A Practical Guide to Evil is a YA-ish fantasy web serial set in a world with capitalized Good and Evil. The gods (which definitely exist) created this world to settle a wager about whether Good or Evil would triumph, but it is up to the world’s occupants to determine which way the contest will go. Of course, not every person is equal in this contest.

By a combination of exertion, will, strife, and trauma people can take on the mantle of a Name (an archetypal role) on either side of the conflict. Those Names are bound to tropes (varying by the person’s side in the conflict) which can entrap or empower. Some Names (Black Knight) are clearly on one side of the conflict (Evil), but others (Apprentice) can arise on either side. No two people can hold the full power of one name at a time; where there are multiple pretenders to a Name, those pretenders must settle whose vision of the Name and its purpose will win (Evil tends to do this with violence, Good rarely has multiple contenders).

I love all of that. This wholehearted embrace of archetypal story as a narrative toy and tool for a larger fantasy series is great. It’s what convinced me to read it in the first place.

Better yet, people in the series are aware of these Names and tropes. They embrace the study of Name-lore, learning the ways in which a Name may be caught by trope and pattern and story. They try to use that knowledge to their advantage. That’s a delight.

But it’s not all a bed of roses.

I’ve been reading this web series on and off since last summer. I’m about a third of the way through the last (seventh) book in the series. The books are long, and they’re full of typos—I’ve had to turn off my editor brain to enjoy them. That’s been annoying, but manageable.

Worse, I’ve been frustrated by the polemical feel of the narrator’s (or maybe the author’s) perspective at times. Without having read other material by the author (ErraticErrata, or EE), I’m not sure whether the change in the narrator’s perspective over the course of the series is intended to be character development, or whether it’s a change in EE themselves.

Look, this post is going to go long. If you just want to know whether I recommend this or not… yeah, I think I do. I have reservations, mostly tied to the aforementioned polemical feel. But I think the series is somewhat simplistic fun at the start, with intriguing worldbuilding, and it gradually grows into more interesting complexity. There are good questions about the bounds of morality and the impact one has on the world. I really do love a bunch of the characters too.

Now, if you want to see me get deep into the weeds, well…

The series starts with an extremely pessimistic ends-mosly-justify-the-means view of the world. There are some interesting moral quandaries, and we follow our protagonist down her road towards Evil as she seeks to do some good things in the world. Perhaps because we’re following our protagonist’s perspective, we have a somewhat slanted view of things: characters associated with Good are regularly myopic, rigid, lawful stupid types. Characters associated with Evil are nuanced, intelligent, and often sympathetic in their hopes and dreams even as they do evil things.

Our protagonist, with her pragmatic and deep-seated desire to improve things for her people, sides with Evil in order to achieve her goals. On a surface read it’s clear that she’s made the only smart choice. From the narrator’s perspective—or maybe the author’s, and the ambiguity frustrates me—siding with Good would have been self-defeating. Following Good’s rules and teachings would have blinded her to important truths about the world, and it would have offered her at most a symbolic victory with no real improvement (and a lot of suffering) for her people.

Reading that perspective was tolerable for about one or two books. I loved the nuanced view given to the villains. But the “what if bad is good and good is bad” twist grated on me the longer it continued, as it felt clear that EE wasn’t just offering a nuanced view of Evil, but was withholding a similarly nuanced view of Good. If I wanted that twist, I could have gone back to read Jaqueline Carey’s Banewreaker again.

As you might have guessed, I didn’t stop reading. I liked enough of the series’ trappings, and the books were fun. But my fun continued to sour even as I continued enjoying the other parts of the series.

Gradually, the narrator’s (or the author’s, it’s still ambiguous) perspective shifted. Around book four, we were given more nuance for Good characters. Our protagonist and primary POV character was still a Villain, and still spent more time being infuriated by Good than not, but we were finally exposed to a few Named on the side of Good who didn’t feel like flimsy strawmen EE had introduced to support an apologia for Evil.

And here’s the thing: I still don’t know whether EE planned this shift in perspective from the start, or whether EE’s perspective shifted over the years of writing this series. There’s so much in the series, spread over such a long time. Without a lot more research, I can’t know.

For context: book one’s first chapter is 11k (a pretty normal length here), and there are 30 chapters in all. Book two has 51 chapters plus ten interludes. The books only get longer from there. What’s more, EE has posted at a prodigious pace; book one’s prologue went up on March 25^th of 2015, while book two started November 4th of 2015. Book four’s prologue posted in April of 2018, and book seven’s prologue went up in March of 2021.

At that pace, I doubt EE had much chance to edit. This certainly explains all the typos. But, given my own experience with the transformative act of editing and the squirrelly nature of a work in progress, that also leaves me inclined to believe that EE’s plans may have changed over the years. On the other hand, the narrative holds together well enough that I’m certain at least some of the shift must have been planned.

Regardless, as the books progress there are increasingly many interludes with other characters’ perspectives. These follow other Named Villains, or unNamed normal people, or even Named Heroes. These give us some of the additional nuance I crave.

However, we don’t see the narrator’s perspective shift until several books in. And even when we come to sympathize with some Named Heroes in later books, they require some browbeating to see the errors of their own ways. Because of that it feels like EE is implying that all the Good-aligned Named our protagonist faced (and often killed) in the early books really were just as myopic and hidebound as they seemed.

When you think too long about the implications, the story still reads like an apologia. Only our protagonist and her friends are sufficiently enlightened. The more they’re able to spread their perspective, the more other people can share that enlightenment.

I don’t love that. I still enjoy the series, and I’m going to finish it, but… it’s a bit annoying whenever I think too hard about that.

Maybe this is just good writing. Maybe the point all along was that the simplistic division of Good and Evil blinds us to our actual impact on the world. The narrator certainly seems to learn this, as her perspective has shifted along with her circumstances. And this series is definitely a critique of those who claim to be Good without paying any greater attention to what change they make in the world, or who suffers for their actions. It’s also obviously calling attention to the dastardly acts those serving Evil will embrace in pursuit of their own goals. Our protagonist wonders whether her various sacrifices and acts of violence have been worth it, or whether she’s just lying to herself about her dreams of some greater good.

I like that a lot.

It’s a good series so far. Also, some of it really annoys me. I wonder what it would look like if it were edited, and whether EE would change anything.

Maybe someday I’ll find out. Until then, check this serial out for yourself.