It’s possible that you haven’t heard about this book yet, so let me set the stage here: H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is a dystopian romance that blew up as an indie title before getting a seven-figure traditional publishing deal, and it was just recently released in a pretty new physical hardcover. It has also been publicly accused of being written by AI.

(A quick side note: If you aren’t an Atlantic subscriber, you won’t be able to read the article at that link. Ironically, perhaps, there is at least one other website that has taken the entire article, stripped the author’s name off of it, and reposted it, with only an “originally published at the Atlantic” link at the bottom to indicate that they didn’t produce it. I’m not going to link to that article. You are welcome to find it, if you want.)

Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t think I’d have picked this book up in the first place. I’ve read my share of romance novels/romantasies in the last couple of years but I’m growing tired of it as a genre, and what the kids call “spice” is starting to slowly slide toward being a reason not to pick up a book. But a good friend who has become The Person I Talk About Books To told me she’d read it and recommended it, and then told me about the AI controversy, which at the time I hadn’t heard about. She thought the accusation was ridiculous, having read the book, and pointed out that of course the author everyone was tossing accusations at was a young Black woman.(*)

For what it’s worth, Wolfe’s publisher, who gave her a whole lot of money, is standing behind her on this, and since AI-written text can’t be copyrighted, you’d think they’d have a significant interest in making sure she actually wrote the damn thing.

The book is on Kindle Unlimited, as it turns out. So I didn’t even have to pay for it. Fuck it, I thought, and downloaded it.

If this book was written by AI, we are all in really fucking big trouble, folks. Human-generated culture is dead if AI wrote this book.

That sounds like a strong recommendation. It’s not. Not quite. Daggermouth has a problem that for some reason seems very common to the indie-book-to-tradpub-success pipeline: Wolfe constantly either uses words that are just slightly not the right word or describes situations that sound good at first and don’t make sense upon second looks. The type of thing that sounds like nitpicking if you only provide one example, and I don’t plan to eviscerate the book at the moment, so let me nitpick: there is a bit early on where a character is drinking from a glass, and his many rings “clink” against the glass.

The glass in question is a wine glass– stemware, in other words– and if you’re holding stemware in such a fashion that your rings are clinking on it, you’re holding it wrong. At one point– hell, this might be the same conversation, I don’t remember– a character is sitting behind an executive-style desk having a conversation with a second character. He stands up and “in four long strides” (Wolfe is terribly fond of counting her characters’ strides) he walks to the other character to get all up in his space.

The problem is that this description both 1) forgets that he was sitting behind a desk and 2) puts the other character really far away from that desk. Seriously, take four “long strides” right now. Is that normal conversational distance?

The writing, in other words, in a mechanical and a craft sense, is mediocre. I’ve read a lot worse, mind you. But it’s definitely not good. And again, this is a weird indie-to-tradpub problem; I had the exact same issue with Ryan Cahill’s books, and I can think of three or four other authors I’ve had the same complaints about who I’m not going to bother to call out by name right now.(**)

The story hits its stride at about the 100-page mark and is off to the fucking races after that, and never lets up or slows down for the last 80% of the book. This is a good story, poorly written. And there’s enough genuinely good stuff in there– particularly the ending, which caught both me and my friend completely by surprise. There are bits that are ridiculous, too; the worst offense was a bit where the fated lovers of the piece surprise eight soldiers in his apartment, kill all eight of them, and then decide to stay the night in the apartment rather than, say, realize their cover is completely blown and go literally anywhere else. They don’t even clear the bodies out until the next morning.

I didn’t have any damn idea how to rate this, and had I not spent the first 100 pages debating every third word choice and mapping out locations in my head, this might have been a five-star read, because it needed to get good enough that I stopped paying attention to the flaws in the writing. The book managed to shut down the persnickety editor part of my brain, and usually, once that guy is unleashed on your book, you’re done. But I got caught up enough in the story that I finished the book basically overnight, and after that first 20% I was genuinely expecting to have to DNF or force myself through the rest of it. I put it at four and a half on Storygraph (follow me!) and four on Goodreads.

I would not have thought for a single second that this text was AI-generated had I not been told that it was controversial. And, to return to the article for a moment, I’m not convinced of their methodology, at least based on what the article tells me– there are, for example, two entire sentences that appear word-for-word in other books that they looked at, but they leave out the kind of important detail of which book came out first. Maybe the fucking AI ate the sentences for this book and spit them out for the other one? Plus, I’m sorry, if you’re comparing this book to a book from someone who “wrote” 400 books last year, and the sequel to this one isn’t coming out for another year, guess what? I know which author I think is writing AI. Hell, I know which author I’m pretty sure doesn’t even exist. If this book comes out as a higher percentage chance of being AI than one of the other person’s 400 books, your methodology is crap and you should redo your study.

Is it possible? Sure. I’m not going to claim that my internal AI detector is top-tier or anything like that; in 8th grade the easiest way to see if a student cheated and had AI write a paper is to ask them to read it out loud, and as soon as they hit a word they can’t read, ask them what it means. It works every single fucking time. I generally don’t have to think about it a whole lot harder than that. But if it is? If a fucking genAI slop program wrote this book? It doesn’t have to be fucking Dostoyevsky for that to be a major fucking concern.

So, yeah. I’m pretty sure H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is not written by AI. It has issues but ultimately I enjoyed reading it. I’m in for the sequel. And I am absolutely terrified about what is going to happen to human culture if I’m wrong.

(*) I Googled “H.M. Wolfe age,” and the fucking AI assistant told me she was born on October 28, 2025, and then helpfully added “Age: 0” afterwards.

(**) In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the only indie-to-tradpub author who I haven’t had this problem with is Matt Dinniman, including his non-Dungeon Crawler Carl books.