Death Wish Book Review and Summary
-
Chloé Laurent - 04 Sep, 2026 19:12
Author: Lilly Lu
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL
Blinking cursor. A merciless white rectangle mocking me on a thirty-two-inch monitor while my next-quarter acquisitions slate sits in a state of terminal, humiliating blankness. Right. Let us dissect Death Wish instead of writing my own damn words.
Lilly Lu’s 2026 supernatural sapphic offering arrives riding a wave of high-concept morbidity. We are dealing with an immortal bureaucratic entity—specifically, a century-old Best West Coast Reaper named Amory Ng who moonlights in a pottery class because her lopsided bowls supposedly ground her. Ground her. From what? The sheer, crushing weight of pushing incorporeal consciousnesses into the great unknown? Please. It is a delightfully domestic absurdity to give an existential reaper a hobby straight out of an overpriced Silver Lake artisan collective.
The Ceramic Metaphor of Immortality
Or maybe the pottery is brilliant. Wait, no. The pottery angle is a completely tired cliché that reduces an eternity of grief into a whimsical DIY afternoon. Actually, let me pivot—clay is genuinely an apt hermeneutic lens for eternity. Shaping mud while ignoring the metaphysical void is peak millennial coping machinery.
Lu leans hard into the juxtaposition of dreary supernatural governance and yearning. Centuries of paperwork interrupted by a rogue vampire who desperately wants finality. Clementine Lim dodged her initial reaping and now needs administrative assistance to actually die. Which creates an immediate structural tension: how do you execute a romance where one party’s primary objective is permanent cessation?
The Pacing Abyss
This synopsis reveals a narrative dangerously backloaded with generic action beats. We glide along on the atmospheric friction of longing, pottery dust, and Veil-crossing, only to crash head-first into a standard-issue villain. A murderous vampire maker running rampant. How painfully pedestrian. Why must every atmospheric character study inevitably devolve into a turf war? It screams studio note interference. Give me an entire manuscript of two queer immortals staring across a pottery wheel until someone cries, not a showdown with an absentee sire.
Fans of Gideon the Ninth mixed with the moody domesticity of Legends & Lattes will undoubtedly devour this, assuming Lu can sustain the atmospheric tension without leaning on cheap cinematic pyrotechnics. Yet I fear the third act will rush the existential stakes just to clear a contractual word count. The dynamic between a jaded bureaucrat and a tired bloodsucker practically writes itself. It radiates rizz, but hopefully the prose doesn’t devolve into mid-tier TikTok-bait dialogue.
I need to finalize the floral arrangements for my upcoming book launch before the florist stops answering my emails.
#deathwish #booktok #sapphicromance
