withinadream

I've finished my first book for the 2026 Book Bingo! And I'm trying to post more in 2026, so I'm hoping to write up reviews for all of my bingo squares.

Book: Once Was Willem, by M. R. Carey

Bingo Square: MC Isn't Human (I'd initially started thinking it would be my Historical Fantasy fill, but Once-Was-Willem insists so strongly that he's no longer human that I felt I had to use it for that square instead)

Genre: Medieval fantasy horror

Summary: When their young son Willem dies, two desperate parents seek help from an evil sorcerer to resurrect him, and end up with a strange reanimated creature inhabiting what used to be their son instead. Once-Was-Willem and his fellow outcast magical friends end up joining forces to face down that evil sorcerer when he threatens the village that rejected Once-Was-Willem after his return from the grave.

I stumbled across Once Was Willem while checking out a book in another series by Carey (writing as Mike Carey), the Felix Castor urban fantasy series, for a reread. I love Carey's take on ghosts in Felix Castor, and I thought there was a good chance I'd like his take on comes-back-wrong as well. And indeed I did! This was such a fun read, and I'm glad I finally got off my ass to read it after keeping my library loan for an embarrassingly long time. Once-Was-Willem was a very enjoyable narrator (I love a first-person narrator with a distinct personality), and the writing felt grounded in its 12th-century setting in both vocabulary and character points of view/morals while still being an accessible read.

It's very rooted in folklore and feels fairy tale-esque, which was a nice surprise. The genre and reviews/marketing I'd seen (as well as how dark Felix Castor gets) had led me to expect something much darker and grittier, but while reading I had the thought that I would have really liked this book as a preteen. Your mileage may vary, though – several reviews I read after finishing remarked on how disturbing they found the violence, whereas I was thinking it pulled its punches a bit with both gore and plotlines (more on the latter in a bit). The events are dark, sure, but we're not getting the blood and guts lovingly detailed on-page, and the darkness felt more fairy-tale than Saw. Then again, we do see a preteen get ritually sacrificed, so my darkness scale might just be miscalibrated.

I loved Once-Was-Willem as a character – he has a very Frankenstein-esque arc at first, retreating from humanity after being shunned by his creators, but then he returns to defend the people who likely wouldn't be willing to do the same for him. His interactions with children were especially delightful. I also especially adored Betheli (we stan a disabled preteen girl who manages to foil the spells of a sorcerer with unparalleled power simply by annoying him enough!), but the whole gang of magical outcasts were amazing.

We are now entering the Spoiler Zone, because one of the few points that fell flat for me was the ending.

Because the book is marketed as adult horror, and because of my experience with Carey's other books, the ending felt especially saccharine to me. Our main cast has the revenant Once-Was-Willem, two shapeshifters, a river spirit, two ghostly young girls/women killed in unjust circumstances, and Unsung Jill, a millenia-old cursed being with one eye always looking at Hell. One shapeshifter gains a magical flute that she can use to modify reality, and in addition to defeating the big bad, she uses it to bring our two ghosts back to life and remove Jill's curse. Far be it from me to complain about a happy ending as a lover of romance novels and everyone-lives AUs, but the ending did feel more like the everyone-lives AU of a darker canon. It would have been stronger had our ghosts Betheli and Morjune remained dead, at the very least.

I did love the implication that the cast becomes a team of medieval Avengers, ready to fight in defense of imperiled children everywhere, and I will be imagining many a sequel where they team up again to take on evil. But I wish we'd kept a bit more bittersweetness and held to Betheli and Morjune's unjust deaths. (I am neutral on uncursing Jill on its own.)

I also enjoyed the reveal of Anna and Kel's shapeshifting being a result of Elohim heritage, and the metaphor their powers and heritage became for the complications of cultural heritage when the parent who brought you that heritage was also a bad parent.

The Elohim and Hell, once we got to see the whole picture, also felt very medieval in flavor to me, while still being something that (as Once-Was-Willem warned us in the first chapter) would thoroughly horrify your average medieval Christian.

I would definitely recommend the book overall if the genres are your cup of tea, and I'm very excited that Carey's next book (The Tinder Box, releasing this June) is another historical fantasy. I snooped in his back catalog to see if I'd missed anything else RTMI, but alas, looks like everything else is post-apocalyptic, the one thing I can't read.