“At the end, everyone seemed to be expecting an apology, but I didn’t have one to give them. What could I say? This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Our story begins at the end. The end of a 10-year prison sentence, that is. Oliver Marks has served ten years for murder and now that he’s been released, Detective Colborne, the recently-retired arresting officer, has some lingering questions about the case. In telling the story, Oliver takes him and the reader on a journey through the halls of Dellecher, an elite conservatory in New England prestigious and infamous for its unique teaching curriculum restricted to the works of Shakespeare. As Oliver and the small cohort of fourth-year theater students live and breathe Shakespeare, their lives take on the tales of the Bard, with all the passion, emotion, and tragedy they entail.
After the first twenty pages, I was fairly convinced I was reading an iteration of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—elite school, murder, an overall aesthetic of dark academia—but as I got deeper into the story, deeper into Dellecher, and deeper into the obsession with Shakespeare, If We Were Villains took on a shape and identity entirely of its own. The story Oliver tells is stretched over their last year at Dellecher, teasing out the underlying tensions, relationships, and resentment which led to the inevitable implosion.
M. L. Rio does a remarkable job of bringing Shakespeare into every crevice of the story, from the roles students embody in real life to the hybrid way they speak by using lines from the sonnets as though it were their own language (these are set apart in italics, as seen in the quote at the beginning of the review). In addition to this Shakespearean-speak, I loved how Rio slowed down and dissected the performances themselves to allow the reader to see what was happening in and amongst the students as they played their roles onstage. The use of these tools truly pulls the reader into Dellecher and imitates the sensation of being submerged in Shakespeare like the students describe.
I was hooked until the very end, rooted in place for the last fifty pages because I couldn’t guess the ending. I have a soft spot for the New England/dark academia genre and If We Were Villains not only scratched that itch but added to my appreciation instead of being the “same old same old”. Oliver’s story is not one you’ll want to miss.
Personal rating: 8.5/10
Recommend? Absolutely
Re-read? Potentially, I feel there’s still so much of the Shakespeare-aspect to unpack
Time: 1:52
Bonus content and an ode to my current residence:
“All through the second half of October, the skies were bruised and stormy, and Gwendolyn greeted us every morning by saying, ‘What dreadfully Scottish weather we’re having!”