All Hail Chaos is the second installment of Sarah Rees Brennan’s A Time of Iron, a portal fantasy which finds a young woman named Rae swept into the world of the fantasy novels she and her sister Alice hold dear to their hearts. The first installment, Long Live Evil, saw Rae embrace the identity of Lady Rahela, a villainess of the highest order. At least that’s how Rahela, the Beauty Dipped in Blood was portrayed in the books before Rae entered its pages. While Long Live Evil gave readers a true “villain protagonist” that first book ended the way it did before Rae entered it… sort of. All Hail Chaos is about the consequences.
Rae is a fantasy reader who’s been transported to her favourite fictional world of swords and sorcery, castles and monsters. Playing the villainess, she thought she could change the narrative, but this version of the plot is far more deadly than the one she knew.
Her friends are on the run: the Cobra shelters in an eerie manor haunted by dark secrets, while Emer and Lia stoke a revolution in the gutters. Undead armies roam the kingdom, raiders camp at the city gates, and the all-powerful Emperor – Rae’s favorite character ever, now possibly the greatest monster in the land – wants her to be his evil queen.
Romantic in fiction, complicated in reality. What’s a villainess to do? Time for wicked bargains and fake engagements, in a fantasy where the most dangerous thing you can do is believe in someone.
For all of Rae’s maneuvering, many plot points still fell into place. When the Once and Future Emperor arises from the abyss, it isn’t exactly who she expected it to be. Key, a character Rae saw is largely disposable despite the feelings Key had for Rae, is the Emperor. But Key as the seemingly all-powerful emperor has little restraint, proving to be a true chaos engine.
Like Doctor Who, there are “fixed points” in the story that cannot be changed. However, certain people may be moved around to a degree and this is very much seen in the “excerpts” of the books prefacing each chapter. We see this change because of the new character introduced, Rae’s sister Alice, who is an even bigger fan of the Time of Iron series than Rae. We only see glimpses of Alice in the “real” world, but it is enough to show a good sisterly relationship.
The bulk of the novel sees Rae trying to navigate against the plot she thinks she knows. This proves challenging because the character she inhabited died in the first installment of the series and is even more complicated by how unsettling Key has become. He was initially a character Rae loved, but the creature he’s become as an undead Emperor forces her to play against his whims and be even more nimble than she was in Long Live Evil. There’s a tense interplay between them that hints at possible romance, as Rae bounces between fear and passion because she knows Key is not the one for her… or rather she is not the one for Key. It turns the relationship almost toxic because she fears she has to withhold information from him. I’ll say this, it makes the relationship a fascinating thing to experience as it unfolds across the breadth of the novel.
I also enjoyed the continuing metatextual commentary about fantasy novels, reader assumptions, and how those things play off each other. There’s a Deadpool-like commentary with Rae essentially addressing the reader directly. Fun stuff.
There were some interesting twists and turns throughout, I enjoyed the “self-aware” characters. Especially if those characters came from our real-world like Cobra. In fact, I’d welcome a story focused on Cobra. If Rae entered the story, others could too. Part of the fun is trying to determine who those “real world” transports might be.
All Hail Chaos is a fun, enjoyable sequel that reveals enough answers to questions raised thus far in the series. There’s a bit of a repetitive nature to the story, but that is tough to avoid in a second book/sequel.
I am looking forward to the finale and hope for some more surprises in it than were in this one.
Recommended.
© 2026 Rob H. Bedford
Trade Paperback | Orbit Books
May 2026 | 464 Pages
https://www.sarahreesbrennan.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
