Tildes Book Club discussion - June 2026 - How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler
This is the sixth Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-sixth overall. We are discussing How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler.. At the end of July we will discuss A Psalm for the Wild Built by Chambers.
I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.
For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
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I wanted to read this and am realizing now that my hold never came in because... I neglected to actually place it! I've now ordered HtBtDLaDT and will pass on Psalm this month.
They're both pretty short (Psalm especially); you can probably do both!
Humor and snark and sarcasm play a big role in this book. Did it work for you? Did you relate to or appreciate Davi's attitude?
It worked for me a lot of the time, but I thought author overdid it on the cultural references. This book very much felt to me like it would work best in a specific snapshot in time because of it, and that time was already slipping away. That said, Davi doesn’t really remember her original life. It’s pretty clear that she was a tabletop gamer and probably played a lot of video games. It’s just occurred to me that we also don’t know how old she appears to be. Adventure parties in D&D type games are mostly made up of teenagers by default, I found this out when I first started playing and intentionally built a teenage character because I thought that would encourage the other characters to help me out.
As for Davi’s attitude, I thought her attitude was pretty weird and pretty distasteful up front, though I was willing to roll with it. Even though she talked about it constantly, I found it really hard to keep in mind just how many times she had looped, I think I probably brushed it off as exaggeration most of the time. I do really like how the author explored it in the second book, which I read right after the first. I don’t really feel like I can dig into that because spoilers.
Did you like the second book? Would you recommend it? Thanks for not spoiling the story.
Yes I did. What's going on in Davi's head is expanded upon, it turned a lot of the first book into a setup.
Oh, I'm glad you mentioned this actually. I was sort of on the fence about reading the sequel, but it sounds like I'll probably enjoy it
I just finished it today and I'd say its basically required. Its not a sequel. Its the second half of the story
Davi’s snark and humor (in part) made for a good romp of a read. I did enjoy it, but there was a crassness to it that got old after a while, and that I felt was unnecessary. At some point the crassness felt like it was coming out the mind of a teenage boy for teenage boys. Ultimately, I started quickly skimming the crass to get to back to the story. It’s too bad because though I otherwise enjoyed the book, there isn’t anyone I would recommend it to because of it.
I'm not officially part of the book club, but I was looking for something to read in June and ended up checking this out from the library after seeing it was the book of the month here.
I'm actually a pretty crass person myself, though contextually only with people I'm well familiar with (my wife, my friends of 30+ years). I ended up putting this book down after just the prologue. The crassness of it just felt very edgy and try hard, just as you reference it being like coming from a teenage boy and the character absolutely reads like a woman being written by a man (breasting boobily), given it is.
I was just skimming this thread to see if anyone else had that thought or maybe if I'm just wrong and being to harsh. So, glad I'm not totally alone.
I’m not part of the book club either!
I was wondering if anyone else thought the same way. I too can enjoy some crass humor, and again like you, with a very limited number of people, most notably my husband. But not all time. It grows old and weary when overused, and that’s how I think this book used it.
What did you think about the world building?
The world felt a little "generic fantasy" in a way that's probably deliberate. I haven't read the second book yet, but I get the feeling that the world or the whole time loop situation is going to be revealed to be more constructed or planned.
The system where humans use magic crystals for spells, while wilders eat them for stats, was an interesting mechanic. Humans can perform short term feats the other can't, but it looks like they always lose the war of attrition to the passive buffs from the other side.
What other books/media does this book remind you of? What do you think influenced the author? Do you recommend any of them?
The pacing of the book reminded me of the Murder Bot series which I also have tagged as a “good romp.” They both have a generic world with main characters who don’t particularly enjoy having to navigating it. They both use dark humor as a coping mechanism and manage to quickly pull the reader through to the end.
House of Leaves for the abuse of footnotes. I didn't mind it too much when I was reading a physical book, but I'm using an e reader tk read tbe sequel and it's getting kind of annoying how it's formatted.
