Anji Kills A King, the first novel by Evan Leikam, one half of the “Book Reviews Kill” podcast, is a brutal road-trip of a novel with a compelling voice. It falls quite neatly into the genre of “terrible people making a series of disastrous life choices because it seemed like a good idea at the time” (which, as a genre I’ve just invented, explodes all marketing categories but is nonetheless as recognisable as science fiction and fantasy). It draws heavily on the aesthetics of sword and sorcery, while the influence of mid-00s grimdark is discernible, although Anji Kills A King lacks the bedrock of misogyny that was common to many examples that come to mind.
Anji is a servant in the palace laundry. The kingdom she lives in is not a shining country of peace, justice, and social mobility, though we learn Anji’s parents once worked in secret for the hope of reform before their untimely deaths. It’s corrupt, unjust, and nastily repressive. Anji blames the king for this. (The king might be the face of the situation, but Anji is a teenager with the political understanding of your average low-information voter. Is whoever will replace the king worse? Maybe! Who knows! Does Anji understand anything about the political structures of the country she’s living in? Demonstrably not very much.) So when Anji has the chance, she stabs the king to death and makes a run for it. Planning is not her strong suit; she acts on impulse and bravado.
This is partly why she doesn’t make it very many days down the road before someone catches up with her.
There’s a bounty on her head, the biggest bounty anyone could imagine. Such a large bounty means the band of legendary mercenaries known as the Menagerie are on her trail. The Menagerie are folk heroes of a sort. They follow a code, and for twenty years and more, hidden behind animal-faced masks that are rumoured to give them magical powers, they have hunted down their prey. The Hawk—a caustic, aging warrior—finds Anji first.
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Anji Kills A King
Their encounter does not go particularly well for Anji—I believe I mentioned her impulse and bravado issues?—and ends with her a captive, being marched through a hostile landscape towards the prospect of a nasty execution. But it rapidly becomes clear that the Hawk is not necessarily on the same side as the other authorities of the kingdom, nor of her (former) comrades in the Menagerie. Oh, she’s still going to deliver Anji to execution—if she can. She wants that bounty, though perhaps not for the reasons Anji assumes.
A tentative alliance against the weather and the landscape paves the way for something as close to friendship as is possible between captor and captive. Temporary and limited as it is, it’s much better than what happens when Anji falls into the hands of the surviving members of the rest of the Menagerie: cruel, mad, fanatic, or a combination of the three. They will deliver her to execution without even the grim solidarity that’s developed between her and the Hawk, with no chance of escape or even the hope that her death might matter. Unless, of course, the Hawk retrieves Anji from them, but even that road still leads to death.
Leikam’s voice is clear, vigorous, and compelling. His world is spare rather than richly described, a straightforward canvas on which the emotional journey of the novel takes place. The narrative is told entirely from Anji’s point of view, in a close, intimate third person that prioritises her emotions: her impulsivity, her lack of knowledge, her ability to learn, her bravado, her fear, her conniving, her cowardice and her courage. It parallels Anji’s growth into understanding the Hawk, and where the Hawk is coming from with the Hawk’s physical degeneration due to her dependence on an extremely addictive drug.
This drug causes temporarily increased physical abilities and a great sense of wellbeing. Long-term use results in physical and mental changes, leading to a gradual and largely irreversible transformation into a more bestial form. The Hawk is, unfortunately for her, already some way down this path.
This book is about two people who spend a significant amount of time together and develop a complicated emotional bond. For the clarity and education of the general reader, in this age of romantasy and the growth of “dark romance,” I feel I should note that there is no romance nor hint of romance here. The development of sympathy between Anji and the Hawk is of a different order, and perhaps a more interesting one; it is rare indeed that we see this sort of narrative, this sort of relationship, developed between two women. They are enemies. They perhaps never stop being enemies—not, at least, until the final violent and dramatic climax of the story, and perhaps not even then—but that is not all they are, and their ultimate goals are not as different as they look in the beginning.
Anji Kills a King is a very effective first novel. Tightly paced, well-characterised, and with a keen—albeit vicious—sense for the ridiculous, it presents us with an excellent roadtrip from hell, delivering a satisfying climax and a conclusion that leaves open the possibility of more stories. I enjoyed it, though at times the violence seemed dwelt upon to an excessive degree; I suppose I prefer my horrors left a little more to implication and aftermath, rather than fully described. But I’ll certainly be looking out for Leikam’s next novel.
Excerpted from A Song of Legends Lost, copyright © 2025 by M.H. Ayinde.
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