I Bought Brimstone at 1am and Regretted Nothing (Almost)

A librarian, a death sentence, and the worst man in the mountain

The setup is old-school fantasy romance and I mean that as a compliment. Saeris Fane is a mortal, a scavenger and thief in a dying, drought-cracked human city where water is currency and the fae are a bogeyman story. She touches the wrong piece of quicksilver, does something impossible with it, and gets yanked across a portal into Yvelia, the fae realm, which is frozen and gorgeous and absolutely not thrilled to have a human girl show up who can do the one thing their whole civilization has been missing.

Because Saeris is an Alchemist. That’s the hook, and it’s a good one. Alchemy in this world is a lost art, and she’s the first person in living memory who can bend metal like it’s a personal favor. That makes her a weapon, a bargaining chip, and a problem, which is exactly the kind of leverage a romance like this runs on.

Enter Kingfisher. Fisher. The horrible glowing man. He’s a fae warrior with a war to win and a personality you could sharpen a knife on, and he needs Saeris the way you need a fire extinguisher, which is to say resentfully and completely. Their whole dynamic is built on him being awful and her refusing to shrink, and Hart plays it exactly as long as she can get away with. Sometimes longer.

The good, the slog, and the man who ruined my sleep schedule

Let me be fair before I complain, because I did love this. What Hart does really well is want. The slow burn here is actually slow, actually burns, and does not cheat. Fisher is antagonistic for a genuinely long stretch, and the book trusts you to sit in that tension instead of collapsing it in chapter four. When it finally turns, when the banter stops being armor and starts being the thing between them, it lands because you waited for it. I have read a lot of “enemies to lovers” that skips the enemies. This one makes you do the time.

And the spice, when it arrives, arrives. This is a properly explicit book, not a fade-to-black, and Hart writes it with heat and a sense of humor. There is a scene involving a bath and a lot of stubbornness that I will not describe in a review my mother might read, but I remember exactly where I was sitting when I got to it, which was the passenger seat of a car in a grocery store parking lot, refusing to go inside.

Now the slog. Because there is one. Brimstone is long, and it is not all load-bearing. There is a middle stretch, once Saeris is settled into the fae world and the plot machinery starts grinding, where the book kind of idles. Training sequences, world-building lore drops, a war that keeps getting referenced but stays offstage. I found myself doing the thing where you thumb ahead to see how far to the next Fisher scene, and that is never a great sign. If you cut a hundred pages out of the middle, I think this is a tighter, meaner, better book. As it stands you have to be patient, and “be patient” is a real ask when it’s book one of a series and you know the actual payoff is another volume away.

Here’s where I question my own taste, because I have to. Fisher starts out genuinely cruel, and the early dynamic leans into a possessive, controlling energy that in real life I would find alarming and in fiction I apparently find delicious. I know what that says about me. I’ve made my peace with it. But I want to be honest with you: if a hero being mean and then being mean-with-longing is not your particular poison, you are not going to have the good time I had, and no amount of me telling you the world-building is solid will fix that. There are also moments of the dubious, pushy dynamic that dark romance readers will clock and expect and everyone else should be warned about going in. This is dark romantasy. It says so on the tin. Believe the tin.

The tangent I keep having with people about this book: it is basically comfort food dressed as a dark fantasy. Under all the frost and the alchemy and the war, the bones of it are cozy. Found family creeping in at the edges, a snarky sidekick or two, a mortal fish-out-of-water learning the rules of a shiny new world. That’s why it hits the same nerve as the ACOTAR and Fourth Wing crowd, and it’s why it sells. It scratches a very specific itch that a lot of us are apparently walking around with, and I’ve stopped pretending I’m too sophisticated for it.

A love interest who is genuinely unpleasant for two hundred pages is a gamble, and Brimstone is proof that when the gamble pays off, nothing else in the genre feels quite as earned.

About Callie Hart

Callie Hart came up in the dark contemporary romance world, which is the important thing to know about her. Before the fae and the frost she was writing motorcycle-club and mafia-adjacent stuff, the properly filthy, morally-bankrupt-hero end of the pool, and you can feel that pedigree all over Brimstone. This is not a fantasy author who wandered into romance. This is a romance author who knows exactly how to build a bad man you want anyway, and then decided to give him magic and a war. Fae & Alchemy is her big pivot into romantasy, and it worked, riding the same wave that lifted a lot of BookTok darlings but with a sharper edge than most. She writes like someone who has zero interest in being tasteful, and I respect that enormously.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. The obvious one, the ur-text for this whole shelf. If you want more mortal-girl-in-fae-world with a slow-burn turn, start here or return to it.
• From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout. For the sheltered-heroine-meets-infuriating-guardian energy and a plot that keeps escalating past where you expect it to.
• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. If what you loved was the training, the banter, and the “I hate you until suddenly I extremely do not” pipeline, with dragons instead of alchemy.
• Kingdom of the Wicked by Kerri Maniscalco. For a darker, witchier flavor of the same forbidden-attraction-to-a-dangerous-immortal thing.

You can grab Brimstone over on Amazon if you want to find out about the bath scene yourself.

For your book club

1. Fisher is deliberately unlikeable for a long stretch. Did the payoff justify the wait for you, or did the early cruelty poison the romance permanently?
2. Saeris’s alchemy makes her valuable to everyone around her. How much of her agency in the story is real, and how much is other people wanting to use her power?
3. Dark romance leans on dynamics that would be alarming in real life. How do you personally draw the line between “fun in fiction” and “too far,” and did Brimstone cross it anywhere for you?
4. The book is long and the middle drags. Would you have cut anything, and if so, what stays and what goes?
5. Brimstone clearly sits in the ACOTAR / Fourth Wing lineage. What does it do differently, and does the borrowed familiarity help it or hold it back?

Anyway. I’m four hundred pages into the next one and Fisher is still being impossible and I am, once again, not going to bed.