Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs To Die
Apr. 19th, 2026 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotLatest read, very enjoyable, but so many editorial thoughts I had to consciously stop myself from writing in my Storygraph review. To summarize: Sir Cameron, a gorgeous knight who fears death and isn't as charming as he thinks he is turns out to have his death noted in a prophecy about stopping the evil wizard Merulo. Glenda, the elf he thinks is his friend (she would call him more of a pet) is chosen to take him to the assigned place and kill him so that the prophecy can come true, but he escapes her and begs shelter from Merulo on the basis that keeping him alive will benefit the wizard. He is also very much turned on by Merulo chaining him up, which results in him being turned into a vulture and then a woman. As a woman, though, he hooks up with Merulo for the first time and they start a relationship. Merulo's plan is to kill God, who apparently turned their world from a high-tech Earth into high fantasy Larnia a thousand years ago; if he succeeds, the world should bounce back. Unfortunately, everyone else catches up, and the elf manages to kill Cameron in accordance with the prophecy ... but Merulo drains his own magic to turn back time by a day in order to save him, and we also find out that he's actually a dragon in human form. The two of them go off to Merulo's sister's home in an undersea habitat, where she and Merulo work on completing the plan, which makes Cameron a little desperate as the dragons were apparently machine intelligences in the before times. Glenda goes to find their sister, a half-dragon who works as a witch, to track them down. At last the dragons manage to find out that God is already dead, and they pull down the barrier between Larnia/Earth and the Mars and moon colonies that were made before the switch. A ship from the moon picks up the main party and they get to learn about the real world. Evidently some kind of alien? god? found a copy of an RPG and remodeled the earth to fit it. And now Merulo can chill out because his life's work is done, and he and Cameron live happily ever after.
There's so much. There's TOO much. The writing is honestly pretty shallow - Greer Stothers is on Tumblr and therefore at least fandom-adjacent, but afaict they've never written either fic or original stuff before, and I do think the lack of experience shows - and it can't contain all of the complexity in an elegant way. Every chapter/scene is there to do One Thing, whether it's "have funny seduction" or "advance Merulo's plan" or "show what the elf is up to", and there's so much here that chapters desperately need to do two things.
What I think would have been best is for it to have been chopped into two books, with the break right after Merulo turns back time. That was a stunner moment - Cameron actually gets killed! Merulo admits that he's a dragon in a badass way! A big big spell is triggered! That would have given more space for the development of the relationship that occurs pretty quickly in the first half of the book (we go from Merulo being an evil wizard that Cameron is shamelessly willing to beg for help to Cameron being attracted to Merulo for menacing him to Cameron developing a soft spot for him to Cameron actually telling the elf to tell Merulo that he loves him). Then the second book could have the Pern-like secret SF reveal and all of the dragons, which felt like such a different story and didn't get enough space to breathe as the concluding half of a novel. Bring in the sisters, have the midway turning point be when they get picked up to space, and just spend more time making that shift feel natural.
The half-dragon sister side plot particularly demands this - she did not get nearly enough space. So, Merulo and his sister Hydna were hatched from eggs that their mother found/stole to protect, but their mother also had a biological child with an elf; then the elf killed her (dragon parts are important sources of magic) and "surgically corrected" their child, raising her among the elves and humans. Merulo doesn't believe they should get involved with her because she's with the Church, but ... from the Glenda POV chapters, it's clear that Domitia is an outcast on the fringes of society, with loads of trans/queer/intersex vibes (and this is NOT a queernorm world). She's NOT with the Church on a philosophical level. She gets a great moment meeting up with him, makes excellent points (that he's imposing his own will on a planet full of people, just like whatever being changed their world did), and she dies preventing the world from being changed back. And I think she's right! Leaving the world as it is but taking down the barrier to open them back up to the rest of humanity/the universe is the balance. Merulo's hacked himself to pieces to do this in hopes of becoming a spaceship/computer so I get why he's devoted to it but that doesn't override the need to find out what everyone else wants. Plus by that point, we've spent several chapters watching Domitia traveling with Glenda, Glenda getting more attracted to her but continually showcasing her bigotry until Domitia finally pushes her through a portal to get rid of her. It just feels like a very, very loose thread, lots of lost potential. I assumed it was going toward some resolution but it didn't, and it doesn't even feel like intentional tragedy. Apparently Stothers is writing a prequel, though, which might get into this?
A lot of implied smut between chapters but none on the page; that's for the best, I think, given how much practice it takes to write good sex.
Anyway! I enjoyed it, but I kind of wish it were the author's second work so that it would be a bit more polished. Also, it stands out to me that they credit someone who I'm pretty sure is KJ Charles's agent for picking up the book and getting her husband to agent it.
There's so much. There's TOO much. The writing is honestly pretty shallow - Greer Stothers is on Tumblr and therefore at least fandom-adjacent, but afaict they've never written either fic or original stuff before, and I do think the lack of experience shows - and it can't contain all of the complexity in an elegant way. Every chapter/scene is there to do One Thing, whether it's "have funny seduction" or "advance Merulo's plan" or "show what the elf is up to", and there's so much here that chapters desperately need to do two things.
What I think would have been best is for it to have been chopped into two books, with the break right after Merulo turns back time. That was a stunner moment - Cameron actually gets killed! Merulo admits that he's a dragon in a badass way! A big big spell is triggered! That would have given more space for the development of the relationship that occurs pretty quickly in the first half of the book (we go from Merulo being an evil wizard that Cameron is shamelessly willing to beg for help to Cameron being attracted to Merulo for menacing him to Cameron developing a soft spot for him to Cameron actually telling the elf to tell Merulo that he loves him). Then the second book could have the Pern-like secret SF reveal and all of the dragons, which felt like such a different story and didn't get enough space to breathe as the concluding half of a novel. Bring in the sisters, have the midway turning point be when they get picked up to space, and just spend more time making that shift feel natural.
The half-dragon sister side plot particularly demands this - she did not get nearly enough space. So, Merulo and his sister Hydna were hatched from eggs that their mother found/stole to protect, but their mother also had a biological child with an elf; then the elf killed her (dragon parts are important sources of magic) and "surgically corrected" their child, raising her among the elves and humans. Merulo doesn't believe they should get involved with her because she's with the Church, but ... from the Glenda POV chapters, it's clear that Domitia is an outcast on the fringes of society, with loads of trans/queer/intersex vibes (and this is NOT a queernorm world). She's NOT with the Church on a philosophical level. She gets a great moment meeting up with him, makes excellent points (that he's imposing his own will on a planet full of people, just like whatever being changed their world did), and she dies preventing the world from being changed back. And I think she's right! Leaving the world as it is but taking down the barrier to open them back up to the rest of humanity/the universe is the balance. Merulo's hacked himself to pieces to do this in hopes of becoming a spaceship/computer so I get why he's devoted to it but that doesn't override the need to find out what everyone else wants. Plus by that point, we've spent several chapters watching Domitia traveling with Glenda, Glenda getting more attracted to her but continually showcasing her bigotry until Domitia finally pushes her through a portal to get rid of her. It just feels like a very, very loose thread, lots of lost potential. I assumed it was going toward some resolution but it didn't, and it doesn't even feel like intentional tragedy. Apparently Stothers is writing a prequel, though, which might get into this?
A lot of implied smut between chapters but none on the page; that's for the best, I think, given how much practice it takes to write good sex.
Anyway! I enjoyed it, but I kind of wish it were the author's second work so that it would be a bit more polished. Also, it stands out to me that they credit someone who I'm pretty sure is KJ Charles's agent for picking up the book and getting her husband to agent it.
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