Meet our reader lens with a lot of head trauma: Binsa. To those on the outside, Binsa is a “living goddess,” chosen by the gods to hear the woes of her people, arbitrate disagreements, and empower her priests with magic to help the masses from her place on the Scarlet Throne. But, it turns out that when Binsa showed up for the magical deity drop-off she ended up with a demon by mistake. Binsa is from a world that is generally unpleasant to be in, and even worse if you are a woman. When she finds out that her appointed goddess doesn’t infuse her with divine power during her rite of ascension, she uses a contract with a demon to fake it until she makes it. Things are going well with one small road bump–priests of the divine are only supposed to last a few years and Binsa has been a conduit of the divine for a suspiciously long time. When a new girl, Medha, is selected to take over her position, Binsa and her demon strike a deal: To magnify his power and help her wrest control from the priests, she will sacrifice human lives. She’ll do anything not to end up back on the streets, forgotten and alone. But how much of her humanity is she willing to trade in her quest for power? Deals with demons are rarely so simple.
This book is a sneaky and devious time, immediately establishing that we can’t trust Binsa’s version of events and that we are being actively lied to as a reader. This is not a book with a ton of surprise twist rug-pulls; instead, it is an enigmatic morass that we are knowingly wandering into hoping you can find a way out. This metaphor also works really well with the fascinating demon contract that Binsa enters with Ilam. Ilam is a giant black cat demon with mental powers that range from reading minds to affecting memory to warping perception. Binsa uses these powers to consolidate power and keep her position, but it is immediately obvious that while Binsa is twisting the minds of others around her, so too is she being twisted by her contracted demon.
The examination of this demonic contract is one of the more interesting elements in the book. All too often, demonic contracts are blanketly categorized as this evil thing protagonists are tricked or forced into and must get out of. Ilum is a different sort of beast. He offers immense power with pretty clearly defined and implied costs and does not pressure Binsa into taking them (yet, who knows with all the mind-altering powers). As a huge fan of warlocks in Dungeons and Dragons, it feels fresh and new to see Demons treated as ruthless traders more than evil temptresses’ and I had a lot of fun with this interpretation.
The world here is interesting, but everything is kept very surface level as our view is narrowed to the small box Binsa is kept in. I think this works thematically and adds to the oppressive atmosphere of the book. The pacing is extremely fast, to the point where several sections of the story fly by without proper time to absorb new information as it is presented. This leads to one of my first minor gripes with the book, which is there is such a thing as too unreliable a narrator. The book ends on a pretty interesting cliffhanger, but thanks to all of the uncertainty around events and reveals in the story I didn’t get a good sense of what we accomplished or where we stand after the entirety of book one. I closed the last page feeling mostly confused, but still intrigued. I suspect that this is the type of series that will be best consumed in one go and might want to hold off reading until there are more books out. Also, the author picked really strange ages for Binsa in the story. In the present, she is a teenager, who talks and acts like she is in her 30s. In the flashbacks, Binsa is 7 years old, and talks and acts like she is a teen. It was distracting to the point of breaking immersion, which was a huge deal for a book that is so involved with its atmosphere. Of course, there is the potential that all of this is intentional and that there is some weird behind-the-scenes thing happening with her age. Yet, it still wouldn’t give me back the lost sense of immersion in book one.
Overall, The Scarlet Throne is certainly one of the more interesting reads of the year and definitely scratches the itch for readers who like a lot of mystery and discovery in their fantasy stories. It’s rare we get this much shameless murder from a likable protagonist and I am very curious to see how far Leow can push Binsa before I turn away.
Rating: The Scarlet Throne – 8.0/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.