How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories: Unraveling Holly Black's Most Enigmatic Novella
Stories have teeth. Holly Black knows this better than most, and she wielded that knowledge like a blade when she penned her 2020 novella about Cardan's transformation from story-drunk prince to cynical High King. In the faerie courts where words can bind and tales can kill, learning to hate stories isn't just character development—it's survival.
I've been thinking about this particular work a lot lately, especially after my third reread revealed layers I'd completely missed before. There's something unsettling about watching a character who once found solace in narratives learn to despise the very thing that shaped him. It mirrors our own complicated relationship with storytelling in an era of manufactured narratives and curated truths.
The Architecture of Disillusionment
When we first encounter Prince Cardan in this prequel novella, he's drowning in stories the way some people drown in wine. His tower room overflows with human books—fairy tales, myths, legends—each one a small rebellion against the Faerie court's disdain for mortal culture. Young Cardan collects these stories like shields, using them to construct an alternate reality where cruelty has meaning and suffering leads somewhere.
The irony cuts deep. Here's a faerie prince, born into a world where lying is impossible, seeking refuge in human fictions. Black constructs this paradox with surgical precision. In Faerie, where words carry literal weight and promises bind like chains, stories represent something almost incomprehensible: beautiful untruths that reveal deeper truths.
But that's before Balekin enters the picture.
Brothers and Broken Narratives
Balekin doesn't just abuse Cardan physically—though there's plenty of that. The real damage comes through narrative manipulation. He takes Cardan's beloved stories and weaponizes them, twisting each tale into a lesson about power, cruelty, and inevitable betrayal. Remember that scene where Balekin forces Cardan to recite "The Little Mermaid" while standing in salt water until his legs bleed? That's not random sadism. It's calculated narrative terrorism.
What struck me on my latest reading was how methodically Balekin dismantles each story archetype. The noble prince becomes the fool. The clever youngest son becomes the victim. The happy ending becomes a trap for the naive. Under Balekin's tutelage, every narrative pattern Cardan once found comforting transforms into a prediction of pain.
This process doesn't happen overnight. Black shows us the slow erosion of Cardan's faith in stories through small moments: a fairy tale left unfinished, a book thrown into the fire, a bitter laugh at a happy ending. By the time Cardan burns his entire collection, it feels less like destruction and more like exorcism.
The Mortal Girl Who Broke the Pattern
Enter Jude Duarte—though she's more specter than character in this particular novella. Her presence haunts the edges of Cardan's transformation, representing everything his stories promised and failed to deliver. She's the mortal girl who refuses to follow the script, who won't be rescued or destroyed according to the usual patterns.
In one particularly revealing passage, Cardan reflects on how Jude defies every story he's ever read about mortals in Faerie. She doesn't pine for home. She doesn't accept her place. She doesn't conveniently die or transform or disappear. She persists, stubbornly real in a way that makes all his carefully collected narratives feel like lies.
This is where Black's writing really sings. She doesn't just tell us that Cardan learns to hate stories—she shows us how Jude's existence makes those stories feel small and false. Every interaction between them (recalled in memory, since this is a prequel) becomes a crack in the narrative framework Cardan built to understand his world.
Power, Performance, and the High King's Mask
The novella's climax—Cardan's coronation—reads like a funeral for his relationship with stories. He takes the crown not as the noble prince of fairy tales but as someone who understands that power is just another performance, another lie that Faerie folk can't technically tell but somehow manage anyway.
What's fascinating is how Black parallels Cardan's journey with the very structure of storytelling itself. The novella refuses to follow conventional narrative beats. There's no clear redemption arc, no moment of triumph. Instead, we get something messier and more honest: a character who survives by rejecting the narratives that once sustained him.
I keep coming back to that scene where Cardan, newly crowned, stands in his old tower room looking at the empty shelves. He doesn't feel victorious or tragic—just empty. The stories are gone, and with them, a version of himself he can never recover. It's not character growth in any traditional sense. It's character erosion, and Black makes us feel every grain of loss.
The Meta-Narrative Twist
Here's where things get really interesting—and where Black shows her hand as a master storyteller. This entire novella is, itself, a story about learning to hate stories. We're reading a narrative about narrative rejection, engaging with fiction about the dangers of fiction. The recursive loop is dizzying if you think about it too hard.
But that's precisely the point. Black isn't actually advocating for the abandonment of stories. She's examining what happens when stories become cages rather than keys, when narrative patterns become predictive prisons. Cardan doesn't really learn to hate stories—he learns to hate the way stories have been used against him, the way they've been deployed to limit and define him.
This distinction matters. A lot.
Cultural Resonance in the Age of Narrative Warfare
Reading this novella in 2024 hits differently than it might have even a few years ago. We're living in an era where narrative manipulation isn't just a fantasy concept—it's daily reality. Every scroll through social media is an encounter with competing stories, each trying to define reality in its own image.
Cardan's journey from story-believer to story-skeptic mirrors our own cultural moment. We've watched trusted narratives crumble, seen stories weaponized for political gain, experienced the exhaustion of trying to parse truth from spin. Is it any wonder that a novella about learning to distrust narratives resonates so deeply?
But Black offers something more nuanced than simple cynicism. Through Cardan's transformation, she suggests that the problem isn't stories themselves but our relationship to them. When we treat stories as prescriptive rather than descriptive, as rigid templates rather than flexible tools, they become prisons.
