The Monstrous and the Human: What Makes a Monster in Assistant to the Villain

Hannah Nicole Maehrer’s Assistant to the Villain opens with decapitated heads and a job offer from a man in black, yet the novel’s most unsettling proposition is not the gore—it is the quiet dismantling of the word “monster.” The story asks whether villainy lies in actions, in labels, or in the eye of the beholder. By following Evie Sage, an optimist who signs on as assistant to the kingdom’s most feared figure, and Trystan Maverine, The Villain, a dark mage whose cruelty serves a purpose, the novel presses the reader to reconsider what makes a monster. Its thematic claim is audacious: monstrosity is not an essence but a construct—often the weapon of those who need an enemy, and sometimes a mask worn by the truly righteous. Through Evie’s moral drift, Trystan’s tortured backstory, and a king whose shining armor hides rot, the narrative insists that the line between hero and villain is drawn in ink, blood, and choice, not birth.

The Assistant’s Ascent into Darkness

From the prologue, Evie’s relationship with fear is off-kilter. When she stumbles upon The Villain in Hickory Forest, she notes that she “still felt no fear” even as he grips her arm and threatens her. That absence of dread is the first clue that her internal categories are not the kingdom’s. Five months later, she walks under three severed heads dangling in the main hall, lamenting only the popped eyeball she once stepped on. Her internal monologue, far from horrified, mocks the job posting that might read “Must be comfortable and even supportive of arson, torture, murder.” This gallows humor signals that Evie has learned to separate the spectacle from the man. She sizes up her boss not by his severed-head decor but by the way he helps her pick up scattered papers and insists she see a healer after a fall. Her refusal to brand him a monster becomes the novel’s central argument: labels stick to surfaces, not souls.

Yet the novel complicates Evie’s stance by showing how deep she wades. In chapter 61, after her father’s betrayal leaves Trystan captured, Evie dons her mother’s rouge, orders a severed head hung as a warning, and descends to the dungeon with a vow to “save Trystan or become a villain in the process.” Her earlier detachment has hardened into complicity. By the time she sedates her own father and tells him, “We’re all monsters in the end,” she is no longer the innocent assistant. She has constructed herself as something that fits the label she once refused for Trystan. The shift demonstrates that monstrosity can be chosen—not by acquiring fangs, but by deciding whom to protect and what to sacrifice.

The Villain’s Scarred Origin

While Evie slides into darkness, Trystan’s own history reveals that the title “The Villain” was thrust upon him by King Benedict. In chapter 25, Trystan recalls that “Benedict had been the first person to look upon Trystan’s face and call him a monster.” That naming becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: he builds an empire of sabotage and revenants because the king’s label left him no other role. His methods are monstrous—his magic seeks out a victim’s weakest point and slaughters without hesitation, as seen when he kills multiple Valiant Guards in chapter 9—but each act is tethered to a revenge he considers justified. The novel does not excuse his violence, but it strips away the simplicity of a pure evil. Trystan risks immolation to capture a guvre solely because the king holds its mate captive. The scene, simultaneously foolish and tender, reminds the reader that even a figure defined by malevolence can be driven by a desire to rescue rather than destroy.

The contradiction sits in Trystan’s own mind. After the dragon’s collar removal plants a seed of compassion, he admonishes himself for the “hindrance.” He cannot integrate the merciful impulse with the identity he has worn for a decade. His sister Clarissa—a peripheral but searing voice—calls him “a monster” in chapter 17, and the pain in that moment reveals that the label cuts him because he partly believes it. Trystan’s arc thus deepens the theme: a monster might be made by his own hand as much as by another’s voice, and the real horror is that redemption becomes an unimaginable luxury when the world has made you its villain.

Heroes Who Breed Monsters

No examination of monstrosity would be complete without the man who wears the crown. King Benedict is the kingdom’s hero by virtue of his throne, yet the novel gradually exposes him as the narrative’s truest monster. He started the war with Trystan; his Valiant Guards slaughter innocent employees in Trystan’s safe house; and his reach extends into Evie’s own family through her father’s betrayal. The ultimate treachery arrives when Evie learns that her father—the man who once told her bedtime stories about a hero named East Marigold—is the traitor feeding information to Benedict. The father’s gasping line, “He’s… a… monster,” refers to Trystan, but the scene already has shown that the father’s hero mask has crumbled. Evie’s reply, “At least mine lives in the light,” reframes the entire novel: a monster who hides behind goodness is far more dangerous than one who advertises his darkness. The king’s invisible evil illuminates how the label “monster” can be a tool of propaganda, deflecting scrutiny from the real predator.

Symbols That Stain and Bind

Maehrer threads the theme through objects that carry an almost moral weight.