Is that what the bad echo-y speech was in the audiobook? Agreed that it was terrible, it reminded me of the way Death was done in the early poor quality Discworld recordings.
Yes, those were the footnotes, and dear god the narration/recording choices for them were... bizarre
Pretty much every page had a few footnotes.
"It's not my fault this happened." [1]
*1 - Ok so maybe it actually is my fault.
It was fine when I could glance down to the bottom of the page. But my epub copy of the sequel is putting all the footnotes at the end of the chapter. So I'm seeing them long after I forgot the context for them. I'm not sure how an audio book would handle them, but it sounds like it's just reading them right away.
I agree that this was a pain, BUT, in case it's helpful, EPUBs almost always have a link on the footnote number to the footnote content, and vice versa, so that you can pop over to the footnote and back with two taps. This was the case for my EPUB of the book!
And yes, footnotes are almost always read inline in audiobooks (and were for this one, with some very weird recording setup or post filter to make them sound aurally distinct, which I think mostly just made them sound terrible).
100% agree. I really liked the narrator, but those parts sounded like a bad recording in a cave.
In case you were curious, the footnote narrations are totally fine in the sequel. My guess is (I've seen this before, especially in fiction) they literally forgot to record the footnotes for the first book, and the narrator recorded them from a home setup instead of in the studio
You’re right, the sequel was much better. Maybe the reader called them in for the first one from her phone.
Oh thanks that actually made this much more readable.
Was there a side character you particularly liked?
Droff, the stone eater, was an interesting highlight being a character that would believably be great at logistics. Notably, there wasn't much of a hint that the book would even consider any sort of logistics so the stone eaters seemed to just be set up as huge "combat units". Still, having a character such as Droff being a character not quite like anything else was certainly something the story benefited from.
Was there a side character you particularly disliked?
What did you think about the role violence plays in the story?
I’m usually adverse to violence and do skim a lot of it. With that said, I felt that a lot of the violence in this books drives home how utterly horrific this has been for Davi and gives credence to her don’t give a shit attitude. It also helped me feel invested in Davi, like I really want her to succeed this time. It also made me more willing to go along into the moral gray areas of the character because of a “would I be any different?”
The horribleness of it all is something I've sometimes interrogated with RPG characters both in something like WoW and TTRPGs but also as my larp characters.
We get stabbed and we bleed and we die and we resurrect over and over and over and when we are healed we get up and fight immediately again. Who are we? Why are we here? What hell is this?
Who would any of us be if we were subjected to that, especially after more and more cycles of it.
Dinniman asks similar questions in the dungeon crawler carl series. The npcs go through existential crises.
Yeah I like it less personally, mostly because it's explicit that they're being controlled by a system. It's a different angle on it but one I'm a bit less interested in.
The violence at the beginning of the story (with the wizard) felt rather excessive but the story did move on and so that part of the story could fade into memory. At the end of the book (at the convocation), Davi had the sudden realization that other people dying may actually be permanent this time around. That realization had more impact because of the earlier part of the book. So, that violence element of the book did eventually work out but it took a while to lead up to that.
What did you think about the author's use of thaumite among the wilders and for magic?
The way the author used thaumite for magic gave the story as a whole some freshness.
What do you look for in a fantasy novel? Does this book provide what you want in the genre?
What surprised you about this book?
The biggest surprise for me is that for a timeloop story, there actually wasnt that much looping. Outside of the bit at the beginning we mostly avoid the usual trial and error thats common in these stories. While the protagonist has the benefit of knowledge gained in previous loops, the fact that everything is new territory for her makes this feel quite different.
The author did a ama on reddit about a year ago, he thought showing Davi figure out an the rules would be boring.
What do you think about Davi's quest and the groups she met along the way? Did you appreciate the political machinations and maneuvering?
Slight tangent: I listened to the audiobook and thought her name was Dobby.