If We Were Villains
Ten years after his release from prison for a murder he may or may not have committed, Oliver Marks agrees to finally tell a retired detective what really happened during his final year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory. There, a tight-knit group of seven Shakespearean acting students lived and breathed the plays they performed, casting themselves in the same types of roles — hero, villain, temptress — until the lines between the stage and their own lives began to blur.
When a shift in casting upends the group's fragile hierarchy, old resentments and desires that had simmered for years boil over into something none of them can take back. As the group's charismatic, self-destructive dynamics spiral toward tragedy, one of them ends up dead — and the story Oliver has spent a decade not telling finally comes out, unreliable narrator and all.
M. L. Rio's atmospheric dark-academia debut is steeped in Shakespeare, using long passages of the plays themselves to narrate a story of obsession, jealousy, and the danger of actors who can no longer tell where their characters end and they begin.
Narrator, one of the seven acting students; imprisoned for a decade for the death at the story's center.
Oliver's closest friend and typically cast as the group's hero.
A wealthy, striking actress cast as the temptress.
Cast as the villain; sharp-tongued and volatile.
Richard's cousin, cast as the ingenue.
A television series adaptation is in development, co-produced by Eleven and Blink49 Studios.
The novel is structured like a five-act play, complete with dramatis personae, prologue, and epilogue, alternating between a present-day frame narrative in 2007 and flashbacks to 1997.