“How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying” by Django Wexler
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Rating: 4/5 Stars.
An interesting, and raunchy, book featuring a protagonist caught in a time loop. For over two hundred attempts, Davi, the proclaimed saviour of the kingdom, has tried to rally the human Kingdom against the wilder forces of the Dark Lord, and failed each time. Well, she has had enough and decides that since the Dark Lord wins, she will be the Dark Lord instead.
But like a novice trying to play at expert level in a computer game for the first time, she’s not very successful. It takes quite a number of attempts before she manages to join a band of orcs without being killed in the first few minutes. From there, she has to lead them to the Convocation, where the next Dark Lord is to be chosen. Along the way, she has to recruit more wilders, so she will have a horde to back up her claim to be the next Dark Lord.
The nature of the time loop Davi is caught in is not explained in the book, nor does it feature prominently in the story once she joins the band of orcs, as she wants to succeed in this attempt and not have to start again, with possibly a different outcome. But she is forced to reconsider her present life when an event occurs that causes the time loop to manifest differently. That and the discovery of surprising artifacts at the Convocation makes her reconsider the current life she is leading and just what she wants to do once she does become the Dark Lord.
A humorous story about a person trying to discover why she appears to be the centre around which the world revolves. But that revelation will have to wait for the next book.
Book read from 2026/06/10 to 2026/06/16.