I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons is Peter S. Beagle’s first new work of fiction in eight years, and those who are enchanted with his previous works, particularly his iconic 1968 story The Last Unicorn, will find another humorous and, at times, surprisingly dark and moving fairy tale within its pages.
A young man named Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax (who prefers to just be called Robert, thanks) has inherited his dead father’s business as a dragon exterminator in the tiny kingdom of Bellmontagne. Dragons in this world are considered mere pests—vermin that the local villagers hire Robert to remove or kill. Robert hates his job. He abhors potentially harming the dragons he’s paid to eradicate and dreams of escaping the violent drudgery of his work to take on the infinitely more prestigious role of becoming a prince’s valet.
Escaping his situation, however, seems impossible. Even though his work makes his stomach turn, the money he gets ensures his mother and siblings have enough to live on. And so Robert does what he can to save the dragons he’s hired to exterminate, which means that his home is secretly full of tiny serpentine creatures who have become part of the family.
One day, the king of Bellmontagne seeks him out (in quite a comedic fashion, I should add) and orders him to the castle to do a full expunging of the hundreds of dragons who live there. Robert’s services were not called for in recent years because of benign neglect, but when Princess Cerise falls for the heroically handsome Prince Reginald, she begs her family to rid the royal abode of all the firebreathing beasts scurrying in its walls so as not to embarrass herself in front of her new beau’s eyes.
Buy the Book
I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons
Robert, Princess Cerise, and Prince Reginald have all been shoehorned into the expected roles that often arise in fairy tales: a young man of modest origins with unrealized powers, a beautiful damsel whom everyone is looking to wed (and has a bevy of princes who follow her around), and a dashing royal who looks every part the hero. All three of them, however, bump up against those archetypal expectations. Robert just wants to stop killing dragons for a living, not become a hero; Princess Cerise has agency and forges her own path no matter what those around her say she should do; and poor Prince Reginald thinks he doesn’t have the fortitude to play the part he was born into.
As such, a main message of There Might Be Dragons is that others’ expectations don’t define who you are, but in certain cases, neither do your perceived limitations about yourself. In the novel, for example, Robert tries to explain to Cerise why Reginald is making such foolhardy choices in his quest to become the hero everyone expects him to be:
“My mother, sometimes she says that everybody in the world is a donkey with the heart of a lion. Everybody. Only most people don’t ever discover it—they don’t have to, they get along all right just being donkeys. But it’s there, always, if you really need it. If you really want to find it. If you look for it.” [page 164]
Reginald (and Robert, and Cerise) find the lion inside themselves before the end of the book, though in ways they didn’t expect. The adventure starts for them when Robert is coerced by Reginald’s valet to go on a dragon hunt with the prince, with the expectation that the prince will get the credit for any magical animal he slays. Unsurprisingly, however, dragons are also more complex than humans realize, and there is another malevolent force at play that brings danger to the three of them.
Like much of Beagle’s other work, the story told in I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons is light in tone and self-aware of the tropes it is upending. But under the book’s whimsical visage lie deeper, darker themes. Some moments are downright disturbing, such as when we read in gruesome detail how Robert has to go about killing those hundreds of tiny dragons who have taken up home in the castle. Later on, more than one human meets a grisly, gory, and charred end, giving depth and gravitas to a tale that is more complex than the fanciful vibes Beagle’s writing gives off.
The last quarter or so of the book, when the three face off against a formidable magical foe, falters a bit, as the foe in question doesn’t arise beyond the cookie-cutter traits one might expect from a Big Bad in a fanciful tale. How the Big Bad exacts their revenge on those who tried to kill them, however, is at least creative, and their downfall ties in with another takeaway from the novel: No human can ever truly understand or control creatures as mythical and otherworldly as dragons, and to try to do so is folly.
But overall, I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons will delight fans of Beagle’s work. The story resolves in satisfying and unsurprising ways. The ending also feels open: There is more story there to tell, both about the three main characters we follow as well as the dragons that inhabit the world they live in. I would love to see another book or three set in this world, and here’s to hoping that Beagle has some other story ideas percolating so that we get more of Robert, Cerise, Reginald. And, of course, the dragons.
I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons is published by Saga Press.
