RED SONJA: CONSUMED – The She-Devil Returns to Prose (an almost spoiler-free review)
For OG fans of the She-Devil with a Sword, the wait for a new prose adventure has been agonizingly long. No disrespect meant to the Dynamite comic books, but there is a specific, undeniable thrill in holding a tangible sword & sorcery prose adventure in your hands, and it’s an experience Red Sonja fans have been starving for.
If you read the classic 1980s ACE series of paperbacks—all six of them— you’ve already had a taste of Red Sonja in prose. If you haven’t read them, and you’ve been hunting them down, you know they currently cost an absolute mint on the secondary market. Fortunately, those original adventures are finally getting an omnibus reprint in 2027, making it the perfect opportunity to revisit them or put them on your shelf for the very first time.
But we don’t have to wait. Red Sonja: Consumed was released a few months ago, and if you haven’t read it yet, it’s not too late to pick it up.
Published by Orbit Books, Consumed marks the debut prose novel from legendary comic book scribe Gail Simone. Simone is no stranger to the She-Devil with a Sword, having penned her most definitive, modern comic book arc under the Dynamite banner. Dynamite has kept Red Sonja in print for over 20 years, and it’s been a great run that has kept fans happy. But if you have been reading the Red Sonja comics and craving a more visceral, descriptive dive into her psyche and world—the kind of deep exploration that comic book panels simply can’t deliver fully—Consumed is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
Simone handles this medium shift beautifully. Without panels to rely on, she leans heavily into the sensory details of the sword-and-sorcery genre. The book perfectly balances blood-soaked action with the deep character study that modern fantasy demands. Simone imbues Sonja with genuine trauma and vulnerability without ever sacrificing her trademark badassery.
As sci-fi heavyweight John Scalzi perfectly describes it on the cover: “Gail Simone writes like a storm gathering. Thunder is coming.”
And that is exactly what this reading experience felt like. You can feel the atmospheric pressure very early on. A significant portion of the story involves Sonja on the road, fleeing from Queen Ysidra—Sonja’s scorned paramour and a sovereign whom the She-Devil betrayed by making off with a highly sacred treasure. While travel narratives can sometimes drag, Sonja’s journey is anything but boring. The road is packed with secondary plots and enemies that keep the momentum going, all building up to a highly satisfying denouement.
Simone takes the time to flesh out every character. No one is left two-dimensional, not even the briefest antagonists brought in merely to torment or interact with Sonja. The senseless murder of a stableboy is a visceral moment that, in another tale, might only be mentioned in passing to underline the callousness of the murderer. Sonja’s adventuring companions are so well-crafted they essentially become primary characters in their own right. And then there is Queen Ysidra herself, who becomes far more than just a standard antagonist pursuing a stolen artifact, ultimately meeting a tragic, noble end.
What makes Simone’s take on the She-Devil with a Sword so intoxicating is the absolute, unapologetic grit. A pristine, soap-scented pin-up version of Red Sonja doesn’t make a lick of sense for a woman who spends her time butchering her way through life. Simone gives us a warrior who lives on the road, sleeps in the dirt, and wears the heavy musk of horse sweat, unwashed leather, and coppery blood like a second skin.
As a reader, that unapologetic lack of hygiene doesn’t detract from her appeal—it amplifies it. It strips away the plastic fantasy and makes her visceral, primal, and dangerously real. You can practically smell the steel, leather and sweat coming off the page, and frankly, that raw, hormonal authenticity is a massive part of what makes this version of the She-Devil so magnetic.
Don’t Hope For a Sequel—Demand It
Consumed wraps up its 384 pages with the kind of bloody, hard-earned satisfaction you want from a sword & sorcery story. Fans shouldn’t just hope for a sequel; they should demand it.
Fortunately, the odds of a follow-up look promising. When we reached out regarding the status of a second book, Simone confirmed that she was working on one.
In the meantime, the Dynamite comic books are there. Gail Simone’s Dynamite comic book run of Red Sonja is also getting an omnibus reprint this summer. And the orbit reprint of the original Tierney and Smith paperback novels will be here in the new year.
It’s a good time to be a Red Sonja fan!
About the Author
Jules-Pierre Malartre currently lives on a small island west of Montreal (Quebec), which is as close to the Great White North that he will ever dare go, but still cold enough to save him from big-ass spiders, alien abductions, undead dinosaurs and tourists who find his French accent charming. In 2005, he quit a promising aerospace engineering career to go into freelance writing, which was a very, very bad idea according to his mother. Since then, he has become considerably poorer, but he has grown much happier. Along the way, he adopted cats—lots of cats! When he is not writing technical manuals, newspaper articles, press releases or blogs on anything from comic books to yoga, he is busy working on his first novel, a semi-autobiographical fictional account of his life that dares to ask the question, “where did God go wrong with me anyway?” His first short story, “The Rest Was Easy,” was published by the online literary magazine Amarillo Bay in 2013. The five people who read it liked it. He’s well aware that it took him over a decade to publish another one, so he’d really appreciate it if you'd cut him some slack about it! He loves coffee, cats and reading, mostly because those three things go very well together.
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