I was three days into a bad insomnia stretch when I picked up Red Rising. The kind where you lie awake and feel your thoughts turn into rats, chewing on the same worries. I needed something loud enough to drown them out.
What I got was Darrow, a sixteen-year-old miner on Mars who believes he’s sacrificing everything so future generations can live on the surface. He’s good at his work. He has a wife who sings forbidden songs. He thinks the suffering has meaning.
He is wrong.
The book’s first act is a slow, deliberate excavation of that lie. Darrow discovers the surface has been livable for generations. The Golds, the ruling caste, built cities and parks and lakes while Reds dug in the dark, believing the fairy tale. When Darrow’s wife Eo is hanged for singing, he has to pull her legs to break her neck. That is the Society’s custom. The loved ones do it.
After reading that, I had to put the book down and walk around my apartment.
The Slow Excavation of a Lie
Darrow is rescued by a resistance group and transformed, through brutal surgery, into a Gold. He infiltrates the Institute, a deadly year-long competition where the next generation of rulers fight for dominance. Here is where the book could have gone wrong. It could have been a simple revenge fantasy.
It isn’t.
What struck me most was how Brown refuses to let Darrow stay innocent. The Institute strips away his moral clarity. He forms bonds with Golds he’s supposed to hate. He makes friends, then sacrifices them. He becomes ruthless because he has to, and each choice chips away at the boy who loved his wife. There is a moment where Darrow realizes he is winning, and the victory tastes like ash. He does not want to be this person. But he cannot afford to be anyone else.
The Ring That Won’t Let Him Forget
The core image that haunted me was Eo’s wedding band, woven from her own hair. Darrow keeps it. It is a small, fragile thing, and it represents everything he is losing by becoming a Gold. Every time he betrays someone, every time he tortures or kills, that ring is still in his pocket. It is the ghost of the man he used to be.
Brown’s writing here is muscular, almost punishing. He does not waste words on beauty for beauty’s sake. The violence is specific and intimate. You feel the weight of a blade, the crack of bone. But he also gives you moments of strange tenderness. Darrow and his friend Sevro, a feral boy who looks like a goblin, share a laugh in the dark. Mustang, a Gold girl, looks at Darrow with something like understanding. These moments make the brutality worse because you care.
Where the Story Drags
I have to be honest about the problems. The first hundred pages are slow. The world-building is dense and some of it feels borrowed. The Institute sequence, while thrilling, drags in the middle. There are moments where the plot relies on Darrow being too clever, too lucky. And the female characters, aside from Mustang, are mostly fuel for Darrow’s pain. Eo is a martyr, not a person. That bothered me.
The book also has a young adult sheen that can feel like a limitation. The prose sometimes reaches for epic and lands on melodramatic. I winced at a few lines.
Who He Becomes When He Wins
If you want clean heroes and happy endings, this is not for you. If you want a story that asks whether revolution can be waged without becoming the enemy, read it. If you want a protagonist who makes you uncomfortable, read it.
What I took from Red Rising is this: vengeance is a promise you make to a dead person. But promises to the dead are made by the living, and the living change. The question the book leaves me with is not whether Darrow will win. It is whether there will be enough of him left to call the victory his own.
I finished it at 4 AM. The insomnia was gone, replaced by a quiet unease. The rats in my head had been replaced by something sharper.
