If We Were Villains

Shakespeare as Architecture

If We Were Villains is not merely a novel that references Shakespeare — it is a novel built from Shakespeare. The seven students at Dellecher Classical Conservatory are named, characterized, and fated according to Shakespearean archetypes: the villain, the hero, the ingenue, the tyrant. They spend four years performing the same plays, cycling through the same roles, until the roles begin to perform them.

Rio’s central formal gambit is that this is not metaphor. The characters are theater students who have spent so much time inhabiting Shakespeare’s people that the line between playing a role and living it has dissolved. When Richard, the natural villain of the group, is cast against type in a production of Othello, the psychological displacement this causes is not melodrama — it is the novel’s thesis. These are people who have outsourced their emotional lives to a canon, and the canon has run out of safe parts for some of them to play.

The Shakespearean saturation pays dividends throughout. The language is deliberately heightened in a way that mirrors the students’ own heightened speech; the chapter epigraphs from the plays function as ironic annotations rather than decoration; and the structural parallel between the novel’s events and Shakespeare’s late tragedies gives the narrative a sense of inevitability that feels earned. Rio studied Shakespeare seriously, and it shows in the specificity of the allusions rather than their frequency.

The Dark Academia World

The novel constructs the dark academia aesthetic with more specificity than most entries in the genre. Dellecher is isolated, elite, and entirely organized around a single discipline — the study and performance of classical drama — which means that Rio can build an institution whose logic is internal and self-reinforcing. The students eat together, rehearse together, live together, perform together. There is no outside to retreat to, which is how institutions of this kind maintain their hold.

What If We Were Villains understands about dark academia that some imitators miss is that the beauty of the world is not incidental to its corruption — it is the mechanism of it. The students love Dellecher genuinely. They love the language they have been immersed in, the performances they have given, the intensity of a life organized entirely around art. This love is what prevents them from seeing clearly, and what makes the moral rot possible. A world this beautiful does not require its inhabitants to think critically about it.

The atmosphere is sustained with considerable discipline. Rio does not break the register to provide external perspective or narrative distance. The reader experiences Dellecher as Oliver experiences it — from within, with the particular blindness of someone who has chosen to live inside an institution and internalize its values.

The Frame Narrative and the Mystery

The novel opens with Oliver, one of the seven, being interviewed by a detective ten years after a fellow student’s death, preparing to be released from prison after serving his sentence. The mystery structure is therefore inverted: we know from the first pages that something has gone badly wrong and that Oliver has paid for it. The question the novel turns on is not whodunit but why, and who knew what, and what it cost the group to protect itself.

This is a smart structural choice. It removes the thriller pressure from the novel and replaces it with a more elegiac form of suspense — we are reading, alongside Oliver, the account of how a group of people who loved each other destroyed themselves. The retrospective narration also allows Rio to manage information carefully: Oliver withholds, misremembers, or simply does not know things, and this unreliability is thematically coherent rather than a manipulation of the reader.

The actual mechanics of the mystery are not the novel’s strongest element. The solution, when it comes, requires accepting certain decisions about character behavior that feel more schematic than inevitable. But If We Were Villains has never really been a mystery novel in the procedural sense — it is a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, which means the ending is less a revelation than a fulfillment.

An Honest Assessment

The novel’s most debated quality is its prose register, and the debate is legitimate. Rio writes in a style that is deliberately elevated — long sentences, Latinate diction, imagery that reaches for grandeur — in a way that mirrors its characters’ immersion in Shakespearean language. This is formally coherent: these are people who think and speak in a heightened register because that is what they have been trained to do. But coherence and success are different things.

For readers who enter the register willingly, the prose becomes part of what the novel is doing — a sustained performance of a particular kind of literary seriousness that both celebrates and interrogates the tradition it draws from. For readers who find the register mannered, no amount of formal justification will make it enjoyable. This is a real constraint on the book’s audience, and worth knowing about in advance.

What is harder to dispute is that the novel achieves what it sets out to do. It creates a world that feels genuinely immersive, populates it with characters whose dynamics are specific and observed, and uses its Shakespearean scaffolding to ask real questions about identity, loyalty, and the cost of beauty. For a debut novel, that is a considerable accomplishment.

Our rating: 4/5 — A fully committed dark academia tragedy that earns its Shakespearean ambitions, with prose that will either feel like a feature or a bug depending entirely on your tolerance for the deliberately overwrought.