The Paradox of Narrative Liberation
The most profound insight in Black's novella might be this: sometimes, you have to hate stories to truly understand their power. Cardan's rejection of narrative isn't really rejection at all—it's a form of liberation. By refusing the scripts others write for him, he gains the agency to author his own existence.
This connects to a larger tradition in fantasy literature, where characters must often reject prophesy to fulfill it, or abandon quests to complete them. But Black takes this trope and strips it down to its bones. Cardan doesn't get a new, better story to replace the ones he's lost. He gets something more terrifying and more real: the blank page of an unscripted life.
Writing Craft and Emotional Architecture
From a technical standpoint, Black's novella is a masterclass in compressed storytelling. Every scene serves multiple purposes, revealing character while advancing plot while exploring theme. The language shifts subtly as Cardan ages, moving from the lush, story-drunk prose of his youth to the sharp, stripped-down voice of his disillusionment.
Take this evolution in how Cardan describes books. Early in the novella: "Each volume was a doorway, each page a path to elsewhere, elsewhen, elsehow." By the end: "Books. Paper and ink and lies." The transformation happens at the sentence level, in the very rhythm and texture of the prose.
Black also uses a fascinating technique with temporal shifts. The novella moves between past and present, but not in a predictable pattern. Sometimes we're deep in a childhood memory, sometimes watching Cardan burn his books in real-time. This fragmented structure mirrors the way trauma disrupts narrative coherence. We don't remember our disillusionments in neat, chronological order.
The Shadow of the Larger Series
For readers coming to this novella from The Folk of the Air trilogy, there's an additional layer of complexity. We know where Cardan ends up—married to Jude, transformed by love, finding a new relationship with story through her. This knowledge casts a shadow over the novella's darkness, suggesting that learning to hate stories might be a necessary stage rather than a final destination.
But Black resists making this connection too neat. The novella stands alone, refusing to promise that Cardan's story-hatred will resolve into story-love. In the context of just this text, the ending is genuinely ambiguous. Will the High King ever find his way back to narrative? The novella refuses to say.
Personal Reflections on Story and Skepticism
I'll admit something: this novella made me uncomfortable in ways I'm still unpacking. As someone who writes about stories for a living, watching Cardan's relationship with narrative curdle felt personal. It forced me to examine my own assumptions about the inherent goodness of storytelling.
Because here's the thing—stories aren't inherently anything. They're tools, and like any tool, they can build or destroy depending on who's wielding them. Black's novella is a reminder that uncritical story-love can be just as dangerous as story-hatred. The goal isn't to choose one or the other but to develop a mature, complex relationship with narrative that acknowledges both its power and its limitations.
The Faerie Court as Narrative Ecosystem
One aspect of the novella that deserves more attention is how Black constructs the Faerie court itself as a space where story and reality blur. The courtiers perform elaborate roles, trapped in patterns of behavior that feel more like narrative conventions than personal choices. In this context, Cardan's story-hatred becomes a form of resistance against the court's suffocating scriptedness.
The formal revels, with their ritual cruelties and prescribed revelries, read like stories that have calcified into reality. Everyone knows their role: the cruel prince, the scheming courtier, the disposable mortal. By rejecting stories, Cardan is really rejecting the Faerie court's insistence that identity is destiny, that role is reality.
This adds another layer to his eventual kingship. A king who hates stories might be exactly what a story-trapped court needs.
Conclusion: The Story That Ends All Stories
"How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories" is ultimately a paradox wrapped in a contradiction, dressed up as a fairy tale. It's a story that argues against stories, a narrative that questions narrative, a fiction that exposes the dangers of fiction. In lesser hands, this would collapse into pretentious meaninglessness. In Black's hands, it becomes something rare: a fantasy that feels emotionally true.
The novella doesn't offer easy answers about our relationship with stories. Instead, it provides something more valuable: a framework for thinking about how narratives shape us, limit us, and sometimes liberate us through their very destruction. Cardan's journey from story-drunk prince to story-skeptic king isn't prescriptive—it's descriptive of a process many of us undergo as we mature, as we learn to see the strings behind the puppet show of narrative.
Perhaps that's the novella's greatest achievement. It doesn't tell us whether to love or hate stories. It simply shows us one character's journey from one extreme to the other, and trusts us to find our own balance between belief and skepticism, between narrative embrace and narrative resistance.
In the end, Cardan learns to hate stories not because they're false, but because he believed they were true in the wrong way. He thought they were maps when they were merely suggestions. He thought they were prophecies when they were only possibilities. His hatred is really a form of heartbreak—the pain of discovering that the thing you loved couldn't save you after all.
But maybe that's the beginning of wisdom: understanding that stories can't save us, but that doesn't mean they're worthless. It just means we need to find new ways to love them, ways that acknowledge their limitations while celebrating their power. Ways that let us be readers without becoming prisoners, storytellers without becoming tyrants.
The King of Elfhame learned to hate stories. But in doing so, he might have learned something even more valuable: how to live without them. And paradoxically, that might be the most important story of all.
Authoritative Sources:
Black, Holly. How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2020.
Black, Holly. The Cruel Prince. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2018.
Black, Holly. The Wicked King. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2019.
Black, Holly. The Queen of Nothing. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2019.
Bernheimer, Kate, editor. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. Penguin Books, 2010.
Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Princeton University Press, 2003.
Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. University Press of Kentucky, 2002.