Disenchanted isn’t the first Robert Kroese novel I’ve read. Familiar with the somewhat dry brand of comedy Kroese weaves into his novels, I began the book with the expectation to laugh, and to laugh well.
The plight of our hero, Boric, surprisingly strikes a chord at the very heart of human nature: what makes us who we are, even as we fight our faults to pursue that which we believe is owed to us. But rarely, if ever, are things as they first appear.
Boric is pulled across the country he once ruled, chased by mindless zombie-shells of the heroes he once admired—and some he loathed—in his own rotting corpse, his soul firmly rooted to his body… which only continues to lose parts of itself in the same fashion that Boric sheds his assumptions of the world’s workings.
At his core, Boric is a clever, selfish brute with sexist tendencies, but his cursed life as a corpse king reverses his perspective on the world he thought he understood. Without getting into spoiler territory, Boric finds the strength to live up to his mistakes instead of simply avoiding them. Boric realizes the price of selfishness, losing his modernist lover before finally reuniting at the price of the destruction of his kingdom.
Or so he thought.
Disenchanted is loaded with semi-ridiculous fantasy magic, debauchery, ironic plot twists, and on-point one-liners delivered with the sort of sass reserved for getting a severe beatdown from grandma with a wooden spoon—to put it lightly.
The dynamic nature of Boric’s character is a refreshing twist to the selfish king type, and when coupled with the key thee at the center of Boric’s problem—aptly summarized as, you are your own worst enemy—Kroese delivers a deeply realistic portrayal of the darkest struggles of the human psyche.
Boric may be a character on a page, but he is relatable in a way that humanizes him for all his many faults. In Boric’s development, Kroese temporarily sheds his flair for comedy to address the maturation and emotional growth of a particular type of man all too commonly found in the world.
To summarize, when Boric screws up, he does it in style. But his inability to atone for his actions in life is reassuringly amended by his acceptance of his inhumanity in death.
If you like wacky antics, badass warriors, scientific women masquerading as pageboys, and suicidal sheep**--I’m not even kidding—then Disenchanted is for you!
Until next time, this has been ElricBlurbs’ BookLook!
**To explain: central to the plot is a certain extremely itchy variety of sheep’s wool. The wool is so itchy that the sheep that can’t satisfy the itch actually commit suicide—or sheepicide—by jumping off cliffs, or getting shot with arrows by the nearby watchtower guards from a certain semi-hostile country that lies in bored wait.