• Gold employment mark: Wound around Evie’s pinkie finger, the enchanted mark binds her to Trystan’s service. It is a literal shackle, yet Evie never resents it; she brandishes it as proof of a choice she made freely. The mark blurs the line between servant and ally, suggesting that belonging to a villain can feel like belonging to a cause—and that a gilded cage can be mistaken for a crown.

• Blue magical ink: Created by Clarissa, this ink is used to forge contracts and, crucially, to communicate treason. The traitor’s letters home are stained with it, making the ink itself a symbol of duplicity. When Evie realizes that blue ink connects her father to the king, she understands that the outward glow of magic can hide poison. Ink writes the stories of who is hero and who is monster, and the novel insists that those stories can be rewritten with a different hand.

• The mated guvres: These serpentine creatures embody the theme with allegorical precision. The male guvre, “a kaleidoscope of bursting and twinkling color,” is imprisoned to lure the female from the king’s grasp. The female is “too cunning, too smart” to be caught—she will only come for her mate. The parallel to Trystan, who risks everything to free a captive, and to Evie, who will become a monster to rescue him, is unmistakable. Love does not erase the monster label; it simply redefines what the monster fights for.

• Evie’s mother’s butterfly clips: When Evie dresses for her darkest mission, she puts on her mother’s rouge and wears her hair loose. The butterfly clips, a talisman of her lost mother, represent the innocence that was stolen from her long before The Villain arrived. The motif whispers that monsters are often forged by grief, and that a girl who has already lost everything has little left to fear—least of all a label.

Complexity Without Easy Answers

Assistant to the Villain refuses to hand the reader a tidy distinction between good and evil. Evie’s assistant role is not innocent: she organizes torture schedules, overlooks bloodstains, and by the end actively participates in cold-blooded schemes. She even jokes about her own “need for normalcy” being whittled away. The novel challenges the impulse to call her a hero simply because she is the protagonist. Similarly, Trystan’s moments of affection—lifting Evie when she falls, teasing her about chairs revolting—do not sanitize the fact that he kills. What the book proposes is that monstrosity is a spectrum measured not by deeds alone but by the truth of one’s loyalties and the lies one tells to sustain them. King Benedict and Evie’s father lie every day; Trystan never pretends to be anything other than what he lets the world see. That honesty, the novel suggests, may be the only shield against becoming a monster in the dark.

The final note is one of fragile hope. When Evie says, “We’re all monsters in the end,” she does not slip into nihilism; she draws a line between those who hide and those who stand in the light. Her Trystan, villain to the core, is luminous to her. The real question, Maehrer seems to say, is not whether someone is a monster but whether their monstrosity is rooted in cruelty or in love—and who gets to tell the story.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Evie’s response to the mangled corpse in chapter 1 challenge the novel’s surface definition of a monster? Evie’s cheerful “Would you like me to work around this gentleman?” in the face of a torture victim on her desk shows that she does not equate gore with evil. She sees the act as a test rather than a moral failing, recognizing that The Villain’s methods, however gruesome, serve a purpose she does not yet fully condemn. Her reaction suggests that monstrosity is not an automatic by-product of horror but a judgment shaped by context and intent.

2. In what ways does Trystan’s history with King Benedict complicate the label “villain”? Trystan’s entire campaign of sabotage began when Benedict first named him a monster. By revealing that Benedict’s Valiant Guards have committed similar or worse violence—and that the king holds a guvre captive—the novel recasts Trystan not as an unprovoked force of chaos but as a counter-myth formed in response to royal cruelty. His monstrosity is a mirror, not an original.

3. How does Evie’s transformation by the novel’s end illustrate that monstrosity can be a conscious choice? Evie progresses from an assistant who ignores severed heads to a woman who orders a decapitation and poisons her own father. Her vow to “become a villain in the process” of rescuing Trystan signals that she knowingly crosses a line. The choice reframes the earlier, passive nonchalance: now she wears the monster mask deliberately because love demands it, proving that a gentle heart can steel itself into something terrifying when pushed.

4. What role does the gold employment mark play in blurring the line between servant and villain? The mark on Evie’s finger physically binds her to The Villain’s side, but she wears it with loyalty rather than shame. It confuses the kingdom’s binary by showing that a so-called innocent has signed a magical contract with evil. The mark is visible proof that she has chosen this world, making her an accomplice in the eyes of the kingdom—and a willing partner in her own.

5. Why does Evie claim “At least mine lives in the light” when her father calls Trystan a monster, and what does that reveal about the novel’s central theme? Her response contrasts her father’s secret treachery with Trystan’s open darkness. The father wore the mask of a loving, helpless invalid while working for the king; Trystan never disguised his villainy. Evie’s line asserts that a monster who hides is far more repugnant than one who does not. It crystallizes the theme: the true horror is not the creature with fangs but the one who smiles while sharpening the knife in the dark.