A Necessary Chaos is a novella by Brent Lambert.
Finished on: 28.9.2025

Plot:
Althus is a Phantom Dragon, an anarchist group fighting against the Empire. Vade is a Whisper, part of the Imperial secret service. They have been assigned to spy on each other and have spent the last years in a relationship that has grown as intimate as it is treacherous. Maybe their feelings for each other aren’t as pretend as they would like to think anymore. Their love will be a test for their loyalties.

A Necessary Chaos is a queer SFF novella, so right up my alley, but I didn’t connect with it as much as I hoped. It just felt a little unfinished overall.

A Necessary Chaos has gotten some good buzz and has crossed my social media feeds a couple of times, though I didn’t need much convincing to give it a go as I am always looking for queer reads, especially when they are by BIPoC and have a speculative slant. This novella gives us all of that.

But I couldn’t really get into it. For one, the novella often feels hurried, as if it would have needed more pages to tell its story. Things happen very fast, and instead of this amounting to a good pace, it left me wishing that we got more time to get to know this world and the characters.

This feeling of hurry was also underscored by the fact that the novella really had a lot of typos – one every 10 pages or so at least. Nothing that a spell-check would underline, more like homonyms and once a randomly appearing semicolon. There is also a discrepancy between the back cover description and the actual content of the book. The book is published with a small press, but this feels more unprofessional than small press issues. (I wish that I didn’t care for these details, and maybe if I had been more engaged with the story, I wouldn’t have cared, but as is, it just compounded my feeling of unease with the novella.)

That being said, I did like Vade and Althus as characters, although the novella doesn’t take much time to introduce them. We don’t get to see the careful beginnings of their relationship, but start with them having to make the decision for each other, which I found an interesting starting point for a romance. There are also many interesting ideas that Lambert comes up with that make for a great world one can envision.

There was a lot to like about the novella for sure, making me regret that it was just a novella instead of really taking ist time with the characters, story and world it has at its disposal. (It could have gone the other way, too, making me happy that I didn’t have to spend so much time with it.) It is a debut, so let’s hope that Lambert grows with his second work. I can definitely see myself picking it up again.

Summarizing: should have been a novel.