If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio Review

By Ava Shaffer

This dark and theatrical novel set in an elite performing arts college follows seven young Shakespeare actors through their final year in school. From debut author M.L. Rio, If We Were Villians chronicles a friend group’s obsession with the Bard, and the dark paths art can lead them down. A whodunit mystery emerges when one of the actors is found dead, and each of the friends in their tight-knit group has a motive. Told through the frame story of the narrator confessing to a murder he may or may not have committed ten years prior, If We Were Villians is a modern addition to the dark academia genre.

“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”

Being an English major surrounded by other dark-academia-loving, Earl-Grey-tea-sipping, The-Secret-History-reading, people, I had only ever heard wonderful things about this book. So my expectations were through the roof!

Unfortunately, the hype for this book and a couple of technical elements made it fall flat for me. I enjoyed it and had a good time reading it, especially the final 30-ish pages, but overall I wasn’t as moved as others were by this.

My favorite parts of If We Were Villains were the character dynamics and the way their relationships evolved as they progressed farther into madness and paranoia after discovering one of their classmates dead. I love when books have a well-written found family trope, and I especially love it when there’s so much drama and love and lust and hatred between the friends. It’s so messy and dramatic, incredibly middle-school-first-co-ed-friend-group coded.

I also really enjoyed the police procedural and whodunit mystery aspect of this story, especially the way the narrative played with timelines. Whenever there were really suspenseful scenes or clues being found out, that’s when I was most engaged with the story. However, those genre-defining scenes were few and far between, making me wish there was more.

“One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.”

The main thing I disliked about this book was all the Shakespeare quotes interspersed in the character’s normal dialogue. Sometimes these moments worked well and really added to my immersion, but often I felt they were pretentious and distracting. The prose and lyricism of this book didn’t do enough work for me to believe that level of ostentatious intellectual display was totally justified or earned. I see this book compared to The Secret History a lot, and that is definitely the main place I see these books differ. The Secret History succeeds at justifying pretentious characters and dialogue because it weaves those baser aesthetic tropes of intellect into the equally lyrical prose and complicated plot. In my opinion, If We Were Villians does not do this as tactfully.

“I don't know, it's like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets makes sense. The good ones, anyway.”

In general, I liked a lot of elements of this book and think it definitely had the potential to be a favorite read for me. But everything just felt kind of muted. I wanted the story to lean in more toward the little glimmers there (the relationships, the scenic descriptions, the initial world-building, the mystery genre, etc). However, I am still pretty impressed with this novel as a debut, and look forward to reading future books by M.L. Rio.

I’m still happy I got to read this, especially during my final fall semester in college because what a great time for a dark academia murder plot set at a university, but I was overall left feeling lackluster about it.