The Fall 2024 Light Novel Guide

Love Is Dark

What's It About? 

Sosei Takarai just wanted to be a regular high schooler. He goes to school every day, hiding a job he doesn't even enjoy, until the class idol, Asumi Shiramori, inexplicably asks him out. Sosei is over the moon, but with all his free time after school and on weekends taken up by his job, he barely gets to see Asumi, let alone go out on dates. Then, one day, he spies his mysterious classmate Kuchina Hitsujimoto at his workplace. Why is she there? Sosei's job, after all, is as an assassin. His romantic entanglements are bittersweet and painful, and the closer Sosei gets to his dream of normality, the further away it seems. A dark rom-com about a boy who kills and a girl who takes lives with a touch.

Love Is Dark has a story by Ao Jūmonji and art by BUNBUN, with English translation by Zoe Womack. Published by Yen Press (October 15, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

I have read a lot of light novels for the preview guide and I have made it no secret that I disliked most of them. So you should listen up when I grab you by the shoulders and tell you Love Is Dark is good. This story of a not-so-ordinary high school boy who moonlights as an assassin but fumbles while texting his new girlfriend is both funny and action-packed enough for a decent anime adaptation. Combined with in-depth worldbuilding that depicts a society where some people are born with special abilities called “cheats,” I was fully sucked in. Author Ao Jūmonji has written hundreds of light novels and is most famous for the series Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash. In keeping with their previous works, readers should keep in mind the content warnings for violence, gore, and child abuse in this story, which is indeed on the darker side.

Sousei longs to be an ordinary high school student, but this wish was doomed from the start. He was born with a “cheat” (similar to a “quirk” in My Hero Academia parlance) that allows him to instantly resurrect every time he dies. His older sister, who also serves as his guardian, sends him on nightly assassination missions where he can best take advantage of his abilities. But each day at school, Sousei leaves that life behind to turn his attention to fitting in, finding the right words to sound normal in social situations, and more recently, being a good boyfriend to his very first girlfriend, Asumi. What's more, Sousei's sister has asked him to investigate Kuchina, his aloof, beautiful classmate who keeps turning up at the same hit jobs as Sousei. It's only a matter of time until Asumi gets the wrong idea. Surely the two halves of his double life won't ever clash and blow up in his face!

The combination of love triangle and action thriller has certainly been done before. But this pairing works especially well in Love Is Dark because of the novel's focus on providing in-depth personality development for each character. Pretty, innocent love interests like Asumi are a dime a dozen in stories with high school settings, but the extended length of this light novel format gives her time to present clear motivations for her actions, making her feel more like a multi-dimensional human than a cookie cutter “girl who is in love with the protagonist for no discernable reason.” I also found that the book got more interesting as it progressed and slowly revealed critical details of Sousei's personal history. It relies on tired tropes you've seen before, most obviously the love triangle, the reluctant assassin, and the ever-present “high school daily life” surface plot, but the story is more than the sum of its parts. Juumonji's experience in crafting a fast-moving plot and a wholly original world is evident in this riveting light novel.