Alchemised Review: A Dark, Disturbing Fantasy Epic

Dark Fantasy Alchemised Is a Complicated, Disturbing, But Ultimately Compelling Ride

The fanfiction to traditional publishing pipeline has been working overtime this summer, dropping multiple bestselling fantasy books whose roots are firmly planted in the world of transformative fandom. To be clear, this isn’t a new phenomenon by any stretch. While Fifty Shades of Grey is perhaps the most famous bestselling book that previously began life as a fanfic, but it’s hardly the only one. In the past few months alone, several popular stories with roots in the world of Harry Potter have been released, and given their general success — both Julie Soto’s Rose in Chains and Brigitte Knightley’s The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy were instant New York Times bestsellers—we’ll likely see more in the future. One such title is SenLinYu’s Alchemised, a sweeping dark romance based on one of the fandom’s most popular (if controversial) stories.

A gargantuan doorstopper clocking in at over a thousand pages, Alchemised is not for the faint of heart. It’s a marathon of dark, disturbing, and often extremely upsetting imagery. The book comes with extensive content and trigger warnings, and let me be clear: they’re no joke. This is a story that’s virtually bursting with graphic depictions of torture, murder, sexual assault, suicidal ideation, self-harm, kidnapping, enslavement, psychological trauma, body horror, and an extreme amount of violence and character death. It’s a dark fantasy set in an uncomfortably dystopian setting, so prepare your expectations and heart accordingly. (And whatever you’ve heard about the Draco/Hermione of it all, this is not a traditional romantasy, and while the relationship at its center is technically a love story, it carries plenty of problematic and unsettling elements.)

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Set in a world where alchemists can manipulate both metal and matter, the story follows Helena Marino, a healer in a seemingly unending and brutal war against the High Necromancer, whose immortal Undying are attempting to take over the kingdom of Paladia. Captured by enemy forces, Helena awakens to discover that she’s missing two years of her memories, her abilities have been suppressed, and the war she has given her life to has been lost. Her best friend, the prophesied leader Lucien Holdfast, is dead, and every other member of the resistance group known as the Eternal Flame along with him. Convinced her missing memories hold the key to the last remaining secrets of their movement, Helena is given to the mysterious High Reeve, who turns out to be a former Alchemy Institute classmate of hers named Kaine Ferron.

Transferred to his family’s crumbling estate, she’s held captive as her mind and body are violated, and she struggles to hold on to what little she can remember of her former self. Told in a striking nonlinear fashion, the story follows Helena’s initial struggles to regain her memories while contending with the horrors of her imprisonment, her fears about Ferron’s intentions, and the Undying breeding program being set up to repopulate the kingdom’s alchemists, The Handmaid’s Tale-style. In the wake of a shocking event, the story launches into an extensive flashback sequence that takes up the bulk of the novel and details the final years of the war, including everything from Helena’s off-the-books covert work for the Eternal Flame, the toll her healing takes on her, and her professional relationship with Kaine.

As many readers probably already know, Alchemised began its life as the megapopular Harry Potter fanfic “Manacled,” which racked up over 10 million views on Archive of Our Own before it was removed ahead of this book’s publication. And it’s true, some elements of the story survive the translation better than others. SenLinYu does an admirable job transforming a magical world of witches and wizards into a science-fueled religious dystopia rent in two by a battle between faith and the dark promise of immortality. But no matter how impressive the worldbuilding elements can often feel, the story is inevitably haunted by the ghosts of its source material. (In ways both good and ill.)

The narrative rhythms of the book will feel familiar to anyone who has spent any significant length of time reading in the fanfic world, giving it a fast-paced narrative and brisk feel despite its massive bulk. (I finished it in two days and felt like I was on the slower side of things.) Helena is given the sort of interiority and depth that will delight and horrify readers by turns (her repeated torture sessions are brutal, and we’ve got a front row seat to all of them). Kaine, for his part, is busy hiding his own set of secrets and traumas, including a nightmarish past and a personal quest for vengeance. The path of their relationship likely won’t surprise anyone, but SenLinYu still manages to make the push and pull between them compelling. (Though they do tend to have the same argument a few too many times.)

Unfortunately, however, many of the story’s secondary characters and relationships—virtually any that aren’t Helena and Kaine—are fairly thinly sketched at best, with many serving as little more than plot devices. For example, we don’t really see enough of Helena and Luc’s friendship before the war (or even during the early days of the conflict) to truly justify her singular devotion to him. There are moments where you may wonder why she’s so attached to this boy she barely hangs out with, and whose other friends don’t actually seem to like her all that much.

On some level, the story seems to count on the fact that many readers will simply default to mapping Harry and Hermione’s relationship onto Helena and Luc’s, and it’s a bit lazy, if only because the deft way SenLinYu has reimagined the history of the Holdfast family and their traditional claim to power is actually quite creative. (Don’t hate me, shippers, but I’d have happily traded some of the more repetitive Helena/Kaine scenes for more focus on the history of Paladia and the Holdfasts.)

But, if you’re reading this book, it’s largely because you’re fully committed—or want to be—to the relationship at its center. And if that’s what you’re here for, you’ll be very happy with Alchemised, which puts its leads through a veritable meat grinder of emotional angst, self-loathing, and intense yearning over the course of its pages. The story is told out of order, confident enough in the Helena and Kaine chemistry to trust that readers will still respond to it after several hundred pages of abuse and terror, and if there’s a word for slower than slow burn, well, this is it. Alchemised is, in its way, a love story, yes, but it is primarily a story of survival, of what we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of the people and things we care about, and what such impossible choices leave of us in their aftermath. This isn’t a romantic story by any stretch of the imagination, but its main characters go through such a crucible of pain and emotional agony that it’s hard not to root for them to find some sort of peace together.

The novel’s biggest flaw is found in its final third, which doesn’t (at least for me) address the fallout from the darkest aspects of its early chapters in nearly enough depth. It’s probably not a spoiler to say that Helena gets her memories back over the course of this book, which forces her to face the physical and mental violations she has had to endure at the hands of people she previously loved and trusted. The book—likely because it could have taken another thousand pages to parse the emotional complexity of these revelations—largely brushes past them, and while both Helena’s fractured psyche and a ticking clock escape plot help provide some cover for this choice, it feels a little too convenient, particularly since the story is so unwilling to let readers off the hook about the horror of what they’re seeing elsewhere.

Though most will likely pick up this book for the relationship at its center, Alchemised is strongest as an exploration of morality and corruption. There are no heroes in this book; the very idea of a history that one is meant to be on the right side of is malleable, and every character is compromised to some degree or other, both in terms of the acts they’re willing to commit and the ones they’re willing to look away from. All told, I’m very interested to see what this author does next—in a world without any preestablished guardrails.

Alchemised is available now wherever books are sold.

Lacy Baugher Milas writes about Books and TV at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB

Dark Fantasy Alchemised Is a Complicated, Disturbing, But Ultimately Compelling Ride