I Fell for a Villain Again and I Blame Nikki St. Crowe

A girl, a curse, and a king who really should not be this hot

Here’s the setup, stripped of the spoilers: our heroine gets pulled into the fae realm under circumstances she didn’t choose (there’s always a bargain, isn’t there, there’s always a technicality some ancient fae used to trap a human girl before she could read the fine print), and she ends up tangled with the Never King, a ruler who is exactly as unavailable, cursed, and simmering with repressed everything as the subgenre demands. He is not nice. He is not supposed to be nice. St. Crowe knows her assignment there.

The world building leans on the same bones you’ve seen in a dozen fae romances since 2021, courts and curses and human girls who turn out to be more than human, but St. Crowe writes the atmosphere well. The Neverwoods itself has a real creeping dread to it, less “sparkly enemies to lovers” and more “this forest wants to eat you and also date you.” That tonal double act, horror and want sitting right next to each other, is the best trick the book has.

What actually works, and what made me want to throw my Kindle

The tension works. I’ll say that plainly because it’s the thing the book is built around and it mostly delivers. The scenes where the Never King and the heroine are forced into proximity, trapped in a room, bound by some rule neither of them asked for, have real heat, and not just the physical kind. There’s a scene involving a bargain gone sideways in his chambers that I reread twice, not because anything shocking happens but because St. Crowe knows how to stretch out a moment until it’s almost unbearable. That’s a skill. A lot of romantasy writers rush the slow burn because they’re scared readers will get bored. St. Crowe isn’t scared. If anything she might be a little too unafraid of the pause button.

That’s my real criticism, and I want to be fair about it: the pacing sags hard in the middle third. There’s a stretch where the heroine has the same internal realization about the king’s cruelty masking his pain roughly four separate times, in four separate scenes, and I started flipping ahead looking for plot the way you check your phone during a boring meeting. I don’t think this book needed to be as long as it is. A sharper edit could have cut maybe eighty pages of repeated internal monologue and the book would hit twice as hard.

I also have to admit something, which is that I picked this up right after a string of genuinely excellent fae romances (the kind where the mythology feels invented, not borrowed), and I think that colored my read a little unfairly harsh in spots. Was I annoyed at St. Crowe’s book, or annoyed that it reminded me of five other books I’d just finished. I’m honestly not sure. Question your own taste, I guess.

Where the book redeems itself completely is the ending stretch. The last quarter moves. Choices get made that actually cost something, the king’s motivations click into place in a way that recontextualizes his worst moments earlier in the book (there’s a confrontation near the end that made me physically put the book down and pace around my apartment, which is the highest compliment I can give a romance climax), and the cliffhanger, because there is one, is genuinely mean in the best way. I was mad. I immediately wanted the next book. That’s the job, and the ending does the job.

The most dangerous kings aren’t the ones who want to rule you. They’re the ones who want to be chosen by you, and hate themselves for it.

About Nikki St. Crowe

Nikki St. Crowe writes the kind of fae fantasy that lives in the specific corner of the internet where “morally gray” is a compliment and “he’s literally a monster” is a selling point. She’s built a loyal following in the Neverwoods world, writing king after cursed king with the confidence of someone who has fully clocked what her readers want and is not going to apologize for giving it to them. No pretensions here, just a writer who understands appetite and feeds it, book after book, without much daylight between releases.

If this wrecked you, read these next

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, for the original template this whole subgenre is remixing, cruelty and court politics and a slow unraveling of a broken man. Neon Gods by Laura Thalassa, if you want the same “dangerous ruler, human girl, bargain neither of them can escape” energy but tighter and meaner. King of Battle and Blood by Scarlett St. Clair, for a Never King style romance that leans even harder into gothic dread. And if you want to see St. Crowe’s world get more room to breathe, keep going in her own Neverwoods series, since book one is really just the setup for the bigger mess she’s building.

You can grab a copy here: The Never King on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Is the Never King actually redeemable, or does the book just want you to think he is because he’s hot and sad?
2. Does the heroine ever have real agency in this bargain, or is she just reacting to what’s done to her the whole book?
3. The middle section repeats a lot of the same internal conflict. Did that build tension for you, or lose you?
4. What does the Neverwoods itself represent, beyond just a dangerous setting, do you think St. Crowe is doing anything with it thematically?
5. That ending. Are you mad? Be honest.