and the next book is not yet published.