Liza Anderson knows that no one will take her novel seriously. “It’s about female desire,” she says at the book’s launch party, “and who takes that seriously?” Her fantasy debut first came to my attention as a “dark academia witch romance” written by a Yale Law student two years ahead of me. But really, We Who Have No Gods is less a fantastical romance and more a ruthlessly realistic vivisection of villainy.
Until reading the novel, I did not appreciate that law school might be the perfect setting for the study of villainy. But it makes sense: power predominates in both the subject matter of law school and the values that reign within its halls, particularly at a place like Yale that has such deep ties to the highest echelons of government. While Anderson is in many ways a refreshing exception to the buttoned-up Yale Law School culture (she wears sword earrings and sustains creative interests), her book bears the unmistakable imprint of the institution, from its austere gothic architecture to its obsession with influence. We Who Have No Gods draws on Anderson’s law school experience to trace the human price of prioritizing the pursuit of power.
The novel’s grand struggle unfolds between two rival factions. The choice is between a morally unconvincing establishment and a monster apocalypse. Representing the establishment is the Acheron Order, which aims to keep the world of the dead from overtaking that of the living. The Order has quietly perpetuated its influence for centuries and believes it “controls reality” because its “members become presidents, senators, important people.” Directed by professorial Elders, the Order prizes rules, hierarchy, and tradition, and it is fittingly headquartered in an artificially old gothic castle. Ahem.
The Order is under growing threat from the Brotherhood, a fascist offshoot dedicated to unleashing monsters from the realm of the dead to destroy people of “impure” lineage. The Brotherhood is led by Aren Mann, an eloquent murderer in tailored suits who admirably plays the role of lead villain. He worships power and even killed himself to be reborn with more of it. But Aren simply takes ordinary practice to an extreme: magic in this world often requires drawing one’s own blood. No one, it seems, escapes the self-laceration of power.
Anderson’s talent lies in eroding the distance between villains and their opponents, exposing the ways that ordinary people grow comfortable with villainy. One of villainy’s disarming masks is scholarly respectability, dignifying disastrous ideas with intellectual pedigree and cloaking real-world harms in abstract principles. Notably, both Aren and his archnemesis Max, the “progressive Elder” in de facto control of the Order, are scholars. The countless deaths Aren causes are merely chess moves to him, and even Max describes Aren’s project “casually, like an academic prospect—rather than a horrifying potential future best avoided at any cost.” When an Elder tries to have the protagonist Vic killed, he relies on legal euphemism: “The rules are clear. She must be silenced.” If severing principles from their human consequences seems obviously unwise, you may be surprised to learn that it is actively encouraged in law school and throughout the judiciary. Constitutional law classes teach us that doing otherwise would be inappropriate “policy” reasoning—the antithesis of principle and rule of law. Anderson’s scenes of gruesome violence illustrate what polite statements of principle can conceal.
Another misleading guise of villainy is normalcy. Like Hannah Arendt before her, Anderson appreciates that the most politically destructive people can be perfectly normal—and even likable—in their personal lives. Aren has a boyish grin and even regrets the unfortunate necessity of killing innocent people. After finding a photo of young Aren with her mother and Max, Vic thinks: “He couldn’t be that bad, could he? Not this smiling man … looking at his two friends like they meant the world to him? If he was … intent on eradicating an entire population of witches—how was it that he looked so normal?” She wonders, “How could [someone] have been friends with someone like Aren and not noticed the rot at his core?”
The novel proposes an unsettling answer: there may be no stable psychological differences between villains and their milieu, between the architects of evil and highly ambitious people in general, who are endlessly incentivized to sacrifice their human impulses to their aspirations. When you go to Yale Law School, you learn that for every politician you loathe there are thousands of people salivating to take his place, and some of them have a great sense of humor.
Though the novel never slips into moral relativism, it does show the difficulty of locating villainy safely outside of oneself, particularly if you aim to exert any influence. Its professed antagonists, Max and Aren, often sound indistinguishable. “Power is the only thing you need to make things better,” Max tells Vic, the protagonist. The distance between Aren and Vic, too, begins to vanish. When Aren casts a spell on Vic, she comes to hear his voice in her head, his heartbeat in her own chest. She even draws on his magic, as she has none of her own. Just as the protagonist is never entirely innocent, the villain is never entirely othered. Aren was horrified when he first learned to cast his signature spell of blocking out the sun. By the end of the novel, it is Vic who feels a darkness “that came from inside her, stamping out the light.” To fight villainy, it seems one must come to mirror it.
We Who Have No Gods brilliantly captures the impersonal nature of modern villainy, which is more the logical product of institutions and social forces than differences of individual psychology. The Order’s castle has “a mind of its own” and begins to think for its inhabitants. Vic fears the castle will devour her and steps outside to find clarity. With its unraveling hallways and disappearing staircases, the castle directs the paths of those inside and distances them from their former lives. Even as the institution wages war against the forces of death, it contains no life or joy. The Order is tellingly named after Greek mythology’s river of misery, through which the newly dead entered the underworld.
Ironically, the dismal human consequences of fixating on power are evinced by the novel’s many underdeveloped relationships, particularly the two-dimensional romance subplot. In classic Yale Law School fashion, Anderson is so focused on the great power struggle that character development and relationships are half-hearted at best. What eros survives is saturated by the need to dominate. Most people in the castle are products of marriages made to enhance magical abilities, and Vic herself is inevitably drawn to the Order’s highest-ranking warrior, Xan. Her desire is stirred by the crudest indicia of strength, Xan’s muscular build and combat skills, which are tirelessly emphasized for hundreds of pages. Fighting monsters evidently leaves no energy for a line of banter between the love interests, trapping characters (and readers) in a wearisome loop of monster battles and muscle flexing. But the novel’s tedium may be its greatest achievement. It invites us to wonder: isn’t the consuming struggle for dominance the very thing that secures our subjugation?
