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Rina Kent on God of Malice
In them own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A five-year-old who sided with the villainThe origin of Kent’s entire body of work sits in a single childhood moment, specific enough that it has become the founding story they return to in interviews. The film was obscure, the villain unnamed in their retelling, and the feeling was disproportionate in exactly the way formative things are.
At the tender age of five, I fell hopelessly in love with a villain from an obscure indie film. When he met his untimely end, I sobbed inconsolably, wailing that it simply wasn’t ‘fair.’ My family watched, half-amused, half-bewildered, as I stood up for the misunderstood bad guy.
That childhood scene did not stay an anecdote. It hardened into a deliberate career position: Kent would write the characters everyone else disposed of, and they would write them all the way to endings those characters were never given elsewhere.
From that moment on, I realized that anti-heroes, villains, and society’s outcasts were the characters that fascinated me the most. As I grew up, my vivid imagination and natural gift for storytelling led me down a path where morally grey men became my muse. I made it my mission to be their voice and give them the endings they deserve.
The Legacy of Gods series, and Killian Carson at its center, did not arrive fully formed. Killian first appeared in Kent’s Royal Elite universe as a secondary presence. The decision to follow a villain out of a supporting role and into his own story had a direct precedent: Jonathan King, whose single point-of-view chapter in Twisted Kingdom, the final book of the Aiden and Elsa trilogy, proved too compelling to leave behind.
What can I say, I have a soft spot for villains, I guess? When I wrote a chapter for Jonathan in Twisted Kingdom, the final book of Aiden & Elsa’s trilogy, I was fascinated by his mind and knew I needed to spend some more time there.
Killian follows that same logic outward: a character whose interiority demanded more space than a shared story could hold.
Over time, the center of gravity in Kent’s fiction shifted. The villains remained, but a second figure grew equally important alongside them: the woman who chooses to stay.
It began with tales of monsters but soon evolved into stories about the fierce women brave enough to love them.
How they wrote it
Characters first, schedule secondKent builds plot and character at the same time, but when the two come apart in the early stages of a book, character wins. The method has a direct consequence for how Killian reads on the page: his psychology is not a scaffold for events, it is the reason for them.
They actually come hand in hand, but usually, the characters live with me long before the complete plot comes along. That’s part of the reason why I write extremely character-driven books.
Inspiration is not something Kent waits for. The daily practice is structured and front-loaded, and it runs on schedule rather than mood. The implication for a book as tonally consistent as God of Malice is that the darkness is a sustained choice, not an atmospheric accident.
I usually write in the morning, because that’s when I’m most productive. I don’t wait for inspiration, I kind of summon it.
The production cycle behind each release is longer than the publication gap suggests. Kent builds in time for multiple rounds of outside feedback before a book goes out, and that discipline is paired with a stated commitment to schedule over spontaneity.
I write months beforehand so the book can have time for beta readers, editors and proofreaders. I’m very goal-oriented and I make a clear schedule then stick to it.
The Legacy of Gods series, set at Elites’ Royal College, was designed with two structural rules that shape how God of Malice fits into the larger arc. The first rule governs who the main characters can be; the second governs how the older generation stays present rather than receding.
Every book will have a main character from RES.
That first rule locks the protagonists to the Royal Elite School alumni network, connecting God of Malice to the world Kent had already built. The second rule runs deeper: parental figures do not fade into backstory in this series. The weight of legacy is structural, not thematic decoration.
Yes, the parents will have POVs in some of the novels!
What they want us to sit with
What it costs to love someone you should fearThe content warning on God of Malice appears on the public book page, not only inside the novel. Placing it there is a framing decision: Kent is telling prospective readers what genre of discomfort they are signing up for before the first page, not after.
This book is a dark unconventional romance and contains themes that aren’t to everyone’s liking. Please check the author’s note for content warnings before reading.
The question of how dark is too dark has a specific answer for Kent, and the answer is internal rather than external. It has nothing to do with reader tolerance or market convention. The threshold is whether they personally cross into hatred of their own character, and the process of writing through that feeling is where the attachment forms.
The darkness gets too much when I personally hate my male characters, but I push through those feelings anyway, because I eventually love them.
For a character like Killian, whose homicidal urges and coercive behavior are the actual subject of the novel rather than obstacles to be resolved, that process matters. The book asks the reader to make the same journey Kent did.
The creative stance underneath all of it is refusal: refusal to write toward a consensus of what dark romance should look like or what readers are assumed to want. The word Kent chooses is rebel, and they locate it at the beginning of their career, not as a retrospective label.
I was always a rebel who wrote what I connected with the most.